This is a good explanation, thank you. I didn’t think about people who literally post stuff to earn money. Since so much talk already revolved around scraping sites like Lemmy, that was all I had in mind.

What you describe sounds like the same problem with services that avoid paywalls or ads of news sites.

In this case I fully aggree that some solution needs to be found.

Thank you. I haven’t thought about copyright just now. This is indeed something that needs to be addressed.

Although I personally still don’t have much of a problem with that. I think copyright laws are highly debatable.

This comparison is lacking because water is unlike data. The data can still be accessed exactly the same. It doesn’t become less and the access to it is not restricted by other people harvesting it.

Could somebody explain why this is bad? I’m not a fan of all this AI stuff. But I can’t think of an argument besides “Big tech is bad and they should not make money if they use public information to do so.”

I’m genuinely curious. There may be massive amounts of data being processed. But only public data, right? If they can use that data for something, isn’t that something positive? Or at the very least nothing negative? I always thought anything that is posted in public spaces means making it available for anyone to use anyway. So what am I missing here?

Not just frequent jokes, but those annoying ever-repeating jokes. Like as if 80% of users were the same person. Before opening any post on Reddit, there is a good chance to be able to correctly predict the exact content of a significant portion of the comments. I get that it can be funny to an individual to come across stuff like “I also choose this guys wife” or “And my axe” more than once. But for people like me, who did not just start using the website, it is really annoying to come across the same jokes literally hundreds of times.

This goes hand in hand with the general idea of a “Reddit hivemind”. Depending on the subs you visit, you can see that Reddits userbase is actually really diverse. There are people from every demographic with all kinds of different life experiences. But in a lot of subs, anytime a woman is mentioned there is a flood of people acting like as if there are no women on the internet and as if no person using Reddit could have a girlfriend. Again, I get that it can be funny once or twice. But when the idea that every user must be a typical “Redditor” gets repeated all the time it’s just annoying. Needless to say that I don’t look forward to being called a “Lemming” on this site.

Also, repeating comments on the same post. Obviously you don’t have to read all the comments if there are already hundreds of them. But if there are too many comments saying the exact same thing it just gets harder to read them all. So it would be nice if people would look whether the point they want to make maybe has been made already. They can increase that comment’s visibility by upvoting. No need to make other people read the same content multiple times and by that make it harder to read different comments.

No, I don’t have heard of such a website. (Although the comment made by Shady_Shiroe comes funnily close to it.) But that is probably because all ad supported sites I visit have more than enough users without adblock to support themselves.

From a pure, real and practical standpoint you are right. For you and me and most users here it won’t do any harm to use adblock. But that only works because there are so many people who don’t. If everyone were to use adblock now, then the websites would start to either find ways to circumvent the adblock or they would not be available anymore, either because they went down or got paywalled. I’m fine with paying for some websites. But there are too many things I think are useful on the internet to be able to pay for each and every thing I see individually or via subscription.

What I want to say is that I don’t think it would be good if a big portion of users would start to use adblock so I don’t think it could be right for any individual person to do so, even if you can’t tell how many more adblock users it would take to make a negative impact.

Wow, there are a lot of comments describing how neccessary it must be to use adblock. I don’t think I can actually change anyone’s mind here, but I’m going to share my perspective anyway:

While I don’t agree with the statement quoted in the original post, I do think that ads are neccessary for most websites I visit to function. Not because of the content creators, but because of the companies running the platforms.

I know, ads can be problematic. But to outright block all ads is no solution. Privacy and data protection are very important to me, so I’m against every form of targeted ads. But just generic or maybe contextual ads? I don’t see any harm in that. Malware is mentioned often in other comments. I disable JavaScript whenever I can. That’s absolutely enough for blocking all ads to not make any real difference in terms of security. Although I have to admit that blocking scripts also blocks some ads.

But still, I see all ads on YouTube and search engines for example. And I’m happy to see them. It’s incredible that such platforms, providing so many people with access to so much content from so many other people can actually exist. There are a lot of resources needed for this.

And if I still don’t want to see ads simply because I don’t want to? Then I don’t have to, even without any adblockers. If I don’t think a website is worth the ads it thinks it needs to show me, then I don’t have to use it. I can just leave. If it is easy to provide the same service without ads then there must be countless alternatives already.