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Comment by chuckdries | Hacker News Reader

But it's distinctly passive with ad blockers. Sure, you want to read my content without supporting me (some publications prevent you from doing so, but mine does not). You're just affecting you. With AdNauseum, you are actively attacking our ability to make money off of other users. You're punishing me for writing content that you want to read.

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I'm not trying to punish you for writing content I want to read, I'm punishing a horrible and unethical industry that you've chosen to profit from.

The current state of online advertisement is an absolute blight on the internet.

Online ads are the primary source of malware among anyone I've spoken to, and online advertising standards are atrocious.

Just because someone uses the profits of a Ponzi scheme to support the creation of free content doesn't give you the right to complain when that Ponzi scheme gets busted.

I wish you all the best in finding a way to support the creation of your content.

How is advertising a ponzi scheme? (genuine, earnest question)

We don't buy from an ad network, we have an ad sales department, the same people that used to sell print ads to local businesses now sell online ads to local businesses.

There may be big systemic problems with practices of the big ad networks, frankly I haven't looked into it enough to have an opinion, but we don't use these big networks and we still have to deal with the fallout

Apologies, I didn't mean to say that online advertising is ponzi scheme. I used ponzi scheme as an example of an illicit practice.

When I was in a high school physical education class, if one member of our class wasn't ready (changed into p.e. clothes and standing in a line) 5 minutes after the bell rang, then the whole class had to do ten push-ups. I remember thinking how unfair it was for the whole class to be punished for the actions of one individual. But I'm sure the P.E. teacher's response to any mention of unfairness would have been something like, "Tough. Life is unfair." And I completely agree with that.

I don't; the fact that life is unfair doesn't mean we shouldn't push for better conditions, and in fact, this is the entire reason why we live so long, have worker rights, etc.

It sounds like you do agree that life is unfair, though. At least, you call it a "fact". I think it is a fact, as well, because "fairness" is an ideal that we strive towards, and ideals never exist in reality. I don't disagree with you that we should strive for better conditions.

In the case of chuckdries being financially punished by a swath of users choosing to install AdNauseam or similar plugins, I think we might agree that it isn't fair for his particular case, but it is fair in the aggregate, or more general case, due to the reprehensible behavior of "big ad networks", which created the impetus for the development of these types of plugins in the first place.

I'll admit to being in a negative mood, which is why my mind went immediately to gym class. :( I just don't see a sensible way out of this situation that will both castigate the bad actors in the advertising space, while simultaneously allowing for these small "home-grown" ad networks to escape the castigation.

We've got to find a better way of supporting websites than selling out our visitors, though. Some revenue models that worked for traditional print simply won't work for the web. I think the sooner we find that out and adapt our models, the better off we'll all be.

I am also attacking your ability to track and infect other users with malware, so I am doing a good thing.

And no, I am not punishing you - I am punishing a shitty industry for wasting millions of hours of time globally and causing damage with malware. We've seen that pacific methods do not work so the only way to drive change is to actively fight back until the lowlife either adapts (by becoming better) or dies.

You are punishing me and only me. We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fake ad clicks have been actively hurting our ability to sell ads for about a year now. Our ads are pictures. Pictures are not malware.

Also what ads cause damage? Like sure the ads on porn or piratebay are cancerous but no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

See my other response above ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112864 ) about why this extension wouldn't change anything for you.

> no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

Please look up "malvertising", install an ad blocker if you haven't already then come back and feel free to revise your statement. ;)

I personally use ublock origin in dynamic filtering mode, I use it like a blacklist, where I allow ads on all websites by default but block them selectively on particularly bad websites.

I can't seem to find which comment of yours you're referring to, I know that our ads are still blocked by most ad blockers and we've seen fake traffic and fake ad clicks in our analytics before.

I've edited my comment with a link to the response. Again, if your ads are actually safe and not obnoxious you could potentially just alter the markup every time you end up on an ad blacklist so the selectors no longer match.

Forbes was running malware ads at least once in the last year iirc. Additionally, most places have ads from an ad network so it isn't like they are specifically choosing ok ads or anything. While porn and pirate sites have some of the worse ads, that doesn't make the rest of the ads much better.

no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

That is, unfortunately, very incorrect: https://www.cnet.com/news/new-york-times-bbc-dangerous-ads-r...

That is appalling

That's why ad blockers are essential for normal people just to have security. We literally can't trust newspapers not to serve up toxic waste.

Perhaps you can be trusted! But nobody knows that, and it's reasonable to presume otherwise.

Put it this way: do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.

Your story doesn't add up to me.

> We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses.

Fine, so you either (a) tell a business that you have XXX page views per month so they'll get YYY impressions (which may be blocked, but that you can try to make non-intrusive); or (b) you let the advertiser track the value they receive from ads placed on your site.

In the (a) case, there shouldn't be any difference between adblock and a fake clicking blocker. In the (b) case, a sensible advertiser should be able to weigh the value of the add they placed on your site no matter what mix of real and fake clicks they get: I ended up selling X USD to visitors coming through that place's ads, which amounted to Y USD in profit. Y > cost of the ads? Keep the ads going. Y < cost of the ads? sorry but we're out.

The only situation where fake clicks are bad is that where the advertiser suddenly realizes that "hey we sent you XXX people" is just a meaningless figure from which you just cannot infer a proper value metric to decide whether that ad is worth its cost or not. Which is another way of saying that it gives ad purchasers a reality check that can only be positive in the long run, disregarding the short-term loses of people who were selling inflated ad spaces until now.

As I understand it, what we do is closer to B. I'm not on the ad sales team, but the way it was explained to me, our ad partners have analytics on their website like everyone does these days, and they generally give us a link specific to our website that they can look at the analytics on and tell how many people visited that page, therefore how many people clicked the link. I'm told they see huge spikes in traffic that looks fake and get angry, threaten to drop us, etc. Basically they accuse us of artificially inflating our numbers, and without super detailed analysis it's hard to tell what is and is not fake. If you compare the traffic coming in to their affiliate links to the traffic we record on our own analytics, I'm told it looks super suspicious.

EDIT: apparently some advertisers have ad content prepared they give us that uses common advertising tools like doubleclick.net and such.

I'm curious why you would feel The Pirate Bay is any more cancerous than a "reputable newspaper".

I just disabled uBlock and checked TPB. There were no ads on the landing page, and after using "search", had to scroll right to the bottom to find one small ad, for a reputable web hosting company (Siteground).

I opened our local news - smh.com.au. At the top of my page there's a similarly sized ad. There are also ads the full vertical length down each side of the page, which due to broken text rendering is just a picture of a man and I don't know what is being advertised.

If I scroll down a bit, there's a horizontal ad consuming roughly a third of the screen for American Express.

Most news articles have an auto-play video, and usually starting with ads. Several pages have ads with embedded sound, making this particularly embarrassing to test in the office.

I get that it's reasonable to have ethical issues with TPB. I wouldn't agree that reputable newspapers have a moral high ground on advertising.

I can't speak to the general case here, but after reading Chuck's other comment, I think you may be mistaken about his website specifically:

> We don't even use an ad network a la google, we sell our own ads to local businesses and such.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112764

In this case, I really doubt this extension would hurt him - how the extension works is just like uBlock uses lists to hide things, AdNauseam uses the same lists to explicitly click on those items. His own ads wouldn't match any of the rules in those lists and unless they are extremely obnoxious nobody would bother adding his ads in there.

If he does get on one of those lists it's quite easy to change the markup of the page (class names, etc) to stop the rules from matching. If you're doing the right thing by hosting your own ads you fully control the markup and layout and it becomes extremely easy to protect yourself from this.

I can't speak to adnauseum specifically, but a lot of ad blockers use a combination of techniques to detect ads that are surprisingly hard to circumvent.

But just in general, I don't believe I should have to spend my time cat-and-mousing ad detection. It's not sustainable, especially for a paper that only employs 2 developers, which is rare. Most papers don't have developers in house, they contract out this work, or if they're owned by a conglomerate like Gannett, their owner handles it. It also feels sketchy, circumventing ad detection sounds like something obnoxious malicious ad makers would do.

EDIT: having just tested it, Ublock Origin does block the ads on our website.

No, i'm punishing you for only providing ads as a form of payment.

Or in the new york times case, for getting ads in spite of paying. Ads are a fucking poison; i will do anything i can to destroy them.

Some websites don't care about users, and push malicious and obtrusive ads, I don't see a problem in users trying to sabotage their income stream. It's a free web. You are free to serve ads, I'm free to use an extension to spam them.

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