That’s me, or close enough. Its oddly freeing. All that hassle makes it very easy to simply walk away from any webpage with excessive complexity. Turns out that I don’t really need to read every webpage that sounds interesting because there are practically an infinite number of them. So skipping a few, or even most of them, is no big deal. The supply of interesting websites that still work with a totally locked down browser is more than enough to keep me entertained 24x7 if I really wanted that.
FWIW, I’m also that guy with a symmetrical 1gbps ISP…
[quote=“Jerry_Vandesic”]
Rob, you seem to have confused Adblock and Adblock Plus, two different
projects/companies. The article is about the Adblock Plus software, not
Adblock, but the title and your text simply says “Adblock” (the block
of quoted text correctly says “Adblock Plus”). You also show the Adblock
icon (hand in a stop sign) as opposed to the Adblock Plus icon (the
letters “ABP” in a stop sign). You might want to fix this.[/quote]
BBS post title still says “Adblock” only… (as does the URL for both the BBS and the original post - one of the problems with pretty permalinks…) Time for a URL change with a redirect to the new “Adblock Plus” title URL?
The whole [free|annual]credit[report|score].com is such a shitshow. The government brought this upon themselves by making a forgettable, generically named .com website be the real, official, safe way to get a credit report:
Why couldn’t they have made it a .gov? Even now if I want to find out my credit scores, it takes me about ten minutes of googling to be confident I’m putting my info in the right site.
I am this fourth type of person and I think you’re vastly over-estimating the amount of time it takes to sort out which traffic to whitelist on a page that isn’t working quite right. Additionally, once I’ve established my most commonly visited websites into my whitelist, my browsing experience is just fine 99% of the time.
I sort of read this as “Adblock is committing brand suicide” because people don’t flock to ad blocking plugins in order to find a new way to connect with online advertisers and have their web experience interrupted by or filled with advertisements. In fact, some people strongly don’t want to be tracked or categorized or solicited.
Acceptable ads, for AdBlock, are far less intrusive. They have to follow a policy that limits their impact on users’ bandwidth and system performance. That’s a tradeoff I’m ok with. The problem isn’t ads themselves. It is ads that are always beeping, burbling, flashing in the background, coming down like windowshades, demanding that you watch them before you’re allowed to move on.
If acceptable ads are less valuable because they are less intrusive, how sad for you. But in the end, everyone is going to have to compromise here. We will have to allow enough ads to support web sites, and web sites are going to have to limit the obnoxious factor of those ads. It’s a little disingenuous of you to gripe about that.
Yep. I am so freaking done with everything turning into a rent-forever-to-continue-using-it scheme. I understand paying a subscription for productivity software that undergoes regular major enhancements (even if I don’t like the idea), but for a podcast player that’s essentially feature-complete as-is, Marco trying to wring more money out of his existing users and selling out the free tier to Google’s all-seeing ad network because sales have plateaued is nothing short of abusive.
If you’re looking for replacement recommendations, I’ve started using PodCruncher, which is a one-time $2.99 purchase. It’s not quite as stylish, and it does lack a couple of things that Overcast has (silence-skipping, voice boost, and some of the super-granular playback speeds like 1.125x), but it lets me create smart playlists that work the same as Overcast’s, it supports per-podcast episode and playback management, and it lets me set the skip forward/back amounts independently. Castro is another good option if you’re not huge on using playlists - I used version 1.x of the app, but not the currently-available 2.x. Heck, even Apple’s podcast app has come far enough since its inception to be serviceable for casual-to-moderate usage, depending on exactly what you’re after feature-wise.
Yeah, that happened to a video coaching app I use. I can’t recall the exact timeline, but was something like this: it used to cost around 5 bucks out the door. Then previously standard features became add ons and crippled upload to YouTube to try to sell you on their propriatary social media video sharing. Then it became a $120 to $500 a year subscription service
I just want the $5 app to record and playback with annotations and upload to you tube. Grr…
As for Adblock Plus selling ads, I think that is a serious issue. Blocking ads is, I think, a user right, though one I don’t participate in directly as I want to support the sites I visit. But blocking ads and then selling access? I think that is sketchy and could easily turn fair use into illegal copyright infringement, or at least edge case law in that direction.
I’m all for reining in intrusive ads - I think those ad-filled viral media sites with one factoid per ad-filled page and confusing ads that look like the “next” button should choke on a curiosity gap and die. But I find the idea of turning off a websites ads and then selling access to ads on that website to be a step too far.
Steve Mann’s Eyetap wearable computer was able to do this stuff even 10-15 years ago. It uses an augmented reality display with edge detection to know where rectangles (usually) of real-world ads are, and then he can select them and have them blanked out, or replaced with images of what he’d prefer to see. I watched a presentation he did years back where he demonstrated it by walking into a bathroom and turning some lame wall ad into a video of a waterfall.
If you block ads, at least block them with something that isn’t taking a shit on both of us: get rid of AdBlock and try uBlock Origin.
Boing Boing you really rub me the wrong way sometimes, the reason a lot of people have kept using Ad Blocking on your site is because you have had some invasive freaking ads in the past. I don’t know the situation now but I’ve already tried the site at least 5 times without Ad Blocking and always had to go back to it (I wonder how many people remember the ad bar that would scroll with the whole site incident).
While AdBlock Plus accepting money to display ads pisses me off to a slight degree I do admire the fact they’re trying to clean all the horrid bouncing ads, auto play video ads and so fourth to be something more acceptable and less eye violating.
So pot meet kettle, I might feel a bit different if you peeps hadn’t been so crappy with your ads in the past.
Edit: Thought I’d try and see if the ads have improved and there’s still animated GIF ads on the site, so yeah the Ad Blocking stays on.
LOL, don’t be such a sap. I don’t care if you use an adblocker. But I do care if you’re being fucked by your adblocker. So, use uBlock Origin instead of Adblock Plus, and quit handwringing about loyalty to a brand.
