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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

Ads are allowed to run arbitrary JS, but that doesn't mean they are allowed to do arbitrary things by policy. That is, the technical restrictions are not able to be as strict as the policy.

A bunch of us were working on a project where ads would be fully declarative, and so no longer able to run arbitrary JavaScript, but this received very little interest outside of Google (advertisers didn't want to move to a new format, publishers didn't care) and we moved on.

(Still speaking only for myself)

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I do wish google engineers would do something positive for society and switch to a career in subsistence farming. No one needs ads. Not arbitrary JS ads, not declarative ads, not personalised ads, not any ads.

But what do you see as the alternative for funding sites? The site we're on is funded by (declarative, non-personalized, non-obtrusive) ads. I would rather have ads than paywalls.

"Made for Adsense" sites have no value, if they get shut down, nothing is lost. Normal sites that switched to Adsense have become worse, because now they need clicks and engagement above all else, incentivizing click-bait and low-effort content. Nothing would be lost if they switched to subscription models and provided valuable content. There's little in between in my opinion, it's either "site doesn't use Adsense, it's a company site / personal blog / some institution", "site was made only to make money by adsense with the lowest price content possible, had a bunch of links bought and now provides a passive income to some SEO" and "site used to provide quality content, loses readership to spam-sites because Google has fucked up their sorting algos and now switches to low-value content as well, because anything else can't be financed".

Twitch shows that people are very willing to pay for content. I'd very much be happy to if that removed all of the spam.

If a website cannot survive without ads, maybe it doesn't need to actually exist in the first place. The world will go on.

I do think the world would go on, but it's a world I would like less. Some things would move behind paywalls, others would move to the boundary of whatever was considered advertising (sponsored content? Product placement?)

I think of it as a bit of social selection for websites. If a website has content people value, they find ways to support the website. If not, well, maybe the site not existing is not a terrible loss.

The world can move on without having the site shutdown, then. Don't visit those sites and pretend they don't exist.

Once upon a time, children, people made websites with no ads, and no paywalls. Sure, there weren't as many websites; and sure, they didn't have as many sliding panels and other gimmicks.

And for sure, I appreciate being able to buy stuff online. But I seem to be able to do that without viewing ads! Amazing!

> I would rather have ads than paywalls.

No offense but I've heard people who work at ad companies repeat this like a mantra, and it's a false dichotomy, akin to a coal company who dumps slag in rivers saying, "Well we think it's better than letting everyone freeze to death." We're not asking Google to stop advertising altogether and close up shop, just to make the internet ad ecosystem a little less awful and Orwellian.

> We're not asking Google to stop advertising altogether

I think my parent was: "No one needs ads. Not arbitrary JS ads, not declarative ads, not personalised ads, not any ads."

Fair enough, though the suggestion that Google engineers take up farming was probably not very serious. However, the idea that we have a choice between no ads or the most pernicious ads imaginable is certainly a false one.

> the idea that we have a choice between no ads or the most pernicious ads imaginable is certainly a false one

I agree with you. I spent a large part of 2018-2019 trying to make ads declarative, and am now working on (among other things) increasing the isolation of conventional ads [1] and implementing cross-site advertising without cross-site identity leakage [2].

But it sounds like you and my parent have very different views: there's a lot of space between "ads should be a lot better" and "ads should not exist".

[1] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/624

[2] https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE.md

Why is it up to the advertisers and publishers?

I suppose they're the paying customers.

how do you think google, an adtech company, makes money?

If they tried to unilaterally make such a change and ban the old formats, both the advertisers and publishers would complain to competition regulators around the world. And whether you think there would be any merit to those complaints or not, the outcome would still be another round of lawsuits with billions on the line.

> with billions on the line

Not my money. Why should I care about lawsuits between advertising networks and their advertisers, regulators and so on?

> Why should I care

You don't need to. But the person is asking why Google is or is not doing a particular thing. So it is their interests that are relevant to the current discussion, not yours.

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