Ad block and you don't stop
vicki.substack.com
vicki.substack.com
As the author points out, to our eyes the internet is unusable without an ad-blocker. With an ad-blocker, it is somewhat OK, and with it we grudgingly accept the status quo. This is fine as far as those platforms are concerned. The working ad-blocker is our pacifier.
We are being tolerated.
Nowhere in that pipeline do "tech-savvy users with a solid ad-blocker", "who on the whole have a decent understanding of the mechanisms used to influence people" come into play - unless you're counting Russian agencies and others who are explicitly using it for propaganda (not to be confused with people who like-and-reshare David Icke nonsense.)
For example, I found Nightline [0] on itch.io earlier today. I'd never even heard of itch.io but I follow a cool nerd on Twitter and she retweeted [1] another cool nerd.
We know about RSS. I have dozens of feeds and they're really varied. I've been following many of them for at least a decade.
You're just not finding this stuff on /r/yourregionalcity unless someone like us posts it there.
[0]: https://colorfiction.itch.io/nightline
[1]: https://twitter.com/colorfiction/status/1330575276561063937
I.e., from a monetization perspective, losing (part of) the ad-blocking group is much more expensive than retaining them with their ad-blockers working.
See: Participation inequality [0] and the 1% rule/90-9-1 rule[1] and the friendship paradox[2].
Re-reading your comment, I think you might actually mean that people commenting on random forums think they are the biggest contributors to <something off of the the forum>, which isn't nearly as certain.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_inequality
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
I'd posit that Reddit understands that the demographic actually generating content (comments, posts, etc...) are very tech savvy, heavily utilize ad blockers and ad-stripping third party clients. Reddit understands that these users would leave the site en masse if their third party clients or ad blockers were interfered with. This would result in a drop in quality content for "average", non-ad blocking users to interact with, ultimately killing their web traffic and ad revenues.
I'd also bet this is why Reddit has yet to force everyone to the new advertising-optimized redesign, which their power users hate.
old.reddit.com still gives the experience that you're used to if you want to remove the redesign.
I want to agree but I don’t. Twitch recently went to war with adblockers and they don’t seem to have lost any meaningful amount of streamers/viewers (at least the streamers/games I follow have the same amount of viewers/chat spam as before). Why would reddit be any different?
I don't know what Gallowboob gets paid to be on Reddit, but I expect nothing and get nothing. On Twitch I assume even the small-time streamers are trying to make money and get big. So Twitch has that leverage over their power users.
agree completely with you
The only LOGICAL reason to go from a format that works to such a terrible format, is that it can make ads work better
Facebook does some pretty ridiculous stuff to try and prevent AdBlockers and outside tools from being able to remove things from your timeline.
I suspect they feel like ad-blocked users are better than non-users, but they are still going to try their damndest to prevent adblocking.
Google owns all of the spam filters used by 99.9% of all email providers. If they don't like your content, the majority of your intended audience will never see it. This isn't including search traffic. They regularly censor news organizations without telling them.
Recently, Mailchimp announced that they will block any content they deem unacceptable. They get to decide what your recipients will see.
Payment providers like Paypal and sites like Kickstarter also regularly ban people they deem 'unacceptable'.
The phone company isn't allowed to block you because you said something politically incorrect to my friends and tech companies should be no different.
The tech community isn't protesting this right now because their perceived enemies are being blocked and censored en masse.
Don't be shocked one day when you are censored and blocked and people like me just don't give a shit anymore
AT&T does block their customer's email content without informing their paying customer. At this point I trust NSA more than these private companies. At least NSA has some government oversight and subject to FOIL request with these private companies it is basically the East India company all over again, wild wild west. They can do pretty much what they want. And like the Federal Reserve has their own private armies.
Vote with your money and internet usage.
The government will need to overcome free speech first.
That all seems pretty reasonable, and it's not like we have the right to demand that a private company host our content.
I don't care if adults look at porn or engage in porn-based commerce; I'm not saying "porn is immoral and it's good to block it!" I do believe that the vast majority of businesses not already working with that industry don't want the aggravation that comes along with dealing with that content, though, and that's why it's widely barred.
This is just one reason why people should not eagerly condemn everything that is "sexually explicit" and hand-wave it away ("Yuck, of course no one wants anything to do with that.")
On a site called Hacker News, people should grok that, but the audience around here isn't what it once was. Do you people want Gilead? Because this is how you get Gilead.
It's not insanely difficult to start your own mailing list/ newsletter service. At my previous job, I had did exactly that. Then you can absorb the potential legal liabilities yourself.
Think I found it in the ToS, though.
_"Mailchimp also does not allow the distribution of Content that is, in our sole discretion, materially false, inaccurate, or misleading in a way that could deceive or confuse others about important events, topics, or circumstances."_
Once upon a time, l'd consider this reasonable. They're within their right as a company. But anymore I wouldn't use their service if I was looking for a mail distribution platform.
I fully trust that the policy has been implemented with the best of intentions, but without a common core of cultural values, an environment of partisan hostility, and accepted narratives downstream from the raw data being interpreted as the absolute 'truth' by either side, I think it's safest to select contractors that you expect won't fold under political pressure, or engage in their own activism if your product is meant to be mass market.
Either that, or integrate a level of service redundancy to account for potential deplatforming from any of your providers.
If your product or service is meant to serve a partisan niche, I think you have a lot more latitude.
Do you have a citation for the censorship allegations?
Disappointingly there are those who would downvote you for the heresy you speak. These people are delusional for thinking corporations are bothered by the social/racial/whatever justice that drives them to call for more censorship. Corporations are opportunistically using these moral panics to impose control.
The nazi dog guy was prosecuted under telecommunications laws originally intended to stop people making obscene phone calls.
The phone company normally connects two people at a time. That's not a public forum.
Yes it is. I remember conversations here on HN years ago where some would argue that people in fact loved ads.
Now it seems this line of argument is gone for good. Everybody agrees ads are horrible.
The only question that remains is, are they indispensable? I think not. We'll see.
Without ads, businesses will put up subscription-only features and paywalls. People hate those too. But we need to accept the fact that businesses can't make money by giving everything away for free. I'd rather put up with ads than see the internet devolve into paywalls on most sites -- paywalls are more annoying to work around.
On the other hand, if I'm reading an aggregator like Google News, the interesting thing is that the top article for a particular sub-topic might be from the NYT or another site with a paywall, but if you look down the list you can get a similar article from a non-paywalled site. The cool thing about this is I get exposed to a bunch of random sources, and often they are local news sites.
I've looked into subscribing to some sites, but most want north of $10 per month, some in the $20-$30 per month range, and I just don't get that much value out of them to justify paying, especially when I'd end up having to pay for several of them, which would add up to several hundred dollars a month. It's still a real shame that micropayments isn't a thing; I wouldn't have an issue reading the first paragraph or two of an article, and then having to spend something like 5c to 25c to read more. I fully understand why micropayments haven't taken off, but it's a shame nonetheless.
Of course some content on e.g. Youtube is now partially funded by ad-revenue but that seems like something that happened more or less accidentally, and it has some undesirable consequences (hence why people are increasingly trying out other revenue streams).
One size doesn't fit all though
I fully admit that my opinion is not the only one. I'm sure there are some people whose attitude matches the one you describe. But my guess is that sentiment toward ads is declining. At the very least, publications are deciding that they can make more money off subscriptions than ads. Not sure if the revenue for ads is declining, or what.
Ads is just another word for manipulation. I see ads as an amalgam of screaming signaling noise that feed our primitive brains with ideas that are not ours.
I don't care if it's a huge, medium, small, unobtrusive. I simply can't stand ads at all.
All this disgust is on ads on a very basic level, imagine what I think about target ads/tracking.
edit. spelling.
Such "passive" advertisements (including billboards or the ones you see on the TV) are okay compared to the hyper-targeted advertisements which have pretty much lead us to present-day's dragnet-style surveillance.
Like I don't really have an issue with someone posting a thread "BIFL Request: Spatulas" and some brand rep being like "Hey I work for $company and we have a thing that might work for you." One of the best answers I ever saw on /r/femalefasionadvice was a Lululemon rep doing a full breakdown of their different product lines, model differences, prices ranges, target markets. Like god damn I wish all ads were like that. It was an actual informative sales pitch.
I think some light regulation that says reps have to be upfront about their affiliations is all that's really needed here.
The real thing is shills posing as independent third parties posting praise/visibility/reviews or even complaints about some thing that they have a vested interest in you buying or using. It's most egregious and obvious on reddit, but I guarantee you it's here on HN too.
I bet 99% of accusations of "shilling" are false. It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking.
I'm still prepared to call that "shilling".
So-called influencers exist on this basis. Influencers' work is initially unpaid, until they show they have a following and can be comfortably loyal to brands. If you follow growing social media accounts, especially on TikTok and streaming platforms, they'll quite often make it clear they hope to be rewarded later (correctly or incorrectly).
> It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking.
Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association.
It's not about disagreement or conspiracies, just that everyone talks like they're selling you things now even if they just own the thing and aren't being paid or intentionally 'influencing'. And I remember when it wasn't like that - even on reddit. I don't think it's an intentional thing (which would be your conspiratorial thinking) so much as an emergent property of large, anonymous, loosely connected groups of people where some of the people are only there to sell stuff, which just so happens to be convenient if you're there to sell.
I mean, it's HN. The orange-username "voting ring" is built right in.
It was Duke Nukem 3D.
:)
Well, this implies that dark web and the sea of malware are some dragon land in the middle that needs to be quietly trespassed to reach the other safety. But the better analogy is more like current pandemic where people navigate elbow to elbow and some of them have COVID-19, regardless of the physical location. Trust me, your packets can be next to some malware/dark web packets right after they left your router and are still traveling inside your building, even before reaching your ISP gateway.
One can never be 100% confident of the accuracy of quotes from decades past, but it's interesting to note the conflation of advertising and commerce here -- perhaps even more so if it's a contemporary reminiscence.
At the time Wired produced physical magazines (albeit with advertisements within) so the idea of people paying them for thoughtful content was not alien.
I don’t want to read the whole thing because I don’t care too much, so I may be a little bit off topic here, but afaik nobody has managed to block Facebook’s sponsored posts with these lists.
Reading posts on r/uBlockOrigin, there seem to be multiple versions of facebook, and what works for some doesn't work for others.
I don't use facebook too often, but if adblock really stops working, I will completely abandon it. Before I found the correct filters, my usage did drop, since every other post (literally) was an ad.
I know we all like to rip on them but at least it's better than WhatsApp or discord where someone has to actively create and account and learn the platform before using it.
This is an unfortunate situation to be in.
Googlebot
Mediapartners-Google
LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Apache-HttpClient +http://www.linkedin.com)
All this cat and mouse will go away as soon as Chrome V3 manifest lands and kills blocking webRequest, because privacy or something (V3 still lets you spy on all webRequests, just not override them ...) :/
Streamlink's workaround is to avoid playing pre-roll ads by sniffing for SCTE35 segments in the playlist.
However, you can't just seamlessly skip ads. Twitch's servers won't send you the next segments of the actual stream until an appropriate amount of time has passed. What's an adblocker to do in that case? Show a blank screen?
If Twitch wanted to squash adblocking entirely, they could so easily do it.
yes? Isn't that what people did back then? eg. live sporting event, when the ads came on you went to go get snacks or the toilet. It's not ideal but it's still better than having commercial messages blasted into your consciousness.
If they ever succeed I’ll just go elsewhere. I’m not spending one minute of my time getting brainwashed by ads.
I’ve also stopped Chrome from auto updating in anticipation of Google enforcing Manifest v3, which will cause uBlock Origin to break. That should give me enough time to figure out my next move.
This is a fun game for me :)
Beyond that, there are lots of things about Firefox that just annoy me. Off the top of my head - The search box being on the bottom and taking up the whole horizontal width of the view box, the inconsistent menus (context menu sub-menus fly out on hover, the program menu sub-menus do not), the boxy design and the native title bar which results in less vertical space. They only thing I'd want from Firefox would be containers - but I just use separate Chrome profiles to get the same effect.
I'm also a developer and I vastly prefer to use, test with and develop against something from the Chromium/Blink/WebKit lineage over Gecko. I want a mono-culture and to that end, I basically only test with Chrome and Safari. Everybody else can either keep up or die (or fork Chromium, customize it and maintain that). There's absolutely no problem with every Linux distro using the Linux kernel mono-culture, so why would there be a problem with a common browser engine/infrastructure mono-culture?
If I have to switch, I'd much rather go with something like Vivaldi or Brave. I doubt it will come to that though as I will probably only have to pause Chrome updates for a brief time while new extensions come out to keep blocking ads. The Manifest v3 limitation is in the number of rules (30k per extension) so I bet that each filter-list will just be it's own extension. There is no limitation on cosmetic filtering via injected JS.
Went looking for a paid option on Facebook to remove ads, like youtube premium which I enjoy, but they are very much against doing this. I guess when your entire organization becomes about selling ads, the team that wants to just make money directly gets shouted down.
So not sure I understand the hate ads get. I like having a job and getting paid.
The textfiles! [1]
"Howard said his gripe is not with advertising per se, but with the time it takes to view a page with advertising. "It can take 4 to 6 seconds to download each ad, and if you are on the Web a lot, that really gets annoying," he said. "If the advertisers want to pay for a high-speed Net connection to my house, then I would take the ads, but right now it is costing me money to look at their ads.""
This is reason #1.
As a user, I chose minimalism. I prefer a UNIX-like research OS instead of a corporate branded one from a FAANG company. I prefer text-based software and the VGA console. I rely heavily on programs other than web browsers for making HTTP requests. Sometimes I forget why I became a software minimalist. When I started using the internet in the early 90's, there were time limits; I had to use the time as cost efficiently as possible. Thus the answer is speed, cost and reliability.
Through this choice of minimalism I am able to avoid, to a noticeable extent, others usurping as much of my resources as they can get away with. I am able to minimise having to allocate computer resources and bandwidth to subsidise the "multibillion dollar industry" of serving internet ads. I can use the internet on slow connections and it is still reliable.
IMO, when users debate the merits of internet ads, we are in fact debating the merits of allowing this "multibillion dollar industry" to use our self-financed resources; the computers we bought, and the bills we pay to keep them powered on and connected to the internet.
"Now, whenever you load a website, scroll on social media, or hit Enter on a Google search, hundreds or thousands of companies compete in a cascade of auctions to show you their ad. The process, known as "programmatic" advertising, occurs in milliseconds, tens of billions of times each day. Only automated software can manage it."
This is reason #2.
As above, when users debate whether internet ads are acceptable, IMO we are debating whether to let others use some of our computer resources and bandwidth. Specifically, we are debating whether to subsidise the operation of the "multibillion dollar industry" of internet ads.
In addition, arguably we are debating whether it is acceptable for others to add milliseconds of delay to the fulfillment of our HTTP requests while ad selections are made in real-time -- for the purpose of supporting a "multibillion dollar" industry.
Users self-finance their internet use. However the "multibillion dollar" internet ads business and those companies who rely on internet ads-related revenue for survival are not self-financing. They rely on the contribution of user resources.
I have not seen much debate on the question of internet ads framed as a debate over donation of user resources nor user consent to millisecond delays. However, for me, these comprise 100% of the reasons I cannot tolerate internet ads. This is why I use a text-only browser to read things posted to HN.
I enjoyed this article and the historical perspective it offers. I think that Privoxy and other similar projects not focused on a single application deserve mention when recounting the history of combating the attempted advertising-driven commercialisation of the internet.
1. However I am not sure that the "block" list model is scalable if ad tech keeps growing -- I think we may see some antitrust regulation that could result in an even greater number of ad servers on the internet. Personally I use an "allow" list approach since I do not need to worry about images nor JavaScript.
With the clear intelligence of the writing one has to guess that getting a cursory knowledge of how a gasoline motor, clutch, transmission and differential works would take far less time than this article took to write!
Maybe I’m being pedantic here but if you can make sense of Kafka - turning a car key shouldn’t be much of a mystery!
Cars are much more then that nowadays... They are computers with code that fails... The other day my car stopped by itself because it got scared and almost got me in an accident