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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

I'm hearing this moralistic (and naive IMHO) argument a lot lately. Do you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead? Please don't rant against "evil ads" like that; rather, think about an economically feasible model which allows content creation and the web to thrive.

The problem with ads, and the sole reason I'm personally using an ad blocker, is tracking. For me, mass surveillance isn't an adequate compromise to make for free content.

I don't have a problem at all with classic banner ads OTOH. By merely switching off JavaScript you used to able to switch off most tracking years ago. But today's web pretty much requires JavaScript for even the simplest interactivity. Thank you W3C and WHATWG and Google for HTML5's lameness.

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I think the "do you want hidden ads instead?" is a bit naive as well, to be perfectly honest.

It misunderstands the nature of advertising and advertisers.

The kind of person/organisation who will target you with fake news and paid-for or ghost-written articles or books (which incidentally, is an increasingly large number of popular publications already these days) is not the kind of entity that says "oh, well i've got banner ads, best hold-back now in the interest of good-faith relations".

Advertising does not voluntarily stop. Advertisers do not hold back in the name of decency. It generally expands until it is either stopped (through legislative and societal bans, not having the rights to advertise in a particular place, or until it is cost-prohibitive to do so) or until the eyeballs stop looking (either because it has lost power or become so obtrusive that people either block it, turn to substitutes, turn off or push back).

Do you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead?

As if we didn't have that already?

>I'm hearing this moralistic (and naive IMHO) argument a lot lately. Do you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead?

We already have that buddy. One problem at a time.

One thing I wanted to do was to allow ads everywhere and only block ones with obtrusive ads. That is instead of whitelisting good ones, I would have to only blacklist bad ones. But could find out how to do that with uBlock. Maybe somebody here can help.

You can try uMatrix. Same author. Adjust the defaults. There is a learning curve.

Do you not count tracking as obtrusive?

Lets see if Basic-Attention-Token works

It won't. Most people don't want their attention monetized.

Most people don't know that it already is and has been for a very long time.

And as they get wise, they increasingly install ad blockers. That's going to the moon at the moment. Tools like Ad Nausium are the next logical step.

How will they tackle abuse (hackers running bots and "mining attention")?

> Thank you W3C and WHATWG and Google for HTML5's lameness.

Is HTML5 lame, or are web developers just too lazy to learn to use it properly?

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