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Comment by tifadg1 | Hacker News Reader

I block all ads everywhere. I'm not opposed to paying for services I really need, but so far I've found nothing I couldn't do without.

Ads really made a mess of the internet - content farms, keyword farms, most of google results are paid for, sponsored for, or came from farms. We've really gone full-circle if I have to prepend reddit or stackexchange to get something that's not crap. Be it a question about daily life, or a product review, or a tech related thing.

Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities potential into improving engagement by 0.001%.

But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?

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You know it's bad when Reddit has what you're looking for more than half the time. I constantly have to use `site:reddit.com` because otherwise I usually get a bunch of blog fluff with no real content that's designed to get me to look at ads.

True. And I block reddit because it is addictive, information wise.

The reddit redesign broke my addiction. Their redesign is so disgusting and incompetent, it reminds me of countries that require explicit medical gore to be printed on cigarette cartons. Every time I have the misfortune of finding myself on reddit, it's as though I'm looking at a picture of a diseased organ from a dissected cadaver.

you can still use old.reddit.com to access the site and set that as your default if you're logged in, my experience hasn't changed much since the redesign

To be honest I'm thankful they broke my addiction and I'm not looking to pick the habit back up.

And the URLs haven't changed; I run an extension to automatically redirect me to old.reddit.com

It still has the information you crave. Come back, we have candy.

Reddit /is/ the candy - a bunch of empty information calories that makes you feel good until you realize what you've done. 99% of it is forgettable the moment you move on to your next post.

I block top level reddit, because that was too addictive. But I allow links to subreddits, users and posts, because that makes search results useful. I suppose that if you got addicted to specific subreddits, this approach is not as useful.

How did you set that up? I have something setup to do the same with leech lock but it isn’t perfect

I use Leechblock. It allows regexes as well as allow & block lists. I'm not near my main computer right now, and don't have the same setup here, but IIRC, I allow reddit.com/r/* and reddit.com/u/* and block reddit.com

I'm a fan of AdNauseam

https://adnauseam.io/

I'm curious does this actually visit the destination in your browser (like behind the scenes)? That seems incredibly dangerous as a huge amount of malware is distributed through poisoned ad networks.

Ha, that's an interesting one. It's more likely to lead to bans on the affiliate/website side than piss off the advertisers, but that might not be a bad thing.

Since I've started using it my ads have gotten weird. Lately I've been getting ads for wedding rings and women's clothing. I am a single guy

I think you and many others block ads because on many websites they are implemented so aggressively that it renders the website near unusable. This aggressive implementation is, in a way, a manipulation of the intention of ad tech and ruins how well results can be measured. Pop-up ads create false clicks, numerous ads on a page lessen the value of any given ad impression, etc.

The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. This is generally what makes search advertising work. Popular keywords garner a premium price, which in turn prices out those who are looking to manipulate the advertising platform with misleading ads. Higher cost ads means that less ads need to be sold to make a profit. Unfortunately, such an elegant solution has yet to be seen for content based websites, and so massive amounts of ad placements are added to websites just to break even.

My unpopular opinion: I would rather see content disappear than ever see an ad of any kind. I used to be tolerant of ads but I'm never going back, ads of any kind are repulsive. I even think that billboards on the highway should be banned, they're eyesores.

You are not alone. I'm also like this. Ads are horrible both in concept and in execution; their existence causes all kind of troubling incentives (for example: all those discussions about youtube radicalising young people because their algorithm prioritises polarising content? Remove the incentive to increase engagement at all costs, which is caused first and foremost by advertising, and the problem it's gone); and the worse of it is that we know there are a lot of very smart people out there, with a good grasp of how a human mind works, whose job is to insert tricks into advertising to manipulate you (by the way, this is not just about dark patterns, which is another can of worms of its own, but about neuromarketing and similar concepts). And then there are astroturfing campaings, which by design are even more dishonest than standard advertising.

I really, really despise advertising. It can't disappear soon enough.

To make this comment a bit less ranty, I'd like to add something: some people believe that ads don't work on them. I very much disagree. Ads DO work. That's exactly why I don't want anywhere near me.

I agree. About your last point, I can feel how ads affect me emotionally now and that's why I find them repulsive. My household is a "no-ads" household and I don't allow my children to view ads.

Ads have been around as long as human societies have been around. Just look at the murals of Pompeii for example, or the rock walls in modern day Syria with commercial advertisements. As long as humans have something that others want, there will be advertising.. unfortunately.

I think it anachronistic to construe signs and graffito from the ancient world to be equivalent to modern advertisement, marketing, or public relations, which belong to the world Edward Bernays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays) helped invent. It really is different in kind from the menu with prices someone painted on a wall around 79 CE.

My unpopular opinion: Show me ads and pay me for interating with them. You can even get all my data (income, recent purchases, hobbies, ...) preferably anonymised in some way. Let me rate ads and show the rating to everybody. If I buy the advertised product/service increase the public rating of the ad, otherwise decrease it.

Optionally, adjust the price according to rating. The higher the rating the lower the payment for interaction with the ad. Let unpopular/unsuccessful ads/advertisers pay more for the same customer.

Let me adjust the price and rating thresholds to exluce low priced / low quality ads.

Keep track of my purchases to build my reputation among advertisers.

>The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost.

That's where we started. It's a solution, but only for one side of the market. It leaves a lot of potential inventory and revenue on the table.

Maybe, but I think part of the solution is to convince more people to block ads. Most people I know still don't have an adblocker, even though modern ad blockers have been around over 15 years. I think they need to get over the fact that it's not immoral to block ads when those ads not only destroy the experience of the internet but also are often outright scams that Google and the like are complicit with. If the punishment for having overly aggressive and deceptive ads was that the average person blocks the ads, the bar for where ads start to lose money becomes far lower. Most legitimate content creators these days take subscriptions directly, have preroll sponsor ads, or sell merch. If ads make up the majority of the money you take in, what you're peddling probably isn't worth much on its own.

That seems akin to an 'ethical' approach to ads. But as always with ethical products that are competing in a common market, how do you prevent cut-throat/unethical competitors from dominating the market if they have better engagement, conversion rates due to more aggressive/deceptive/manipulative techniques?

I don't want better ads or more targeted ads because they are more likely to influence my behaviour.

Of course it would survive! There's better marketing and sales channels than stupid ads. But of course, you need more time and brains to set them up.

Having a well designed, rationally priced, and useful product that will last a long time helps too.

I'm not opposed to paying for services I really need, but so far I've found nothing I couldn't do without.

Presumably your ad blocker doesn’t prevent sites that display ads from loading at all. How then do you make the calculation about doing without?

Otherwise, if you use websites that are solely ad-supported, then you are neither paying for the service nor doing without.

Nobody pays for anything by looking at ads. Web sites are free, they just happen to include advertising noise among the real data. People can simply filter out the noise if they so choose.

Web sites that require payment are more than welcome to return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of sending a copy of the requested data for free.

Nobody pays for anything by looking at ads.

We can play semantic games - “looking at” ads - or we can acknowledge that people pay for websites by allowing their browser to load ads, which is both true and the uncontroversial truth my comment was assuming.

Websites are obviously capable of returning that response or a 200 with text that states that the site declines to show the page...

I’m still curious how OP decides that OP is doing without.

It's not "true and the uncontroversial truth". It's a violation of the design and spirit behind the HTTP protocol. It's also a violation of social customs we're used to in meatspace - if you give me a magazine for free, you have no grounds to expect me to look at the ads inside, instead of tearing them out without looking and reading the content I'm interested in.

This expectation that "you pay for content by looking at ads included" is a unilateral decision made by publishers who embed ads, and pushed by the advertising industry. We have every moral right to refuse looking at ads. And if you demand payment for the value you provide, do it the honest way: demand up-front. HTTP protocol has provisions for that too.

> true and the uncontroversial truth

Not even close. There is only one truth here: nobody's charging users for anything. There are no payments.

Webmasters run servers that send pages to any client that asks, 100% free of charge. Advertisers pay webmasters to load these pages full of ads. What clients do with these ads is not under anybody's control. They might look at it. They might delete it. Who knows?

So any problems that arise here are between webmaster and advertiser. The ads aren't being displayed? People aren't clicking on the ads? Not making enough money? None of that is the user's problem. Nobody is obligated to solve these problems for them or even to help out by looking at or clicking on ads.

Presumably your ad blocker doesn’t prevent sites that display ads from loading at all.

Poor phrasing on my part. I meant: Presumably if your ad blocker detects ads, it doesn’t prevent the site itself from loading.

For advertisers, the fact that people that may never click on any banner ad, are blocking the ads on the internet is not a bad thing per se.

Once they got a click, they know that this user does not have an ad blocker so is less tech savvy, and more susceptible to be influenced by marketing.

Click through rates and conversion rates have increased on desktop traffic in the past few fears.

> Ads really made a mess of the internet - content farms, keyword farms, most of google results are paid for, sponsored for, or came from farms. We've really gone full-circle if I have to prepend reddit or stackexchange to get something that's not crap.

This alone makes ad blocking a moral imperative. They don't really care about the internet, it's just some money making scheme to them.

> But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?

Aren't capitalists all about adapting to adversity? If capitalism can't survive without ads, then let it die a well-deserved death. Nobody should be putting up with advertising for the sake of it.

I hear this mentioned a lot

A) What you wrote: Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities potential into improving engagement by 0.001%.

But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?

B) What people say about 'the brightest wasting their time on Wall Street instead of creating things'

Why are we assuming these people would do something meaningful with their lives if they were not working on 'better advertising and better conversion'

Perhaps they would just be doing something else that pays well but has little long term contribution to humanity

Capitalism could easily survive. I still buy many things, even though most online ads I get are completely irrelevant, and all are (modulo +"*ç% re-layout) unclicked.

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