Is "acceptable ads" really a bad thing? I'm not opposed to seeing any ads; I just don't want badly behaved ones. And is there a less bad alternative to accomplish that?
Because you can't choose what's acceptable, they do.
You won't decide the topic, format, quantity, density, duration, nature or interruption type. Which is different for you, me, or your children.
What's more, ads are not made for your benefit, ever, but to the benefit of the advertiser which may (but statistically more likely may not) align with yours.
And also because:
- the incentive gets twisted, which means you can't trust ublock on the long run.
- unkown unknowns means down the road, some ads will manage to track you or serve malicious content despite ublock filtering.
- ads paid content is a terrible business model which take a price people are not wired to assess nor realize they pay for something they disguise as free yet has an impact on the entire society. Not a great thing to encourage.
And I say all that as someone who gets revenue from ads.
Why is this? Would you also say this for other long running open source projects which have never breach the trust of their users?
The repo was handed in good faith, not for the sake of financial gains. It turned out to be a mistake, from which I learned. That was now nearly seven years ago. If the take away from that event after years of never breaching user trust is that "uBlock Origin can't be trusted in the long run", that's pretty harsh.
I think the story of how uBlock was transfered and then managed in a way that was not what you wished is pretty well known, and I think most people know that you forked back the project to restore that trust, and they appreciate the work you're doing for the community. At least I know I do, so let me take this opportunity to say thank you.
As far as uBlock Origin goes, it's one of the extensions I trust the most.
Based on his past actions, I feel comfortable trusting and using uBO until he decides he's done.
Not exactly the acceptable ads must conform to the standard that is defined by the acceptable ads Committee which consists of publishers users, and distribution. Something like that.
That seems like just an implementation detail. If users are able to choose/vote what is "acceptable" that seems like a concept worth trying.
[0] pop up blockers, originally
If you live in the city, advertisers manipulate you every waking minute of your day, bombarding you from billboards, on tv, on the internet, and are constantly shoving their disgusting garbage in front of your eyes in new ways; at petrol pumps, on your tv menu, right in front of you on a taxi cab.
Worse still, the more you pay to avoid this trash, the more you become attractive to them as someone with money to spend. I can't remove the ads as a walk about the city, but for damn sure I'll remove them wherever I can in my home. Pi hole, ublock origin, sponsor block etc, all running to keep this crap out of my life. If people wont pay money for what creators are making, and they can't provide it for free, I'm fine with it going away. It probably wasn't worthwhile to begin with - only "addictive".
Ads are a scourge and make me sick. There are no "acceptable ads".
They can all pay the consequences now of me blocking them.
If they had been well-behaved and stuck to inline ads with no cookies, I would have left them there.
I REALLY do not want to pay for a bunch of random services with my tax dollars. In your example, once I lose interest in youtube (or peertube in this case) I would still be paying for other people to use it and I get no benefit.
Right now, when I lose interest in Facebook (as I did) I just move on to the next service, it is unbelievably friction free. I just type a few letters in a URL.
Facebook dislodged Myspace, Tiktok is competing with Facebook, Discord is a brand new social media product. Anyone is totally free to create a subscription service or alternative (see DuckDuckGo). I don't understand the monopoly case.
While I support this sentiment, a definition of "badly behaved ads" which is based on whether or not the advertiser paid money to some third party is just not a definition I can live with.
But the problem is, that is very poorly enforced in practice. Whenever I use ABP, I see ads breaking the standard everywhere. To the point where I can only assume the Acceptable Ads definition is just a deflection.
And of course, there's the whole "you need to pay to get on the list" which creates some very awful incentives.
The word I think you're looking for is "canter," as in three main gaits of a horse being walk, trot, and canter, with some other ones like gallop, tolt, and more obscure ones. They are defined by the number of beats in the gait. The walk has 4, trot 2, canter 3, and gallop is also 4.
But to extend the dressage metaphors, a Gish Piaffe would be extravagent and showy movement that goes nowhere and stays in one spot, a Gish Passage would be where the extravagent movement is independent of the direction, etc.
Dressage means "to straighten," or "to educate," so one works on the dressage of the horse, and dressage riding is riding with that intent. What people do in the olympics is ride, and it is the overall dressage of the horse that is what is judged. It's one of the few remaining sports in the olympics that is not merely a game. Source: am dressage bro. :)
Seems pretty much in line with food labeled as "organic" or "fair trade". You can say you meet the requirements, but if you want to advertise it somebody else certifies it.
But ... the ad industry would never accept a static ad more akin to a billboard than a tracking device. Many times in the past malware has found its way into networks run by the more highly regarded ad systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
If a content publisher refuses to let people read articles without a subscription or with an ad blocker, I am ok with that. It is their choice.
The sad part is that you assume that modern day billboards aren't tracking you. All you need is a camera, a tiny computer and some AI. Once walked by a fully electronic billboard where the slideshow crashed, the log it displayed listed everything it could identify about people passing by, age, gender, height, hair color, emotional state, ... .
Is JS synonymous with tracking? Why can't you just track server side? I don't see how removing JS from ads would prevent FB from targeting me on my FB feed.
The ads market is a very complex and competitive industry. This means that practically every display side provider has their own special "ad product" to differentiate themselves. Almost all of these require JavaScript to implement their key features.
In addition there could be 4 or even more parties involved in showing an ad (publisher, publisher's supply side provider, advertiser's display side provider, advertiser, plus miscellaneous middlemen). These different parties may not trust each other, so they currently use JavaScript to send (via `fetch`) themselves information about the auction to check up on each other.
I've seen websites ask me to disable my ad blocker when I only have Privacy Badger enabled (on top of Firefox's built-in behaviour).
>Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Also, the fact that they are taking money to get on the 'acceptable ads' list looks a little shady. It could be (let's be generous) misinterpreted as a third party just elbowing in to get a cut of the transaction, like some kind of protection racket. I'd worry this sort of thing might draw unwanted attention in some jurisdictions, even if it really isn't warranted.
Why bother going with the solution that is both technically and ethically more complicated? Just do the dumb thing and block everything.
BUT as the definition of acceptable is not in the hands of the accepting receiver but in the hands of the sender the word acceptable is used in a twisted manner. You are told it is acceptable but their behavior will be driven by forces yielding anything but acceptable.
Ignore what they say - their behavior matters and incentives are stacked against your interests with no effective limits.
It might exploit a buffer overflow or it might exploit a distractable human, but it's malware just the same.
It was a great deal for everyone, but people who installed ABP.