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Comment by taohansen | Hacker News Reader

This is deeply upsetting to me because I have continually pushed Firefox to friends and family as the only alternative to Google's strongarm dominance of our virtual lives.

I have no other alternative to recommend my social circle and feel, daily, increasingly helpless to do anything about a future determined to shake down the miracle of humanity for pocket change.

Mozilla Corp--the for-profit business arm of nonprofit Mozilla Foundation--has sold out its users before in a partnership with German ad company Cliqz and again in a marketing blitz for Mr. Robot. No amount of outrage from its users has changed their behavior. Perhaps because we are locked into a browser duopoly, Mozilla Corp feels privileged to continue to abuse user trust.

How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

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> It was not a paid placement or advertisement.

I would like that people were more explicit in why they despise ads. For me it is because they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily rely on tracking.

For a long time my impression of Mozilla is that they are trying to "sanitize" ads on the web by experimenting on advertisements that are non-tracking by design.

(this does not cover cliqz, I never found a good reason for that and honestly think they should be more transparent about it or cancel it)

Clearly we see that Mozilla has no interest in being an holy warrior against advertisements, but as said above ads can work while respecting privacy.

> How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

non-profit or for-profit every company still needs money to keep existing

Reasons to despise ads?

> they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily rely on tracking.

- They attempt to influence me into buying things I do not want or need.

- They take up some of my attention, a resource that I consider very valuable.

- They create perverse incentives to create content that advertising buyers appreciate (particularly worrisome when we are talking about a browser, that I have to rely on to not sell out my privacy).

- The are often promoting things that are often objectively bad for me (e.g. energy drinks).

- They apply all sorts of psychological tricks, many with negative consequences (e.g. implying that I look bad).

The fact that Mozilla wasn't paid for this means very little. This is clearly Mozilla experimenting with a new channel of advertising that could be monetized in the future if successful.

Thanks, I finally found in your reply what I couldn’t put in words to my family and friends. Is there any quantitative or qualitative evidence to improve (make stronger) point #2 ?

Edit: I am talking about attention when I said #2

My point is that ads are essentially the only way to gain visibility for a lot of products.

The fact that internet ads are in such an harrowing situation is a consequence of perverse incentives on ads delivery and reliance on clickbait titles.

wouldn't it be nice if there was a culture of treating your own site or page as a place for "editor choices"? If there was a model of trust between page owners (or admin on social media) to choose quality advertisements in a model similar to television? (I do not live in the US, here television ads are mostly reasonable)

My point is that ads are not just a way to monetize your own page, they are also a way to allow easy product discovery. In may opinion, before you can call them purely evil it is right to also point out the beneficial effects they do have.

Also many of you point also apply to most modern journalism and articles online. They are strong negative point but they do not imply that a whole practice is irredeemably evil.

Don't forget they track you in very ingenious ways, effectively eroding your privacy.

> my attention, a resource that I consider very valuable

How much would you pay for a browser?

It's not the fact that Mozilla sanitizes or does not sanitize the ads to prevent user tracking. It's the fact that there was never any explicit knowledge that ads like this would even show up on the browser homepage, which violates further trust in Firefox and Mozilla.

> I would like that people were more explicit in why they despise ads.

Sorry, but no. Ads are not a good way to monetize software. Period. This has been discussed enough in countless articles during the last two years. The reasons are well-known by now. If you still managed to miss all that has been written about ads, I recommend Pinboard's talk about website obesity as a starting point.

> Ads are not a good way to monetize software. Period.

It certainly seems to have be an effective way to monetize software.

And TBH it didn't bother me much back when we were only talking context-based ads in search results or ads related to the blog posts I was reading.

I do agree though that todays 3rd party-tracking-megaton-js-web-ads needs to die just like the old punch-the-monkey-scams needed to die.

Obviously a software should not be just a giant chum-box, there are no kind of upsides to that.

Still I do not understand why everyone should keep a mile away from them and be shamed for trying to ameliorate the bad sides of internet advertisements.

1. They're ugly. 2. They're insecure. 3. They spy on users. 4. They lie. 5. They are a form of psychological manipulation. 6. They encourage consumerism and wasteful spending. 7. They waste economic resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Customers are the ones who pay for a company's marketing budget. 8. They lead to centralization of power in large firms.

I completely agree, but I also believe that it could be relevant to keep in mind the difference between what ads are right now and what they could be.

If Mozilla can grow a small but reliable advertisement space and impose significant restrictions on the style and taste of the ads this could actually improve the whole industry.

>This is deeply upsetting to me because I have continually pushed Firefox to friends and family as the only alternative to Google's strongarm dominance of our virtual lives.

Agreed. Frankly, this is not a good time for Mozilla to fuck around.

> How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

Would enough users pay money for a browser?

Technically with moves like this, we already are. The question should instead be phrased: would enough users opt into giving money instead of being advertised to, and that's much trickier. You'd lose some opportunity cost with an ad or not model and having to support that, but I think a nontrivial amount of people would rather spend money than be advertised to.

Eventually paying users will get ads too.

I pay for two newspapers (WSJ and a local one) and I am still served ads in both. My local one still serves "sponsored content" which I consider to be the worst kind of ad. WSJ also seems to have no problem with using targeted ads and third party data collection. I understand why they do it; I'm the kind of person to pay for a newspaper and that makes me an especially valuable.

I genuinely don't think it is hyperbole to consider online advertising perhaps the single most destructive invention in the last decade and a half. Many of the terrible aspects of social media would not exist if people were paying for it with their dollars. Social media has exasperated divides and now poses a serious risk to democratic institutions.

Anonymous trolls in a no advertising world would be fewer because people would actually have to pay for those twitter accounts. Moreover, there would be no incentive for online publications to feed us clickbait, sponsored news, and outrage simply to encourage more eyeballs on ads.

While WSJ comments can be pretty partisan and terrible, they pale in comparison to Twitter's.

I paid for Opera back in the days when they had the option to pay for an ad-free version. They eventually decided to shelf that model. shrug

There are definitely enough users who would donate money to support a fork of a browser that pursues their interests. Not enough who would support Mozilla though.

You'd find that there are enough users who'd say they'd donate but would do no such thing once you pass the wicker basket around.

Unlike most other software browsers are in a unique position here. They have regular users that use the software often and a lot and can do periodic donations campaigns that reach all of them. On top of that there are billions of potential users opening various niche possibilities. This may not be enough to develop a massive full blown browser engine, but definitely enough for forks.

doesn't it work for wikipedia though?

Iridium browser seems like a good alternative. It is firefox with a focus on privacy.

Their webpage says Iridium is built on top of Chromium.

I don’t know the status of it, but Brave is built on Firefox iirc.

Edit: nope, was wrong

Brave is built on Chromium[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

Brave is based on Chromium too

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