RE: The Problem with Adblockers & A Solution
The harvesting of data on the internet is untenable. It's been said that there is no free software, because if you don't pay in money, you pay in data.
Unfortunately, even if you pay for software, a la Windows, you aren't NOT paying in data too.
Steemit is a solution to that problem, potentially. While the current implementation of Steemit, AFAIK, still harvests data like any other platform, the nature of the platform, incorporating blockchain cryptocurrency, potentiates other models of economic return.
It is my sincere hope that advertising models die utterly and immediately. Due to the fact of capital concentration enabling wealth to collect and profit from personal data, in myriad ways, both the right of people to be secure in their persons and papers, and the ability of people to compete on a fair basis with everyone else economically, are eroded, even destroyed.
While this adblocker seems an improvement over having no adblocker, or one that hurts small content producers, since advertising itself is the enemy of freedom and prosperity, I can but hope that it succeeds marvelously and quickly, until it fails when the advertising industry is utterly destroyed.
I hope it is the last adblocker that fails, but that it fails utterly.
Sorry, and thanks!
Thanks for the comment. I'm interested in why you think advertising is so bad. I sometimes find out about things I want through adverts, which I consider to be a good thing. If I was only shown adverts of things I cared about, they wouldn't even annoy me, to be honest.
Are adverts really so evil?
It is not simply that advertisements are evil, although they can be, by being manipulative, subliminal, and used for propaganda. Simply offering goods and services for sale is not what the advertising industry does.
Rather it is the overt and covert harvesting of personal information, the industry of selling, sharing, and parsing that data, and the provision of that data to state actors, criminals, and business organizations, for uses other than advertising, that is evil.
From Orwellian fascism, to blackmail, to inside business information used to profit from that data, horrible crimes against humanity are newly potentiated, furthered, and worsened. This is not advertising, but surveillance, and the collection of personal information by 'free' software and services is the tip of the economic and political manipulation iceberg that is a real threat to the free people and nations of the world.
While governments are variously limited in what kinds of information collection they are able to undertake legally, these frameworks are easily bypassed by 'offshoring' such data collection, retention, and manipulation services, which are provided by private companies, like Google, that overtly claim to gather our personal information in order to provide targeted advertising.
It is for this reason that I use this name, valued-customer.