Edit: I'd appreciate it if someone could respond to the points I made rather than simply complain about why they don't like ads.
They could have been good citizens, but they've proven time and time again they'd rather be the scum of the goddamned earth and use every annoying and malicious trick in the book to fool you into paying attention to their bullshit for the second or two it takes to make their shit go away instead. Not to mention all the overhead of their shit making everything fucking slow as hell.
The question is how far Google wants to take Manifest V3. The current path will mean a huge boost for browsers with Manifest V2 capability, e.g. Brave, Firefox and to some extent Safari.
The idea that they have to profile and track your every move all over the internet in order to try and sell you stuff you don't really want or need.
Example: If I go to a pet supply web site, an ad for dog food is perfectly understandable --- maybe even welcomed. But just because I was profiled visiting and maybe even buying, I shouldn't be bombarded with ads for cat food all over the internet.
Even worse is the fact that over time, your profile becomes incredibly detailed. They sell this info to their "affiliates" -- which is basically any data broker willing to pay for it. Next thing you know, your insurance rates are being increased based on something they found in your profile.
For the individual consumer, there is nothing good about privacy invasion and personalized ads.
The difference here is between you watching ads versus ads watching you.
You should. They're inventing new ways to use this data against you all the time.
For example, there has been some effort to profile you based on the price you pay for goods on the internet. They assign you a "sucker score". Once you're classified as a sucker, the price you get offered is higher than what a "non-sucker" might receive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-onl...
People are being refused jobs and treated as criminal suspects based on their location profile. Insurance rates are being increased based on these profiles. Real estate agents and auto dealerships are starting to use this data in their negotiations with you.
Let's be honest here, rich people get better insurance rates. Not because of some nefarious scheme to impoverish the poor, but because they claim less (which is the primary driver of insurance cost).
Additionally, many (if not all) insurance companies use things like your home address as a factor in pricing, which again benefits people living in rich(er) areas.
Firstly, I don't think that your web data would be particularly predictive for insurance, without substantial modelling/dimensionality reduction and secondly, such modelling/DR is gonna be a very difficult sell to regulators, who typically demand a fully explained model for premium calculation.
Secondly, much of this is illegal in the EU, you should probably elect representatives who'll ban this for you.
No? They use a multitude of sources (Facebook for example) and factors such as "Do you buy premium beer" to judge how much of a sucker you are and adjust their price according. There have been cases in the US with rates varying significantly among individuals who live in the same neighborhood with similar size houses and coverages.
Again, the rate they initially offer and any subsequent increases depends on how much of a sucker they think you are.
This is one of those things that sounds plausible to people not in insurance, but I'd you look at the regulatory structure makes little sense.
What they do use is prior claim history and public records (credit, driver license etc). That's most likely where the differences you've seen come from.
Personally, I don't care that they're doing this (to me). I care more that they shouldn't be able to legally do it.
And also, as other people have said: it's ads that are the problem. Not personalized ads. Ads in general. They're ugly, bad, awful, battery-sucking, headache-inducing, loud, autoplaying, CPU-hungry, slow, very bad no good.
Seriously.
One of Trump's first acts as POTUS was to allow your ISP to get in on this action.
If it goes away I don't know how I would cope.
Maybe it would reduce my Internet consumption, which would be a good thing overall...?
I don't even care about that, what gets my goat is that ads pileup significantly slow down pages and increase energy consumption; and sites still get plastered to unreadability.
I can't imagine anything different. I'm prepared to go to great lengths to preserve that status quo... although IDK exactly what those could be.
DuckDuckGo has been pretty successful with context based advertising --- based simply on the terms you search for.
Facebook and Google have a global reach. They have trackers and profilers on about 80% of the web sites.
no need to be exclusive, both can be a problem.
That's not true. If I'm forced to see ads they might as well be personalized. Hell, sometimes (rarely, I'll admit) I even find some things that interest me, like new products or services. Personalized ads work, there is no way around it.
What irks me about these complaints is not complaining about ads, we all know they are annoying, but the faux moral high horse people, especially in this supposedly ultra rational community, put themselves on. I mean, it's not like you are begging to be paying a subscription to get rid of ads. For most sites you are still going to be browsing there with your adblocker even if the "legal" opportunity to get rid of ads is offered. If the ads weren't personalized you would complain about how irrelevant they are or something in that vain. You are not avoiding websites that display ads you find annoying you just block them. So please, stop with the moral high ground. You block ads because you can and because it's easy and, on the face of it, harmless.
Yes, the data gathering can be abused, like anything, really.
Don't forget personalized prices, too. Or pushing on you the "premium" versions of products.
We show that personalized prices and advertising might boost firms’ profits in comparison to mass advertising and uniform prices, at the expense of consumer welfare. - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01677...
The Journal identified several companies, including Staples, Discover Financial Services, Rosetta Stone Inc.and Home Depot Inc., that were consistently adjusting prices and displaying different product offers based on a range of characteristics that could be discovered about the user. - https://lifehacker.com/how-web-sites-vary-prices-based-on-yo...
Hah, and what, have multiple walled gardens, pay monthly subscriptions for skimming 2 articles 1 a month? Have to deal with the whole payment process? The complication alone would be more that what I get out of it.
Besides, pay what? Most things on the net are crap anyways. You know those SEO cancer, content devoid, webpages? I would hate hate hate for them to get even 1 cent off of me. Most _good_ pages, ones I am truly interested are not ad powered anyway. HN is _almost_ add free. Reddit is pretty annoying with ads, but the content is community generated anyway. Most forums I visit are not ad powered.
I swear, if I could, I would pay the ad revenue myself. I really really am curious how much that amounts to. Can't be too much, I remember reading _somewhere_ that FB has on average 50$/year off of each account. Sounds about right, but maybe my memory was playing tricks on me and the info might be bullshit. Would love to just send 2 cents for each page visited would that be fair? Someone should do a micropayments interface so that I can send some crypto to pages I read.
Modern ads are surveillance tech and I want to see that die at any cost. Ads would then either have to adapt to stop being surveillance-based or the most interesting "content creators" would adapt to monetize in other ways.
I really don't see a future in which interesting "content" just stops existing just because tracking ads don't exist. If people want things, they will appear and eventually will be able to be monetized in some way.
Yeah, which explains why journalism has pretty much collapsed in the past few decades.
It's all the low effort, spammy targeted crap that is the problem imo.
And 'ads also help small businesses to grow' is bs if you ask me.
- online ads are largely for the big business as small business gets crowded out & out-spend on search terms etc.
- targeted ads do not contribute meaningfully to conversion if you look close enough. Conversion metrics are crap as they do not account for the huge selection bias involved.
- marketing in general contributes nothing to society, it is all busy-work that changes nothing but maybe moving some people around between brands. It is a zero-sum game where the everybody keeps spending more and more and more for less impact & the market as whole is not impacted.
- 70 to 90% of all clicks & impressions are by bots.
- Content creators get jack shit for advertisements, if you pay like 1$ a month for someone's patreon or whatever you are generating more revenue then watching a thousand ads.
And then there is all the nefarious uses of targeted advertising that follow from it...
As far as I'm concerned, we'd all be better off if that entire industry was nuked off the face of the Internet.
On a larger scale, I believe the mental health harms to the general populace of incessant and emotionally manipulative advertising is far worse in consequence than some artists not earning money (and I've supported myself writing fiction, I'm not dismissing creators here). If artists earned money but it required 80% of the population to become hooked on bath salts, I'd consider that a problem.
Also, I have MS and that includes some twitches/spasms + I'm slightly visually impaired so I have some accessibility stuff set up and jumping/moving ads etc. are a common issue for me, as is engaging on accident through a finger/hand spasm. Now consider how many people are elderly or have vision issues; I feel like ads are uniquely predatory to certain populations.
> I'd appreciate it if someone could respond to the points I made rather than simply complain about why they don't like ads.
I'd say explaining to you why they don't like ads should help you understand why they think it's a good idea to remove the primary source of revenue for content creators, if that primary source is ads.
Here's the worlds smallest fiddle.
If your primary source of revenue is automated advertising, I don't care if you lose money. Sorry not sorry. Get some sponsorships, exclusive content, whatever. But if you want to sell my information to companies to build a profile on me and then invade my life with all manner of annoying distractions using that data, you want me to feel bad when I put a stop to it because you didn't get your penny from me? Cry about it if you want.
Seriously, fuck ads. We have offered a truce to the ad companies before. Put a banner at the top. Slap a commercial in a video. But that's not good enough for them, they autoplay videos and popups and tracking pixels and 10 ads in a video. And then when we tell them where they can go stick it they act like we are stealing. So fuck them, they can go hungry, and if you intend to monetize me by funneling my attention to them, you can go hungry too.
Yes, people are that adamant about blocking ads. I block all ads. I don't need my mind polluted with noise and my life to be about stepping over dogshit every step I take and I don't need spyware running in my browser.
Nobody wants to hear the stupid jingles on YouTube every 5 minutes (yes, I've had them every 5 minutes). I'm sick of lazy loading ads shifting content and then when I interact with the main content spring to life with that interaction and start playing audio.
I don't want ads at all, period. Their abusive history is enough reason for that.
I do not care if the website owner goes broke, if they want to live off of it charge for it. If people don't want to pay then a lot of people need to realize their content isn't all that valuable in the first place. It is great that small businesses can use ads, but unfortunately the market has ruined it for everyone by being so lax with the experience as a whole. Ads lie and sell you shit, so everything that shows up is probably shit.
Internet ads can be irritating and the pervasive cross site tracking and profiling bothers me, but I don’t have fundamental issues with advertising generally. What is totally unacceptable is being served ads with malicious payloads on major websites.
If a website wants me to take their “please disable your adblocker” popup seriously they need to make 100% sure they don’t serve ads that instantly redirect the browser to a fake facebook phishing website that breaks the back button. Until then it’s adblock everywhere and the same for all of my friends and family to whom I give computer help.
Then there are also the ads that are annoying: those with moving parts or sound. I will always block those.
I use uBlock primarily as a line of defense, not just to avoid annoying ads.
As an example, a few years ago the ad network of a newspaper here in Norway was hacked. Anyone visiting their site (or affiliates) would silently and without any user interaction get infected with a banking malware.
The malware that time would cause bank transfers made through the online banking site of the most popular bank here to go to a different account than the one specified. It could have done something else.
Then one day in the middle of class I start hearing sound coming out of the speakers which disrupted the class. The site had put an ad on it with an autoplay video. I put ublock origin on it right away.
HN users tend to get annoyed by (1) ads, (2) paywalls, and (3) articles without enough research (aka time aka money). I'm cognizant of the fact that HN isn't a hive mind, and so these complaints aren't necessarily coming from the same people—but some certainly are.
Well, which is it? Or do we expect content creators to work for free?
If we have to pick a poison—and, well, I think we do—the ad model has one major advantage: accessibility. If we want to make information available to as many people as possible, an ad-supported model is the way to do it. Paywalls lock out everyone at the lower end of the income bracket, and force everyone consume content from only a smaller number of sources (since subscribing to every website is impractical).
This isn't to ignore all of the negative social consequences of advertising. The question isn't whether ads are bad, because they absolutely are—the question is whether they're worth the cost of accessible journalism.
"we" don't care either way. Their business model is their business
In any case there's plenty of people not blocking ads. It looks like everyone uses adblock if you look at a tech audience because they are a tech audience, not because everyone is using adblock
There are alternatives, a good one I see used in Ptreon, the supporters get early access to content, the rest will get it a month later. Let me try find the pros and cons
Cons:
- you need first to find supporters, so for a while you need to work hard to get them
- some supporters might feel entitled to stuff, you need to make sure to be clear about what being a supporter means
- you need to be very clear and transparent , some supporters will not tolerate delays or low quality/quantity updates
Pro:
- you have a predictable revenue model, you don't depend on an algorithm
- you mostly don't have to censor your content (there are exceptions true, but there are alternatives)
- you don't have to promote scams like VPNs, shit games with loot boxes, crypto scams
- you are not forced by an algorithms to release on a certain text/video length , a certain schedule , use certain shitty thumbnails or click-bait titles
- if you make public your content after a month or week etc, your fans that don't have money still get it and will promote it, also influencers will promote it because they know it will be free after a time interval.
This patreon model does not solve everything, just wanted to mention that there are alternatives to shity ads that track and manipulate you. Other alternative would be honest contextual ads, like if you search for printer ink from city A then Google/Bing could show you an ad from a local shop that refils ink cartridges.
Organizations like NPR have been attempting a user-contribution model since before the internet, and it works to an extent, but they still have to rely partially on (minimalistic) ads as well as government funding.
What I think it will happen is some countries will eventually make laws to make tracking opt-in, like the do not track flag in browsers , or at best for advertisers make the user chose at first launch the default for tracking setting
I don't expect anyone to work for free. If you stop creating because you're not getting paid, too bad for me I guess. But I don't owe you attention because you did something either. There are two sides to this remember.
If what you do is worth charging people for it, charge people. If charging people would make you go broke, how valuable is what you're doing, really?
If your revenue model is "let some scum track my users and sell their data" you weren't taking your revenue seriously to begin with, you need a better business model than "they'll put up with it because they like me."
Sponsorships. Patronage. Merch. Exclusive content. These are viable revenue models, you get what your work is worth. If you can't pay the bills with these, nobody really wants your content anyway and they're probably just passing the time because it's free.
Tracking based Ads generated by Google Ad-words and other networks should cease being viewed by content creators as the "primary source" of revenue, creators need to get creative and come up with better, most lasting revenue sources. Many already have, from direct memberships, merch, first party ads, but I am sure there are other more creative ways to make money
The lazy days of "just toss an adwords tracking cookie everywhere for the fast cash" is over, and I for one will celebrate the death of Ad words and all the other tracking ad networks