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Animats

Anyone likely to read Dr. Dobbs probably has an ad blocker.

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How true is this? Sure, they're technically sophisticated, but that narrative could be overwhelmed by:

1. they aren't teenagers

2. they run websites that depend on ad revenue

3. they realize content creators need to get paid

Truthfully, I've never run an ad blocker before, until over the summer I got extremely fed up with a particular web site that I keep going to out of old habit (slashdot.org). A couple times I left a browser tab on the site, and in the middle of the night some video ads started playing through the computer speakers. And over the summer, I was at the camper on a hotspot connection, and accidentally burned through my entire month's bandwidth allotment because accidentally left their front page open when I went hiking for a few hours. Again, those aggressive video ads.

So I installed an ad blocker, which actually made my 3g wifi hotspot usable over the summer. (Yes, I should stop visiting sites that get too annoying with aggressive ads, or I should just selectively block those sites).

Omg, what the hell kind of dark pattern is it that waits 10 minutes to start playing an audio ad?

It's one of those "I bet someone got a nice bonus for that" ideas that destroys user trust: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/92244...

Omg, what the hell kind of dark pattern is it that waits 10 minutes to start playing an audio ad?

Slashdot's audio ads don't wait 10 minutes to start. Slashdot's much hated auto-refresh "feature" is to blame.

It periodically refreshes the page and brings you a new crop of ads, some of which might be audio ads.

The auto-refresh "feature" merely exists to increase their ad revenue. Nobody I know likes the auto-refresh feature, as it just causes you to lose your place on the page.

If you serve audio ads on site with text content at all, you are a complete moron. The only thing they'll do is advertise the use of AdBlock.

Slashdot's auto-refresh, which can't be disabled without some technical tinkering, is horrible, just horrible. I've left feedback that they should include an option to disable auto-refresh, but was ignored. I guess it's more profitable to ignore your users and force more ads on them.

I installed Adblock Plus and tweaked some Chrome settings to get the system to mostly ignore Slashdot's horrible auto-refresh. It still sometimes scrolls my page a bit, though, which is still annoying.

A lot of us install ad-blockers because :

1. We want to speed up web-browsing experience.

2. Save internet bandwidth.

3. Are quite tired of highly intrusive, epileptic-seizure-inducing flash ads (some of them with audio).

4. Security reasons ( I personally use Noscript which has the side-effect of blocking ads)

5. Simply refuse to accept tracking cookies.

I wouldn't mind viewing unobtrusive text or image ads without tracking cookies (eg: StackOverflow) but very few websites actually implement those. I asked the owner of Phoronix.com about this a while back (who also seems to be having issues with the financial side of things)- Basically unobtrusive ads have much lower value than the obtrusive ones.

Just to add a data point: I occasionally read Dr. Dobbs. I don't have an ad blocker installed.

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