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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 12, 2017 12:03:03 GMT -9
Moving this discussion to a separate thread to avoid hi-jacking the thread where it came up... Interesting to see, how others see Mediafire. I have an ad blocker in action on that page, so I only see the correct Download button. I have a reason and a rationalization for why I don't use an ad-blocker. The reason is I'm too lazy to find and deal with one. The rationalization is that blocking ads undercuts the business model for useful services that are available to us without cash payment. (I hesitate to say "free", since I'm paying with my eyeballs and possibly my attention, even if it doesn't cost me money.) I've worked in ad-supported industries in the past, and I've run a business that bought advertising, so I am inclined to put up with advertising until it gets pushy or invasive. I kind of object to Mediafire because they run or allow advertisers to run ads which are deliberately designed to confuse users of their service, and trick them into downloading stuff they weren't expecting and almost certainly don't want. But then, Adobe does the exact same thing when you download the free version of Acrobat Reader (how many times can one uninstall MacAfee in one lifetime?), and we are completely dependent on that package in this hobby, so I guess we can put up with Mediafire. On a somewhat related topic...when you view YouTube videos from independent content producers, as virtually every wargaming channel is, if you click the Skip Ad button before the ad's run for 30 full seconds, the producer doesn't get paid for your viewing of his video. I can't join the Patreon for every channel I follow, but I can sit through 30 seconds of advertising to toss the producers a fraction of a penny. (If the ad is longer than 30 seconds, he gets paid if you Skip Ad after 31 seconds; if it's shorter than 30 seconds, you have to let it play clear through for him to get credit.) I'm fairly sure that YouTube counts views by viewers who sit through the ad more than views by viewers who skipped the ad when it comes to weighting and ranking videos (like Google, they don't reveal their algorithm), if they count ad-skipped views at all. Just something to consider...
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shep
Eternal Member
Red Alert! Shields up! LENS FLARE!!!
Posts: 1,260
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Post by shep on Oct 12, 2017 12:25:16 GMT -9
Well, there's a difference between content producers who need adds as a means of financial support, and websites that have millions of click-bait buttons put around the one DOWNLOAD button that actually represents their service. I use an add blocker to clean up those download service sites, and deactivate it on websites that need financial support AND that I want to support in this way...
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 12, 2017 16:07:25 GMT -9
Well, there's a difference between content producers who need adds as a means of financial support, and websites that have millions of click-bait buttons put around the one DOWNLOAD button that actually represents their service. I use an add blocker to clean up those download service sites, and deactivate it on websites that need financial support AND that I want to support in this way... See, that's a level of active decision-making that I avoid by never learning about how ad blockers work. Instead, I'm just real leery of extra Download buttons on hosting sites. It mostly works out. Mostly. I wish that Papermau had found some solution other than the one he settled on--AdFly, is it?--because that thing throws my lazy-man's spider-sense into an absolute panic when I've tried to download any of his files (and he has some great ones). Sadly, my experiences with his hosting solution have put me off his content entirely...
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Post by Vermin King on Oct 12, 2017 16:17:44 GMT -9
Well, there's a difference between content producers who need adds as a means of financial support, and websites that have millions of click-bait buttons put around the one DOWNLOAD button that actually represents their service. I use an add blocker to clean up those download service sites, and deactivate it on websites that need financial support AND that I want to support in this way... See, that's a level of active decision-making that I avoid by never learning about how ad blockers work. Instead, I'm just real leery of extra Download buttons on hosting sites. It mostly works out. Mostly. I wish that Papermau had found some solution other than the one he settled on--AdFly, is it?--because that thing throws my lazy-man's spider-sense into an absolute panic when I've tried to download any of his files (and he has some great ones). Sadly, my experiences with his hosting solution have put me off his content entirely... Just clicking into the Ad.Fly nightmare kicks my anti-virus into spasms. At first my Ad Blockers could handle it and I could get to the downloads, but no more ...
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Post by wyvern on Oct 13, 2017 12:29:50 GMT -9
shep: You missed the key adjective, I think - the one tiny DOWNLOAD button that actually represents their service Oddly, I'd not had any AdFly problems with Papermau's site until this week, when I tried to download his new London After Midnight - The Man in the Beaver Hat model (2017 Oct 9 posting). I waited the usual 5 seconds to dismiss the ad, at which point all hell broke loose, and I suddenly had two new windows opening, neither of which included the PDF model download. I had three tries, on the last of which Google flung their "malware ahead - site blocked due to worm virus" scarlet message, so I gave up on it. When I tried again last evening though, it was fine. Strongly suggests there's no useful screening of what AdFly considers appropriate links though.
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Post by nullpointer on Oct 15, 2017 8:01:33 GMT -9
Media Fire is far better than other hosting sites. I don't use an adblocker, so some sites are real awful. You know what, let me make an ordered list if which sites I like to see stuff posted on and which are terrible.
1. Google Drive: ~Upside: really reliable and fast downloads ~Downside: media might get flagged and removed if a copyright complaint is filed 2. Dedicated Webserver fetch, either hosted on the sites server space or have the file served directly by the site's domain (e.g. OneMonk) ~Upside: No ads ever ~Downside: sometimes slow depending on service, expensive for site, files can disappear if site goes down. 3. Dropbox: ~Upside: almost as good as google drive ~Downside: seems to randomly drop old files. 4. OneDrive and other paid cloud storage from major tech companies: ~Upside: reliable ~Downside: slow interface to browse files. 5. MediaFire: ~Upside: well-established, ads generally do not interfere with usability, relatively high download speed, somewhat unscrupulous hosting ~Downside: popups, unscrupulous. 6. Gravitex, Pcloud: ~Upside: functional, minimal ads; ~Downside: kinda weird, small operations -- who knows how long they'll be around. 7. Mega: ~Upside: almost as good as MediaFire, minimal ads ~Downside: weird artificially slow download method, might be taken down by people pursuing Kim Dotcom. 8. Adfly: ~Upside: technically functional ~Downside: weird misleading ads that might harbor malware, popups. 9. 4Shared, DepositFiles: ~Upside: none ~Downside: Incredibly misleading/obtrusive/malicious ads, almost non-functional download capability.
I'm sure there's more but these are the ones I've seen most often.
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Post by sunraven01 on Oct 15, 2017 10:16:02 GMT -9
Ad networks are frequent -- even when well curated -- malware vectors. That's a good enough reason for an ad blocker in my opinion.
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Post by nullpointer on Oct 15, 2017 12:19:34 GMT -9
Ad networks are frequent -- even when well curated -- malware vectors. That's a good enough reason for an ad blocker in my opinion. Some folks are better than others at policing their advertisers. There are plenty that allow (hell, do they encourage?) ads that actively try to trick users with false download buttons and misleading popup messages (4shared in the worst offender of this I've seen). Other folks do seem competent at making their site usable while still devoting a lot of the screen to ad space (Mediafire is pretty OK as this goes, their service does not feel like it targets the downloader like a target to be exploited).
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Post by Punkrabbitt on Oct 15, 2017 13:10:36 GMT -9
Can anyone suggest a good free adblocker for Chrome?
Thank you.
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Post by Vermin King on Oct 15, 2017 15:55:18 GMT -9
I think you will just have to google that
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 16, 2017 2:14:47 GMT -9
My opinion on this matter is that advertisers pay for things so that consumers don't have to. While there are kind souls out there who will do stuff purely altruistically, it still costs a lot of time and money to produce, host and distribute content and people who offer those services do need to get revenue from somewhere in order to keep things going... it's not greed. It's necessity.
The problem arose because advertisers needed to get some sort of return out of all the money they were spending and so ads got more obnoxious and intrusive. Adblockers showed up as response to that, but that changed the rules of the game. Advertisers started finding ways to bypass the blocker, and that made the Adblockers even more brutal in blocking functionality, which made ads get more aggressive, etc.
Then the thousands of online businesses who had come to rely on advertising started to really suffer because they were caught between the terrible option of having a million obnoxious ads or having no revenue. Even the million obnoxious ads were not enough to make things work and so they started finding other ways to make money. Some involved offering premium ad-free options. Others involved forcing people to pay for previously free services. Some turned to adware that forced their users to see way more ads than they were supposed to, and occasionally bots to click ads on the user's behalf. Now we're at a point where sites are hijacking user's hardware to mine cryptocurrency while they browse.
It really is just a modern world example of the age old Tragedy of the Commons. We can't just have stuff for free without some sort of twisted disaster like this happening. For my own part, I don't block ads, but I will block bad advertisers. I will watch YouTube ads without skipping unless they're particularly obnoxious.
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Post by Dominic on Oct 16, 2017 23:28:48 GMT -9
I have used an adblocker for many years. I have also been making YouTube videos for (fewer) years. I am ashamed to say that it took me a while to make the connection - the adblocker worked so well (on YouTube at the time at least) that I thought they were not serving me any ads because I was creating videos myself. When I realized that this was not the case, the first thing I did was whitelist YouTube. From that point on I have made an effort to add pages of fellow creators and "genrally good" sites to that whitelist. (I should add that where I live, YouTube Red is not an option).
Why do I keep the adblocker running? Because there are pages that go overboard, and I want to have the option of removing ads. There are some sites that offer services that I pay for, and they still have large numbers of ads. I get it, but there is a line, a balance.
I also run ads on my blogs. Not too many, I hope - adsense only, which I hope adheres to basic standards. When ads are done right, they are a good way for people to enjoy content and creators to make at least enough to cover their costs.
And I... hope I did not miss the point.
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 17, 2017 1:29:17 GMT -9
Why do I keep the adblocker running? Because there are pages that go overboard, and I want to have the option of removing ads. There are some sites that offer services that I pay for, and they still have large numbers of ads. I get it, but there is a line, a balance. This is the irony of it... There are so many people using adblocker that sites relying on ad impressions to make income are forced to get as many impressions as they can off of the tiny sliver of visitors who don't have adblock. Basically those poor souls are forced to see all the ads that the the adblock crowd doesn't... and that drives that crowd away from the site or encourages them to start using an adblocker, which means that the company has to go even further overboard and adding even more ads.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 17, 2017 10:28:47 GMT -9
I have used an adblocker for many years. I have also been making YouTube videos for (fewer) years. I am ashamed to say that it took me a while to make the connection - the adblocker worked so well (on YouTube at the time at least) that I thought they were not serving me any ads because I was creating videos myself. When I realized that this was not the case, the first thing I did was whitelist YouTube. From that point on I have made an effort to add pages of fellow creators and "genrally good" sites to that whitelist. (I should add that where I live, YouTube Red is not an option). Why do I keep the adblocker running? Because there are pages that go overboard, and I want to have the option of removing ads. There are some sites that offer services that I pay for, and they still have large numbers of ads. I get it, but there is a line, a balance. I also run ads on my blogs. Not too many, I hope - adsense only, which I hope adheres to basic standards. When ads are done right, they are a good way for people to enjoy content and creators to make at least enough to cover their costs. And I... hope I did not miss the point. Really useful to hear the testimony of someone who's seen the issue from both sides. Thanks, Dominic. Maybe using an ad blocker with a whitelisting function for self-curation is a good option, or at least the least bad one. I'll have to ponder that... Also, bravesirkevin, thanks for sharing your perspective and knowledge in this thread. Your breakdown of the escalation of the problem was interesting and informative. In general, I appreciate everyone who's contributed to this thread. I've learned a lot from all of you, and my thinking on the subject is evolving. Not sure where it will wind up yet, though...
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Post by Vermin King on Oct 17, 2017 10:35:30 GMT -9
I totally agree with you there.
I think it goes back to nothing being free. Someone is paying for it, just not you. I'm not sure how my ad blocker works as far as white listing. I'll have to play around with it
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Post by Dominic on Oct 18, 2017 6:09:39 GMT -9
jeffgeorge In my experience, clicking on the icon that most adblocker plugins add to your browser will give you several options, from simply deactivating it on a site, to pausing it, to limiting it to subdomains and so on. Kinda in the same vein, I am seeing more and more sites that blur out the content with a message asking to be whitelisted. I am not sure how to feel about that if it forces me to whitelist the site as opposed to asking for it while you still get to read the content. Do you have any thoughts on that aspect? I should add that I have been contemplating adding a measure to that effect to my sites, although I would probably start with a friendly reminder that things cost money, not a block. Frankly, I could not even tell how much revenue I *might* be missing out on due to adblockers - although that would be an interesting thing to find out - if Google Analytics can tell me...
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 18, 2017 15:51:15 GMT -9
I totally agree with you there. I think it goes back to nothing being free. Someone is paying for it, just not you. I'm not sure how my ad blocker works as far as white listing. I'll have to play around with it If you're not paying to watch, read, or listen to something, you're not the customer...you're the product. The advertisers who buy the ads are the customers. This is how broadcast TV and radio have worked for most of a century. In fact, the cover price on newspapers and magazines usually doesn't cover the cost of printing, let alone the expense of producing editorial content. Again, the subscriber's is the product being monetized; the client is the advertiser.
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 18, 2017 16:56:46 GMT -9
If you're not paying to watch, read, or listen to something, you're not the customer...you're the product. The advertisers who buy the ads are the customers. This is how broadcast TV and radio have worked for most of a century. In fact, the cover price on newspapers and magazines usually doesn't cover the cost of printing, let alone the expense of producing editorial content. Again, the subscriber's is the product being monetized; the client is the advertiser. That's a very cynical, but not necessarily wrong, way of looking at it. In traditional media, the publisher does treat the reader/viewer as their customer and the ad agency that sells their ad space treats the advertisers as their customers, and it's all a tangled codependent mess. Modern digital media are even messier... There's an infinitely more massive disconnect between the advertisers, the service providers and the consumers, but they're all still completely dependent on each other and that makes things really parasitic.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 18, 2017 17:20:37 GMT -9
If you're not paying to watch, read, or listen to something, you're not the customer...you're the product. The advertisers who buy the ads are the customers. This is how broadcast TV and radio have worked for most of a century. In fact, the cover price on newspapers and magazines usually doesn't cover the cost of printing, let alone the expense of producing editorial content. Again, the subscriber's is the product being monetized; the client is the advertiser. That's a very cynical, but not necessarily wrong, way of looking at it. In traditional media, the publisher does treat the reader/viewer as their customer and the ad agency that sells their ad space treats the advertisers as their customers, and it's all a tangled codependent mess. Modern digital media are even messier... There's an infinitely more massive disconnect between the advertisers, the service providers and the consumers, but they're all still completely dependent on each other and that makes things really parasitic. I didn't mean it to be cynical, per se. It's a paraphrase of something I heard someone smart say sometime (how's that for an attribution) talking about broadcast TV, talking to folks who didn't realize that TV shows aren't what networks are selling; TV shows are the bait they use to attract the thing they actually sell, which is our attention. We've gotten so used to getting lots of great (put that "great" in quotes, if you like) entertainment, seemingly for free, that we get very demanding about what we want, but very cheap about what we'll pay for it. The ad-supported-broadcast-television paradigm has spoiled us and seduced us into thinking we deserve our internet content for free, too, but the internet makes it much easier for us to avoid the advertising content that pays for the content we expect for free. Which leads us into an escalating spiral of ad-blockers, pop-ups, search-engine hijackers, and other browser-tampering malware, all of which most inconveniences the people who are observing the ad-supported-content paradigm by watching the ads. We forget that the internet is still a very young medium, and the rules, customs, and culture are still being worked out. But as those things coalesce, it helps us all to remember that content creators have to feed their kids, too, or pretty soon there won't be any content to consume (or at least not any worth consuming). And I guess another takeaway from all this is to bite the bullet and support at least a few of the content creators whose work you enjoy, through Patreon or whatever membership/subscription service they use. None of us can support all the content creators we follow, but if each of us supports a few of them, it will (hopefully) work out in the end, and we won't have so many aggressive ads to deal with.
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Post by nullpointer on Oct 19, 2017 8:04:52 GMT -9
I've come to consider Ads a bit like the price of admission for places I want to visit online. If ads are present, they are better be unobtrusive or I will begin the weigh the worth of the service against the headache of the advertising. Since I don't use an ad-blocker I find that I end up conducting my own quiet protests by simply not ever going back to those sites with such terrible ads as to override the value of the content they provide.
I used to like a blog that started to have ads that auto-played sound, and I just found myself not clicking that bookmark anymore until I removed it entirely. I feel bad for heavy online news consumers seeking a free experience, I don't know what it is about news network and newspaper's webpages that seem to have resurrected all the terrible tendencies of the early 2000's aggressive advertising wasteland.
I'm quite OK with content creators/providers putting a price on my attention and leisure time. Despite trends towards media centralization, I still am satisfied with the freedom I have in being able to shut off a content stream (website/podcast/show/etc.) when the value trade-off between advertisement and content weighs too far away from the stuff I like. It's not perfect, but it's good enough -- at least up to the point where companies start tracking your browsing and shopping habits to be hyper-intrusive in the ads they serve... but that's a different topic.
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Post by Dominic on Oct 23, 2017 23:02:23 GMT -9
I'm quite OK with content creators/providers putting a price on my attention and leisure time. Despite trends towards media centralization, I still am satisfied with the freedom I have in being able to shut off a content stream (website/podcast/show/etc.) when the value trade-off between advertisement and content weighs too far away from the stuff I like. It's not perfect, but it's good enough -- at least up to the point where companies start tracking your browsing and shopping habits to be hyper-intrusive in the ads they serve... but that's a different topic. I have looked into that kind of marketing - although I do not see any use for myself in it. The basic idea of finding the right audience by "pixeling" people who visit your site is not the problem in my mind - it is how you use the information. If I browse through a webshop, put something in the basket and then leave, and I get an email two days later reminding me that "there is still something waiting for you, maybe you forgot?", then I am fine with that. It could be considered a service. Same with offering coupons for people to return to your shop, etc. The line gets blurred when I browse through things on Amazon and get all the things I looked at presented to me in my Instagram feed. I can see where they are coming from, but that is just too blunt. What I cannot understand is that when I buy, say, an office chair, I keep seeing office chair ads everywhere - I mean, I already bought one, sure I need another, right? I think that lacks style for lack of a better word, and I cannot imagine it working too often. But then again, apparently it does... Again, if you do it to work with and for your audience - the pixeling I mean, tracking page visits etc. - then I am okay with it. Being able to target poeple who bought from you before, and those who visited you but did not buy, etc., is a powerful tool. But so many people over- and misuse it these days...
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 24, 2017 8:50:00 GMT -9
The line gets blurred when I browse through things on Amazon and get all the things I looked at presented to me in my Instagram feed. I can see where they are coming from, but that is just too blunt. What I cannot understand is that when I buy, say, an office chair, I keep seeing office chair ads everywhere - I mean, I already bought one, sure I need another, right? I think that lacks style for lack of a better word, and I cannot imagine it working too often. But then again, apparently it does... Again, if you do it to work with and for your audience - the pixeling I mean, tracking page visits etc. - then I am okay with it. Being able to target poeple who bought from you before, and those who visited you but did not buy, etc., is a powerful tool. But so many people over- and misuse it these days... I'd be inclined to cite that as evidence that they are not collecting perfect information. Google knows that you searched for office chairs, Facebook knows that you visited pages that had office chairs for sale while logged in to your Facebook account, but neither of them know that you bought the chair. I'd go further and say that it's likely that neither of them even know that it was your intention to buy a chair, they just noted that you had taken a recent interest in chairs and that had slightly increased the weight of that keyword on their digital profile of you, making it more likely that ads related to that keyword would be served to you by their algorithms. Not to say that the whole thing isn't creepy.... it really is a bit worrying that these powerful organisations have very detailed databases packed with information about who we are and what we're interested in.
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Post by Dominic on Oct 24, 2017 11:25:46 GMT -9
Not to say that the whole thing isn't creepy.... it really is a bit worrying that these powerful organisations have very detailed databases packed with information about who we are and what we're interested in. True. But I am left to wonder whether it is really Facebook or Google that are behind these ads, strictly speaking. The way I understand the pixeling thing, it is supposed to be used for targeted marketing, meaning that I would be seeing ads that the companies I visited are paying for. And from what I am seeing, that appears to be the case sometimes - as with Amazon. They would have something set up like "Someone who had this or that in their basket but did not proceed to checkout." Blunt, but okay. It is akin to a shop owner yelling after you as you leave (which would be strange). I agree that things get worrisome when you imagine that there is a web of keywords that you personally "rank" for with the way you browse and what sites you visit...
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