Unpopular Opinion

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As someone who worked (briefly) as a freelance writer online, the tl;dr bot is my enemy and I want it dead. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.

The only thing that will accomplish is forcing those websites to do the very thing that we rail about; replacing their writers with crappy A.I because they can't afford to pay for actual content.

We rail against the enshitification of the internet, but when there's a legitimate way to fight back by giving these websites a page view/read/click etc... so that they can attract advertisers, we would rather have a bot summarize it for us, giving them nothing.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Which came first…did ad-blocking lead to more aggressive advertisements, or did more aggressive advertisements lead to ad-blockers…

I know this is rhetorical, but I'm gonna bet that advertisers led to ad blockers. I don't mind mild ads, but mild ads don't generate sales. Heck, I'll watch the right ad if it's amusing. I watched a 30 minute ad for Surfshark because TomSka made it funny. When it's noises, popups, security issues all to drive sales, then I'm gonna block it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I know this is rhetorical, but I'm gonna bet that advertisers led to ad blockers.

They did. In the mid to late 90s, we didn't have adblockers. Ads were mostly static images around the content, and could easily be ignored if you weren't interested. In the late 90s to early 2000s, pop up ads started appearing, and adblockers were introduced, or at least became known, to stop them.