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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

Just a datapoint: if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Same with EME - I will not need your efforts in my life.

I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.)

So I hope your manager did their cost-benefit well. I don't know too many publishers in a position to be selective about their readers. But I suspect I know who you're talking about, and won't personally won't miss any of their properties.

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Atlassian products such as Confluence and Jira are some of those tools where I need to disable uMatrix completely to not get a crazy redirect loop when I try to login. Luckily we're leaving Atlassian quite soon, their sites have been such a pain to use for many reasons.

What are the bug reports on uMatrix for this?

Don't really know what's going on with this. Now when I just disable uMatrix and ublock origin, I still get that redirect loop and I'm just not able to use Jira/Confluence. Luckily I don't need to use these products that often, so when I read something I just use our Slack bot to see the ticket.

I guess this may happen if browser doesn't accept third-party cookies.

what will you replace Confluence with?

We'll change our whole business model and do 100% open source, so I guess it'll be Github.

You mean GitLab?

GitHub is free, but definitely not open source (and has never pretended to be).

Github is 100% open source. News to me.

I believe he meant their product will be open-sourced so it will have home at github.

We use confluence for internal documentation that we wouldnt want public. Can that be done with Github or is your confluence used for public documentation?

Phabricator is a reasonable alternative for tasks, repos, CI, and a simple wiki. Not as polished on the wiki side as confluence but overall a good free alternative to Atlassian.

I've also seen this behavior when trying to use Jira in Firefox. It's been a few months, but I was pretty certain it was because I had third-party cookies disabled.

Try disabling referrer spoofing; it helped for me.

>if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back.

Yep, there are lots of major news websites I dont visit at all. I know they are going to have an annoying autoplay video.

I'll skip to the comment section.

I have an extension (Block site) which stops me from visiting some sites by accident (SERPs or links).

If you already have it, you can do that with e.g. uMatrix or uBlock Origin too; no need for an extra extension.

> if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back.

If the site is supported by ad revenue and you actively refuse to permitany ad revenue is it really a loss to the publisher if you leave?

Depends on whether you share the links to others who run without ad blocking in place.

From the linked post: "I tried telling him that the people who use adblockers are likely to share more content, which brings in non-adblock users. However, that is also falling apart as adblock users are bringing other adblock users."

So the site's owners and employees should work for you for free because you're giving them exposure.

https://www.reddit.com/r/choosingbeggars would enjoy discussing that proposition.

It really depends on their marginal costs of serving single customer. I would guess that for text content producers, it's costly to produce content and cheap to show it. Then it makes sense to price discriminate (to show ads / ask for subscriptions as much as you can), but not refuse service to anyone able to bring any kind of revenue, even accounting second-order effects such as more exposure.

You can still see cases where publishers choose to not show stuff to anyone, but that's an artifact of imperfect ability of the publisher to discern between customers that would pay and the customer's that wouldn't -- they don't want to make a mistake to disincentivize someone able to pay from paying. You can see when they try and allow access from FB shares for example.

This makes it completely different from asking actual people for free work: person's price of time is expensive and it's rarely useful to give it away.

>So the site's owners and employees should work for you for free because you're giving them exposure.

Yes, they probably should. It works in the retail world. Shop owners are usually happy to have non-paying customers in their store, and restaurant owners usually happy to have low-paying customers (i.e. they don't buy very much), to make sure their establishment "looks busy". Having a store or eatery with few or no customers is bad: it "looks dead" and can either scare away customers, or just not bring as many in. People are social creatures; when they see a lot of people in a place, they think that it must be popular for a reason, so having some customers brings in more customers, and some fraction of those customers will pay (or pay a lot more than the average), making the establishment profitable overall.

Internet publishers need to figure out a better business model if they one they have isn't profitable enough for them. Other businesses have long recognized that not all customers are equally profitable, and some aren't profitable at all, but they figured out how to make things work.

> Yes, they probably should.

Until internet publishers reach that conclusion themselves, is it OK to force a different business model on them? To be clear, that "business model" is "I don't like the form of payment this business is asking for, so I'll take the merchandise for free instead."

When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.

Amazon makes 1000€+ revenue from me bying stuff there and still shows ads and tries to sell me credit cards..

Do you mind if i hide all this shit while bying stuff on Amazon?

I use about 5 non-commercial services which may show ads (don't know whether they do or not and not gonna disable adblocker to check). I would happily pay 10€-15€ per month for this services, if there would be good save annonymes payment service. I don't want to send my utility bill to paypal or give away my credit card number. Maybe crypto would be a possibility.

Might I suggest the brave browser?

Yes, it is OK. It's my computer, and I can run whatever code I want to on it. If I want to run an ad-blocker, that's my business.

If the store doesn't want to give merchandise away for free, then they should stop doing that. When I make an HTTP request, it's just that: a request. Their server can either respond with the page, or not (or a different page). It's my business what I do with the code that the server sends me.

>When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.

Poor analogy. These websites aren't actually selling you stuff, they're giving away stuff for free, and hoping you'll look at the ads.

If I go into a store that's handing out free samples along with a stack of paper advertisements to look at, and I take some samples and decline to take the ads (or I promptly drop the ads into the trash can), that's the store's problem, not mine. I have no obligation to look at their ads. It's the business's responsibility to come up with a workable business model.

I think it's pretty easy to detect adblockers and hide content for users with adblockers. Some sites do so and I leave immediately. It's not like their content is valueable for me. Usually I got there by accident (clicking random link in SERPs). Actually, it would be a cool setting in search engines to hide sites which don't allow adblockers - better for everyone.

This sort of exposure is not the same as "working for exposure" discussed for artists; the ad-blocking visitor is not taking sole possession of the work, though they are consuming some site resources to read it. The other comment's point about ad-blocked folks being ad-blocked is much tighter on the issues.

If, for a random example since it's the one coming to mind, Marco Arment runs with an ad blocker (which he almost certainly does because he developed an early one for iOS) do you want him linking your piece? Unless you are one of the biggest news sites, you probably do. You might even be happy even if he linked it entirely to savage it.

On the other hand, do you want me? Probably not, I don't have that much reach.

Problem is figuring out who you've got, and even whether they're likely to offer that.

Obviously not. The site was, is, and remains perfectly free to do anything they want and exclude anyone they want.

However, it does appear impossible to criticize technical and/or business decisions without being accused of enslaving web developers.

OP (on Reddit) also mentioned that their site sells content/subscriptions.

As mentioned, if they put up ads that aren’t “blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs” then they could have more traffic.

Even now with an ad blocker many videos autoplay. I bounce immediately once I see a video being loaded.

Are you sure? Just the other day there was a whole thread complaining about ad block plus permitting static ads with clickbait titles. No blinking. No autoplay. And people still we're pissed.

That's apparently the manager's goal. Another way of stating it is that the manager apparently believes browser choice is a good proxy for identifying "bad" cattle.

I have serious doubts that it works out that way, but hey, they are free to use whatever signal they want for whatever purpose they choose. And we don't know their identity - who knows, perhaps running a low-pass filter on their audience's technical sophistication actually makes sense for them.

That's the point: they don't want you because you cost them money to serve.

and then there are those sites that force redirect you to their app or load in some artificially disabled version of itself..

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