Adverts: Love 'em or loathe them?

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Explanation for my poll:

I'm 57 y/o. I wasn't diagnosed an Aspie until aged 46. Until my diagnosis, I'd noticed all sorts of things about myself which made me think i wasn't normal (Aspie-speak = 'neuro-typical'). I'm no good in loud places - I can't hear anyone speak despite everyone else being able to hold conversations ; I can't just hear a pin being dropped - I can hear it being dropped at the end of my street ; Anything that can visually distract me makes what I'm doing difficult. So ...

Until 2009, I struggled a lot with being online and the volume of adverts playing on the screen and distracting me. TV adverts are hard to cope with too. Then I discovered FireFox browser and Add-ins like 'AdBlock Plus'. {Bliss} . The wheel is supposed to be man's greatest invention. I disagree - 'AdBlock Plus' is man's greatest invention. Please answer my poll ... Thanking you in advance for your participation

Ads on the Net? I hate them. But not to the point that I feel impaired, or crippled by them.

Just hate all of that stuff on my browser home page. Hate those click bait articles that show up. The ones with headlines like "Archeologists just found the tomb of Christ, and it had his boyhood baseball card collection. Find out what his favorite teams were." So you read one paragraph, and then you have to click "story continues" to read the next paragraph, and goes on like that for forty pages. Each page chocked full of ads. But before you get to page 40 you accidentally click the wrong thing (because each page is designed to confuse you), and it puts into an advertisement for some product you dont want.

And hate it when Utube Vlogger gets cut off in mid sentence by a commercial.

Ads on TV? I actually LIKE some commercials. But hate most. But again, I dont feel impaired by them.

Adds?! I haven't seen one in at least 10 years. I've been using an adblocker for so long I almost had a heart attack when I saw what the internet looks like without one I don't watch TV either, these days it's so easy to watch anything you want without being interrupted by adds.

I do remember how the volume would change from normal to booming during commercial breaks Is that s**t really working on anybody?!

Now I almost want to read that, maybe you should consider making some money on the side by writing such pieces

My autism and ideological / political preferences combine to induce a near-violent hatred of ads.

Autism encourages that hatred because of (I suppose) the "pathological honesty" (was there ever anything so calculated to mislead than ads?), and the sensitivity to interfering distractions and invasive flashing images and unsolicited loud sounds and intolerance of anything that attempts to pull me away from what I'm doing. Ads insult my intelligence because I can usually see quite clearly what tricks they're trying to use on me (because I took the trouble to use my brain to study these things in depth) and I'm dismayed at the fact that they're thought to work on people. I like the scientific method, and ads seem designed to appeal to the glib, unscientific, lazy thinking style that many people are afflicted with. The presence of ads reminds me of the gullible, narcissistic side of human nature that's a million miles away from the way I define myself, from the kind of mental activity I admire in myself and others.

It's like being constantly pestered by a stranger who keeps laying BS on me, pretending to be my friend, pretending to be an altruistic, responsible expert advisor, when he doesn't care whether I live or die as long as he can get his hands on my money and get me trained into thinking I need the crap he's trying to fob off onto me. No matter how many times I tell him to go away, he's got no shame, he's got a skin like a rhino and he'll always be back, talking as if he just doesn't get it. These days I even catch him steaming open my letters behind my back, he's that desperate for clues that might help him to trick me into making a sale. I hate him.

Politically, I want a community-based system, not a free-market-based one, because I feel that the profit motive flies in the face of anything good that a community tries to do - I see competition as a bad thing and co-operation as the way forward. So to me, ads are a constant, depressing reminder of the sick, consumerist, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses system that pervades human relations. Our government doesn't get this, or doesn't want to get it, and spends all its energy on promoting "the economy" instead of trying to help people, probably because most politicians are business types themselves with vested interests in making a profit, and their claims to be there to represent and help ordinary people is largely a lie. You can tell that every time they open their mouths and spew forth the same disingenuous crap that we get from advertisers.

Not surprisingly I've surgically removed most advertising from my life. I've got several browser plugins and a few routines I wrote myself to block ads and tracking. I refuse to get a smartphone. I don't watch live television. I don't answer market research questionnaires. I'm even considering getting a VPN to hide my IP address and computer from ad-men.

It's a shame in a way to have to be so hostile towards advertising. Some of the TV ads used to amuse me when I was a child, before I realised what they were up to. More importantly, I'm cutting myself off from information about new commodities and services. But any real information is mixed in with stupid propaganda. So in practice I do sometimes look at what the sellers say, though I'm never happy to do so, and I always look for external and more reliable sources before making any important purchasing decisions.

I loathe everything about advertising except what it reveals about humans if treated as an experiment. Most of my hardware and bandwidth is only needed to handle the volume of ads, which I don't turn off because they do help fund sites. However, we would all be much better off with micro-payments supporting web pages, and no advertising anywhere. We should have open-source, co-op search engines and rating services to help us find things we have decided to get, without interference from people who want to trick us into buying, and also buying from them.
Jerry Mander wrote an excellent book called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" and a lot of that applies to advertising of any kind. I used to listen to the radio, and thought that it didn't matter since I would not buy a mattress, golf clubs, or new car anyway. However, I realized that every ad starts off by telling you that you are not content before claiming that their product can fix that. If you don't buy you get stuck with the discontent, and it does work quite well, subliminally. The subconscious mind does not have a logical filter to reject bad information. I never respond to banner ads, and if someone is spending enough to get me to remember their name, I boycott them.

Thank you all for responding so far. Interestingly, I posted this poll around 4 hours ago and of the 10 poll responses, all have been 'dislike' or 'hate'-red of ads.

Yes

Yes

Yes

And, yes. Completely. Any browser that doesn't have an ad-blocker almost seems unusable to me. How do NT's cope with all this info? I find so much information coming at me, I have to close down and revert to FireFox/Ad Blocker Plus. ToughDiamond's point about shutting yourself off from information about commodities and services is very true: I'm rarely aware of the latest thing(s), which makes me a bit sad. But as I don't easily cope with a lot of information, for me blocking ad's seems the better option.

Adverts are supposed to pay for whatever site you're using, so I don't think installing AdBlock is that simple without some sort of catch (ie, you have to pay for it to never get adverts again). Otherwise everyone would just install free advert-blockers and nobody would have to watch another advert again.

So the way I see it, it's either your time or your money. I don't have the money, so I just have to put up with 10 seconds of crap before watching YouTube videos.

There is no catch. You only have to pay for apps not to show adds.

I've been using a free AddBlocker on my laptop for more than 10 years and I can go anywhere I want without paying or seeing adds.

Well, same thing. I don't pay online so I've just got to put up with the ads.

^
There are a few websites that detect ad-blockers and refuse to show the content unless the user disables them, but in my limited experience most websites don't. There was one place that did, so I found alternative sources for the same information, except for once when I couldn't find any. I reluctantly disabled my ad blocker, and to my surprise I didn't see any ads It might have been something to do with my use of the NoScript browser plugin which, although it isn't strictly an ad blocker, probably stops some ads indirectly. And I was out of there as soon as I'd got what I wanted.

The best ad-blockers are free and they're fairly effective, especially if you use their "block element" features where you click on the ad and they zap it, though in practice the blockers are already pre-loaded with so-called subscription lists that kill all the known rubbish automatically so you never see it. A lot of websites do a bait-and-switch thing where they let you browse freely for a while till they think you might be hooked, then they put a wall over the page and don't let you continue till you've given them your contact details (they call it signing up). Most of them can be got round with the block element feature. I've seen websites that offer a paid-for service that doesn't have ads, but it's well worth trying a blocker first.

I've also read arguments (by the advertising industry mainly) that blocking ads is immoral because the ads pay for the websites. Superficially it might seem that they have a point, but most people don't block ads (especially on mobile phones), and AdBlock Plus by default let through what they call "acceptable ads" which they've approved, apparently on the basis of them not being highly invasive. The other argument against the morality thing is that the online advertising model is broken anyway. Advertisers just measure the number of ads they think have been seen or clicked on, and pay the host website on that basis. They don't measure whether anybody bought anything. And the morality argument rather falls apart because of the fact that the website owners very rarely warn anybody that they're going to push ads onto them. They usually just recommend that you visit their website and then, splat! you're getting all these irrelevent ads. Even the owners don't have much knowledge or control over what ads get served up, Google or whoever just pays them to carry their ad-delivery and tracking software.

As for tracking, sometimes they tell you somewhere in the small print of a very long privacy agreement, which I guess they're hoping you won't have the time to read, and I expect they know that most people don't bother with it. Certainly there's little detail about the colossal amount of personal information they're collecting and sharing. The process is anything but transparent. Without tracking protection, you typically visit a website, they tell their business partners all about what you seem to have shown interest in (without telling you anything), and the next thing you know is that you're getting "targeted marketing" from all kinds of advertisers you've never heard of, and they don't tell you how they found you. Nor are they in any way realistic when they decide who's genuinely interested in something they're selling and who isn't. That's why if you don't opt out of junk mail (and they try to scare you into thinking you're in danger of missing something urgent if you do), nearly all the thousands of ads you find on your doormat are completely irrelevent to you. They knowingly annoy all those people and waste resources in the hope of making one sale. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. don't respect people's wishes for anything resembling a fair deal by any sane standards.

So I feel pretty sure there's a strong case that the whole Web advertising thing is broken and shot through with sharp practices, and that's why my attitude is that until they clean up their act, I'll use all means at my disposal to thwart them. Hopefully if enough people take the same stand, they'll have to reform it. I wouldn't object to paying a not-for-profit fee for an ad-free internet, but for the time being it seems they'd rather offer it "free" so they can trap people with unsolicited ads and data mining without informed consent.

I stopped visiting YouTube when they made my acceptance of their "privacy policy" mandatory. So these days I use a free program to download them from the links without visiting the website at all. Obviously I can't use YouTube's search facility, but it's just as good (and often better) to do a Web search for youtube + name of song or whatever - obviously I don't use Google's search engine, I use one that doesn't track me. Then I paste the link for the required hit into the program, which downloads a personal copy of the video file which plays without ads or tracking. Facebook is much better with a browser plugin called Social Fixer which hides tons of annoying rubbish. There's also a free plugin called Clean Links that removes the tracking data that Facebook adds to the links you click on your newsfeed to visit other websites. Facebook videos can also be downloaded without much bother. Some of the methods were a bit nerdy to figure out, but it's all easy now I know how it's done.

No: if you use a laptop or computer instead of a phone, you can install a few free plug-ins that will block all adds for free.

Yes, there are sites that ask you un de-activate your addblock, but they are fairly rare.

^^ Facebonk is the biggest data thief out there, and was the leader in insisting on non-anonymity. I'm pretty good at ignoring ads, as long as they are not well-targeted. I've heard of ads popping up based on words spoken on a 'cell phone. The outfits I really hate sell goods on-line, but include a lot of factory seconds and broken returns, with a return policy that recovers about a dollar per hour of effort.

Really. I should work for some grocery store tabloid writing copy.

^^ I'm pretty sure that most of the "I got back at my evil _____ by doing this" stories offered on the 'net are either pure fiction, or highly embellished. That goes for stories about fish that got away, one-night stands, and many other popular "true" genres too.

It's like getting paid for trolling

My fav headline on a checkout tabloid was "Farmer Says UFO Alien Sang 'Love Me Tender'".

Ive gotten a lot of mileage out of telling folks about it. One coworker buddy told me "I still havent gotten over that thing you told me weeks ago about the alien singing Elvis".

I got into a conversation with someone on WP in the science section, and mentioned it. Then I decided to post a video to illustrate. I figured that a little grey guy in a saucer would sound something like Alvin and the Chipmunks. So I found a UTube vid of the Chipmunks singing "Love Me Tender" and posted it. And then I said "if for some reason you DOUBT my stories about UFOs then all I have to say to you is this.." And I posted Alvin and the Chipmunks singing "We cant go on forever...with suspicious minds....". The other guy thanked me, and said "I was feeling down just now, and I needed a good laugh."