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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

When I worked at reddit, I refused to run Adblock. I felt like it would be hypocritical to work for a company that made its money from ads, and then block them. Also I wanted to make sure that I had the same experience as the users.

When I left reddit, for the longest time I still didn't run Adblock because as a shareholder it still felt hypocritical.

But a few years ago I couldn't take it anymore -- the web go so awful with ads on it became unusable. And so I relented and went full Adblock. And life got a lot better.

(I did however whitelist reddit and a few other sites that I like whose ads are bearable)

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I once criticized one of Reddit's advertisers (AMC) in a sponsored comment post (they no longer allow comments on these).

Reddit shadowbanned my account sitewide. That's enough reason for me to never, ever view Reddit without an adblock.

I loved commenting on ads. What a shit show that was. They were smart to remove the feature, but I do miss it.

Me too, the Velveeta comments were the best

I am pretty sure I still get comments on my ads. It's almost entirely spam and those comments you think are probably spam it's just a 'good job' response.

Don't worry, Twitter allows commenting on ads.

FB allows commenting on ads. This does not go well for certain types of advertisers. Political and religious ads especially. Even the bland corporate advertisers have to spend some time cleaning up the inevitable mess.

What's especially puzzling is that FB allows image uploads as an ad response unless the advertiser was smart enough to disable it.

Well, you could call this "engagement", at least people are clicking and investigating.

Also it appears Twitter does it as well - so many promoted tweets are just roasted in the replies.

I'm still confused by google's "Chromebook Megathread" ads. with comments disabled.

It's vexing.

"(they no longer allow comments on these)"

Is that the case ? We (rsync.net) used to advertise on reddit quite a bit and we would have sponsored posts that had a proper comment thread and Q&A, etc. - I thought it was fantastic.

So this is not even an option anymore ?

It is still an option.

I work for a company and on the very team that serves billions of ad impressions a year.

I use adblock every fucking day. The internet is simply unusable without one.

Insert Michael and Webb "Are we the baddies?" sketch here.

*Mitchell and Webb

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

And advertising is marching under the rat's anus banner.

thanks for making the world a shithole dude

Eh, do what I can.

well, a lot of people manage not to.

I use adblock, makes it so much easier as an experience also surprises me how many companies are tracking me on some of these webpages. But, I am sympathetic to the idea of businesses depending on ad revenue.

I like how some websites e.g. news websites, put up a message that they depend on ad revenue and ask for adblockers to be disabled, I did it for some websites where I like the content, but then I also feel I am perhaps very unlikely to click on any of the ads (at some level I suppose my mind has learned how to focus on the content and ignore the ad space e.g. on google search I remember I had developed a habit of scrolling down and ignoring the first few ad results without actually consciously doing it). So, considering I am way less likely to click on an ad, perhaps I am not actually hurting the business, or maybe actually helping improve conversion if I can go that far :)..

Most clicks on ads are certainly misclicks. The business is to make store owners believe that they are getting exposure, not to actually give them sales.

All of the little guys like me who tried to run a Goggle Ads and Microsoft Ads campaign know that we can spend a few thousands dollars without a single impact on sales.

Then the salesman from Google calls you and tells you it’s because you’re doing it wrong. Try such and such keywords. Link to your payment button to see your ratios! Try to optimize for CTR and EWQ and ASDF (not the strange proximity between those ideas and random letters on a keyword). It must be you. It must be YOU!

The business is to make the business owner believe as long as possible that it will work.

> The business is to make store owners believe that they are getting exposure, not to actually give them sales.

To be scrupulously fair, the business is to make store owners believe that they are getting exposure, regardless of whether they actually get sales. Much like snake oil salemen, it's prefectly fine (nice, even) if the patient improves; that just means a chance to sell them more and 'better' snake oil ("brand maintainence", I think they call it) later.

But the real question is, did you ever use the new interface instead of old.reddit.com?

I tried for a week. When my CPU melted I switched back to old.reddit. But I use the mobile app (which is basically the new interface) for about 50% of my redditing, so I sort of use both. But always the old interface on the computer.

I hated the Reddit app so much I bought BaconReader.

Apollo all day.

And do you use RES?

i.reddit.com

is best for mobile

>you ever "use"

What do you meany "use". It's totally unusable even with full adblock

> old.reddit.com

This is what I use.

This has to be the most misunderstood comment. Honestly eve tho I don't work for an and centric company I do feel what you went through. Because of how much YouTube helped me, I couldn't bear myself using an ad blocker. Then things like Patreon and sponsorship deals came along and I decided to treat myself a nice ad blocker. Still couldn't do the full thing, so I went with one called "fair ad blocker" that actually let's in some no -intrusive ones so it's a little light on my conscience. Still using it. It let's in some annoying pop ups too sometimes, but such is the price.

I once tried not running an ad blocker or noscript on a work computer. That lasted for a couple months until the day I got a redirected to a porn site from an innocuous search result. There are too many ways to weaponize a site to let your guard down. If the site operator can't or won't vet all of the code they send you then you should feel no obligation to execute it.

I've been in a similar situation. For me it was a different type of struggle... More, I need to be informed about the space.

I am a firm believer that there are ways to do ads in a manner that respects the end user, is not obnoxious as well, and isn't privacy invasive. And this applies to both buy and sell sides of the industry.

But much of the space is garbage and in some cases malicious, so I block ads with a prejudice, run NoScript on Firefox on desktop and mobile, etc. It's a PITA, but a better experience overall.

It is a bit amusing to watch the changes Reddit is making to "improve the user experience" though, when to people in the industry, it seems like fairly transparently telegraphing development of surfaces for new ad placements or signal collection for targeting models.

What pisses me off is Reddit leadership can't seem to just be transparent about it.

I really wish reddit would begin to pay small amounts to its moderators. I feel like it would be a basic income experiment and kinda neat since the mods do most of the content and user moderation for reddit and spend thousands upon thousands of hours there.

I disagree. If income was paid out Reddit would then be sending out 1090s or W2s to every mod. Analytics and time tracking would be put in place. An entire team would need to be stood up to oversee mod management. Mods from certain regions of the world would be disavowed, and the barrier to enter would naturally be higher for new mods.

I say mods should be either full employees or volunteers, you can't mix between the two.

This is such a dumb hill to die on.

I agree, that's why I left the hill still alive. :)

It's incredible how people are chastising you for having skin in the game

When you view it through the lens of "journalism dies without money, and local journalism survives on ads", I can see some nobility in it.

You're probably better off sponsoring some journalism directly instead.

The guardian has a supporter tier. Some local news stations where I live have memberships with minor benefits.

Subscriptions? Could be a local thing but in my country newspapers have always been paid with them. News has never been assumed "free" until the internet came around. In fact the first newspapers all the way back to the 17th century were intended for diplomats, nobility and merchants. Free news is usually shite anyway.

>the internet came around

Yes, it did.

I have subscribed (and might still be subscribed) to several news magazines and papers, though not my local. It's kind a circular drain of "lower pay > lower quality > fewer subscribers > lower pay".

So subscribe and pay them directly. From all metrics I've seen direct payment is the most efficient vs merch, super chats, and views themselves. Pay for premium.

In what way?

I've never had it explained to me what's wrong with hypocrisy. None of us live by our high ideals, do we? It's funny when a comedian points that out, but why should we do as we say?

Sounds like a quote from The Diamond Age: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+diamond+age+hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is usually dishonest ("I'm going to tell you a lie in hopes that you believe it; my behavior shows that I don't actually believe the lie") or unfair ("I'm going to try to convince you to play by a more restrictive set of rules than I do so I can get an advantage over you (or just avoid having the drawbacks of those rules myself)", both of which are bad things.

Moreover, just because you're not capable of perfectly adhering to a set of principles doesn't mean that it's not worth trying. "Oh, I know that I'm not going to be able to uphold every single commitment I make, so I'm not going to worry about upholding any of them."

Yes it might be a hint that you don't believe what you say, but that shouldn't detract from you saying being potentially correct. After all the truth value isn't affected by who says something. I bet there were smokers who were part of discovering that smoking is unhealthy.

The thing about pointing out hypocrisy is that you're actually lending authority to the person you criticize, you're saying that you believe in the side he's revealed to actually support.

Morality is important, but self-righteousness is unpleasant to be around. Punishing hypocrisy helps strike the right balance.

I did the same when I worked on Google Ads; I felt it was important for me to have the full ad experience. It was easier back in the early 2000s though, before the Web ad ecosystem got so horrible.

Now I block ads and trackers with great zeal. Google's most of all. Surveillance capitalism is bad for almost everyone. Advertising is a mind virus.

My experience of ads is that they're much better than they were in the early 2000s. Back then major websites would have literal scams advertised on their site. Things like you're the 1 millionth visitor click here to collect your prize. Now I rarely see that sort of thing.

Perhaps scams have a high selection pressure to evolve to be less detectable (while we are also being trained to detect them better). You might be seeing plenty of scams, but they are just camouflaged far better?

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