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Comment by leokennis | Hacker News Reader

This exactly. This is also why I never feel "ashamed" when sites ask me to please disable my ad blocker because when I block ads they'll go out of business. Or why I'll always decline even "user respecting" ads on sites.

We're fighting the ad and tracking industry here, the internet equivalent of a gang member with a shiv and a length of pipe. I'm not going to fight nicely. I'll deny you any chance and any method I get.

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> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

-- Banksy

Saving this text. Very accurate.

I agree that we should not feel shame at blocking ads. I remember when the web was new and "pop-up blockers" became a thing. Ad companies and everyone using them have long ago burned any and all good will we might have had towards them and deserve nothing but our contempt.

I remember IE6's so-called blocker failing to block a lot of popups. It wasn't until I discovered Firefox in 2004 that I stopped seeing them.

Then Google came along promising no intrusive banner ads or popups. They would make their money from quieter personalized ads that knew what you wanted because they had more data about what you were doing. People loved the idea. It was going to save the internet from the horrible advertising industry.

Actually, I seem to remember that these ads were contextual at first, not related to any profile they would have built for you but only related to the content of the page.

Which is entirely different. Ads are still manipulative (by design), but at least purely contextual ads don't track you.

Oh that's right. With gmail, people assumed they would be based on your email contents but sure if Google actually ever did that.

They did. They actually stopped not long ago (2017): https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...

Just a small reminder for people using Firefox and ublock origin: you can remove almost all cookie prompts by enabling the annoyances filters in the addon settings

Anyone not using Firefox/Ublock; you can use NoScript to block the banners, and a lot of other adtech (including some paywalls such as Bloomberg) as they are all JS-powered.

It's quite surprising to see how many JS plugins are in operation on a typical consumer site, and satisfying to know they were all blocked unless expressly permitted :)

Keep in mind, however, that you will end up enabling all the "Please enable Javascript to view our website (even though our website works well enough for your casual visit without it)" banners, that are enabled in the HTML by default and hidden by JS :)

For example, one particular maroon-headwear-related Linux distro's bug tracker has a particularly egregious blinking bright red banner, asking you to enable JS for the website to "function correctly", even though reading bugs on said tracker works fine without it.

And if you don't want to or can't install noscript, you can use my little hack https://noscript.it/ to view a page without javascript.

Note that it is a hack/poc and does not always work, especially the x-frame-detection is iffy so if you try it and just see a blank page try the "enable proxy" checkbox. I use it every now and then on iOS to get around some especially obnoxious JS, but if there were more users I would be more motivated to improve it (hint hint:-)

I can't find that. Could you be more specific?

"Filter Lists" settings-tab -> expand "Annoyances" -> Fanboy's is by far the most popular one. Otherwise read the pages they link to / view the content (many have descriptions in content) - many of them are intended to work with Fanboy's, but if not you may have excessive duplicates.

Thank you!

And on Safari use Hush!

You can also block all sorts of annoyances. Last year I added ##.ytp-pause-overlay to my list, now when I click to pause embedded youtube videos all the useless crap like "more videos" does not show up. I also tend to block any sort of mouseover modals that show up on sites, like profiles on forums or reddit.

Want to add that uBlock Origin is not only exclusive to Firefox. If you prefer a WebKit-based browser you can use Orion on Mac with uBlock Origin.

The ad industry eventually ruins any medium it touches, and is responsible for spreading misinformation and propaganda that have killed millions.

It ruined print when every other newspaper and magazine page had an ad mixed in with the content. Sure you could get the paper for free, but how much content are you actually reading?

It ruined television when an hour-long show is interrupted several times to show 15 minutes of ads.

And now it's ruining the web with the advent of ad tech and the brilliant minds that get paid millions to think of new ways of squeezing more value out of people's attention. Web sites are riddled with ads now even worse than in the popup days. I have to navigate a legal minefield of dark patterns to ask them to please not track me or sell my data.

These are just the ways it ruins content and user experience. What about the misinformation? The lies from the tobacco industry, the political ads that overturn democracies, astroturfing and embedded marketing...? The list of shady and downright evil practices is too long to mention.

Advertising is a scourge on humanity. It needs to be strongly regulated and companies as influential as Google and Facebook need to switch to user respecting business models, for the sake of all of us.

You might show me ads, but not track me, privacy badger stops you from doing that. But if your ads are trying to track me, then privacy badger stops that too.

I'm not likely to bother blocking first-party images or other content so-delivered. Odds are I won't be bothered enough by those to block them, or if I am I'm more likely to abandon the site than to start blocking that kind of ad on every site.

The problems are the tracking and the ad networks that kinda treat both the viewer and their site-hosts as consumable resources, but that sites can't realistically avoid if they want/need ad support, because that's where all the money is. Break the ad networks, break tracking (and I mean legally, in both cases—tech means for blocking are doomed, IMO) and ad money won't go away, it'll be redirected to less-awful ways of delivering ads.

Unfortunately the ad blockers are not usually able to tell the difference between first-party ads and network ads. In practice both from an ad server.

I think there's actually a great opportunity for someone to create an ad server that only serves first-party ads with no tracking.

The Deck was such a thing. It was sort of invite only because once you go first party you have no way to validate the user base so you need to trust the partner. For ads that result in direct sales this can be easy to do though.

It was more of an ad network, no? Also I think it shut down.

I'm talking about something even simpler than that. I have my own website and I have my own advertisers who want to put ads on it. I need a way to serve them and do contextual targeting (e.g. stories about a certain topic) and frequency capping and forecasting and the other sort of basic stuff I expect from Google Ad Manager.

You are generous.

However I don't want any content which could be distracting or plain unsafe for mental wellbeing. One example are the ads for violent games on BlueStacks when I was using the emulator for Android education software for my children.

No thank you. Any content I can't control will be kicked.

Either by using adblockers or by just not using the service.

Advertising is mental pollution.

I dated a woman who experienced trauma in the past and she would routinely get horror movie trailers in YouTube. Even I found them disturbing. Neither of us had any interest in getting intrusive thoughts from watching assault and body horror. Putting in uBlock Origin did wonders for her well being.

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