The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 23, 2020 3:21 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track by rgmoore
Parent article: The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

I donate or subscribe to various sites that have that option as well. But I block ads everywhere, whether there's a subscription/patronage option or not. I don't want the mental pollution.

> blocking them is undermining the system I'm benefiting from

Blocking them is pushing towards the system I want to see. Blocking ads reduces the value of ads, which makes them less viable, which pushes future companies to not treat ads as a viable business model.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 23, 2020 5:05 UTC (Thu) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link] (1 responses)

Unfortunately I think one of the results of blocking ads is that companies like Facebook have a massive incentive to build far more intrusive advertising platforms.

Of course, they have that incentive anyway, since they can make far more money selling their users' attention with a sophisticated and intrusive advertising platform than with a simple advertising platform . . . I'm not sure there's /any/ way we can push back against this kind of thing, short of completely rebuilding the Internet economy.

Maybe if there was a pervasive, unintrusive and easily managed way to make micropayments to the sites that you visited it would remove a lot of the incentive for advertising, but getting that in place would be kind of hard to do, and would potentially have lots of /other/ perverse incentives. But short of that I don't think there's a decent solution.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 23, 2020 22:22 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> Unfortunately I think one of the results of blocking ads is that companies like Facebook have a massive incentive to build far more intrusive advertising platforms.

And people can choose to not use Facebook as a result, and adblockers will help prevent other sites from feeding data to Facebook.

> Maybe if there was a pervasive, unintrusive and easily managed way to make micropayments to the sites that you visited it would remove a lot of the incentive for advertising, but getting that in place would be kind of hard to do, and would potentially have lots of /other/ perverse incentives. But short of that I don't think there's a decent solution.

There's absolutely a decent solution: block all ads, and don't treat it as your problem to solve. Someone else's ad-based business model does not obligate anyone to help them succeed. If enough people block ads, and enough technologies make it easier and less out-of-the-way to do so, ad-based business models will become less and less viable.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 24, 2020 14:53 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Blocking them is pushing towards the system I want to see.

Blocking ads alone is only an attempt to destroy the current system. If you want to push toward a specific alternative system, you have to actively support that alternative. Otherwise, you have no control over what you'll get in the long run. It might be the system you want, but it could be something worse, like a more abusive ad system that's harder to block or the collapse of useful ad-supported sites with nothing to replace them.