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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Wow, look at the chart for how much ad blockers improve webpage performance for The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. What absolute piles of shit they serve us and expect us to happily suck down for such meager morsels of content! This makes me 100% want them to fail even harder. Journalism hitched itself to a stupid advertising model that serves no one well and the proof couldn't be more stark.

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I tried out The Independent with a popular "modern" browser

I found I could browse and read really fast if I just controlled DNS^1

I did not use an ad blocker.

I did not disable Javascript.

What I did was limit the available DNS information to a single domain, www.independent.co.uk

I experienced no significant delays or resource usage.

I was able to read the news no problem, fonts and formatting looked fine

There generally were no ugly image placeholders just white space

I tried blocking the ICO(1), PNG(2) and WOFF2(24) files. The page still looked great

The images are hosted on static.independent.co.uk

The video I suspect is hosted on a third party site, tracked and linked to adtech

I can easily download the images if I am really curious to see them but most images on news pages, unless they are photojournalism, are garbage, IMO

Anyway, I think it is quite easy to avoid all the tracking and ads, even without an ad blocker or disabling JS

The only things that "broke" on this website was the image display, offsite video sourcing and comments. Basically all the cruft :)

1. Truth is I did not even use DNS, the IP address was loaded into the memory of a loopback-bound proxy. No cookies were sent. No user-agent was sent. The only headers sent were Host and Connection

"limit the available DNS information to a single domain"

I would like to do this too, how did you go about doing it?

There are a number of different ways of doing it.

Are you familiar with running daemons? There are many different ones that can suffice.

The other question is browser you are using. I always assume the browser will ignore /etc/hosts. Otherwise the HOSTS file can provide a quick way to try this out.

Which daemons exactly? What would be their role?

How do you expect The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to make money?

By providing better journalism than what I can get for free. That starts with the user experience, which is currently quite poor.

No one is willing to pay for local journalism when every site will copy your story as soon as it breaks.

Great, that puts it on-par with the status quo.

The problem is the free services can't exist without the originators. The originators can't exist without revenue. If the journalists who are actually writing the pieces as opposed to copying them don't get paid the whole thing falls apart.

That's when the current originators fall and newer, more intelligent ones take their place.

No. It's when clickbait and fake news crafted for engagement over truth takes their place.

How do they expect me to make money? I hate to be snarky, as I do actually value journalism and think it represents an important part of a free society. However, why is it my responsibility to participate in their business model? Can we fund them with taxes (in a non-dystopian way that keeps political interference out of the equation)? After all, they don't spend time thinking about my business model.

> However, why is it my responsibility to participate in their business model?

It’s not your responsibility, you can simply not visit their site if you don’t wish to participate.

> Can we fund them with taxes (in a non-dystopian way that keeps political interference out of the equation)?

How can this possibly work?

Personally I think big tech aggregators like Google and Facebook should be taxed to support journalism. That could either be a fee when someone clicks on a link or a flat amount per year that everyone gets to spend on journalism implemented as a tax refund.

These companies have sucked all of the value out of journalism. Normally I'd be fine with that, but the tragedy of the commons on an entire vital industry seems to large to ignore here.

So what, Google and Facebook are now incentivized to ban those links from their platform, further increasing the censorship rampant on their platforms?

>It’s not your responsibility, you can simply not visit their site if you don’t wish to participate.

Agreed, this is the best answer. If I don't agree with a sites choice in terms of background scripts/privacy/funding method, I just stop visiting it.

High level, there are basically four paths to getting revenue in journalism:

- ads

- subscribers

- donations from small patrons

- donations from large patrons

These cover a lot of different business models.

If you want to make money at journalism (or just keep the lights on), focusing on ads when they've been a declining source of revenue for decades is kind of crazy. And that's not due to ad blocking.

It's worth mentioning that ads can also be delivered without tracking and oodles of Javascript. Sell ad placements that are images, even GIFs.

People were blocking ads long before those were reasons.

The first ad blockers existed for popups and because ad networks were being used as a malware injection point.

Only extremists had an issue with the standard JPG banner ad at the top of every page.

TIL I'm an extremist.

Welcome to the club.

Though those little rectangle GIFs were mint back in the day

There is a 5th way. Sponsored content. Basically where people pay to have an article written about a particular topic or product.

>focusing on ads when they've been a declining source of revenue for decades

What led you to that conclusion? (You may be right. I don't know.)

They should have invented Craigslist. No newspaper did this because they couldn't see the value of free classifieds driving traffic for select paid listings.

I'd pay 25 cents an article, if they can get together with a few other content creators and decide on a shared micro-transaction system.

I have been waiting for this for a decade. Now that I’m a software developer I can only imagine what the difficulties of implementing this would be.

> what the difficulties of implementing this

Not every problem is technical. Modern journalism is still just a participant in capitalism.

This is a business model problem, and figuring out how to build a healthy company and news organization with a reliable stream of revenues to allow long-term planning. Add in the pressure that most journalism is now private sector with growth expectations, such that the BBC and NPR are outliers.

Isn't that the purpose of the BAT used in the Brave browser?

Yeah, and I hope it works out. But -- last I checked -- I can't use pay pal to add BAT, and I don't think it's a stable coin...

That's easy. I don't. I have no problem parasitically eating them for long-tail information while paying for my primary sources.

uBlock Origin and rampant infotheft it is. And that's okay, I don't really care if they live or die. Just like they don't really care if I live or die.

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