ebu

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i was in the middle of writing a guide for setting up modded minecraft for a private server with friends when i encountered something that forced me to stop and think. to accurately place this in context requires a little bit of introduction, so i will give you the fast version.

minecraft mods are commonly assembled into modpacks, and as is the case with most community efforts, this can be a time-consuming labor, often done for no financial gain. insofar as modpack authors need to eat, they might choose to take on sponsorships, embedding ads and affiliate links in their modpack listings, or in the modpack itself. i encountered such a link-injecting mod in our modpack, and a couple lines from the mod's description caught my eye.

This unique mod enables our partners to easily embed their partner links into the multiplayer menu of their modpacks. [...] Keep in mind, this mod is specifically created for our partners and is meant to enhance their modpacks. It's not adware or an unwanted intrusion. If you've encountered this mod in a modpack and prefer not to use it, you can easily remove it without affecting the functionality of the modpack. It's designed to enhance your experience, but your preferences always come first.

okay. so. first off. this mod, while installed, injects a permanent affiliate for a server hosting service smack into the top of the multiplayer menu, copying the styles of the server list right below it. i have accidentally clicked this link thinking i was joining our multiplayer server.

that is an ad. this mod's sole purpose is putting that ad there. this mod is, in fact, adware. there's no coherent definition of "adware" that doesn't include this mod. why lie about what the mod is? and then this second part...

It's not adware or an unwanted intrusion.

the most sensible reading here is that it's saying it's not unwanted by the modpack authors. which, yes, they had to make the explicit decision to add the mod. but there's no reason to pretend that the people actually playing the pack want ads -- people overwhelmingly despise ads in general, and judging by the number of people in the modpack discord yeeting this mod out of their installs, this is doing the opposite of "enhancing" anyone's experience.

despite this writing being directed at modpack players, it still pretends the only parties who might consider this an intrusion to be the sponsors themselves and the modpack authors (sorry, "partners"). the description of this mod outs itself as uncaring toward the player's preferences, categorically excluding them from consideration, or at best, shoving the responsibility of respecting those preferences right back onto them. don't like, don't look, right? just uninstall! we aren't here to enforce our presence (until we are), you're free to opt out (while you can)! ignore the fact that we deliberately disallowed you to opt-in.

no matter how nicely or politely it's presented, advertising is fundamentally a hostile force. by the incentives of the economic structure it exists in, it must seek out, disguise as, and inject itself in front of the actual things that people are drawn to. and once it has done that, then it tries obfuscate and propagandize away that truth -- to pretend that it was always there, that it is somehow a positive thing, that nobody minds. that chipping away at people's time, space, and energy en masse is fine as long as each individual intrusion is "small enough", a size that will never stop increasing.


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