> hardworking volunteers continually update and maintain the filter lists
This can't be said enough.
Large numbers of users still have no idea that their blocker works at all because of these lists.
The collective amount of work which goes into these free-to-use lists on a daily basis is impressive, especially considering it's done entirely on a voluntary basis.
Thank you gorhill. Seriously, all the work you have done with uBlock Origin has made the world (wide web) a better place. And first recognizing the oft thankless blocklist maintainers here without a hint of name dropping yourself is truly honorable.
uBlock + uMatrix is such a powerful combo that I don't need any other ad- or script-related extensions on top of them. No Ghostery, no NoScript, none of that.
Big shout-out to all these volunteers indeed, I wouldn't use the web so much if it weren't for them making it half-decent.
The amount of effort being put into these lists as well as the success of your extension also speaks volume about how unbearable ads are nowadays. I hope we will never lose this battle, at least not on the Internet.
Consider, you are posting on HN that does not have 3rd party advertisements the website is simply cheap enough to keep running that it does not matter. Personally, I would not mind if all the advertising supported publishers went away. There are enough people willing to make absolutely free content that as a consumer I really don't need more than that to be entertained.
Still, there are a range of funding available that doesn't depend on advertising such as donations, subscribers, and or merchandising. What's at risk is really the lowest form of content that can't be supported with it's own merits and I really see the problem if it simply goes away.
You’re vastly misunderstanding what exactly Hacker News is. It has multiple(?, two?) full time employees working on it, funded by Y Combinator, one of the most ‘important’ venture capital firms in Silicon Valley/US.
Hacker News is a marketing expense for this investment institution.
Most newspapers are also "marketing expenses" for their owners. Editorial independence has always been a challenge for the press, either from "philantropist" owners or from big advertisers.
The site would collapse. That’s not an exaggeration. Those two aren’t merely employees; they run and direct HN.
I disagree with many of their decisions, but they’re largely irreplaceable.
There are also a lot of behind the scenes volunteers that do the work, too. But making the front page interesting on a daily basis is no small feat, and from an outside POV that seems almost entirely thanks to those two.
The front page is highly curated. From time to time you will see stories that are many hours old with a handful of upvotes overtake newer and more popular stories.
Those stories are promoted by staff because they are interesting and didn't get the limelight they deserved.
The reverse also happens. For example, many cryptocurrency stories are suppressed because they are neither interesting nor novel.
So in short, yes, votes play a role, but without curation, HN would be a cesspit of self promoting cryptoscams and repetitive content. (After all, how hard could it be to fake HN votes?)
> Personally, I would not mind if all the advertising supported publishers went away.
There are a large number of award winning hyperlocal news websites run by hardworking and talented local news journalists who rely on advertising to survive. With out them though, there's be no one to report or investigate the shady things going on in local government.
This advertising is directly sold by them (which isn't easy to do in an Era of Google and FB), without networks.
For 99% of them, it's the most practical way to pay the bills. Subscribers are possible, but only if you're established and you have a wide enough audience. For a small town you'd need 1000 subscribers at 5k just to make a 60k pretax salary which support 1-2 staff members.
Advertising supports hard journalism, which supports a healthy democracy. Ask yourself if all publishers supported by advertising going away would truly be a good thing.
Honestly, it would be better for these hyperlocal sites to be supported by ads from the local community, both for lack of toxic ads and for the fact that most readers will be in the same community. Now there's a startup idea for you.
Hyperlocal media supports smaller coverage areas where it's not practical to have a publicly funded organization. Even then, you're going to have debates regarding the agenda of the organization.
At a local level advertising generally does not corrupt the journalism. At the local level, it's community oriented where the journalists are genuinely interested in giving a voice to advertisers as well as informing citizens. It's a more positive ecosystem than what you see on the national level.
There are thousands more that are not members - simply professional and entrepreneurial journalists trying to make a living doing what they care about.
My hyperlocal news outlet is “sponsored” by many local businesses. I have always felt there was a conflict of interest created by this sponsorship.
One of the businesses is an auto shop. If that auto shop is doing something like re-using old oil to save money on oil changes or some other shady tactic would the hyperlocal news go after them?
I’ve never seen investigative journalism out of my hyperlocal news, it is all just community news about upcoming events and the like.
I could be mistaken but your links don’t make it clear to me that any of these hyperlocal organizations are doing investigative journalism. My hyperlocal outlet certainly doesn’t.
An ethical journalist will absolutely go after that auto shop. But what you're describing is a political/ethical conflict which can arise any time an organization accepts support money, even from readers.
There are not a lot of hyperlocal investigative news outlets listed there although granted there are some.
The ones that do exist appear to be non-profits relying on donations (e.g. aspenjournalism.org / birminghamwatch.org) that don't run ads and give a strong impression of being run by one or two people.
I'm really unconvinced that this is a significant industry let alone one that is supported by ads.
There are quite a few, and as I mentioned, most of them are not affiliated with any organization. I wouldn't operate a business based on a market that didn't exist. I guess you can choose to believe otherwise though - although I'm not sure why.
If corporate advertising inevitably corrupts journalism to support corporations, then why doesn't Government support inevitably corrupt journalism to support bigger, more centralized, and more intrusive Government?
I've never heard of a corporation run by somebody who wants to make less money.
I've regularly heard elected government representatives argue that their government should be smaller, less centralised and less intrusive.
What exactly made you think these situations were in any way analogous?
Pre-2003 BBC regularly used to hold the government to account because it was explicitly independent and it had a charter that emphasized its responsibility to the public. That kind of set up simply isn't possible if you are advertising funded - the conflict of interest is too great.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of state funded media but the Koch-linked corporate think tank narrative of "big bad bureaucracies" is a pretty facile one.
I'm not really sure what your curious apparent inability to find companies not cartoonishly intent on profits or your acknowledgement of the existence of elected advocates of smaller government has to do with the question.
I'm also not terribly convinced by "holding things to account". I'm sure many news organizations have, and many more have been accused of, criticizing large corporations for specific misdeeds without necessarily questioning the overall capitalist systems that allows them to exist. Likewise, news organizations also can and have criticized specific governmental misdeeds without necessarily advocating that the government should not be involved in specific things at all, or that some specific things should be handled by a more local government versus a national-level one.
The BBC was never better. It’s a media organisation. By virtue of the people in the industry it must have a left wing bias. More importantly, being a bureaucracy that still exists we know that it’s continued existence is its primary aim. The BBC and all the similar organisations in different countries helped define the bounds of polite opinion. Whether that was 30-70 or 40-60 on some hypothetical left-right scale the effect is the same. People outside the Overton window hated the established media, whether the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph or the ostensibly non-partisan BBC. The explosion in television channels and more importantly, the internet led to an information free for all. The Overton window for polite opinion hasn’t shifted much but people are a great deal more aware of the alternate viewpoints and possibilities. The number of people who find the BBC or any other establishment organ both ideologically congenial and politically relevant has undergone a decline that’s irreversible. The information ecology and economy have changed.
There are plenty of media organisations with a right or left wing bias. The Overton window is defined by the audience not the media. Media gets dumped on by both the right or left when they step outside of the safe zone.
Most telling foreign news may seem left leaning when that country views them as right leaning. In other cases the reverse happens because large organizations pander to their audience and/or the government not what foreigners may think.
I'd say there are quite a few issues (foreign policy, for instance) where the cable news networks are more or less in lockstep with each other but not really representative of the general views of Americans.
Or, to give you another example, consider the tremendous amount of opinion column space given to people like David Brooks who represent a tiny proportion of voters -- and then compare it to the total absence of, say, anyone aligned with Sanders (who I think we can pretty safely say is more popular than any of the world's Never-Trump Republicans).
IMO, that's a function of a subset of Organizations. Al jazeera news exists as part of a different spectrum, but they still customize their message for different nations. Brazil's local news has again got it's own very different spin on things.
I mean, yes, media from different countries is different. That's one reason why I go read RT once in a while. But the US is dominated by its own homegrown media.
Almost, the Overton window is often much wider than individual media companies use. However, your point actually supported my argument as the audience was clearly willing to accept outside the range of existing content.
In the reverse case everyone would ignore Corbyn as people do flat earthers. It's only because he exits within the audiences realm of acceptance that anyone is willing to pay attention.
The Overton window is not purely defined by what the audience thinks. Consider the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or the US during WW2 when freedom of speech was at best a farce. In quasi democratic societies you’re constrained to stay within some distance of the median voter or have any attempt to influence the discourse break down. That’s plenty to influence politics. There’s a lot of difference between +1 and -1 standard deviations from the mean in politics, plenty to sustain the tribalism that’s the driver of most politics. Maybe you need to go up to + or - 2 s.d. to dampen dissent but I doubt you need to go further.
Imagine if the internet didn’t exist. Do you think anyone would have payed attention to the German New Year’s Eve rapes? It’s not like anyone in the media class was going to do it before the cover up was a story in itself.
I was defining say Chinsease sensors as part of the audience rather than the news organization as the orignization does not have contowl over them. Much like in the US Fox News/CBS etc gets a list of words it can't say, they can add to that list but not remove from it.
> Ask yourself if all publishers supported by advertising going away would truly be a good thing.
Yes. Along with the model of paying people to access information. We should get used to the model of paying people to produce information that we support, even information that we don't consume ourselves. An overtly propagandistic model, rather than the covert propaganda by advertisers/political actors model that we use now.
Seriously: how much of a burden would it be for 500 people to cover a single journalist's salary, and the medium through which they publish? Patreon is a working example; there just need to be better tools, models, and expectations other than conning 2% of internet browsers with deceptive ads as the only thing holding our democracy together.
you are posting on HN that does not have 3rd party advertisements the website is simply cheap enough to keep running that it does not matter
This is misleading. HN does have ads, in the form of job posts for the YC companies. The site itself also serves as a business development tool for a (now) huge investment fund.
Additionally, this site isn't so cheap to run anyone could do it without caring about the cost. The hardware and bandwidth isn't free [1], but more importantly, I believe multiple people work on HN part-time, and dang works on it full-time [2]. That's not cheap, at all.
Let's say it's ~2 million every 5 years. That might sound like a lot of money, but it's couch cushion level of expenditure for a large organization. YC easily extracts enough value to keep it running.
Like Wikipedia the vast majority of value is from free content. That trend continues across my browsing habits. I need to use an ad blocker because I frankly don't see a lot of them.
> HN does have ads, in the form of job posts for the YC companies.
I don't really agree with how you're defining portfolio company job links as ads.
AFAIK they do not charge portfolio companies for job links, so is it really an ad if they don't charge for it / it generates no revenue? The companies and tech mentioned in their descriptions are often just as interesting as other stories posted here. They are more in a gray area of content marketing or sponsored content than native advertising.
I suppose you could make an argument around it potentially increasing the value of their equity stake in a company by making that company more valuable. It seems a bit roundabout — I don't consider them ads any more so than a link to your blog post is an "ad" for your blog, or the comment posts in the monthly job threads are "ads".
Ryan didn’t make a leap; that’s the literal definition of the word. First definition I found: a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing a job vacancy.
Ryan’s link to his blog is 100% an ad, IMO. So are YC portfolio job postings.
Where do you drawn the line between when a link to a blog post is / isn't an ad? Is every submission that links to any site an ad? This seems like a gray area to me.
I don't think a job posting is ever not an ad. Whether pasting a link to one's blog is or isn't for me depends on the motivation.
If the motivation is "I might forget my blog address; better record it here", it's not an ad. If the motivation is, "I want people to be able to find out more about me/drive awareness of me or the blog," it's an ad.
HN does not produce content. The other methods also don't scale as well.
Advertising is the fastest, easiest, most scalable, and most egalitarian method there is.
The actual issue people seem to have with is the modern online implementation that is slow, invasive and frustrating. There are companies doing a better job and things will get cleaned up but there's nothing wrong with the concept itself.
IMO, HN comments generally exceed the value of the story linked. Wikipedia suggest you really can scale content without Advertising. For major news organizations you have things like NPR that again work fine. I also brows plenty of forms that may or may not have a banner ad at the top and both models work.
In the wider realm it's a mixed bag, but advertising really does not seem necessary.
HN comments wouldn't exist without the stories to talk about in the first place, otherwise it's just a message board, which have been basically free to host for a decade.
Wikipedia is an outlier that goes through intense fundraising to survive. It also does not produce content.
Media publications are businesses and they need to make money to survive. Donations never work and if you tried to pitch that as the business model at even the hippiest startup convention, you'd be laughed off. Subscriptions do work but the public does not understand how to price the value and would rather go to starbucks instead, clearly seen in the endless comments and downvotes on HN when there is paywalled story or advertising talk. Subscription also bring up the issue of access for people without the means to buy.
20% of NPR's funding comes from corporations. Useful yes, required no.
It feels like advertising, but in practice it's virtue signaling. Much like giving to Habitat for humanity corporations want recognition for their donations, but as pure advertising it's not worth it. So, if they where not mentioned on air corporations would likely cut back, but not to zero.
Cool, let's just take away 20% of the revenue then and see if it's required or not. As quoted on that page: "Sponsorship from local companies and organizations is the second largest source of support to stations."
Virtue signaling is still advertising, paying money for exposure. Otherwise it's a corporate donation and that does not scale at all. You can look at the continuous travails of open-source projects that deliver billions in value but get no funding as a perfect example.
The point is that NPR comes nowhere near the massive amount of content that people consume but don't pay for. Please don't just assume the entire industry is incompetent, there are millions of people working in these media companies and they are constantly trying new options. So far, outside of subscriptions for certain high-end brands like the Financial Times, advertising is the only sustainable model found.
I am not saying the industry is irrational, I am saying it's output is mostly irrelevant to me. Further, advertising supported media is consistently the least valuable segment (to me) because they don't need to be as good to continue. They maximize profits by minimum effort and maximum views which creates mountains of meaningless drivial targeting emotional resonance.
Click bait is an outgrowth of payment in eyeballs.
As to virtue signaling, I bring that up because it can occur even if they are never mentioned on air. A company can say they are a corporate sponsor of X even if X only ever mentioned them on an obscure part of their website. In the world of virtue signaling simply accepting money creates vale. NPR is behaving rationally to accept as much money as possible and even to put effort into getting more because at effectively 90% the funding they would create less value, but clearly they could still create significant value with 90% of their current funds.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make now. Your original comment was that you would be fine if ad-supported publishing went away because there are other models. I'm telling you that there are none that come close to the scale of advertising. The examples you cited either do not produce content or are a microscopic part of the media landscape. Tastes are also subjective and what you call low-quality might be exactly what someone else is looking for.
Anyways, if advertising went away, a massive amount of media you see today would also disappear. You would definitely notice that.
And that's before even getting to the even more massive impact it would make on the economy since every major company today relies on advertising for growth and sales. It's easy to look at few annoying banner ads and say that they suck, but this is a 12-figure global industry that plays a critical part in the economy. It's just not that simple.
The only TV I watch is the Olymics, would it go away without advertising well possibly. I bring that up because my habits are well outside the norm. Would I be aware of 95% of the news disappearing sure, would it directly impact me well probably not.
Advertising is largely zero sum, it increases the cost of products while increasing individual product sales. People would buy almost exactly the same amount of food for example without any advertising so that's pure dead weight to society. Despite all those car ads people would still buy a car without them further without that massive cost those cars would be either cheaper or better, etc across a huge range of industries. Without ads people would still buy soap and other home goods, at worst they would pay less when doing so.
The real issue is that ad-based companies seem to have a feeling of entitlement that makes no sense. It is perfectly normal and reasonable to choose for yourself what you like to watch or listen to on some media.
I personally have no interest in seeing any kind of ads and indiscriminately block all of them. I'm perfectly fine if that causes companies with ad-based revenue to go bankrupt, and there is not slightest legal or moral obligation for me to support these companies.
If you have a company and worry about ad-blockers, the first thing you need to do is to create a product that you can actually sell.
Of course, as long as they don't complain and stop whinning about ad-blockers, I have no problem with companies who base their revenue primarily on ads. I'm simply not one of their customers.
Nobody is saying you can't choose things for yourself. Where did you interpret that?
It's not about ad-based revenue. Every single company relies on marketing for success, and so the economy is tied to advertising. There's a reason that some of the largest companies in the world are advertising businesses. People are also bad at judging value and dont/wont pay for things like news. Like I said before, plenty of publications sell subscriptions but HN threads still whine incessantly about paywalls, while also ignoring how many people can't afford to pay but would still like access.
Also, adblockers are not really a big deal, there are plenty of ways around them, especially if you want the content, and you're at best blocking about 10% of the advertising that's reaching you anyway.
My web app was time consuming to design and create, and fully ad supported. There wasn’t anything like it and people loved it within the niche. It would have been difficult to get started with merchandise, subscribers or donations, but once we had traffic it was easy to sell advertising to fund further development.
I still subscribe daily to print newspapers. Today they had a half page ad for an amazon sale. No clickbaity content, no jarring colors, looks good, is designed to integrate with the content, and contains useful information.
How does it work? You want to publish an ad, you go directly to the publisher. You design the ad for the paper or the magazine. It looks good and works for everyone involved.
Web ads, however, are a complete anti-pattern. I imagine that the advertisers and the publishers can save themselves a lot of money and goodwill if they directly work together like they do in print.
The problem is how to finance the hundred thousand micropublishers. To avoid the adnetwork trash effect you’d need someone big, like medium, to implement some well integrated advertisement with revenue sharing, like youtube.
Failing that affiliate and ad networks and maybe microfinancing like patreon are the only things to get something out of micropublishing.
I've come to realize that there are two things called "Bitcoin". One is the actual technical system that exists. That's the thing that (slowly) does 2-4 transactions per second, and is mostly driven by speculation and some light crime. Approximately nobody uses it for actual commerce.
Then there is "Bitcoin" the idea. You can see the start of it in the initial paper: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1] This is the techno-libertarian ideal of a perfect, stateless financial system that magically solves all financial problems
So Bitcoin-the-idea has everything to do with any money-related problem. Even though Bitcoin-the-reality is in fact not helpful for this. As the idea and the real thing diverge, it becomes more obvious that a large number of Bitcoin-the-idea adherents are essentially religious in their behaviors. (There's another, much smaller segment for whom the idea is something they are working toward. You can tell them because they will distinguish between present and (imagined) future.)
Unfortunately, the Church of Bitcoin attendees welcome questions like your about as much as parents welcome people saying that Santa doesn't exist. So thanks for speaking up and asking blunt questions like this despite the flack I'm sure you get.
The problem is publishers assuming I care about this. That they're actually indispensable to the ecosystem, rather then what they are - a passing interest who's absence I wouldn't notice or care about.
Thanks for getting to the point I wanted. Then I guess ads on these sites don’t matter, as they are so pointless, you’re not Visiting these sites.
However, you still do, so they have value. That value comes at a price, rather you think they are good or not good for the ego system. You’re actions speak in the camp of them being good.
I think we can all agree, some porn and content is not good. However, the value walks with out attention And not our moral desires.
Through out this thread I’ve seen people say they have no respect for Facebook or google and their ads, yet services they use daily. Unwilling to pay, the product is you.
Either pay with your money or lack of attention and this seems like it’s no longer a problem. M
The issue is, we want all this but want to provide them with little or not compensation for their value.
We use to speak with our attention, we didn’t like this store, so we never went there. Today, this extension is merely still going to the store, but ignoring what we dislike.
There’s no debate. I use ad supported services (like Facebook) and I block ads. End of story. If these services go away because of some ad revenue problem (unlikely) I just don’t care. Right now there is no ad supported service that I believe I would pay anything for other than google search itself. I don’t have to right now so the issue is moot. I had a pretty rich life before Facebook and MySpace, somehow I’ll survive and I think I speak for a sizable chunk of people. Some people might value fb enough to pay for it like compuserve in the 80s. Good on them.
I can possibly see how these issues might matter to you if you make a living at google or a large content company, but I, like the vast majority of people do not. It is not my concern. I don’t get why this is so hard to understand.
I currently host my own email, at, if I only used the servers for email, considerable cost both in rent and time.
I wouldn't use Gmail, but I'd probably consider Fastmail if/when I don't want to host my own email anymore.
I might use Dropbox over Google drive (rather than store stuff on my server), and I might use Neocities.org to host a static Web site.
So there are many ad supported services that live next to "for pay" equivalent services.
As for content, I used to subscribe to lwn.net - but stopped when I realised I wasn't reading it closely enough to warrant the subscription. I might come back at a later date.
I'd love to see a site like like lwn that syndicated news; a clean look, perhaps with ads/delayed publishing to non-subscribers, the "subscription link"-system (i could share what I read with non-subscribers). And with proper compensation for conrmtributers (individuals and institutions).
You've crossed into violating the site guidelines here. We're trying to avoid this kind of flamewar, and ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so if you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Unless I'm missing something from the context, the comment broke at least three: the one against calling names in arguments (e.g. "leech"), the guideline about civility (by going into personal attack), and this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
I'm sorry but that is splitting hairs. The comment used a name but it was not name calling, it was the core of his argument. He was being relatively civil, it's clear from the comment. And are you really going to delete someone's comment because you think it's engaging in a straw man argument? Can't the other commenter defend himself?
Sorry I think you sometimes get too heavy handed around here.
Especially not newspapers. Not only their information often isn’t balanced, it is sometimes so much propaganda filled with verifiable false facts (e.g. on the wage gap) that I wish they would disappear. I mostly use them only to take snapshots and build videos about how the press publishes false information or correct information worded in such a way that the reader gets the wrong idea.
I would pay for Youtube. Or rather, for good youtubers. In fact, I donate using Patreon on a monthly basis to a few youtubers who provide accurate news. QED...
No wonder they are dubbed as “Washington Compost” or “Confabulated News Network”. And same for any social network (Twitter, Facebook and Youtube) who censor right-wing informtion, not only I don’t care about their ad revenue, but if they disappeared because of this, it would be a net win for society. Neither newspapers nor social networks will disappear, unfortunately.
We've had adblockers for fifteen years. It was reasonable to speculate that they might kill online publishing in the early 2010s maybe. But now?
Print doesn't have easy adblocking, it's just you and a pair of scissors. Which is stronger, print or web publishing?
How many years of adblockers not destroying the internet should we see before it's reasonable to reevaluate our initial assumptions about their impact?
There are hundreds of articles for any topic on the internet. Even if 10% of them could survive without ads it would more than enough. The problem is right now there is no way to distinguish between them without visiting them all. And I am not going to open and close 5 websites before I could finally find the one without ads.
Website owners could easily fix that problem by declaring some standard mandatory component of URL for every ad-supported page. I would happily write and use an extension that would erase all links that have e.g. string "/ads/" in them. That way I would never visit there part of the internet and wouldn't harm them in any way. However since they don't want to make this small step towards my needs they are welcome to go to hell.
I specifically whitelisted the ads on Daring Fireball (and a few other sites) because they're 1) relevant and 2) unobtrusive. I would whitelist any site with the same policies.
Back when I bought magazines at news stands, the ads were a big part of the reason as they were targeted to my interests (without spying on me). I want to connect with relevant advertising. I just want to do it on my terms, with out spyware, malware, slow load times, autoplaying video and sound, distracting animation, etc.
I am happy to pay directly for content that is interesting and useful to me. For a long time, I subscribed to computer magazines like Byte, even when I had Internet access and supposedly had all the information at my fingertips.
These days, I can't remember the last time I've read a good article on technology someplace other than on a blog, a website of a group of enthusiasts. If I ever ended up on websites like Wired or The Verge in the last five years or so, it was definitely by mistake.
Many publishers make money through ads because most people wouldn't pay a dime for that stuff. Catchy is good enough to make people waste time, but not money.
Edit: oh -- it's not all black and white, either. I use an ad blocker, but I whitelist the pages where I think it's worthwile. It's not an all-or-nothing thing. Publishers who put out quality content and whose ads don't try to serve me malware (eh, Forbes?) get whitelisted. Everyone else, to quote the famous nihilistic philosopher B. B. Rodriguez, can bite my shiny metal ass.
I'll start with the premise that underlies my thoughts here: I like content that some publishers put out, and I accept that it costs money to produce.
I'm a fan of the book Extreme Ownership, and reading your question got me thinking (a bit laterally, admittedly) about the book. I'm in a situation right now where I read and enjoy content made by professional publishers, and I also generally hate the direction Internet Advertising has gone. This puts me in a bit of a pickle... I can use an ad blocker, fully accepting that I'm cutting off the revenue stream from people whose content I enjoy, or I can not use an ad blocker and waste my battery, get tracked, and be generally annoyed.
But what can I do about this? I can sit and bitch about it, I can wait until someone else comes up with some solution (which may just be ad-blocker-pay-walls, urgh), or I can spend some of my brain cycles thinking about and sharing my thoughts on solutions that result in publishers still having revenue without the parts that annoy me.
Maybe you don't enjoy content that publishers put out, and that's totally fine. In that case, it's probably not worth thinking about; the publishing industry having terrible flash ads and video popups and things doesn't affect you, and if they go broke from not coming up with an alternative revenue model, that won't affect you either.
Would people be willing to shell say $5/mo towards their online news content consumption?
A browser plugin could then track time spend (keep all data local), at the end of the month, present a simple dialog that says, your top 5 destinations were these, uncheck any that you don't want to pay, and rest will get your $5 divided by time spent.
This way users would get to browse ad-free, thanks to the ad blocking solutions, while publishers would also get some revenue. Ideally the payment service could generate some revenue as well and pass some to further developement/maintenance of the ad blockers.
I'm not sure I'd agree to a "time tracker," but I am generally way more willing to pay to get content easily and donate to sites I like than I was when I was younger.
Journalism is pretty much a pillar of democracy. Without anyone to report on the activities of government, you get cronyism and corruption. Look at any country where the freedom of the press is restricted for examples of this.
We're opening up our threat intelligence system on the blockchain and soon to reward people in a new token for submitting and validating links. Mostly geared towards anti-phishing, malware, child safety and news credibility. metacertprotocol.com
is what drove me over the edge on the Acceptable Ads program as well, and I switched off of ABP and onto uBlock Origin for this same reason.
I get that it probably doesn't break the Acceptable Ads rules, since they are probably stuff like: your ad isn't allowed to talk, or to pretend to be someone like the FBI or the user's Operating System, or include a JS payload that tries to break out of the browser sandbox, or to break the page layout, or to move around or flash. Those "Around the Web" things break none of those rules, and from a technical standpoint I don't know of anything objectionable about them. Not to mention none of this stuff is any worse than the papers I see in the grocery aisle, and Eyeo probably doesn't want to enter the business of judging whether a headline is Truth or not.
But tabloids have done enough damage to our society without migrating them to the Internet. So off to UBO I go, and I'm bringing everyone else with me that I can. Also, you should delete your Facebook account and never go back, because there's tabloid crap in there, too.
How blatant bullshit from Taboola is "acceptable" is beyond me. Our standards are really, really low if an acceptable ad merely means that it doesn't install malware or do sneaky things to your browser window.
Even before I learned about uBlock Origin, I installed an extension dedicated to removing Taboola ads. It's shocking how many people willingly tolerate that garbage.
This is why I have no qualms whatsoever about ad blocking or busting paywalls on mainstream news sites. If they have such poor editorial standards I doubt their own content is much more reliable.
Taboola is generally known to be one of the less-shady ad platforms, amusingly enough. The fact you consider it to be particularly egregious, which I don't really disagree with, seems to reflect the state of affairs in the online advertising industry.
Taboola, Outbrain and its ilk were what pushed me to install an ad blocker in the first place. I'd put up with ads for years, but these repetitive, misleading, intrusive ads were the final straw. The idea that they're "acceptable" is a joke.
I mirror this 100%. I really wanted to not use a blocker because I was trying to "support the industry". I even for a very short time attempted to build my own blacklist, but it quickly became easier to just block everything.
Now not only have I been using a blocker for a few years, I install one on any family/friends computers I am working on, and advocate for one whenever it comes up.
I don't know what it would take for me to come back now. Unfortunately it's a tragedy of the commons: a small number of sites/advertisers can completely ruin it for everyone -- and, I'd argue, already have.
Not really, the whole industry knows Taboola and Outbrain are the lowest tier, barely above scammy affiliate links. There are of course worse networks like RevContent but nobody is mistaking Taboola for anything but shady.
I am so glad I have no idea what any of you are talking about. I have been using ublock origin from the day I heard of the possibility of adblock jumping shark.
I personally consider a native platform's shadiness by a mix of the kind of content they allow, the kind of content that ends up on there, and the amount of fraudulent traffic/clicks that advertisers get billed for.
Taboola and Outbrain at least have manual reviewers attempting to uphold a certain standard for content, though there is a ton of room for improvement. I've never noticed a lot of suspect traffic coming from these two, which is in stark contrast to networks like content.ad or adblade. Of course, Outbrain/Taboola don't compare to the big networks, but I've experienced a good balance of affordable and reasonable quality traffic, though this isn't always the case, as costs/quality can be quite variable over time.
> Also, you should delete your Facebook account and never go back, because there's tabloid crap in there, too.
You can block those with UBO as well and use Facebook via the browser. There are reasons to get off of Facebook, but this is not worse than another random website really.
If enough people start doing this, AdBlock will somehow react to get people to see their ads again.
Just because you got rid of the problem doesn't mean the conflict of interest isn't there. And if there's a conflict of interest, it's just a matter of time before something happens. Having an extension in your browser that you can forget about is much easier on your nerves than an extension that doesn't do anything bad at the moment, but could.
> If enough people start doing this, AdBlock will somehow react to get people to see their ads again.
That's a hypothetical future problem, not requiring action today.
If ABP is blocking all ads for me, why would I care about a conflict of interest?
In fact, I agree with it; I like that advertisers are victimized, paying extra to be on whitelists yet still not reach people because of a simple checkbox in the settings. Are they victimized, though?
Users who install ABP yet say yes to acceptable ads are a special demographic. Why would the gatekeeper to that demographic give away free access to that demographic? If someone pays for that access, it probably means that they perceive value in it for them. Ads are more valuable if better targeted and all that.
> If ABP is blocking all ads for me, why would I care about a conflict of interest?
You might not care, but if you are recommending others an extension to use for blocking ads, you cannot do it solely on your own preferences.
Imagine being recommended as alternatives an adblocker that you can install and forget or an adblocker that you need to configure and keep on watch in case it starts showing ads anyway. Having no experience with adblockers before, which one would you choose?
This hasn't happened with ABP, and could conceivably happen with any ad blocker, even one whose developers are saints (due to a bug).
Basically "might happen" is just FUD.
Reminds me of 1990's anti-Linux FUD. Don't use that, it might not support some sound card or video card you might want to buy later, even though it works now! You might run into a problem that needs support and then you're screwed. Etc.
So this discussion has devolved to the point of cutting out words from sentences to change their meaning and using the new sentence as a straw man. Here we go again HN.
The fundamental problem with defaults is that people do not change them, no matter what they say.
There might be a fantastically tiny fraction of people actually following through.
Eyeo even uses this behavioral insight to make a case that users like the acceptable ads program (since users don't change defaults)
The speaker was asked by the audience whether there is a control group in which the acceptable ad option is switched off and the speaker only grinned about it.
It's a dark pattern and Eyeo is fully aware of it.
There is no dark pattern except for the cover up of what "acceptable" really is. The setting is prominent and clear, smack in the middle of the General panel. Moreover, I seem to recall, there is no default; you're prompted for this at install time. (Not going to bother reinstalling just to check whether this is true.) In any case, I do not remember at all that there is a situation that ads keep being shown after ABP is installed and having to hunt through settings. I was prompted to check my setting by this HN submission, and it feels like I've never seen that panel before, yet it shows that acceptable ads are off.
I think that people who are vehemently against ads are steered toward the setting which is right for them: and Eyeo probably wants it that way, because their selling point for the whitelisting is that they provide access to a segment of the population who are not vehemently against ads.
It's still a little surprising here. Not having an adblocker at all is the default setting, users had to go out of their way to install it in the first place. Given that, you'd think that people would manage to turn off the 'allow acceptable ads' option too. (Perhaps it is well hidden?)
I'm not bothered by ads. I see them on TV, I see them on billboards, in magazines in the waiting room at my doctor's office and I'm fine with all that. What I don't want is the tracking.
So for me, acceptable ads are the ones that don't involve surveillance of my online activity in anyway.
> Basically, they ran a survey which found that 71% of their users would allow ads with “no annoyances”. That means no animations, no sounds, and no flashy colors.
This needs some context.
This survey ran in 2011 - older readers may remember with some nostalgia the slightly less evil online advertising landscape back then -- pre-Facebook / partner analytics scares, pre Spectre/Meltdown, pre javascript bitcoin miners ... and various increasingly nefarious activities that may fall under the umbrella of 'online advertising'. Plus a significantly smaller ratio of mobile:desktop browser users -- advertising on mobile is rarely thoughtfully executed.
This survey question was answered by just over 1500 people. AdblockPlus on Chrome alone today is showing up on the store as having an installed base of 10,000,000+ people. No idea what it was in 2011, but 1500 people -- some of whom (70 people, 4.5% of responders) indicated that "Blocking ads is wrong and I disable Adblock Plus whenever possible" -- is a tiny, skewed by self-selection, horribly dated basis for current state.
"eyeo does mention that smaller websites can be whitelisted for free. In fact, they claim that around 90 percent of their partners are given this service free of charge.
But that means diddly when we all know that nearly all global ad revenue goes to just two companies: Google and Facebook."
So 90% of websites get it for free, and mainly Google and Facebook have to pay. I think the author intends for me to be outraged, but I'm not.
I'm also not having any reaction to the "acceptable ads" the author thinks I'm supposed to find unacceptable. They're clickbait, sure, but they fit the "no animations, no sounds, and no flashy colors" criteria.
The fact that a product named, plainly, "AdBlock Plus" that doesn't make clear that the "Plus" means "Plus all ads from the 2 largest purveyors of Internet advertising" is worth pointing out.
It seems that the problem is people have different reactions to ads. Some want no ads at all, some don't mind ads as such, but are wary of ads with heavy js and video payloads that cause slowdowns and are potentially malign. There doesn't seem to be a good solution that allows the user to easily modulate what they'll accept.
An added complication is that one party will buy ad space from Google, and then turn around and sell it on to another party that may put up quite different ads from what was initially claimed.
I always thought The Deck[1] seemed to achieve a good balance. It was trivial to whitelist them, and I had no qualms in doing so. Too bad it apparently wasn't sustainable...
non-tracking ad networks are pretty niche, you're basically trading revenue for aesthetics.
I have carbon on one of my projects and get 100 clicks on 60k views for $0.95CPC - I think adsense could easily double that revenue but at the cost of more intrusive tracking ads - not really worth it for a side project but I'd be tempted to switch if I had a bit more traffic.
What does your site provide - does it sell any products or services or is it purely ad supported? If it’s ad supported and you don’t care about your brand I’d say there’s no risk in switching to shittier ads, but if you want to keep a quality brand or have other services you sell, be careful as shitty ads could put off potential paying customers making it not worth it in the long-term.
The advantage of Carbon (or any other quality ad network like The Deck) is that the ads don’t really look like ads, so you can use them pretty much anywhere without degrading the UX and getting essentially free money. It might be not much but it’s still free money in exchange for a minimal change in the UX. Nasty ads might pay more but would degrade the experience so much I would no longer consider it “free” money no matter how much they’re paying.
I run an ad network that serves ads server<->server (I just wrote up how it works[1] for someone else) and I suspect this approach will become more popular to cover the people who "don't mind ads as such".
I don't think the issue is about the minutiae of who's paying whom. It's more the idea that a service which was created to serve the users by blocking ads, is subverted into yet another ad-tech vendor, skimming cream for themselves based on strip-mining the brand equity of what was once a principled venture.
Google and Facebook being partial monopolies might be a bad thing, but that would mean it's even less of a bad thing that they're the only ones who have to pay Adblock Plus while the non-monopolies don't have to pay, wouldn't it?
If the choice is between paying nothing to get whitelisted and paying pocket change, then the latter is preferable of course. But there's a third option, adblockers that can't be bribed by these partial monopolies.
I've always used ABP without thinking about it but today I switched to uBlock Origin and it's been amazing, no sponsored links, no annoying popups.
In my view, advertising doesn't create value, the world would be a better place without it.
I don't understand. Generally I don't mind ads if a website is giving me content I want and what I need. But, what I do mind is when whole sections of a website get their content and scripts from multiple different other domains! Most of times it's easy to block such references altogether, but often it breaks the websites which rely entirely on them. Not the ads are the problem. The websites are the problem.
Why don't they embed their ads entirely inside the webpages? They could do an elaborate internal dynamic ads system without needing to load a whole stream of third party content and software from other domains! What's the problem? I don't get it. So, I continue to block ads per default, and I don't care about the constant whining about how "morally wrong blocking ads is".
EDIT: Having a process integrating ads internally will also give the operators of websites the opportunity to vet the ads for potentially malicious advertising campaigns, aka fake ads, etc. Just an idea.
Facebook serve their own ads inline. Adblock engaged in a cat and mouse game trying to block their ads whilst simultaneously attempting to get them to sign up to the acceptable ads program.
Adblock does nothing to incentivise publishers to behave (rewarding relevant, low bandwidth, visually appealing ads). They only care about using their user base as a weapon so they can extort 30% of profits.
Third party hosting means it is a lot easier to pay a website per view. You can't do that if the ads are hosted on a domain not controlled by the advertiser.
Similarly, if you are going to personalize the ads, they need access to some third party that has this personalization.
Not that I am defending the current state of web advertising, just explaining why it is third party hosted.
I understand the gist of it and how it works. Websites provide not only dynamic ad frames they also embed trackers and the like. Abolishing "third party hosting" as you call it will make all of that not entirely impossible. The website operators still can and will have to gather usage and view data and sell it. They have to do it, not some other third party I might not be aware of.
So, that excuse won't convince me, like, online ads and data mining networks trying to adsplain that their business model might perish. I won't believe a word of it. It will become more strict with a distinct delegation of responsibility, yes. Websites and services will have to use only their own domain to provide any kind of content.
As long as my browser doesn't load anything from different domains other than the website's domain I don't mind. If that exists, every single website needs to adapt such practice. Anything else is a waste of breath.
In terms of technical details, I request that the publisher send me:
- How many ads they want on the page
- The client IP address (at least within a /20 of it)
- The client user agent (they can strip hex/numbers at the end that are added by some US-based Internet providers)
- Some keywords/topics (if they want contextually-targeted ads)
- A cookie they have dropped for the purposes of ad retargeting/blocking if they've obtained a preference from the user to do so.
In return, I send them a list of objects containing:
+ a title for the ad (supplied by the advertiser), no HTML permitted
+ a "description" for text ads (also supplied by the advertiser). <a> and <b> tags permitted, but no other HTML.
+ an image for the ad (also supplied by the advertiser) delivered as a data URI. I verify that it's actually an image (jpeg or png)
+ a "click through url" that points at a domain that the publisher has given me (usually something like ads.mysite.com) that I host -- they have to point the NS for this domain at my name servers
+ a preference url that indicates that the user didn't like this ad. This can be called server-to-server.
I still believe in content sponsorship, even though some mega-ad networks like Google have screwed publishers and consumers hard, and it's nice to see moderated consumer views here: There's a lot of people on HN against any form of advertising on the grounds of some kind of "eyeball rape"
I'm still trying to figure out all the commercials, so I'm not yet focusing on inbound traffic (i.e. website) but if you reach out via email, we can see if we can do something together.
How would you deal with one of your customer faking ad views?
That's the main reason I hear from people why server-to-server ads won't work reliably, since the ad network "needs" more data to verify legitimate views
KYC: I don't accept customers that I can't reach or traffic I don't believe.
I don't actually pay on "ad views"[1] directly. If an advertiser wants to buy brand awareness (CPM/CPV) then I need to understand how they're measuring the ROI on that brand awareness. Once I understand that, I can test traffic -- basically mix it in -- on each of my publishers to see if they are generating that ROI. This takes time for brand awareness since good tests usually take months, but for CPA/CPR/CPL deals are faster, so I end up doing more of that.
Nevertheless, if I thought someone had figured out a way to cheat me, I'd stop their traffic; I'd talk to them, and explain my thinking. Maybe they can convince me I'm wrong.
Interesting you allow <b> but not <strong>. Can you give the names of some of your clients? I'd like to check out how it looks in action. I understand if you can't though.
I'm not opposed to other styling but I need to really think through the implications and understand the impact.
If you reach out (my contact details are on my HN profile), we can talk through how I might be able to help. I'm happy to introduce some of my clients in the process.
> As long as my browser doesn't load anything from different domains other than the website's domain I don't mind
So you don't care about the content, only the source? There's nothing stopping the website from simply routing malicious JS from the ad network. Even worse, it would be much harder to block it this way.
> EDIT: Having a process integrating ads internally will also give the operators of websites the opportunity to vet the ads for potentially malicious advertising campaigns, aka fake ads, etc.
If you let inline malicious code inside your website then you're doing it wrong.
The quote I argued against didn't specify anything regarding your particular ad network. My argument was pretty simple: the content is more important than the origin.
> Since my ad network doesn't serve any JS from an advertiser
That's about content.
> As long as my browser doesn't load anything from different domains
That's about the origin.
Just because your network doesn't serve malicious JS, doesn't mean all networks do. And just because it comes from the same origin, doesn't mean it's safe.
3 reasons... nobody has time to put their ads on specific websites - it has to be automated to reach thousands of websites/communities at once. Second no advertiser trusts an individual website selling ads, unless there is tracking and reports and they know everything about the demographic of people who see the ads. Third - since advertisers are used to highly targeted ads and tracking... an individual website would basically have to rebuild all those tools in their personal system. That would be impossible without 3rd parties.
> Before I wrote this post, I wasn't aware that eyeo served ads directly, which is what prompted me to write it.
I think they floated this idea but ended up nixing it after users weren't happy. I run ABP with "acceptable ads w/o 3rd party tracking" a subset of the acceptable ads list and have for the last couple years. I've never seen an ad they injected or I wasn't aware they injected it.
The ad-supported site I work on and who employs me was added to the acceptable ads list today. I'm not affiliated with eyeo in any other way. We did not have to pay them (yet?).
One heads up and kind of a correction, for users that want to stick to Safari on iOS (myself being one of them) after installing Firefox Focus on iOS, go to iOS Settings -> Safari -> General section "Content Blockers" and toggle on for "Firefox Focus"
As a stupid and impatient person, I didn't get to the end of the article the first time i looked at it. After I saw you wrote it I went back to check if you mentioned ublock by name.
You might want to have something below the header and above the lede that says "hey just before we go any further, the solution is to use ublock origin instead of adblock." And even better, a big image of adblock with another, bigger red "no" symbol over it (in addition to the one that's already in the logo i guess) and then a check mark next to ublock origin. Like I said, I'm stupid. It's an interesting article but i already knew adblock plus was sketchy so I didn't finish.
Although uBlock does a fine job at fighting most symptoms,AdNauseam ( banned by google. )does a better job at fighting the cause by clicking on ads in the background, providing some financial incentives to advertisers.
To fight back and undermine value & business models seems more effective than just docile ad-blocking.
Link: https://adnauseam.io/
Privacy Badger is not an adblocker. It block sites that track you by some magic heuristic. It just happen to be that ads are really intrusive. Every time I see a "please whitelist or page in your ad blocker", I get a smug smile on my face, because I do not have one
It's a great combo, although as a developer it's also a constant source of "why the fuck does this website I'm working on not work" because privacybadger is the most aggressive cookie destroyer on the planet.
Mostly automation -- you don't have to actually craft the list. It will just spot stuff it thinks it should be blocking and do so. And if you need to correct it (uncommon in my experience) the UI for doing so is right there next to the address bar. Also, it's capable of just blocking cookies for some sites, which is nice when they're hosting common J's libs/fonts or something, and blocking them outright would break the page.
I ran Privacy Badger for a while. It is very good for finding out who is setting 3rd party cookies or using alternatives to cookies (eg. localstorage with unique identifiers). Rather than using a list, my understanding is it uses heuristics based on what cookies are set, whether they are 1st vs 3rd party, their expiry time and the like.
The good thing about privacy badger is that you don't have to care about the contents of ads ('acceptable ads') or how much you like a particular site ('please unblock us in your ad-blocker).
If a site has parts with 3rd party tracking cookies then I just don't see it.
The downside of only using privacy badger is that you do see some ads. At the moment I find that level of ads acceptable.
I personally disagree with "forward thinking" description for what AdNauseam does, hence why I disagreed when the AdNauseam authors asked me to implement hooks in uBO[1].
To me the ideal for many reasons[2] is to reduce as much as possible the number of connections to 3rd parties on any given web page.
I care about privacy in absolute terms. The difference to me, personally, between the advertisements I'm served after using AdNauseum and TMN running in a tab for 6 months vs the ads I was seeing using other blocking protocol (such as UBO and Privacy Badger) for longer periods of time have me convinced that the only way to gain any amount of privacy on the web these days is through obfuscation. I couldn't care less about page load time(as long as the hit is <500ms), bandwidth consumed or CPU/memory load on my desktop.
I hate the tracky nature of the web nowadays, and feel that AdNauseam is fighting fire with fire. UBO is fighting fire with CO2, fine unless the fire has it's own oxygen supply, which I would argue the online ad industry has in the form of copious numbers of inattentive and uncaring users.
> it automatically clicks all ads your browser encounters hundreds of times
I think it would be hard to deny that clicking every ad hundreds of times is straying into uncoordinated DDoS territory, considering the installed userbase. I don't see that as enlightened or forward thinking.
I agree with gorhill on this and would rather decrease connections to 3rd parties. After all, part of the reason the web is so slow is that browsers make so many 3rd party connections! With that in mind, my approach to ad blocking is to combine DNS blocks, MVPS /etc/hosts + my own entries, JS blocking, and uBlock Origin. This setup catches more junk and is more likely to work while transitioning or temporarily changing my setup.
I would say the goal of AdNauseam is obfuscating ad profiles. It not necessarily clicks all ads, the rate can be set in the preferences.
Personally, I would welcome similar extensions for social media, automated follows/likes/post/retweets, let facebook backup GBs of generated pictures per users for facial recognition or Gmail mine random emails. A more noble use case for lifefaker if you will.
Sites that offer paid and ad sponsored alternatives are fine. It’s sites that don’t offer subscriptions that should just change their business model, if it’s now based on intrusive tracking ads from ad networks.
And no, I don’t mind consuming contents from hundreds of ad financed sites while simultaneously wanting the majority of them to simply disappear because they could likely never sustain a different business model than ads.
There are other ways to fund content that doesn’t involve slapping a bunch of third party trackers and running retargetted display ads.
Some examples other than subscriptions would be sponsored content and creating a product such as an ebook or selling products that are related to your content.
AdNauseum essentially defrauds advertising networks. That is not the righteous path.
"Acceptable ads" allowed by default (opt-out) are inherently and OBVIOUSLY the right idea, but the acceptable ad list should be maintained by a disinterested party, not an advertiser or ad agency.
Problem is that disinterested parties are just that-- nobody cares enough to do it. Who wants to go to that effort to _allow_ ads?
One solution would be for Google and other large advertisers to fund a not-for-profit company to build acceptable ad lists, and then convince adblock addon developers to enable the lists by default through sheer benevolence.
Enforcement is easy, if they play games like AdBlock and start allowing intrusive ads, Gorhill (uBlock Origin developer) and those like him will instantly disable the lists and their entire model falls apart.
The goal is to make the web a markedly less hostile place to visit by eliminating intrusive ads while still allowing sites to support themselves through advertising.
"The goal is to make the web a markedly less hostile place to visit by eliminating intrusive ads while still allowing sites to support themselves through advertising."
That's not my goal. My goal is to eliminate unsolicited advertising.
I don't want it, and if websites have to find other, non-advertising-based business models to support themselves, so be it.
This mostly just makes it so less tech savvy users would have to be exposed to more advertisements. Even after they've gone out of their way already to install an ad-blocker.
If I'm installing an ad-blocker I want it to block all ads.
> "Acceptable ads" allowed by default (opt-out) are inherently and OBVIOUSLY the right idea, but the acceptable ad list should be maintained by a disinterested party, not an advertiser or ad agency.
That's silly. If a person is installing an ad blocker, the "obvious" thing is for it to block advertisements. You may not like it, but everybody is fully capable of making up their own mind on whether they think certain advertisements are acceptable or not.
this is purely sophistic. It is shady to block ads and sell ads at the same time, but for me at least "ad blocker" meant "stop redirecting me to crap sites while clicking on your menus".
It was about being literally unable to use some sites, I don't care about still images at the bottom of a page.
> It was about being literally unable to use some sites, I don't care about still images at the bottom of a page.
For me it's about privacy and security too, but most of all, I just don't want to see any ads whatsoever. I don't watch ad-supported TV, no ad-supported radio, no ads to my mailbox, won't use apps that show ads, and no ads are allowed in my web browser either.
Use your own definition "ad blocker" if you want to, but everybody else will see it as dishonest if a product claiming to block ads doesn't actually block ads.
mozzila is now trying to introduce non tracking ads in their browser. how are non tracking ads different from posters on the street? (minus security concern, honestly i trust mozilla on that)
When walking down a scenic street, you know who says to themselves, "What this street really needs to make it truly pleasing is more flyers and posters"? No one.
When watching TV, who yearns for more ads? No one.
This is all junk no one needs except the advertisers themselves. The rest of us don't want their garbage.
uBlock Origin is great, I have been using it on both desktop and mobile for a while. I wish it would be there by default in Firefox and also other browsers!
Glaring omission that is built in to Chrome: https://www.betterads.org. one might hope it's not as much of a racket, but the conflict of interest exists.
This is just my personal opinion, but I find that it only removes the worst of the worst though, and I find it dishonest. For example, they ban auto-playing video ads, but
> The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself.
So shitty news web sites that put one of those "we put a useless video here so we can show video ads" videos on their page can still continue using auto-playing video ads, with sound, and I'm pretty sure they'll find some way to define Youtube's pre-roll ads as "totally not a banned prestitial with countdown".
Also, just saw Taboola on their web site - their ads certainly meet the technical standards, but are one of the most obnoxious ones on the Internet, and the cause for many to disable the "acceptable ads" program/switch to uBlock.
They're just trying to take the worst edge off to reduce the necessity to install an adblocker, or, if you want to interpret it uncharitably, maximize the amount of people who get to see the bad-but-not-absolutely-horrifying ad formats.
Not mentioned: on Android, Firefox can use extensions including ublock origin.
And on that topic, "Dark Background and Light Text" currently at 0.6.8 is also mighty handy, though there are some items that end up invisible like voting arrows on HN.
> Let me get this out of the way: I have nothing against businesses making money. Businesses which find a market need and fill that need deserve to make a profit. That’s the only way many services would exist.
Let ME get this straight. I DO have issue with businesses making money by being slimy, rule breaking, ethic-breaking or otherwise deceitful so they can make a buck.
A good purpose for companies is to better society by either make a product, or provide a service. I nary think that people (not other companies, mind you!) would think that some inapp pay-to-play lootbox chumfest would be bettering society. But hey, we offer them LLCs so they can engage in horrendous behaviors and then protect everyone in charge.
And lets discuss ads... No, I'm not paying the bandwidth to download them. I'm not paying the CPU time or ram to display them. No, they are bastions of computer disease and poison. I will block each and every one of them as soon as I find them. I will ignore every domain that attempts to host them. I don't care if "your company relies on them" - well, too bad. Die then. My personal network/computer well being is worth more than your bad actions.
woah. I understand you would like to see the ads economy burn to the ground. but do you plan to build a viable alternative from the ashes? I am not criticizing your hate for ads, but as a fact they empower a sizable sector of our economy (directly or indirectly, like how amazon sell discounted devices with lock screen ads).
I agree that ads-driven websites tends to turn into tabloid full of clickbaits but newspapers had always had ads, why not on the internet?
There's the story about the kid who broke a window, and all the resulting economic activity somehow 'bolstered' the economy. In truth, when all is added up, the community lost by the cost of a window. This is called the "Parable of the Broken Window" (broken window hypothesis relates to a Reagan-era policy of broken windows = crime. not related).
Advertising is the same way. Their primary mode of communication is to jam up legitimate communication and crowd out others. Their best efforts is to enact in a combination of the parable of the broken window alongside the tragedy of the commons to see their wares.
You ask for a viable alternative? There isn't one. The very basis of advertising is parasitic. It cannot live on its own. It has nothing of value to offer. But it can crowd out legitimate discourse and sell our attention and thoughts back to us after weakening us slightly. We wouldn't fight for a tapeworm, tick, or mosquito, would we?
You also argue that they "empower a sizable sector of our economy". Again, that does look to be the case on a first look, but I say look deeper. They're costing even more, and we as a society only recoup the sizable sector as its outcome. Again, the parable of the broken window rears its ugly head.
I have wondered many times how those bad ads keep showing up on many pages despite of AdBlock Plus and now I understand. It's eye opening that these evil people charges 30% of ad revenue to let you through their plugin called AdBlock Plus! For what? Just "reviewing" the ad? There can be one time review fee but not the recurring fee. That is pure conflict of interest and immediate give away to this whole evil money making scheme called AdBlock Plus. They are ad mafia in its very sense.
Thanks for writing this article. AdBlock uninstalled. uBlock Origin installed.
While on one hand, the acceptable ads program does border on extortion, and them allowing Taboola is bullshit (and the reason why I no longer allow those ads), I think "acceptable ads" is a sane approach.
I'm willing to tolerate ads to a certain extent. I'm not going to pay (in money, time, or looking at ads that I consider unacceptable) to sort the good from bad. Ad companies have consistently failed at avoiding bad ads. So some third party will have to do it, and either advertisers or publishers or platforms are going to have to pay for it. That's what Acceptable Ads is doing. Are they abusing their leading position with ABP to charge obscene amounts of money? Definitely.
Could the ad industry have avoided it by introducing strict, technically enforced ads quality rules earlier? Maybe. (Depends on whether they could have convinced the early adblockers to not block those ads, which they might have been able if they enforced really strict rules instead of just banning the worst of the worst.)
ABP allowed Taboola (fun fact: The Taboola ads you got with ABP are/were different, less obnoxious versions than the ones served to people without adblockers). I don't like that, so I no longer use ABP, so ABP gets less revenue. Maybe someone else will make a different "acceptable ads" system that I'll be willing to opt into - and I'm perfectly OK if they squeeze money from publishers/advertisers/platform to make it profitable to maintain such a list.
Anyone know of a clickbait "not why you think" blocker? I bet 71% or more of users find it an annoying pattern. And a clickbait blocker would be wonderful in general.
In conversations about ad-blocking a common idea that comes up is that "you look at the sites -> so there's value in them -> so you should be paying for them". I don't follow this chain of logic. Firstly, it presumes that humans are perfectly rational machines and that we only do things that we want to do, or that are valuable to us. This does not match my experience of reality. Often the main reason we choose to visit a site is because a link to it has been put in front of us. A lot of the time this is largely due to the site's PR/marketing budget. So we've only ended up at the site in the first place because the site wanted us there... then they act put out by our presence and consumption of their hallowed content and demand we allow marketeers' manipulations into our psyches in return.
Most websites (say as a completely unsubstantiated, overgenerous guess: 99% of them) don't need to exist. internetlivestats says that there are 1.8B websites, 200M active. So even if as few as 1% managed to stay alive without ad support, that's between 2M and 18M websites still left to look at. I'd find something to read in there.
Choosing to visit a website is generally extremely passive. We look at the front page of HN (for example), make a few micromovements of our fingers and now we have dozens of tabs full of stuff to read. We didn't wake up that morning desperate to read any of those things, our existence wouldn't be negatively affected if went to bed that night not having read them.
Some people (especially those who currently make money from ads on sites) seem to think we're desperate for them to exist and that's why we put up with their ads. It even materialises into weird threats sometimes "wait and see what happens when we stop operating because you wouldn't watch our adverts"). Bring that world on, I say. There was plenty of content on the early internet before everybody saw it as a way to make money.
People who create content online for business reasons (either to directly make money or to keep their business relevant and known) then act as if they are obliged to make them for the good of society. If it's that difficult and expensive, and you don't want to do it for the joy of it, just stop. Don't pretend you're doing it for altruistic reasons.
> It even materialises into weird threats sometimes "wait and see what happens when we stop operating because you wouldn't watch our adverts").
Note that the threat is not "if we can't make money from our ads, we'll need to start charging a subscription fee for our content."
Because they know that hardly anyone would actually find the content they provide to be useful or entertaining enough to justify paying real money for.
If I woke up tomorrow to find that all commercially produced content on the web cost money, there's only a handful of sites that I'd consider subscribing to (maybe a couple of high-quality news organizations). The sites I find the most valuable are blogs where people freely share their own interests (which cost almost nothing to host).
People treat most pages like utilities, but you still pay for utilities. I'm accruing a constant, slow electricity bill just browsing around, whether or not what I encounter is worth it.
The industry got greedy over Ads money which transformed into a revenue generation model and destroyed the user experience in so many cases. Go to NFL or MLB and I find it extremely ridiculous that you have watch 30 seconds of video ads before watching a short 30 second game play.
Some of the Ads are annoying in page popups and sometime some just hover around as you scroll.
I get the idea behind video ads, but nothing makes me hate a product more that when I want to watch 5 different clips and each one has the same ad before it.
For those who haven't heard of it, I just deployed pi-hole on my home network and it has been great. It is a DNS server that blocks ads, running on a raspberry pi.
Just point your router at it, and all clients get ad blocking. Works for mobile apps, like YouTube, too.
I have that issue as well and read somewhere online that it's due to youtube serving both their ads and normal videos from the same domain name, which can be distinguished by content-based blockers like uBlock but not by pihole which only looks at the domain names.
Which is also why publishers will soon realize they can’t serve stuff in chunks where the reader can opt out of downloading or rendering certain parts.
I thinking canvas+wasm and similar tech will soon be used in a second coming of flash - where a full site will be downloaded as a blob and rendered by site code.
The code used by ads would still need to be hosted on third parties servers, because ad servers can't trust sites owners to host the ad code because of cheating. So blocking advertisers hosts could still work even if ads use canvas and wasm.
I think the idea of downloading ads (code) directly from third parties will die sooner than this “Flash 2” becomes an issue. That just isn’t sustainable regardless of the trust issue (a person described his ad network that doesn’t rely on third party served code in another comment).
But if blocking advertisers’ hosts is working, it’s trivial for publishers to simply present nothing if the ad isn’t successfully downloaded. When the rendering is controlled by the third party, it’s an all or nothing affair.
Where? I am using it on android and linux, with js disabled by default.
Aside from brave tokens notifications, they are monthly, i see no interruptions
I use Safari. Whenever I go to Medium, I get this error: "Safari Web Content quite unexpectedly." I can eventually get this to go away by reloading the page several times. The number of reloads necessary to get it to work seems to be more or less random, ranging from 2-6 or so. Once the problem is gone it stays gone on subsequent reloads, but if I close the browser window and re-open it, the problem recurs. Medium is the only site on which I see this problem.
I can't think of anything non-shady that a blog hosting site could possibly be doing that would cause this.
the battle for privacy, the no tracking options, and those to prevent unwanted ads, has really made for me at least using only one browser just not possible.
while I favor firefox even on my iMac I cannot visit USAToday because of some combination of settings and add ons. Yet Safari works fine. Now if I could just get Safari streaming to behave when I tab away I would use it more but for the most part I have issue with its UI.
It's always looked that way to me. That along with Hacker Noon and Kickstarter. Everything looks like a promotion and I'm less inclined to find any good articles even if they are. It still seems to be trending with a lot of people here though.
Can we just write articles without click bait headlines? Like "Please stop using adblock whitelists because the companies behind them have ethics issues"
I remember reading about some project where as a user you would automatically take part in the bidding process for ad placement on the websites you yourself visited.
The idea was to outbid real ad networks and serve yourself bogus no-op ads while paying the websites you visited through their usual channels.
Does anyone remember reading about this as as well? What happened to that project?
There's one place I still will consider using Adblock Plus - I support some users who still use IE on Windows 7 boxes, and I've kind of looked at it as "good enough" for those situations.
There may be better options, but I haven't really felt the need to go digging through reviews and comparisons of software targeted at IE users.
Beyond all points, I found it interesting how people think they get to control their ads, but at the same time don’t want to pay publishers for content.
I often find it funny when people complain about ads on torrent sites.
I think this speaks of a culture that thinks they should get everything for free.
50 years ago, if you wanted to read the news,you paid for it.
Today , we complain about want ads can the free content providers give us. Yet, we wonder why publishers provide such crap content, because their Main focus is pleasing free users with what ad they will like.
I’m not surprised by how many people speak of micropayment for articles, but no one does it.
The more we block legitment ads, the more crap we’ll see.
The cost to behave nicely becomes too much.
Hacker News has been an amazing place, but more and more things like “evil” for people pushing ads is insane. Evil is hilter, but now you’re comparing you’re as provider in the same way?
The issue is that the ads/commercials are not relevant...and there are too many...many of them of very low quality and even misleading. I don't mind the ads from stackexchange for example or various Pro-audio forums that I use. But compare that with a file sharing website that you mentioned where you have multiple "download" links masking various ads. Micropayments don't work because nobody got them right...
I haven't read the article and don't plan to (because Medium), although usually I'll at least skim an article if the comments suggest that it's worth my minute. At the moment, by a rough word count, the comments on this page total about 6,000 words of free content that nobody wrote with the expectation of getting rich quick by slapping some ads on it. It's just people being real and sharing their thoughts, for better and for worse. I'll read a good portion of it and then be satiated.
The reason I don't pay for content is not that I demand free content. It's that I'm already drowning in free content. Sometimes it's top-notch, usually not so much. I think content creators opposed to ad blockers should put up or shut up. Hide it all behind a paywall. Then I'll decide which 0.000001% of it actually delivers enough quality to squeeze it into my modest "content budget", $850 of which is already taken by my ISP each year.
I'd never heard of eyeo and was only vaguely familiar with adblock plus before reading this. But I have ublock origin installed on all my browsers, and can't imagine browsing without it. For Facebook I use FBP and like wise can't imagine using Facebook without it.
Am I reading this right, that Adblock considers chum boxes acceptable ads? I never really considered it; I have AdBlock Plus installed and have seen way too many of those. Does uBlock Origin block them?
Yes it does. I would recommend ublock origin over Adblock Plus any day. That said, you could also disable “acceptable ads” to get rid of these with Adblock Plus.
I intentionally kept the "Acceptable Ads" feature on for a long time because I am willing to support publishers (just not willing to manually sort the good from the bad), but since they decided that Taboola is a-ok, I turned it off, and at that point, there was no reason to use ABP vs. uBlock.
For iOS and Mac users, may I also suggest people consider using an adblock product we develop – Magic Lasso (https://www.magiclasso.co/).
We agree with the sentiment of the post and are working to create a great alternative to misleading adblockers like Adblock Plus.
Magic Lasso is an efficient and high performance ad blocker with native Safari integration and we don't take kick-backs from advertisers or follow any 'acceptable ads' policies.
I got clickbaited. I thought it's about ad blocking in general, but it's actually an ad of great piece of tool which is uBlock Origin that I already use.
It used to be you had to go to shady Russian porn or warez sites to get tricked into downloding viruses and malware.
Since then the same groups behind these tactics have realized you can just buy ad placement with a legit exchange and get your malware-dropping JavaScript pop up code embedded on the home page of the New York Times or CNET. There were a few high-profile instances of this happening in 2009 or so.
Letting random sites run arbitrary code supplied by anonymous vendors is bad for your digital hygiene.
I don't mind ads. What I do mind is intrusive behaviour of ads on a webpage. Some of the sites even crash my browser. I fear that, more we block ads, the more they'll find a way to show ads to users. And I fear that adblocker's might lose in this cat and mouse game.
Yes, we all want unobtrusive ads, but the problem with unobtrusive ads is that they not call your attention, so there are less chances of seeing them...
For me the best solution is to pay for the service you want, that's the best way to asure quality and independence.
I don't want unobtrosive ads, I want no ads at all, which is why I block them all.
And there is nothing wrong that. Companies that rely on ad-views aren't entitled to anything and its perfectly fine for me if they go the way of the Dodo (including e.g. Google).
It's perfectly normal and reasonable to choose for yourself what you want to watch and listen to.
I on the other hand am fine with some ads, as long as they are not annoying or don't track me.
I am willing to deal with ads which don't do that in exchange for consuming more content and supporting the sites I visit often. Which is why I actually am ok with the acceptable ads setting, which allows me do block most ads except the annoying ones without any major tinkering or extra effort on my part.
Seriously? You want people to switch from software A to software B and you write an article that for the first half of the page sounds like you want them to stop using either of those softwares?
Somewhat related: can anyone recommend an ad blocker for Safari (on macOS) that uses the Safari Content Block API (instead of JavaScript injection? Right now I am using AdGuard, but I am looking for alternatives.
Ublock Origin can work this way with a couple of clicks. Use the advanced user option. Allow all content globally, and then use local override on sites where you want ad blocking.
What advanced settings allows is to edit the blocking rules with something like the uMatrix gui. Once advanced is set, open the uBlock dropdown, then click on "requests blocked".
You will see a table with three columns. The second column edits the global rules, the third one is for local rules. Each of the rows in them shows three bars once you hover over one. Green = allow, grey = noop, red = deny. (Noop is the setting to not overrule the adblocker lists.)
In the "all" row at the top, click on green in the global column, to allow everything everywhere. Click the lock icon. Now uBlock won't interfere at all.
On a site where you want to block according to the lists, open the dropdown, and in the row with the site's domain name, click the grey bar in the local column. Click the lock icon to save the setting across sessions. uBlock will apply the lists' rules to that site.
If this is unclear, I can make a guide with images.
I'm guessing your intention is that uBlock origin can use them but ABP can't?
The problem with this is that it's very hard to define "non-commercial". Have a look at some of the debates around the non-commercial Creative Commons license for more on this.
The web advertisers have a twisted vision of ad effectiveness:
1.I don't want to see ads and i will block them as much as possible.
2.If i see ads i would not click them
3.if i accidentally click them i wouldn't buy anything advertised, even if i have the need for advertised product class: instead of trusting ads i research stuff to decide on my own and then buy it.
4.If i see a product on any site that was advertised to me,i will have a lower opinion of it because it associated with web advertising(which i consider obnoxious and avoid).
So in effect, advertising will ruin your reputation in my eyes and will not get you any financial benefits.
More and more users are going this way and consider all ads as visual spam that designed to steal their time.
The ad industry attempts to recover user attention with "Product placement" and "organic insertion" of ads into real content have the effect of increasing distrust in content and will not work long term(wordfilters and content filtering).
The whole model has no future: the problem with the concept of advertising is that it using old media "mass broadcast" techniques and isn't relevant to the content:
an example is advertising in search results;
Instead of search algorithm delivering "best match for query X" we get ""Best match+Artificially boosted SEO sites+Ads";i.e. the concept of advertising is essentially "pushing our stuff in front of user regardless of our quality",which reduces relevance of content itself, reduces the quality of data channel and user trust.
To further understand the "anti-quality" inherent in advertising, imagine ads as biased news designed to influence people and content as neutral news: with less content(neutral news) and more ads(biased news) the site becomes less neutral and loses quality(despite still having real content).
The advertising industry "broadcast" isn't accepted, so what they decided is that to tailor their broadcast to the user, creating targeting criteria and increase effectiveness of the the ad. Why would this work at all?
Only if the user private information is disclosed: That reasoning is that "targeted ads require target personal data to be effective" and in effect condemn advertising to seek for this private data from all sources. Note that doesn't increase the quality of their product, its finding a cheaper way to advertise that filters out users not interested in their product.
But of course advertising industry is overly-optimistic as what constitutes 'interest' and is eager to "broadcast" its message at anyone showing a minimum interest in "targeted concept".
Why this doesn't create interest, is that people being targeted know that "related ads" are just accompanying noise to their content and that they are specifically targeted because they see it in action(e.g. show interest in topic X, get ads for X-related products for weeks).
This fundamental break with basic psychology, being hostile to user and stealing his time is the fatal flaw.
"Unobtrusive ads" are just less obnoxious way to steal our attention, they're still ads and they still degrade quality of sites.
But what about ad-supported sites struggling to pay the bills? If you can't afford the minimal hosting fees associated with a website there is a problem with your finances: solving it with ads is just masking the problem.
A large site with heavy traffic should depend on products and services it provides, not ads. Ads will eventually get blocked and ignored.
Users don't come for the ads, they avoid them. Ads are only effective when they are centralized on one place where users come to expect them, such as e.g. craiglist categories, ebay,marketplace-type sites,etc.
Classifieds outside such 'centralized marketplaces' are perceived as biased and out-of-place, becoming normal ads and losing their relevance without being embedded in a marketplace. Psychologically:ads turn sites into mini-marketplaces and are perceived as corruption of a site.
Blocking ads will become nearly impossible once WebAssembly becomes ubiquitous. Sites will simply have their own custom render engine and transport protocol; it will be game over.
I don't see that as game over at all, just a change in the game.
Maybe ad-blockers will become site-blockers, or when you hover over a link it will go turn [[bad-colour]] to show you it leads to a site which forces advertising. Or on touchscreens (no hover) maybe those links open into a different, purgatory window. I do something similar manually at the moment, for example when I see Bloomberg/Techcrunch/Medium stuff on here I read the HN comments but very rarely go to the original article as I expect them to force autoplaying videos on me (I'm on a limited data plan) or use horrible UI such as scrolljacking or dickbars that I don't want to spend slices of my finite life experiencing.
Or maybe adblockers will use AI to detect certain images, salesy phrases, moving images etc and employ their own custom render engine to remove them.
I think a lot of the most valuable content is content produced by people not seeking to profit from it.
I often say this about movies but it's also true of a lot of online articles: If the "content creators" can't make a profit because I won't pay for the "content" I really don't care, in fact it's probably better for me and for society if there's less "content".
"content creators" - mostly companies that don't care at all about the subjects they have people write about, or about their audience
"content" - pretty much just junk food for your brain
Yup
Someone put head said they had something like $100 off 60k views. That's about .1p per view.
I'd like to visit a page and before it loads, it would tell me the price. If that's 1/10p then I'd probably just allow it automatically. If it's 1p then I'd probably manually approve it. If it's 10p I might think "nah". I'd rather pay directly than pay through increased prices at shops that advertise. Same principle with videos on youtube - at least those one that someone actually makes.
However if I choose to pay - whether that's 0.1p to read a blog post, or £15 a month for Spotify, I expect no adverts or begging or product placement of any kind. Amazon prime gives videos, and when I watch on A smart TV or on laptop it's fine. On the old fire tv box we have it prepended clips with adverts for other shows. That's not on.
Currnently I pay for a couple of sites, but it's a heavyweight way to crack a nut.
Some sites have this sort of model, but want far more per page than they get from adverts, and then there's a massive hassle of different accounts and managing payments. I might read a blog with a donate button, however it's u likely I've judged the page to be worth more than a penny or two, and the donate options tend to start at $1.
This, and it would also need to be 100% frictionless.
I'm giving money to The Guardian to support their good journalism, but I still get the nag popups to give them money because I'm not signed in (and I'm certainly not going to enable persistent cookies for the site and then sign in across all the devices I use).
now that net neutrality is effectively a distant memory, you may also wish to consider null-routing known advertisers using pihole or your own DNS resolver null zone
Problem is that they promised no ads and got free labor toward that mission. Now that people have marketed them into almost every browser that matters.. they're getting in bed with advertisers.
And amount is going to be 100s of millions, not just a bit of money. money earned by deciving and free labor
I don't need a adblocker, the ads don't load at all because of my pi-hole box.
The only adblocking thing I need is for YouTube against the in video ads.
I moved to uMatrix because of this[1]. That doesn't seem very practical to me. Don't you need javascript to view, say, youtube videos? Also to make almost any sort of purchase transaction too. I do think it's a shame that that's the kind of internet we have to deal with now.
The article says you should stop using one particular ad blocker, and has good reasons for doing so. It's not telling you to stop using all ad blockers, and it gives a name for an ad blocker that people should use.
The "Don't @ me" vibe doesn't really fit well on HN I don't think
As for my mental gymnastics, honestly it used to be to hide the terrible ads but these days I just don't care. Get a better business model if the last remaining non-adblocker users don't keep you in business.
YouTubers use Patreon or (the gaming types) are switching to Twitch and their subscription system. Ebooks and online course sites work well for the more instructional content. There's an alternative to everything currently supported by ads. Heck, I imagine a newspaper would do pretty well on Patreon now that I think about it.
Edit: Dug up an example of an ad I installed an adblock to stop. These[1] are the ads that ruined it for everyone, not the bog standard Google ads. Honestly though I'm not going to the effort of checking each site's ad-worthy-ness anymore. All blocked.
There's a tragedy of the commons effect here, no? Using Ad Block doesn't really change the landscape so long as there are a sufficient number of people without ad block out there. But if everyone acts that way, then things will change and IMHO mostly not for the better.
A lot of the alternatives to ad models aren't great (e.g. paywalls everywhere) or require a lot more resources to implement (e.g. selling sponsorship opportunities that aren't ads). For some sites, especially smaller publishers, I don't think there is a viable alternative and they will simply cease to exist.
Disclaimer: my company runs a network of ad-supported business news sites
Something like laracasts.com for example gives you just enough free content to be useful in of itself and then there's a monthly fee for the rest. A well put together content-based business model.
Instead of thinking of it as not having a viable alternative think of it as not having a viable business model. That's on the business, not the user.
I mean, I hope someone finally comes up with a micropayments solution that works so you don't need 1000 paywall accounts to browse the web. But I'd still prefer ads and I'm not sure all sites I like would survive the transition to anything else.
Yes, except you don't know the price before entering, but once you do you're immediately charged. A store that acted like that would be forcefully closed.
You could say that's not a problem if you already know the site, but most use dynamic ads, so you don't know what you're going to get - you might even get infected (another thing that would get a real store closed).
Finally, most of these stores are connected and tracking which ones you visit and which products you purchase, and you don't have the option of "paying with cash".
Maybe in weird uncivilized countries :) Where I live, the private doctors offices have clear prices for consultations, and any subsequent procedure also has a price to which you can agree before going through with it.
Emergencies are handled by the national health service, so the price is also clear: it's whatever your tax rate is :)
Unlike other tragedy of the commons scenarios, we don't actually know what will happen and if it'll be positive or negative. We just know that the current state of things is not great.
The ad world has caused some really shitty optimizations to flare up among sites supported by ads. Optimize for clicks and eyeballs instead of quality.
Nobody said the content is bad everywhere. I'm saying ads are causing optimizations on terrible principles, doesn't mean everyone is following them.
Furthermore your comment is akin to "if junk food is so bad for you why is everyone eating it and saying it tastes good". It doesn't take much imagination to understand that there's other factors at play.
On the contrary I find this thread to be full of arrogant hypocrites chanting "burn the ad industry to the ground" while watching their daily dose of TV propaganda.
Yet another rant by an ad proponent. Forgets to mention that there is "Acceptable ads" checkbox that can turn off all ads, and whitelisting only affects users with default settings. There is no doubting the power of ads, but personally I want many publishers to go out of business because their content is crap and clickbates.
Websites serve near viruses all the time, both content- and cookie-wise, and AdBlock is a good firewall for both visual and javascript exploits
Companys have turned keeping those settings you want into a chore, constantly updating away the users work, pushing in a war of attrition their preferred settings - and sometimes even just outright ignoring the done settings altogether.
So having a checkbox to turn it off- is by now nothing more then a pr-stuntstrawmen - just as the constant updates, which are used to wriggle out of responsibilities for errors and bugs.
>Companys have turned keeping those settings you want into a chore, constantly updating away the users work, pushing in a war of attrition their preferred settings - and sometimes even just outright ignoring the done settings altogether.
Is it a chore though in ABP? It's front and center in the settings.
This can't be said enough.
Large numbers of users still have no idea that their blocker works at all because of these lists.
The collective amount of work which goes into these free-to-use lists on a daily basis is impressive, especially considering it's done entirely on a voluntary basis.
To get an idea just glance at the commit rate:
EasyList/EasyPrivacy: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commits/master
uBlock Origin: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commits/master
Add to this all the regional lists, specific-purpose lists, the hosts files (Peter Lowe's, Dan Pollock, malware lists), etc.