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Comment by olvar_ | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to point out that the "war" developing is not so much between advertising and ad-blockers. I think most of us would be fine with advertising on some page you are visiting. The real problem comes from trackers and other tactics that don't try to show a product TO you, but try to show YOU to a company. The problem is not that I don't want to see advertising, I just don't want to share my information with someone I don't even know. Maybe there is a way in between.

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Personally, I wouldn't mind SOME ads feeding companies... Hell, I'll watch short videos to get ahead in some games I play...

the problem is massive ads, 3 line stories turning into multi page ad fests, "Around the Web" type crap, security risks injected via ad networks, etc...

It's not the ads per-se: it's the MASSIVE abuse of ads. it's why we can't have nice things.

Same can be said of TV shows and how it went from a minute of ads... t0o 10 minutes out of a 30 minute slot being ads.

Good point about TV. I'd happily subscribe to cable if it weren't for the fact that I'd be paying to have ads blared at me every 5 minutes.

I just DVR everything and then skip ads. I can't watch non-recorded TV anymore - not only ads are extremely long and mind-numbingly boring, they insist on showing the same ads several times during the same show! I don't know how people tolerate it.

You're still affected as the time allotment for actual content is going down. Even reruns are getting compressed

I recently had to add special rules to ublock because cnet.com and cnn.com were auto playing videos that were completely unrelated to the story, and there were huge blocks of ads on the left, right, and in the middle of the story.

I'm also fine with some advertising, but auto-playing video with sound is where I draw the line (especially when bandwidth sensitive).

I've started building a document with my uBlock filters to sync between browsers because of auto-playing videos and static divs covering a third of my screen in web apps. I am now actively involved in enhancing my web experience rather than just setting a broad/loose filter to get rid of most of the junk... that can't be good for content creators going forward.

I have much more problems with ads than with trackers. Sure, trackers are... well, tracking, but at least they don't ruin my experience. Ads do. Not only they occupy a lot of visual space, they jump they blink, they slow down the browser, and they try their best to prevent me from getting the information I want to get. Some even freaking auto-play sound! A mere thought of it makes my heart rate jump and my vision shift to red.

If those guys could stay in the sane bounds, the problem would be much less. But right now it's completely out of hand, browsing without adblocker became a nightmare.

Adding to this, it's a war against malware too. I'll whitelist Forbes' ads if Forbes fixes my computer when it catches malware from one of their ads.

I don't mind invisible trackers, it's the visible ads that I hate.

I suspect this is the popular reason. Unfortunately, I think it forces ad blockers (which I use only for tracker blocking) towards heavy features. Eventually the choice will be between running a bloated plug-in or being tracked. I hope uBlock Origin will keep in mind that some people only care about the tracking.

If you're only interested in blocking the trackers, you might appreciate ghostery (https://www.ghostery.com/) - it does exactly that.

It appears to have a very relaxed definition of tracker. For example, it let doubleclick.net through. All drop-in ad network scripts are trackers, regardless of what they might promise. I'm fine with people adding ads natively to their content so what I'm saying is I don't want my ad blocker trying to do something like analyses video on the fly to strip out native ads or examining text to find disguised advertising. What ad blockers do now is good enough for me and if a content creator gets too annoying with in-line ads, I'll just stop consuming it.

> I hope uBlock Origin will keep in mind that some people only care about the tracking.

Efficiency is a primary feature of uBlock Origin, it's not going anywhere, regardless of whether it blocks tracking or ads, or whatever else.

Just pick your filter lists according to what you want to achieve.

In any case, I fail to see the difference between ads and tracking, as I have often mentioned, ads are just the visible tip of the tracking/profiling iceberg.

"In any case, I fail to see the difference between ads and tracking"

I agree for most ads as they are implemented now but things like the common audible.com mentions in YouTube videos I'm totally fine with, that's how advertising was done for decades before the internet and there's no reason it can't still be done. Web page standards give too much power to the page author by default, if the things they use to track people had never been allowed by default, we never would have had this problem because no sane person would agree to them if asked.

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