Hacker News Reader

Comment by oddevan | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that the goal, though? The best arguments I've heard for casual ad-blocking is that you can't trust the code running through ad networks. If we take the ad networks out of the equation (first-party analytics and ads), I'm much more okay with that.

View on HN

I also just don't want to see annoying fucking ads.

The future of adblocking is an AI-based system that detects already loaded ads visually and simply masks them from you on the client side. Such an approach (sans AI) has been used in the past, but it fell out of favor due to bandwidth and CPU usage concerns. Since then, bandwidth and computing power have grown exponentially, such that the disincentive of the load-and-hide approach will continue to diminish over time.

By “orders of magnitude”

not exponentially

Say it with me so we can normalize this usage

There are plenty of people who misuse the word "exponential", but in this case, assuming much of the period in question was during Moore's Law growth, "doubling every N months for many years on end" is genuinely exponential.

At higher numbers it is very hard for any whole number exponent >1 to be reached

In any case what year was AI adblock attempted so we can check if this is one of the narrow use cases where exponential performance improvements occurred within computing

“Orders of magnitude” will be more frequently correct and also include “exponential”, whereas “exponential” will be less frequently correct

> not exponentially

We don't know that the growth was n^x and not x^n.

Wouldn't that be exponential vs polynomial?

Personally, I err on the side of only correcting someone else’s speech when I know I am right.

That approach (sans AI) hasn't fallen out of favor. Ad blockers still do it, they just also support blocking them from loading. There's no benefit to loading an ad if you're going to hide it, it's always wasteful. Growing computing power and bandwidth doesn't change that.

Of course there is a benefit—there is no way to block users who are running such an adblocker.

Yes! An AI that looks at the ads for us and just filters them out. Now it doesn't matter what they do to circumvent the blocker since the AI works by recognizing the brands and ads themselves instead of relying on page structure.

Imagine having smart glasses which seamlessly filter out product placement in movies, sporting events, even the ads in the real world. It's a dream come true. Our reality can finally be clean again.

There will be some new anti-ad tech becoming popular if first-party ads become a thing. For instance, I could think of some browser plugin that looks for visible DOM elements that change between refreshes. To deal with false positives it could grey them out initially but offer a button to really block/allow for future refreshes.

Ads are a form of brainwashing if you ask me. I've been able to avoid most of them for years by ad blocking and staying clear of TV. Just looking at the shit regular television watchers buy and consume, it really seems like ads warped their sense of reality. They do it by normalizing a lifestyle that fits their product, and through constant exposure people start believing it. Filling the subconsciousness with lingering desires for fake experiences. Its ridiculous and harmful.

I almost never see ads either. Ad blocker on Firefox, and not watching regular TV.

When I sometimes come across ads anyway, they seem like children stories or cartoons...

amen.

Completely agree. I saw someone here describe ads as mindhacking and I loved it. These advertisers are attempting to literally hack our minds, modify our thoughts and behavior patterns, create associations between brands, images, ideas. They present zero information to the reader, you can't trust anything they say due to conflicts of interest.

I don't want them to succeed. I want them gone.

I would like to say "then pay!" however the ad machines Google and Facebook built are so powerful, that a paid system doesn't seem to really work ... and even paid sources add ads. Annoying world.

Yeah. The only way to win this is to get every user to block ads. Just install uBlock Origin by default on every browser. Drive the advertiser return on investment as close to zero as possible.

Only then will the web change.

I suspect many of these become “first party domain hosting a proxy [or using CDN config] which serves the same third-party code as today” which is no more trustworthy in practice though some users might feel better about it.

Those networks will still be there. Their ads will simply be proxied through first party servers.

Nothing wrong with simply not wanting to see ads either. They're noise, to be filtered out.

The ad networks will likely provide a framework to serve and cache those on the first-party server, so you'll probably see the same level of untrustworthiness in the code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com