Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
imlefthanded.com
imlefthanded.com
outline.com: https://outline.com/5HuFGj
Desktop:
- Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking)
- AdGuard (device wide adblocking)
Web browsers:
- uBlock Origin
- uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript)
- SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube)
Mobile:
- Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension support so you can install uBlock Origin)
- YouTube Vanced (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock)
- NewPipe (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock via a fork [0], different UI than main YouTube app)
- YouTube++ (for iOS, similar feature set as Vanced)
TV:
- SmartTubeNext (ad-free YouTube)
For the non-techie, Pi-hole isn't something I quickly recommend due to "knowing when it's the culprit", and the effort in disabling it.
I also have a simple Wireguard config (pivpn) installed as well and my mobile devices are set to always-on VPN for DNS only. Occasionally I will have to turn off the VPN to join certain public Wifi. also perhaps consider hosting your VPN on a well known port if you expect to be on restrictive networks.
Final note: Pi-hole and Pi-VPN(as a frontend to WG) can be hosted on any machine. I have them running on containers.
Still occasionally breaks something you need, but there’s no way around that as long as the web is such a mess.
SmartTubeNext is excellent on Fire Stick, if you can get the damn APK installed!
I find the people behind it slightly sketchy.
I get why they want to stay anonymous but that website is no different from any other malware site - no source, no authors just some affiliate links. Putting your google credentials in an app like that is not something people should be comfortable with.
That, my friend, would be because it is RSS!
The only reason it didn't work is that I refused the app the permission to read text messages.
Pihole doesn't work, they serve the ads on the same domain as the video content.
Christmas 2020 I tried to watch midnight Mass from Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York on YouTube. (Not live; after.)
SIX MINUTES of commercials at the start, and the rest of the program had TWENTY-SIX commercial breaks.
I haven't watched YouTube since.
Don't support these advertisers in any way. Especially Google.
I will absolutely not tolerate ads of any kind and if their business model is ads I would rather see them go bankrupt than put up with it.
YouTube has a lot of problems, and the ads for non-Premium users are probably going too far, but I find a lot of value in consuming and supporting a wealth of high quality content on obscure topics.
No visible dislikes.
DCMA takedowns that put the burden of proof on creators rather than destructive soulless auto-claim bots.
God help you if you lose your account.
I've found that refreshing the page seems to always remove the ads.
Though I'm increasingly taking to searching through Invidious. (YouTube is somewhat more convenient thanks to the !yt DDG bang search.)
I also often play audio through mpv.
Advertising has gone absolutely bonkers and filled the web with complete trash SEO farms with 40 links to some shitty slideshow
I don't believe the web would have caught on like it did if this current condition was v1.0
I wonder how much the website designer even views their own site. It's astounding anyone would approve of this. It now represents the brand as extremely low quality
One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari (the newer useless extension-neutered version), on what I considered a reputable site. I tested again to make sure it was indeed the site that produced this, and sure enough reproduced it after browsing a few pages of listings.
I advised the site that they likely had a rogue advert in rotation causing this, but as usual, the blame got put on me instead, claiming that it was probably some extension (didn't have any - they're basically useless on Safari now) or it was my ISP, blah blah blah
That's the day I decided to use a real browser ("If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser"), so I switched to Firefox and installed uBO. This is also when I decided to call such utilities as uBO "malware blockers" rather than "ad blockers".
Websites can try to deflect the blame all they want[2], but in the end if visiting your website results in any attempts to compromise my computer, it's your site doing it as far as I'm concerned.
If the website industry can't regulate itself to prevent such things, then I'm going to do it myself, and I'll push back on any claims that I'm using an "ad" blocker when I'm really guarding against malware attacks.
[1] I'm loathe to name it since I don't recall which site it was specifically, but it was a classifieds-style site, with the reputation of, say, eBay-level recognition.
[2] https://www.imore.com/content-blockers-bad-ads-and-what-were...
And I'm sure some would be quick to point out that running uBO as a "malware" blocker just happens to siphon up legitimate ads in the same bucket in the process (which is what I think is your point), and my reply to them is that the blockers typically won't block anything that comes from the same IP/domain as the site (as is explained in one of the linked articles). I think it's up to websites to run their ads in a way that doesn't trigger it to get blocked, because the detection pattern for most blockers is based on past abuse of these techniques.
Definitively can't say I miss any of them (web & TV ads).
My point's actually sort-of the inverse of that. My point is that, by describing uBO as a malware blocker, you are suggesting that "ads that are not malware are fine". That's a position you're entitled to take, but I don't agree with it - +1 to the sibling comment that rightly points out that "ads are malware for your brain". Ads are a problem, and they should be blocked. The fact that you happen to be able to also block malware with an ad-blocker is a happy coincidence - but even if that wasn't the case (i.e. even if ad-blockers _only_ blocked non-malware ads), they would still be good, moral, and justified.
I think following happens. Actual click through rate on online ads is low. People don't want to pay lots of money for ads that don't increase their revenue.
Only ones willing to pay for ads are shady business. We are talking unlicensed pills, scams, crypto etc.
Eventually those dry up so they go even lower, malware authors willing to use ads as malware vectors.
I browsed once without ad blocker on some webcomic and shit I had delivered was actually malware. As in Defender was activated.
I don't doubt that plenty of ads are malware but let's not pretend that Defender does not have tons of false positives or that MS cares about preventing them.
I view pihole and ublock as the washable filter. It takes care of the big stuff, prevents my computer from ever seeing most of the avenues for malware to propagate. Then my antivirus can easily mop up whatever slips through.
As far as I know, ad blockers work based on host name and css selectors. If there was an actual anti-malware that was so trivially bypass-able, it would be laughed out of the room. uBO blocks hosts of advertisers. AFAIK they don't distinguish between malware and non-malware, nor do they detect malware from other sources.
The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.
The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?
DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.
2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).
That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity
> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show
It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.
I have noticed when things originally on network television end up on ad-supported streaming services the ad breaks sometimes no longer happen during natural breaks. When those same things end up in syndication on non-streaming cable or OTA channels the ad breaks usually do align with the natural story breaks. I wonder why OTA and cable channels can time things better than streaming services? Are the shows distributed in different formats to the two, and only one includes metadata on when the act breaks occur?
The way it works is that if you start fast forwarding, it automatically stops and switches to play when you reach the end of a commercial break. You watch normally and when a commercial starts just hit FF a few times (the first hit starts forwarding, subsequent hits switch to faster FF speed).
I dropped cable in the middle of 2020. My recollection was that it also only worked if it had been at least 24 hours since the program originally broadcast, but their documentation [1] does not mention any such limit so perhaps they dropped that limit.
[1] https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/dvr-smart-resume
You're welcome.
I even vaguely remember this was lampshaded in Fresh Prince (?)
Uncle Phil is having a heart to heart chat with young Nicky and in the middle says something like "ok nice talk see you in around 2 1/2 minutes" which I thought was hilarious
the other hard rule I have is 'no news from narrated sources' so really no need to cable tv & have cut the cord for more than a decade now.
Why in the hell would I pay £60 a month and have to watch adverts when I can just get it for free?
Why do I have to subscribe to channels I have no interest in to get the handful I do want?
It's like a baker who pads his bread with sawdust throwing a tantrum when customers start going elsewhere.
People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.
Technically I don’t use and ad block, I just run DuckDuckGo’s privacy plugin. You can show me ads, but not track me, weirdly enough it’s 98% the same result. It facinating that ad tech cannot see the difference between ads and tracking.
People in their late 20s and 30s who remember Youtube as a catch-all location for lo-fi homemmade videos with few ads may not feel that YT premium is worth it, particularly if they already use adblockers, and don't use it much on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs). This generation also remembers torrents and Limewire, before Spotify made everything super-convenient.
Those who are more familiar with 'modern Youtube' with multiple pre-roll ads, clickbait and and influencers everywhere may be more receptive to paying just to get rid of the constant ads.
What's a modded APK?
Firefox and other browsers like Vivaldi have awesome adblocking nowadays. There are alternative frontends like invidious.
Newpipe is an oss app, perfect on Android. Vanced is very popular too but I never tried it.
But with nextdns I don't need any of those. Only newpipe because, besides the ads, having to keep the display on to listen to music while running is just stupid.
NextDNS doesn't block ads on YouTube because they're served from the same domain as YouTube videos.
And you are right. Ads are blocked by newpipe, nextdns in this case is worthless.
Sorry for the misinformation everyone.
I run ad-blockers everywhere (and I know there are ways to block YT ads), but will still pay if you give me this reasonable option.
Somehow, (probably because there is no competition - yet), Google has not applied this reasoning to YouTube ads. YouTube ads are often louder than regular videos (which they could fix on their end if they cared), they are sometimes insanely long (I recently got an "ad" which was a 40 minute "free music" thing), and depending on the video they can pop pop up at terrible moments. They still haven't figured out that YouTube is loaded with exercise videos - a content category which has exploded since 2020 and where YouTube enjoys a tremendous lead on the competition. Rudely interrupting one of those is bad and brews resentment. Instead of doing that, they could plaster the entire video with unobtrusive ads and people would both look at the ads and be happy with the service.
I found it pretty smart, because I can imagine myself succumbing to watching a full video that was inserted as an ad if it's interesting enough.
However, if I was at home, opened YouTube just to entertain myself and opened one of the algorithm suggested videos, then – in that situation – an interesting video from a channel that is unknown to me, inserted as an ad could hook me and could lead to me subscribing to said channel.
Instead of that suggestive ad being inserted into the video. Why not use auto-play or recommended videos section? Suggested videos in the menu work great, better even, in your case scenario for content discovery.
I don't watch YouTube with ads and I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium but I pretty much doubt in-video content suggestions disguised as ads will do a better job of predicting what I'll watch next over menu video recommendations.
I'm not happy about seeing MKBHD's video in that restaurant, I don't care at all. I also don't care about seeing that ad (or any ad for that matter).
The original comment I was replying to mentioned watching a 40 minute music video placed as a YouTube ad. I chimed in with my experience of seeing a long tech review video placed as an ad.
>I found it pretty smart, because I can imagine myself succumbing to watching a full video that was inserted as an ad if it's interesting enough.
I'm not praising the ad as a user. I'm explaining why it might be smart from the POV of the advertiser (in this case MKBHD), because it serves their goals.
My parents have a smart TV and the youtube app w/o the paid youtube premium makes it a really bad experience. On iOS devices, I have yet to find a free ad blocker that properly blocks youtube ads after they put in new measures to defeat content blocker based ad blockers.
I had a problem that I figured out the solution to and put up a video of it that made me a few dollars a month. Then YouTube moved the goalposts and demonetized it because I don’t (and frankly, won’t) have 1000 subscribers.
So that’s the end of my video posting on YouTube. I’ve discovered some “hack” repairs to other devices (common washing machine and MacBook speaker issues), but you won’t see my solutions on YouTube, just 99 videos saying to replace it or fumbling with software settings that aren’t the problem.
Most likely outcome will be me posting videos on some alternative video platform. Looking at rumble.com
(I wish Amazon got into hosting videos like this, being at the place to buy seems the best place if you fail to fix).
Without any html/css/<script> intervention on my website, Adsense has been able to enable additional ads that stick to the bottom of the screen and another that pops up before going to another page. It’s all opt-in, but through the Adsense portal.
It’s all automagic now, over and above the blocks I had inserted.
The forced bundling with YouTube Music is the only thing that keeps me from subscribing and keeping a trigger finger on the mute button (I use YouTube primarily on AppleTV). It's not even the price so much as it's the redundancy of subscribing to both Spotify and a lackluster Spotify competitor at the same time.
The moment Google offers YouTube Premium Lite (an unbundled version they've been trialing in European markets) in the US, I'll subscribe and never look back.
I'm waiting for the day when we can solve these ills of private property with technology.
The employees and servers are expending real energy keeping YouTube operational. Meaning, whether it's through ads, a more centralized body stepping in, or some other less pervasive, opt-in business model - the thing needs to cover its own costs. I don't think a lack of private property would solve much there.
You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism.
Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality.
Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. It's really hard to think without the restrictions of capitalism for me, because that's the only way I've ever experienced and it's so effective at prioritizing resources and productivity. Anything else has historically always fallen short.
Though it's still a pretty fucked up and heartless system
That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ...
Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.
"Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.
The problem is using social services to generate capital. A public good for private interests is wrought with contradictions. And, as you can see, covering costs =/= generating capital.
Not even mentioning that the mode continuously works to undermine itself in making production more efficient by developing technology and driving down prices but profits as a whole too.
I often bypass to Wikipedia, because it shows me what something is, not only where I can buy it.
It was kind of like that when interest rates were near zero, affording endless deferral of income.
The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out.
If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time.
People who like it, can also sponsor it.
And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant...
But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories.
Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning.
And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.
At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.
It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.
[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.
Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?
The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so.
But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars.
I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".
I've never even had a YouTube login, but the few channels I access fully via the web interface only ever spam me with YouTube Premium offers for eliminating ads.
There's zero offering/marketing of direct-to-creator subscriptions, not that I've seen.
There's also zero chance of my buying YouTube Premium, but a non-zero chance of my giving money exclusively to the specific creators I value - even if YouTube took something along the lines of a haircut for making just those channels ad-free.
Hopefully the difference is clear.
People just ignore the ads instead.
They can block people who are using adblocker from watching, as long as they don't do that I can't really see any moral grey area here.
That’s not quite correct. YouTube pays out creators who monetize their channels using YouTube ads (separate from any sponsors in the video itself). The amount paid out varies but is around $3-5 per 1000 views.
With YouTube Premium, among other features you get to avoid seeing ads. But Google still pays out creators a share of the YouTube Premium fee. See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276
So from my perspective paying for YouTube is more important than paying for Netflix, since with YouTube you help support smaller creators, while with Netflix money gets consolidated into big names and brands. The platform takes a cut at both, but it is still better to have some go to small creators instead of everything going into giant corporations.
you can listen to any video on mobile in the background, also no ads on mobile (so you don't need some hacky 3rd party app)
And you get YouTube music, which is comparable to Spotify (I prefer it in fact)
There's more content on YouTube then any other video platform, so in my opinion 15 per month is worth it
It’s nice to know I’m directly supporting the channels I watch too, as I can’t feasibly sign up to dozens of Patreons.
Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.
With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts.
The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.
This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it
As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get.
Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.
Edit: https://vancedapp.com/
Though it's just that I don't like the video format in general. If there was an ethical decentralised platform I probably wouldn't use it either.
However the way video has been centralised online is a big problem IMO. Imagine if every blog you read you could only get through Google.
That's how showing ads on your site is abuse of the user.
You did not ask for your brain to be stimulated like this - what you did ask for is the content that comes after ad. That's the thing you consented to.
Ads abuse your desire to watch something that you want to watch, by cramming in something that you did not want, leeching your precious time and brain-processing energy, in order to sell you something that you did not want to have in the first place.
For example, if you were making a transit app, a savvy iPhone 13 ProMax user with a top-tier data plan will see very different problems (or at least see different priorities) on their commute than your Uncle Sidney with his belt-holstered, used, Samsung Galaxy J2 running on Ting Mobile. They're both important, but in the tech world, you have to dig a lot deeper to get the Uncle Sidney perspective.
Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.
I have a few questions for you
1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?
I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.
>3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads
At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we even consider "I don't like your terms so I'm taking the content anyway" an option.
Nonsense. Broadcast TV and radio are the same. I use a TiVo for broadcast TV and use the skip ads function.
We have to consider this in the digital age, because in the analog world, ads have very limited impact.
Except that's not true. Mark Twain and Shakespeare cannot tell you you're interpreting their works incorrectly. JK Rowlings cannot stop you from making paper mache out of her books. I can timeshift and spaceshift content with tape recorders, VCRs, TiVo and more.
I guess the analog would be “Ms Rowlings, I think the price of your book is too high, so I am going to pay you whatever price I want to. You don’t get a choice”
Someone spent time and energy to create something, and decided that annoying ads are the price of their labor. People seem to think they now deserve the labor without the price that the creator has chosen.
In almost all your scenarios they are predicated on having compensated the author in some way. Blocking ads is consuming the content without compensating the author in any way.
The Cook County (Illinois) Assessor used to have them. There's a new assessor now, and a new web site design, but you can still see the space for the banner ad on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20130708043842/http://www.cookco...
As for banks, yes, some banks to have ads for other companies on their web sites. I see them when I pay my bills online. Not all, but some.
1. Since the 90s. 2. Needs to be solved by user agents. Ad blockers generally work by host name or css selector. This doesn't filter out any of the bad guys that are really trying. 3. Continue with ads I guess. This doesn't actually happen in real life as far as I can tell.
The reason I don't use an ad blocker is that I like being able to see what's going on inside of a web browser. Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone.
Next gen ad blocker will be a headless web browser in a data center to capture the canvas, plus automated video editing to remove the ads.
In my current home it's not sanely possible to get wired Internet, so I started by just using the 40GB data allowance on my phone. This was a huge mistake. With the modern Web and being ultra-careful about my browsing, I would still chew through the whole lot in a week. It was costing me insane amounts to keep my phone online.
See the OP's article - one page can be 250MB! And my data allowance was large. Many people only have 2GB on their phones. 8 web sites and they are done for the month.
Why should they give you free content?
Because movie and game studios don't rely on "unspoken agreements".
In most cases publishers don't even ask me to serve ads. They try to go behind my back by asking my browser. When my browser tells them "no", they still have the option to ask me. Some sites do, and I will either turn ads on or walk away without reading anything.
When the agreement becomes spoken it becomes an agreement. There's no agreement when there's no communication.
Another thing is, since these adblock extensions get cleartext view of all the site you visit, you really want them to be completely open sourced. So only ublock origin for me.
I'm OK with most ads. I understand why they exist.
What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.
Aren't there lots like this? At some point Ghostery did that: It would show you static banner ads no problem; it would only be the crazy javascript advert-bidding-based-on-surveillance things that wouldn't show up.
Recently though, she's been spending more time with my grandpa who streams everything. Last I talked to her, she said she felt very spoiled being able to watch whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with no ads. I'd tried explaining how great it is to her before, but I guess she had to live it to really understand how much better the other side is.
Blocking or avoiding ads in every facet of my life is almost a point of pride for me. I'm always alarmed when other people are just cool with it.
There's no way I would use a browser without an ad blocker. Doing so is counter-productive and also a major security risk.
For a long time I told people "my brain is my ad blocker I just ignore it". But after a while I just couldn't stand the web without it anymore. Websites got so bad I couldn't find the content anymore. My CPU would spike to 100% on some web pages and my laptop fans would spin like crazy.
It makes me sad but now I install an ad blocker on every place I can.
I was shocked when uBlock got flack for arranging an "Acceptable advertising" practice on their filter. It seems very similar to centralized regulations in broadcast to me. Larger, more established firms agree to a set of rules for the benefit of consumer and provider.
The Acceptable Ads program started in AdBlock Plus (owned by Eyeo) in 2011. In 2018, uBlock (not to be confused with the highly recommended uBlock Origin) was acquired by AdBlock (which was itself acquired by an anonymous buyer in 2015, not to be confused with AdBlock Plus) and then implemented Eyeo's Acceptable Ads program by default.
The complaint against the program is that it turns Eyeo* into a rent-seeking middleman that profits from giving its users a degraded experience compared to ad blockers that block without selling exceptions, such as uBlock Origin. Eyeo is acting just like an ad seller, taking money from advertisers in exchange for its users' attention.
* And other companies? We don't know for sure who acquired AdBlock and uBlock, but it wouldn't be surprising if Eyeo did or if they have a common owner.
But I had a fast computer, lots of ram etc., yet still I noticed that websites were getting progressively slower and slower. And, as mentioned in the article, auto-playing video ads proliferated and became massively annoying. So I took the time to setup uBlock Origin, and gradually zapped elements on sites when they still made it through.
The difference was huge. Yes, the annoying auto-play ads (mostly) went away, but even more was the overall browsing speed was a huge improved. It was almost like the very early 00's when I went from dial-up to broadband.
It was only at this point that I realized just how much ads massively bogged down the internet.
So you'll get whatever's in the B-list of ads and that may be just two.
I hate when they do this. I just leave and go somewhere else. I'm not submitting to Voight-Kampff just to see a LinkedIn profile.
My fear is I would pay the fee for no ads, but Google would still collect data on what I view and monetize that by selling me ads somewhere else.
By not loading the ads at all, it may stymie non-Google ad networks attempts to profile you.
If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.
Netflix has the same MBAs and bean counters, but their product has no ads and orders of magnitude less clickbait. Its clear they make content geared for their users, not for their advertisers. Youtube is very heavy with advertiser friendly content, and both creators and users pay heavily for that (but its *quote* Free! *unquote*)
Just install that and uBlock Origin and you're set: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin...
Some ads still sneak into my world though. My current peeve is when going to a restaurant and they have "the game" on full blast. I'm perfectly fine with people watching/listening to the game - and half the time the restaurant is considered a "sports bar", so I get it. But what ends up happening is that those major games are mostly ads. And the ads are twice as loud as the game. So here I am, paying to eat at a place and I'm listening to ads. I've been tempted to ask the server if we'll be receiving a discount for listening to each ad like a mobile game!
I wish more of these places would have CC on. Especially if multiple programs are on, you can't have the audio. There's a solution right there, built right in, just waiting.... page in the conversation about how accessibility can be useful to more than just the immediately disabled.
Unless the volume is turned up annoyingly loud, I find the visuals to be the annoyingly loud part: The subdued hues of the painted walls, tile floors, and wood trim reflecting back to my eyes from the ambient lighting are invisible compared to the 500 nits of flourescent colors jump cutting back and forth.
Turning on CC but leaving the visual assault in place doesn't help my eyes much. I would feel less abused if they'd turn the screen off but leave the game audio over the radio.
If I'm just there to eat, one TV is no big deal to me, but the TV Wall is definitely a distraction.
But at least don't try to have the audio on. As technically nifty as some of the restaurants are that try to have per-table speakers or a streaming option are, CC is still less obtrusive to me.
But of course everyone's mileage will vary.
Get a TV-B-Gone.
But I guess there is no law that says that patrons should be shielded from ads. And I don’t think they would listen if I gave them a complaint (why would they give up a source of revenue?). So I don’t know what can be done about it short of a concerted effort by many members. And they (and myself) would probably not be motivated enough to go to that level of effort just to get rid of some irksome ads.
Note: I tried a few google search to find accurate data, but it goes all over the place; is there an accurate estimation somewhere?
(anti ad blocker leads to anti anti ad blocker)
Most of the time it's journaldemontreal.com (and other Quebecor-related websites) that prevents me from reading their articles with my adblocker. Which is a blessing in a way, because it's basically a glorified tabloid with a lot of articles of dubious quality.
I'm on Firefox with both AdBlockPlus and uBlock Origin.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...
Of course this isn't 1:1 parity in reality, but the ultimate manifestation of ad blocking is that.
Google had a good system a few years ago that I was probably the only sucker who paid them for it (and probably why they stopped it). You could pay a chosen amount monthly, and they would not show you ads as a result. It wasn't perfected, but the concept was good for those who understand the problem and want to work towards a solution.
I payed $5/mo and they would roll over unused funds. It worked pretty well, except that it would still show where the banners were, just blank whitespace instead of an ad.
Some things about our brain we just can't change: we like things we've seen before. Both brands and people. Recognition makes a big difference, for example in arbitrary choices when shopping.
This is a completely unsubstantiated claim, and also false if you think about it.
[1] https://swizec.com/blog/pirates-downfall-causes-global-warmi...
>Ad-blockers took off once they started throwing animated banners at us
which is still not true. When they took off the ads were still minimal.
The advertising industry was really aggressive even then. Some publishers put as many popups and banner ads as they could. I'm not saying all publishers would do this, but I have to admit the worst actors are the ones I strongly remember.
Only difference now is that there's a lot more tracking and ads are more insidious where they blend in with content now.
Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.
This has been a hot topic lately[2,3], but at what point is you watching YouTube for years without ads, without paying for Premium, ethically stealing or "piracy"? YouTube was buying petabytes of Hard Drive storage a day in 2012 to keep up with the demand[4], i'm sure it's nearly an Exabyte a day or more right now, so it doesn't cost $0 for YouTube to run the service, they just happen to have enough people on Mobile watching and clicking ads to make a profit[5] and subsidize the rest of us.
0: https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...
2: https://youtu.be/-znPFc-0VS8?t=149
3: https://youtu.be/6jUxOnoWsFU
4: https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube-yearly-cost...
5: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
Here's my take. It's not "piracy" or "ethical piracy" (what the fuck?). The content creators put it out on YT with the expectation that it will get viewed. The little money they receive now is simply a bonus. It's only piracy if the content creator put it out on a platform for some dollar amount (ie, direct to consumer model) and then it is later re-uploaded for free by another channel or via other means..
In other words, you can't claim piracy when the "price" is $0 up front.
As for YT, I don't really care. They are subsidized by the data that is fed to them (ie, viewing history) and resold to advertisers. They get their nut.
If anything, this should really push the forefront on innovation for a decentralized video streaming platform. One organization or group should not have this much power over who gets the "top views" via a proprietary algorithm.
Piracy in general is just 'unauthorized use'[0]. YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy. The only reason there's no consequences for adblock are because (A) it'd be bad optics and bad PR to sue regular viewers, and (B) YouTube sees the value of subsidizing those who block ads as a plus, since it means they can keep their tight grip on where 'everyone' goes to watch videos and thus where creators are required to upload if they want people to see their stuff. If they blocked ~37% [1] of viewers with adblock, different services more lenient to ad blockers (at first) would be able to actually attract viewers and perhaps get the content creators to start dual-uploading their content.
Piracy is another word for copyright infringement. Blocking ads on YouTube is not piracy because you are not violating copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of) by viewing only a portion of the content that is delivered to you. DVRs do the same thing as ad blockers for TVs, but in the U.S., the courts have ruled that DVR services do not infringe the copyrights of media companies.[1]
YouTube and other Google services don't forbid ad blocking in their terms of service.[2] If they did, there would be an uproar because Google itself includes an ad blocker in Chrome, which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads.[3]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business-us-cablevision-cour...
I've seen it block Google ads a few times on this one website which cycles through them every minute. It says the ad 'used too many resources and Chrome has killed it'.
Taking advantage of you, by manipulating your mind is one of the basic premises of ads.
In some ideal 'fair' world ads would just present information for you to make rational choices - but nope, the reality is the ads industry is based on emotional/psychological manipulation. If you seek to understand you can research about the evolution of the industry since the time of Freud where they co-opted psychological techniques to sell things by exacerbating people's psychoses.
Put another way, your arguments would only make sense if the advertisers played fair but they are abusive and try to trick you. You can't make a fair deal with conniving.
The reality of this is so bad that it is destroying our society - at what point is allowing massive scale psychological manipulation/abuse for profit destroying society?
My post here is a bit ranty but I get upset at the lack of fair context in the presuppositions of your argument.
Also, when I accidentally open a video in a private browsing window where I'm not logged in. DAMN IT WHY IS ALL THESE ADS.
Although, I have to say that the ads on YouTube were some of the most targeted of any site, and I would often sit through them.
For those reasons adblock is a must, and paying for YouTube Premium is not an option (I’m not going to voluntarily give a single penny of my money to Google)
Sure, I’ve got CuriosityStream and Nebula subs, but not all content creators use those platforms.
It is what it is.
0: https://nebula.app/faq#:~:text=How%20do%20the%20creators%20g...
1: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/youtube-partner-progra....
2: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2... and https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
This is yet another example of US/BayArea Privilege blindness.
It is NOT cheap in most places to the User. Including in the unprivileged-USA.
The user pays a lot for that bandwidth. Specially now that everyone will unknowingly move to predatory 5G home services but let me try to stay on topic.
People out of the Empire Center will pay both bandwidth and processing power. Where do you think all those old phones you trade in for the latest apple/Samsung ends up? Everyone is running phones that barely gets any security update anymore and is already slowed to the maximum by the OS itself. Trying to load and then display video ads is just evil.
And that is not web only, Apps are worse. If you install Apps, all of them are following the standard set by amazon, newegg, etc... you will get video ads along your usual usage. Ads in between search listings, ads in your cart! and you have to be much more technical to block those.
There's no escape paying the BayArea-cost.
I'm sure this was an answer to the article this thread references. Bandwidth is cheap and it only gets cheaper.
The only way that'll change is if they go back to static images/text, and there's no way in hell the ad industry would ever allow that.
Also, there's an option to enable SponsorBlock, which can automatically skip over ads, introductions, etc. that are part of the original video.
Vanced and Firefox's addons are two of the main things keeping me off of iOS.
But ultimately, you can either examine the binary yourself or else trust them.
One point of note is that it does not automatically update. Whether you install it directly or use the manager app, there is always some manual process involved in updates. (The manager just notifies you when there is an update available.)
What's the best way to block these videos (in Chromium)? I wouldn't mind a solution where videos are completely blocked with a whitelist, since I rarely consume videos except on dedicated video sites (e.g Youtube).
If you were given the task "Remove $1BN of ad revenue. Here is $100M to spend.", how would you do it? I'd imagine it could be reasonably high leverage.
You would immediately see many more billions spent on making it illegal wherever it's feasible to do so. And, of course, an accelerated push to 1) neuter the ability for browsers to block content, how they block content, and what content they can block and 2) a push towards big bundles and blobs of content that can't feasibly be adblocked in realtime with the way current extensions work.
I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so.
Maybe it's an ADHD thing and I'm overstating this, but I personally see really tangible effects on my ability to concentrate based on how many ads I'm surrounded with. Even stuff like Sponsorblock, which is honestly mostly removing intros/outros has helped a lot with how I interact with Youtube. Sure there's data savings, page load time, etc... but I also vaguely suspect that constant web advertising just flat-out affects people's mood and ability to focus more than is commonly talked about.
Seriously, ask your family members about whether they adblock, and install Ublock Origin for them if they don't. If they're on Android, consider (with their permission) swapping out their browser for Firefox (or some equivalent) and installing Ublock Origin again. If they don't mind some very minor UI differences (and in my experience many people don't), then it's an immediate speedup and data savings at the cost of maybe 3 minutes of work and explanation.
The article suggests that roughly 73% of users don't use an adblocker. Some of those users are making a conscious choice, and that's fine, but a lot of them just don't know how to install one or don't know how they work. You don't need to be actually evangelizing ad blockers to still occasionally ask someone who's complaining about ads whether or not they realize that there's a really easy way to get rid of them.
I have done this in the past. However, I have discovered that most of the people I introduce to ad blocking will turn it off later. This is because some sites are able to detect when you are using an ad blocker and even provide steps to turn it off. While there are ways to get around this, most of the people just preferred to turn it off.
It's quite sad, really.
We're going to go back there, it's just going to take a few decades until the new media companies stabilize. Netflix has already started to ramp up its subscription prices, just give it some more time and more pressure to shareholders to increase revenue, ads will come and new subscription tiers will appear.
C'est la vie, I guess. That's who and what we are as humanity.
Do everyone a favor: talk to your kid's school, the IT guys there, and have then install ublock.
All parents, teachers and kids will adore you.
And as mentioned by blakesterz in Private mode I have both uBlock Origin and NoScript disabled because multiple websites refuse to work otherwise.
It has an option for disabling JS (</> in its main drop-down menu).
If you just blanket turn off Js the internet basically is not useable.
If it's at all hard to make the site work for me, I give up - it's not as if there's a shortage of websites to visit. I know when I'm not welcome.
Now I just recommend everyone Ublock Origin :)
Not at all. Because I don't use an adblocker, I don't visit websites that are infested with ridiculous numbers of ads. These sites are not worth reading anyway. I read sites I pay for, I go to my bank, I pay bills, I read Haskell API docs, etc etc.
If I used an adblocker, I'd waste even more time on Internet garbage.
The person with a $50 Walmart Burner phone's experience will be a WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT from the person with the $1100 smartphone with ad blocking turned on.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
I occasionally check to see if Firefox has unbroken extensions on Android and won't be back to using it as my primary browser on my phone until it does or Kiwi ceases to be an option.
I wish more people would do this.
Different people view different webpages due to different interests. And different people also have different thresholds for what would be "toxic adds". I know a lot of articles posted here would fail that threshold for me.
My wife is blown away when she sees my feed. It's like we've been using completely different apps for years.
Relatable. YouTube Vanced is a bigger feature for Android than iMessage is for iOS.
Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.
My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really.
If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole.
You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
> If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist.
Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
I've since resubscribed as their site no longer does this. It seems so crazy to me that I tried to search for when The Economist changed their policy and found nothing relevant, other than a spate of 2015 stories about how they contracted with an ad-tech firm to determine how many subscribers were using adblockers, but the service subjected their readers to malware.
Newspapers have always made their money by selling their audience to advertisers. However, it wasn't too hard to ignore the ads in print and there is a limit to how malicious a print ad can be.
Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all.
https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads
https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metave...
You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense.
If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it.
You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing the content does not make you virtuous, no matter how you might attempt to distort reality. It makes you a thief.
"I don't how you do things, so I am going to steal your product!"
Yeah, that's a formula for a better society.
None of that remotely resembles theft.
What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences.
If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.
You don't like ads. You have zero respect for the product supplier. You consume their work product and delete the ads, using an artificially-constructed moral high ground to justify it.
The web would not exist if your world view had been dominant from the early days. Few people are interested in paying for anything directly. Gmail has 1.5 billion users. Care to guess how many pay for the service? Nobody is going to pay for search, and yet it is one of the most valuable tools on the internet, arguably the one thing that makes it work. A service like YouTube is incredibly valuable, not just from an entertainment perspective but also for learning and more. Once again, nobody wants to pay for it.
I could go on. There are millions of excellent sites beyond what Google has to offer. What's more important is that none of these services would have been built to where they are today were it not for the use of advertising as a revenue generation channel.
At a higher philosophical level, the question might be:
What future valuable service or product would we not allow to germinate if nobody wants to pay for anything and everyone uses ad blockers. Like it or not, this is one of the easiest ways for entrepreneurs to finance their dreams and ideas on the web. Given the vast majority of people will not pay for anything, the options become very few. This is certainly true at inception. Later on, as a business matures, other potential revenue streams surface.
Go try and start something like Facebook (about 3 billion users) and ask people to pay you just $1 per year. Aside from the fact that it would be impossible to support the infrastructure and people needed to run such a beast, well, nobody is going to hand you even $1 per year for the service. I don't care what features and privacy enhancements you might offer, nobody is going to pay. What's left? Well, initially, advertising. That's the only way. Sad, but true.
We don't have to like reality, but we should understand it.
How I spend my time and attention on the site is my personal decision, not the site owner's decision, not your decision, and not anyone else's decision. I don't care if an unsound and generally unaccepted ethical theory like the one you're advocating for disregards my individual right to spend my time and attention as I please. I don't care if you would rather prioritize someone else's profit over my autonomy. My time and my attention belong to me.
I don't use Gmail, and I would prefer Gmail's user base to be distributed among many smaller companies that compete with each other to provide better products. I don't use Facebook, and I would prefer it to be completely supplanted by fediverse services that don't violate the privacy of users and non-users, and don't create poor working conditions for its contractors.* YouTube is not irreplaceable either, and I would rather see a variety of platforms like PeerTube instances and Vimeo break YouTube's near-monopoly of online video content in the U.S. and many other countries. I fully understand the reality of online advertising, which only amplifies my support for ad blocking.
* https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
I have 600 records, pay directly for a YouTube show, pay for 5 substack blogs, I have hundreds of dvds, 500books, endless video games for multiple consoles, Netflix, hbomax, Hulu, boomerang, Shudder, Amazon, I've had sling, CBS watch, wb archive, criterion, and others.
I go through periods of Pandora or Spotify.
The reality is every company wants to charge but they all want to be on the open web at the same time.
Can't have it both ways.
I control what downloads on the internet I pay for, on the device I own.
If you didn't erect a paywalls? Your fault. Not mine.
I wouldn't bed a stranger without a condom
I don't browse without an ad blocker. Or privacy badger.
People who understand ad blockers but don't use them are corporate sychophants.
I will browse news and articles sometimes -because- they are free. If they were not, I simply no longer visit said page. I don't feel I'm owed their content in any way, and I'm OK just walking away if they decide to paywall it.
Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.
I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web.
But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.
I cannot tolerate ads at all now. Part of my issue with them is that you have no control over what you are being shown, obviously. It's the same problem with all the new social media platforms, in general. Anything can popup. And once you've seen something, to cant unsee it.
I personally use ad blockers. Right now I'm browsing with Ghostery and AdBlock. I'm surprised that only 27% of people use them currently. Makes me want to check out my parents computers when I visit next and make sure they have an ad blocker installed. But back to the questions, does this mean that the contract between websites their visitors is inherently broken? Is the current situation a race to the bottom? Is that tenable? What's the alternative?
"Cops hate these 10 tips that save you money. #6 will surprise you"
"Take a quiz to find out which Taylor Swift boyfriend you are"
Well, let's find out. Ads suck all of the air out of the room. If you provide your content through another business model, someone else can just copy your content and slap ads on it and make a few bucks. And because search engines function on those same ads, they're incentivized to send you to the spam sites instead of the real source of the content. If we kill ads as a business model, then we can start to explore other business models and find out what actually works.
> Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads.
No. There are other options. One example is the Patreon model. I pay for several creators who do not gate their content to payment. They make their content available to everyone, for free. I could view their content for free, but I want to encourage them to continue creating, so I pay them for it. Is it a viable option for every situation? I don't know. But the mere existence of ad-based business models means it's very difficult to explore non-ad-based solutions. For this, and a whole host of other reasons, using an ad-blocker is more ethical than not.
Spotify found a solution that works for music.
Food for thought, I wonder if that works specifically for them because it's harder to block their ads. I.e. it typically takes a different level of expertise to block their ads, as compared to a browser extension (have to block their ad traffic on a network level). Or is it really something else about their product?
As a counter example, I don't pay for youtube premium. Definitely part of the reason behind that is because it's easy to block them so long as I'm watching in a browser.
Regulation. It's a harsh measure, but I doubt there is another one. The last 20 years people tried to find alternative solutions. We have pay-walls, we have crowdfounding, we have various subscription models, I fail to see a solution that hasn't been tried, but yet every single year we get exposed to more ads. It seems extremly unlikely that there is something that could replace ads.
But what is the logical solution when there is a damaging thing in society that can't be replaced by healthy alternatives? It's regulation.
Now I know that a ban on ads seems unlikely. But I honestly don't think we have a choice. Because the alternative is that the ad-industry keeps creeping into every single aspect of our lifes, like they have done ever since their emergence. And with the advance of AR, smart homes and AI assistants this seems like a bad idea.
Of course, I wouldn't put it past regulators. In fact, copyright in EU comes close to doing exactly what the above would require.
We're an activist hub and the headquarters of Adbusters magazine, the journal of the mental environment. Since 1989, our international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts has been smashing ads, fighting corruption and speaking truth to power. [3]
[1] The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
Two parents w 6 Google logins between them (2 personal, 4 work entities) and 4 kids, each w a personal and school account. This would require 14 YouTube Premium accounts. Um...no.
Youtube premium family plan covers 6 accounts iirc. So if you could make that work you'd be looking at the cost of one and a half premium accounts.
At this point my blocklist has something like 77.614 domains blocked and I do not believe that its going to get less.
what is intersting is that I grew up with the uncensored internet and the things i found are not on the list of things that I definitly will block for my children.
Its kind of the opposite approach of a censored web for children because to be honest im not so much worried about their activities, but far more concious of the bad actors out there.
I think my habits and me installing adblockers for everyone resulted in worse web for everyone else, the more people block ads, the more ads there will be for the rest.
HN is working perfectly fine without js. For obvious reasons, most non video/chat/app sites work just fine as well.
I write us for a living so I'm not against in the least. It works for me.
My mind is blown every time I see what regular people experience. Horrible, though I am not sure it's worse than what we had to deal with back in the flash and days a decade ago. Could be.
Of course the #1 culprits are the advertisers themselves, because they don't care about their craft, they are lazy and just push all their money to google. But the web should be like an arcade machine where people can pay to get content, and current regulation makes that impossible
Side-note: I don't run ads on any of the sites I manage, yet deal with dozens of bug reports each year as adblockers aggressively find new ways to break sites. IME, ad blockers are about as much as a nuisance as the ads themselves.
I can tolerate ads. Also 10 on a page. And they can even blink. What I cannot tolerate is malware, personal data theft, and ads destroying the performance of any website. Ads have become a liability and advertisers have made it loud and clear that I'm not a human being, instead a resource to be exploited, and no tactic is below their standards.
Makes everything bearable. It doesn't get rid of every ad, but it still lightens the load.
I'm at the point where my phone is just an alarm, instant messenger and casual camera, since other apps are also full of annoying ads.
Firefox+addons seem to work best for blocking ads which is why I am increasingly concerned about that browser being marginalized.
In recent years, though, I've wondered if it might actually be better to turn that all off. Are we adblockers just getting a more purified stream of clickbait "news" and enraging social media posts, without the ads there to remind us that it's all trash?
I suspect so.
It's a weird situation.
Many times I have to hunt for the second half of the article past five or six full image ads and sponsored content.
This feels like a death spiral - the more Adblock the more ads they’ll put up to get seen by a smaller segment of users.
iPhone solutions seem less advanced, unfortunately, but they exist. Personally I use one called "Adblock Pro," but that's not an endorsement, just the one I tried that has stuck.
I've tried others, and they don't seem to do much. Adguard works as well as uBO 90% of the time.
I only see a difference when visiting actual malicious sites, like pirated sports streams, where Adguard might occasionally lets a pop-under through.
All of this together is more than enough content to satisfy a lot of tastes in my opinion. And you wont have to look at a single ad
My mom recently somehow managed to disable the ad-blocker I have setup on her computer and was blown away by how much advertising is on the internet.
I'm still looking for a block list that simply removes all video content from various franchise and local news sites. It is rarely actually relevant to the article, and is often vastly less information dense.
They all seem to implement an ever-so-slightly different player, which means manually blocking the unique element (s) each time.
Definitely a use case for a standard community sourced list.
When legacy media companies sell ad space, often they do not do so through an auction mechanism but through a direct purchase model. That means someone paid anywhere from a few hundred to thousands to be on that page. That gives them more of a client relationship and so they can feel more burdened to make sure advertising clients get 'visibility' and bang for their buck.
Also, they can sell ads in their videos with estimated view/impression counts. If they autoplay, the view count goes up even if you're not watching the video so an unsophisticated ad consumer thinks the ad spend is justified.
I don't run ad campaigns anymore, but I did for eight years and I always preferred no autoplay because intentional viewing is much more valuable for what I was selling.
Use adblock.
Actually built a small internal api end point that checks whether filtering works every 60s and that goes onto status tracker (Kuma)
This could be solved if the web was non-interactive as it should be.
Webmasters need to diversify their income streams. Obviously AD revenue doesn't cut it anymore. You need to implant affiliate links, do paywalls, paid subscriptions to content, and sell merch on a Shopify-powered site that is separate from the main magazine/blog. Ghacks for example sells software and services on their deals subdomain[0], but I'm not sure if it's that profitable.
Think of it like this : a majority of well respected publications are behind paywalls ; so people are consuming information from Facebook memes or WhatsApp posts or worse. And we know how well that is going for us as a society?
YouTube ads are freaking annoying. But I know that the creators of those channels I watch depend on those to make a decent living and overwhelming majority of them are not rich.
You mean who will fill the internet with SEO-optimized garbage and other trash that only exist to serve ad impressions? I sure hope nobody will.
(Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)
If there was no way to block ads Id probably be happy to downsize my internet usage.
Their definition of "acceptable" seems straightforward and paying for certification seems like a pretty standard business model.
If they were to bend their definition for money, that woukd be shady. Do they?
I was browsing the web with AdBlock Plus and found myself assaulted by an image of someone's fungus-infected toenail or something similarly nauseating. I went to report it as a mistake on their forums only to find there was already a thread about Taboola, and they were firm that Taboola was "acceptable". The only way I can imagine ads like that made it onto their list was by paying really good money.
I went to uBlock that day and haven't looked back. Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.
So it is just your imagination. Their definition of "acceptable" is here:
https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria
> Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.
You did not even read it, but just immediately jumped to "shady"/bribery....
> I wanted no part of it.
Me neither, but you spreading misinformation is not okay.
The policy on images is the one that is relevant to my complaint, so let's look at that one:
> Static image ads may qualify as acceptable, according to an evaluation of their unobtrusiveness based on their integration on the webpage.
The policy was stricter back in 2015 (http://web.archive.org/web/20150613035152/https://adblockplu...):
> Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
It changed to the one with more wiggle room in February 2016, in the middle of a backlash against AdBlock Plus's continued tolerance for Taboola's antics. Here's that thread for context: https://forum.adblockplus.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991
Under either definition, it's hard to argue that Taboola's images were "acceptable". They were explicitly designed to grab attention, bore no relation to the text content of the ad, and frequently were disgusting specifically because gross images draw the eye. Adblock Plus kept insisting that Taboola was cooperating, but users (including myself) kept reporting over and over again that their garbage was getting through. After years of violations that get dismissed as "mistakes" (documented in part on the thread linked above), it's reasonable to assume that the only reason they weren't dropped like a hot potato was because they were paying to not be dropped.
As a power user I also set JS off by default and whitelist specific sites, and also use garbage websites in private mode so their garbage tracking is hopefully purged.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges?utm_conte...
What this review means? Do you have a link? Is it reviewed by a security developer hired by Mozilla or some community person?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
It's exactly what you're asking for, a badge showing that Mozilla "staff security experts" have carefully reviewed the extension to ensure that it is free of malicious or unsafe code. The extension must also be effective at what it does, offer a good user experience, and be regularly updated.
I could be totally wrong, but ublock-origin just keeps certain things that match a pattern from appearing in the html. It can't remove the annoying "in-video" ads, right?
Or are you saying you might as well not pay for premium if you'll still have to deal with the product placement anyway?
In 2005 or so there was a bunch of trojans going around for IIRC Blizzard games to steal account creds on various sites and my first response to that was "huh, that site has ads?"
People give Brave grief over BAT, and maybe with good reason, but it's one the few efforts to try and bring some sort of involvement to the public side of it as to where the money is flowing that seems to have a chance of going anywhere.
Upvotes the moment I read this. Yes. This is what they did and they deserve to be blocked in every way possible for it.
This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that are actually good.
The concept of "value" for consumers has been completely twisted and I am not looking forward to seeing where this race to the bottom will end up.
For a lot of consumer tech companies, it's less about providing value to consumers and more about extracting value from them. Between vendor lock-in, privacy violations, and arbitrary one-sided changes in service, it's straight out of an abusive partner's playbook.
This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.
Unfortunately, web ads suck. Because there isn't enough Gatekeeping(tm), I can't buy things from web ads, because the probability of it being a scam is too high.
I get what you're trying to say, but here's a counter example. I have a hobby of astrophography. I live in a rural area without many other people nearby interested in the stars, much less a highly technical hobby like astrophography.
Asking on message boards like cloudynights, or reddit gets you a lot of well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level.
I'm currently building an observatory and I need input on which mount to use in my observatory. I don't have a good concept of what to buy for it as I've only dealt with really beginner mounts and I'm not a beginner anymore, and there's no astrophography retail stores within travel distance. Online advice is poor and hard to weed out those who are beginners meaning well and those who actually know what they're talking about.
However, to pull us back to what we're talking about here, I get a magazine for the industry called Sky and Telescope and it has ads. To me, ads are one of the best things about that magazine because it lets me know what options I have that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, or have any way to compare.
Though to be fair, ads in a magazine don't spy on you, don't infect your computer, don't move and steal attention and don't follow you around. But I think there is a place for targeted, well behaved ads.
There's quite a lot of HN readers who work for businesses that derive most of their revenue from ads (Google, Facebook, content companies, etc) so there's always going to be people here who are willing to stand up for ads. The famous Upton Sinclair quote is quite appropriate - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
And occasionally I still get those but lately almost all ads I see are some interesting headline that then takes me to a page with an for nonsense products every paragraph and an extremely fluffy article to tell me that dinosaurs had feathers / the Romans had steam engines or something similar.
I have sold on eBay for over a decade and at some point the desktop site became so slow as to be unusable with ad blocking. No idea who at eBay thinks getting in the way of sales to spam people with banner ads is a good idea.
You can't research good appliances either online, because the SERPs are stuffed with SEO-ed blogs and sometimes industry magazines, monetized with Amazon affiliates or other networks, with titles like "5 best dishwashers in 2022". Unless you know someone in the industry or offline with knowledge you don't know what to buy.
This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.
There's no adblocker for this problem either. Google is complacent with their fat ad revenue and monopoly on search and doesn't care.
My go-tos are sites like Wirecutter, where it seems like the hit to their reputation would be too high to be blatantly bought-out, even if they'll generally only hawk products that can be bought on Amazon or other sites that give them affiliate money. They're not always perfect, but I trust that they're trying to do what they set out to do.
The main issue with most review sites is that they're kids. Companies like NYT/Wirecutter don't want to pay old men that are experts in manufacturing. They hire kids with little life experience to review something like a washing machine. They haven't had 2 or even 1 washing machine in their entire lives. They wouldn't even be capable of doing a teardown. Let alone identifying which parts are quality vs not.
Unless of course your main qualification is not trying to find something that is built to last. Which is the hardest thing to get these days. Finding garbage like electronics and software is easy. Everyone wants to sell you software rather than high quality manufactured goods. And I want the least software possible as I'm very anti-technology for a software developer.
My research sources would be roughly in this order:
1. Consumer Reports (teardowns, can't beat this method. You pay them directly, if interested in least conflict of interest)
2. Wirecutter (good for a free source, but puts near-zero weight on reliability)
3. Amazon reviews (can find some old timers reviewing there but always keep in mind that most people aren't very intelligent. They maintain nothing and won't skim a manual)
4. Reddit (a lot of zero life experience kids on that, meaning generally anyone under 40)
5. Then whatever else you can find on the web
Looking past the bargain and location aspects, this site is super useful for understanding products in greater detail
And no, their service is not supported by ads - You have to pay for a subscription. Consumer Reports needs to be mentioned more IMO. Because even on reddit, there are companies that offer advanced stealth-like astroturfing campaigns for products/services.
The counterargument is that Consumer Reports could be intruded by corporate shills, but their reputation is solid and they've been around for a long time.
We can do better than CR - but right now, afaict they're the best we have.
Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working: sometimes Redditors recommend products which are way too expensive (still good quality, but the extra price really isn't worth it), but if someone recommends a genuinely crappy product, they get downvoted and replies saying "don't buy this"
Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.
So many of the Reddit threads were blatantly astroturfed.
By the way, while I have you here, have you considered extending your used car's warranty?
The top post in the relevant enthusiast sub recommending stuff to buy had no actual information, but it was stuffed with Amazon affiliate links. It was basically a "Top 5 X 2022" post except it was on Reddit instead of its own spam blog
Would you know if it did?
The second time you buy a type of tool you definitely need to go for quality, the first time though, are you certain you're actually going to be constantly using that tool?
If the tool breaks quickly, that's not usually a terrible outcome. Most companies have at least a 90 day limited warranty you could take advantage of in that case. In many cases, you can even just return the damn thing to the store where you bought it and get a refund or exchange for a better tool. This, of course, assumes that the reason you needed the thing in the first place isn't incredibly time-sensitive, but, usually, it works out fine.
Of course, if it lasts forever, then, great! But, in the intermediate scenario, where you encounter the limitation of the tool a little ways down the road, that's actually where this strategy shines, because you get a chance to upgrade to a better tool without wasting a ton of money on top of the line equipment right away. I know photographers who do this with lenses all the time: they'll rent a new lens for a week or something, go out and shoot it to see how it really works, and then determine whether they want to commit to it. $100 spent on a lens rental has saved some of my friends more than $1000 on glass they don't need. And, if they ultimately do end up buying the lens, that $100 is $100 well spent for peace of mind that they will actually get the use out of the thing that they actually bought it for. And, I think the Harbor Freight strategy makes a lot more sense if you view the initial purchase from HF as possibly a long term rental.
Now, there is that one caveat that you need to buy "the cheapest tool that could possibly work." If you're a professional machinist, for instance, don't go buying a $5 caliper and thinking that will be good. Go and spend the $150 or whatever on a Mitutoyo instrument to begin with, because you know damn well you will need it. This is just an example I pulled from personal experience, as I needed a caliper for hobby purposes a few years ago and ended up looking at things ranging from that $5 caliper on up to precision instruments. For my purposes, the low end is totally fine, because I don't need accuracy better than 0.1mm, and it's not my professional livelihood on the line. But, if you're a professional, never trust an instrument that doesn't come with a certificate of calibration.
I've also used this strategy with good success on photography equipment, myself. I wanted a DSLR camera I could use to take pictures for hobby purposes, mostly intended for web use. I did a little research and decided that a used Nikon D3400 was for me. So, I went to eBay, found one that only had about 1200 clicks on the shutter that came with the 18-55 kit lens and the original box for $325 (tax and shipping included), and I bought it. I augmented that with a used 90mm Tamron macro lens for under $150 and I was good to go.
It has one or two small limitations that either only come into play outside of the original use case I had in mind, or which aren't really annoying enough to mention, but, for the most part, it's been a spectacular camera that I spent under $500 on, as opposed to spending $1000 on a Z50 (or, you know, gone really crazy and gotten a D850 or a Z9), and then another $900 on a new Nikon 105mm macro lens, but, for my purposes, I can take photos that are 95% as good as what I could ultimately produce with the more expensive equipment, but, I can legitimately say this strategy has saved me over $1000.
I did exactly the same thing when I started learning to play the cello. A new, carved wooden cello suitable for a student probably runs around $2000-2500, and that doesn't necessarily include a decent bow. This is also an instrument one will certainly grow out of if one continues playing. I did my research and went out and bought a Yamaha electric for $3000 and went to a cello shop to try out bows, ending up with a nice $1200 bow. I ended up with an instrument I'll never outplay and a bow that will last me years. The alternative would have probably been a much less playable bow and instrument, or a lot more money expended.
So eventually the cheapest tool makers get enough money to buy up the differentiated quality makers for their logo with enough branding power to price discriminate, and slap it on products from the same cheap factory line.
Then, ugh.
There’s also that motto of “I’m too poor to buy it twice”, which comes into play when item y has a price like 75% of the premium version and/or you know the tool will have some rough travel and high demand, or time lost from outage isn’t acceptable. Then just spend the money on known-solid brands.
Reviews are an area where I really value specialized forums more than social media or blogs or industry publications.
In all cases with reviews even when no monetization involved, there can be a bandwagon mentality for brands and also people convincing themselves the high price they paid matters for something (even though it may not).
On that note though, an even worse practice is when a brand achieves notoriety for quality and starts making "light" versions of their tools. One example of this before they went belly up was Craftsman making nearly identical looking "Sears" brand that weren't covered by the craftsman warranty. Bosch also did this with pimping out their brand name to extend to rather crappy home appliances here in the EU. Black and Decker was synonymous with reliability in the early 80s, and I still have some jigsaws and circular saws from my dad that work great from that era, but anything from them now is arguably worse than the cheapest things you can buy at Harbor Freight.
It's an incentive problem. It's extremely difficult to get incentives aligned over a timeline longer than a few years that it might take for options or stock to vest or clawbacks to expire.
The batteries on my ~20 year old Craftsman cordless drill are finally getting to the point where they won't hold a charge. I'll probably have to bite the bullet and wade into the mess of "brand-name" tools the next time I have a significant project.
But anyhow, what happened with B&D has happened to so many previous quality brands. It's really frustrating to me.
Battery powered hand tool systems are a big cost now, especially that brushless motor have got so good. Its important to think about them as a system, like will replacement batteries still exist in 2 years, can more tools work with the same battery, etc. That makes it harder to try something and see how good it is. I agree with you re many tools though. For tools I'd recommend talking to someone who works with them daily to get a real opinion, and wouldn't trust anything I read
My best guess is that by doing this they can raise margins on some items by making them lower quality or by charging more than they could otherwise get away with. If a brand has a great tool X, you might buy their lousy tool Y just to be able to use the same chargers and batteries.
For me, anyway, as a non-carpenter, I just end up with an annoying bespoke set of chargers and batteries.
The thing about their system is the whole only works so long as they keep you locked in. Once you make a choice you are locked into that choice and won't be looking at alternatives - but if they change batteries you suddenly are faced with the loss of your entire investment and so you are likely to look at the competition and might buy something else. That makes changing battery formats less attractive to the big brands trying to get people who buy a lot of tools.
The store brands have a different motivation: they know you won't be buying them again anyway, so they don't care. Changing formats means they can come up with some tiny reason the new one is better and try to sell the next customer on how their new battery is better.
If you are not a buying a lot of tools your plan isn't bad, just throw away the tools when the batteries die in 10 years. The tiny reasons some battery is better - over 10 years might add up to something slightly better than before anyway.
After the first ones broke we asked around and received only three recommended brands. DeWalt, Makita or the Blue Bosch line (in Germany). We went for DeWalt and never looked back. The power cells haven't changed in form or fitting in the years since and we could not be happier with performance and durability.
It is like deciding on a DSLR system. Once you are invested into Canon, Nikon, Sony or the likes with lenses and accessories you are locked in but also you learn to really know your tools and imho receive a productivity boost.
For example - whenever I am with other people and need to use their tools, I have to look at them and see how they work, what buttons/knobs are where and so on. With my DeWalt tools this is already muscle memory and the work as an extension of my arm - my brain uses them as if they were a part of me. This let's me focus more on the task I want to perform, not on the tool.
The smaller brands like Craftsman and "store brands" seem to change relatively randomly.
There's also just quality of life. As a DIYer I'm not particularly concerned about wearing out tools. But still I might want to pay more for better ergonomics, ecosystem compatibility, power, tolerances, or other non-longevity qualities, rather than being stuck with an adequate but suboptimal tool that gets the job done while bothering me.
But I can't pay more to get a higher quality version of the tool, because the store doesn't even bother stocking a higher quality version.
If I plan ahead, I can shop online and find a quality tool. But what I really want is the option to buy a quality tool during a weekend project.
“You…treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”
Adblocking isn’t simply convenience it’s life-preserving.
Best dishwashers 2022 -amazon
You’ll most likely end up on Reddit but sometimes make some good discoveries.
The net-net of all of this is that I buy a lot more stuff from brick and mortar stores now, where they've done the curation, and will only carry the stuff that sells best per square foot, and minimizes their returns.
I think Google dropped the ball on their search objectives in this department. Why is it so bad at helping us search products? If I specify something with 2-3 conditionals why can't it match all the clauses, filter out fake reviews, out of stock, not shipped to my region and such?
They don't want to help us find what we want to buy, they want to sell us what the advertisers have to sell, and the two don't match. They want to sell us things we don't need, this is the reason we never buy anything from the ads and their whole industry is a scam.
I'm doing this myself before I buy a treadmill. I want the most reliable one, not the most tech features, and while my hunch is Sole is the one for me based on their warranty, I'm going to confirm with CR before dropping $1,600 on one.
The problem is that people plug their ears and put blinders on to avoid spending $30 for teardown advice from an outfit like Consumer Reports. Too cheap for their own good.
Almost everything about fridges nowadays wants to promote the virtues of the amazing new features associated with them.
After hours of searching, I narrowed it down to 3 models. All were the most basic fridge & freezer combo I could find. Exactly one of them was in stock, so I got that one.
I agree with you but there's a simple shortcut you can employ: purchase commercial/industrial models that you see being used in industry.
Gym equipment is a good example: your local, serious weightlifting gym is probably using Hammer Strength plate-loaded machines and Rogue frames/racks.
Cooking: Look in the commercial kitchen of a high end restaurant - that's where I first saw my commercial microwave being used.[1]
TV: NEC P461 commercial display - I found the model number by climbing behind the arrivals/departures board at the airport.
[1] https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/microwaves-and-m...
Huh. Trying to imagine someone doing that and not getting detained. "I just wanted to read the model number, officer, I swear!"
Other than that, good advice. :)
I feel cruel saying this but I really think it's true. Just like how most games have microtransactions because a minority of people who will spend an incredible amount of money on them. Most people are caught in the crossfire and ads just annoy them and steer them away from the product, but mass advertising is an effective way to target the minority who ultimately spend enough on the product to offset the cost.
On the other side of the spectrum: using the Instagram app was the first time in my life I felt positive about the ads I was being shown. I was shown ads for microdosing psilocybin (it's legal here) which blew my mind hahah. It's almost like I got through the uncanny valley and into the other side where ads are actually relevant!
Pretty weird since I almost never use Facebook. But I use Google, GMail and YouTube all the time ... and yet, the YouTube and Google Ads really suck! (They seem to be based on IP address rather than identity: I keep getting shown stuff that's obviously based on my housemate's browsing.)
To be clear there was still the gross undercurrent of "okay, why the hell do they know that?" but it was nice to see it actually working as intended for once.
In the case of electronics and photography gear it takes a huge amount of reading between the lines to interpret reviews even assuming the reviews are honest.
For instance at the Best Buy website there is a review for a photo printer where the user posted photographs of utterly ruined prints they made on this printer. Well, I've made prints like that too when I put the paper in upside down. That's what happens when you put the wrong side of the paper in.
A decade ago the story about Sigma lenses on Canon bodies was that 90% of them were OK but 10% were defective in subtle ways (like the autofocus doesn't quite lock on) Sigma on Sony today seems to be better. When you're reading reviews though you have to guess "did this person get a bad instance of the product or did this person have the wrong expectations for how this was supposed to perform."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
Oh this heinous shit is not just limited to cheap tat. Samsung will happily sell you their highest end TVs for four figures with unremovable banner ads in the source menu.
How many UX designers just give into client demands, how many devs work extra hours to make up for bad management practices? How many managers are under pressure over sales created deadlines? How many sales people are under pressure over the company's target numbers?
There will always be a few people who are willing to put their neck on the line but it'll require a culture shift before any momentum builds up and most feel comfortable protesting these practices at their workplace.
But developers don't control what marketing put in their sweet Google Tag Manager container(s).
When I was younger I felt bad, but I also had no money.
Now I get frustrated when I can't give a website I like and want to support a reasonable amount of money...
Of course, if they feel their website is worth $120/year and I feel it's worth $10/year, there's a problem, but thats their business decision to say ad-free costs that much regardless of your level of consumption or desire for the content
The amount of guilt I feel about ad blocking is equal to the amount of guilt advertisers feel about bothering me with their ads.
Not GP, but when I think about the negative consequences of BAT, I'm thinking about the user and society overall, not necessarily the website owner in specific.
Monetizing attention is dangerous, and I think we should be a lot more careful about when we do so, as opposed to monetizing attention being the default way we fund everything online. BAT is in many ways less harmful than existing advertising networks, but it's still trying to find a way to ethically commoditize otherwise private attention/focus on what we read/see, and I think that the omnipresent commoditization of that attention/focus across society is harmful regardless of whether or not it's invasive or collects PII and regardless of whether or not users get paid for selling something that we shouldn't encourage them to sell. I think that this has an effect on how humans process the world, I think it has an effect on how much energy we're willing to devote to different tasks. I think it has an effect on attention spans, and on what types of content get made, and the way that we spread memes/culture, and how we interact with each other. I think it has an effect on market efficiency and on what products succeed. I'm not going to oversell modern advertising as some kind of giant monster that's responsible for all problems, but I think its effects are likely more negative than positive at this point and that we can build better systems that don't optimize for keeping people hooked on consuming content endlessly just so we can redirect some of that attention to a product.
As a website owner, the social stuff still applies to me, I may not want my stuff commoditized at all. But I also recognize that users have the right to modify code running on their computer, including for the purposes of inserting their own ads, so if it's happening with the user's permission I can't really get mad at the user. In many ways I'm the least impacted person in this situation. However, that doesn't mean that I think Brave's system is good for the user or for society, and I'm not going to encourage people to use it.
My feeling is that Brave is trying to reform a system that I would like to see destroyed.
Talk is cheap, especially stories that don't pass any kind of smell test: we would not take our life into our hands by collecting any user data, when it's easy to discover that for real hackers.
https://brave.com/data covers our data policies for baseline and optional stuff.
If Brave users opt into Brave Rewards for private user ads in push notifications (which, contra Butterick, do not belong to any page they might be near or above; they belong to the user's inventory, same as new tabs and unrelated windows of all kinds), we still wouldn't put ads in pages without both publisher and extra user consent (too many users still wouldn't want in-page ads, even if opted into user push notification ads).
HN is full of made up nonsense about Brave, in spite of all the hackers here who can verify our open source, network behavior, etc. etc. This site has seen better days.
However, I also had negative opinions of it like many people here before I really dug into it. I think your marketing really needs some work. I don't exactly know what it is - it might not even be your fault. The negative view of crypto many have has been associated with it. I would remove all mentions of crypto from your website. If people really want to know how the tokens work, they can go into the documentation. Having the word crypto on your landing page does you no good.
On sites that handles all their own ad sales and display directly, I still see their ads.
Even our response to the Snowden releases was to get Google Analytics running over TLS and to make it even harder for a normal solo person to host a website that isn’t through one of the major silos.
The art of not feeling guilt
No thanks. If they had stuck with a simple, in-line, hyperlinked image I would have probably not cared, but this is too much.
The way the ad is delivered is what is annoying and not the ad itself.
I believe this is true about society in general and has gone on since long before 2003. Almost every ill in modern society can be drawn back to some people doing their best to convince other people to buy shit from them. At this point, I think we should make a serious political effort to outright ban advertising and marketing entirely. Whatever the results of that are, I seriously doubt they'd be worse than what we have.
Indeed. Even with an ad blocker, you have this issue where your momentary attention on the internet (say by visiting a site) is presumed to have value. So anything to get you to click on some shitty link.
I don't know why anybody would feel any guilt. When cable was the only thing available, I would switch to my Gameboy when ads would come on and mute the TV, effectively blocking the ads. I'm always curious if people who shame others about ad-blocking similarly think that action was immoral and I should instead be forced to keep my eyes open with superglue when the ads came on.
> People give Brave grief over BAT
Many people are against crypto-currency with no reason other to be contrarian (or they just really, really, really love JP Morgan/Chase). BAT is not even required to be used to use Brave...
I have mixed opinions on where the ad-blocking layer should live (I generally think at the router level), but there are some undeniable benefits to having at least some form at the browser-level as well, and I think Brave making this a default was a fantastic idea.
Quick note on router level approach: without MitM and full JS/HTML/CSS runtime, can't block tracking and ads effectively.
PiHole etc. are good but not sufficient to stop the latest, and with Google pushing for more AMP borg-ification of sites' content, getting into the 1st party content that unfolds only at TLS termination and JS execution is essential to blocking threats.
Fixed that for you ;)
Like, I remember growing up absolutely surrounded by advertising. It was on the TV, it was on the radio, it was in newspapers and magazines. Literally every second page in a magazine was ads! It was crazy. I grew up with it (as did many of you).
What were the major level societal consequences of this shift? And when did it begin? Was radio just as bad in the 30's?
Are newspapers where it went wrong? Man, at that point we may as well go the whole way and blame the industrial revolution ;)
More generally, advertising is a consequence of the economic system we've (somewhat) collectively as a species decided we want to achieve our goals. I doubt the first urban dwellers expected the vast new cities to be hives of disease, either, but them's the breaks.
Tim Wu, The Master Switch (2011), chapter 5
If a site is responsible I will add them to my white list. How do I know if a site is responsible If I'm blocking you might ask? Well you just know.
Nasty side effects: journalism suffers as "tech" prospers, less well-informed, more polarised society, freedom of the press is threatened (now by "tech" intermediaries, in addition to governments), justice system competes with "cancellation", etc. via "tech" intermediary "platforms"
Consider downstream effects of all this on governance
Journalism has declined in quality. But "tech" does not provide a solution or even a viable alternative, it is the cause.
With journalism, advertising once supported far more unbiased reporting. This was too long ago for many younger folks to remember. People born into a world of "tech" companies happily accept today's lower quality "news"; many even try to profit from it. With "tech", advertising tends to support increased digital surveillance. Not a net gain for humanity.
Blocking these ads is a moral imperative at this point. I don't feel guilty, I feel proud and I encourage every single person to do it.
I don't use an advert blocker but I know what they look like.
Why? The adverts don't really bother me and I also think they're dubiously moral.
* This implicit agreement is too open to exploitation. Many people don't understand the depth of the tracking/ad ecosystem. If the full cost were explained to them, they might not agree to that exchange. I think I do understand it (well, probably it is worse than I expect, but whatever), but if the ad companies get to interpret this implicit relationship in the way that benefits them, then why can't I? I think the agreement should be explicit, and some sites do make it explicit -- they block people like me. Fair game! I'm sure they won't miss me, I can be quite annoying.
* I'm not sure I believe in this implicit agreement anyway. From the beginning, the design of the internet has been that information is sent to the browser, and then rendered in line with the client's needs. If I use elinks, lynx, or some graphical browser without javascript is that morally dubious? What if I'd like to minimize the amount of javascript I run, but selectively enable it as necessary, like umatrix?
* The underlying goal of the people placing the ads is not just to get something rendered on a screen somewhere, right? Their goal is to capture some attention. As you say, you don't read the ads. I could browse a while and train myself to ignore them too. At which point... the person who placed the ad still doesn't get what they wanted. At least if I block the ad, there's at least some chance that they'll detect that, and maybe the poor fool who paid for the placement can get a refund.
This is a big part of why the implicit deal argument doesn't really make sense. If a website sends me information then the information is on my device just like a letter, so I should be able to do what I like with it. The framing of this as an agreement between the user/publisher that we accept or reject skips over the question of whether it is even possible or moral in the first place for a website operator to try and offer an unsigned contract that removes user autonomy/rights, and whether it is moral in general for us to normalize that kind of contract.
The way that online advertising gets phrased sometimes is that you have something free that's being given to you, and consumers with ad-block are going out of their way to take more or to change the content of the webpage. But that's not really what's happening -- what's happening is that something is being given to me for free, and then the person serving that content is asking to come into my house (computer) and they're saying that they should be able to tell me what to do with the content after it's entered my house. Adblocking is the same as throwing out the spam mail from your mailbox without opening it, and anti-adblocking normalizes the idea that it's acceptable for a business to guilt or pressure people into reading junk mail.
If an industry did ever start trying to guilt people for not opening every single physical letter that was sent to them, it would be good to push back against that industry even if the industry was only trying to make a moral argument and not trying to pass laws. Some implicit contracts are so inherently invasive that they should be rejected at a conceptual level -- not merely rejected by turning down the contract, but by vocalizing, "I refuse to normalize or acknowledge the concept that a remote operator in another state has any moral claim whatsoever in any situation over what a user-agent does with information that is in my home." So we reject the concept of a website delivering content in exchange for delivering ads not because we deserve anything for free, but because we don't believe website operators have any authority (legal or moral) to set up this kind of contract, and we think it is borderline immoral/invasive for them to assert that they do. Even allowing their expectation to alter browsing behavior or treating it like a contract we have to reject gives it more legitimacy than it deserves.
It's the exact same reason why we all reject the implicit social contract where advertisers expect people to leave their volume turned all the way up for commercials, or for screen readers not to skip ads during navigation around the page to different sections. Remember that advertisers are actually the people paying for this content, and their implicit contract with users is based around actual attention -- not for allowing code to run, not for rendering the ad on the page. Advertisers have an implicit contract with us where we alter our purchasing behaviors and pay attention to their products in exchange for free content. But by and large, all of us (including anti-adblock advocates) reject that agreement and say that advertisers have no moral authority to demand that. We all kind of recognize that accepting this contract with advertisers and shaming people for walking out of the room during a TV commercial would be infringing on something vaguely sacred -- people's rights to consume content how they wish within their own homes and to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to.
But then anti-adblock advocates try to draw a line saying that it's OK for a user to ignore advertising unless a user-agent helps them. That just doesn't really make any sense, it doesn't make sense to say that pressing a button to mute a TV is morally better than having the TV press the button itself; both outcomes are exactly the same. The only place to draw that line that stands up to scrutiny is around the users "home" -- to say that once content enters their network, be it physical junk mail, or TV commercials, or online ads, users are then free to do what they wish with it even if it's to burn it and never open the envelope -- and no one has the moral authority to dictate what users do with that information or to force them to read it regardless of how much other stuff is being given away for free.
Do I think it's fine to walk away during an advert break on a US TV station or to mute? Yeah that's fine.
Can you cut up your magazine and reconstruct it with the advertising pages removed? Yeah fine.
Both are different from advert blocking because of the automation and the specific targeting of the workaround. I think that's where it crosses into not as morally reasonable.
I think it's also just a huge faff to run custom software in your browser just to avoid seeing some adverts.
I think that's a really arbitrary line. Screenreaders skip ads. Scrapers/apis skip ads. There isn't a clear division between an automated tool and a tool with manual intervention.
In some ways this feels like the same legalism that popped up in spam phone calls where to get around auto-dial rules businesses would have someone on their end sit in a room and press a button over and over to complete the call. In the exact same way, we could imagine a version of Ublock Origin where every time the page loads it comes up as a blank screen, and then I hit a button on my keyboard, and then the screen renders without ads. I don't think that advertisers would see a difference between those systems.
Remember that from the perspective of the advertiser -- the person actually paying for the content -- you walking out of your room during a TV commercial and a piece of software skipping the TV commercial are the same thing. The advertiser does not see a distinction between those actions because the advertiser is not paying for content in exchange for the privilege of streaming data to your computer, the advertiser is paying for content in exchange for your attention.
It is weird to me that people are able to latch on to the idea that ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts, but don't view circumventing advertising through other means as stealing money from advertisers. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that when we say that it's fine for people to block content manually but not using user agents, what we are effectively saying is that it's fine for them to ignore ads as long as they're not particularly good at ignoring them. But even that isn't a great argument.
Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages? What if I make a machine with image recognition that does the same thing? It just doesn't make sense to say that ad blocking is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient, and then it becomes immoral.
Yeah - we're talking morals!
You won't find a mathematical equation to define the moral line.
> ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts
Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing, I just think it's morally dubious. I didn't say anything like I thought it was criminal.
> Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages?
I think so yes.
> It just doesn't make sense to say that something is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient
Well yeah, again it's morality, it's human and fuzzy.
Automation is often a line for morality. Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.
This isn't some kind of new idea.
Not for arbitrary reasons though, there are tangible effects from automation that we worry about in those systems. We draw distinctions because there are parts of the manual process that we can point to as valuable.
We worry about automated weapons because they take a safety check out of the system. We kind of are saying what I mentioned above, that we want killing to be kind of difficult and emotionally hard to do. But that doesn't map to ads, unless you're saying that one of our goals is that we want blocking ads to be emotionally draining/difficult. But I don't think that's what anyone believes about ads.
Similarly, people don't oppose automated speed cameras because they think automation is a moral line, they oppose taking humans out of the decision making process for whether or not someone should get a ticket. But this doesn't really map to ads unless we think it's important that humans have to consciously decide to skip content, which... why would we think that? Some people also don't trust the automated cameras to be reliable. This also doesn't really map to adblockers, because adblockers aren't being used by other people to make decisions about you.
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> Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing
I should phrase this differently, that's totally my bad.
I can't think of any way of defining an implicit social contract between website operators and consumers that wouldn't also define an implicit social contract between consumers and advertisers themselves. It is weird to me that people think it's morally dubious to do things that deprive website operators of profit, but that it's not morally dubious to do things that deprive advertisers of profit.
If we say that advertisers don't have a right to ask us to look at content, I'm not sure why website operators should be different.
She doesn't want an ad-blocker because they do break things at times and she actually likes seeing some ads and especially getting coupon or discount offers, using things like Rakuten. I know that you can fine-tune the settings of uBlock Origin, but she doesn't want to be bothered with that.
I'm the weird one.
You pay, just not with money! (insert evil laugh)
Consumers of GA may be blind, I'm guessing (confidently) Google and other big players are far from blind today.
Reddit.com is eye fucking cancer.
Old.reddit.com is consumable....
Interestingly, after a 15-year-long account I was "permanently banned" for TOS violations which cannot be determined... Reddit is dead to me. (Ill be deleting (scrambling) millions of comments... I was top mod of a sub /r/ with 1.5 million users, which is now one of the most active /r/s...
If anyone would like to buy my 15+ year old account, make me an offer.
- Banksy
And yet -- would the modern internet even exist but for ads? I'm not so sure.
It seems there is a bifurcation, even among those of us with the technical know-how and resources to live ad-free lives: those who tolerate ads, and those who do not.
I count myself in the latter group. I will be happiest if I go the rest of my life and never see another ad, in any form, again. I will go to great lengths and expense to avoid them. It is self-evident to me that they are toxic, to my own psychology, at least.
The dichotomy brings to mind the "edit streams" in Neal Stephenson's latest, Fall: an internet essentially stratified by class. Who has the money and resources to filter the shit out and who doesn't.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthan...
Frankly I don’t understand the ethical position of people who use ad-blockers.
Which means that by using an ad-blocker, people are removing themselves from the audience that has any vote in how content sites develop. You're miffed that sites are becoming dumber while ads are all over the place and uglier every day? You don't like video ads, modal calls-to-action and dark patterns? Well, the audience that actually brings in the money seems to have no problem with all of that, so ad-blocking people will proceed to take a hike right past the attention of site designers.
There's still a sweet spot to aim for that is ad-compatible. For one thing, limit CLS, because I think content that jumps around due to ads has got to be one of the biggest drivers toward reaching for an ad blocker.
Also, some widely-used ad systems are not all that compatible with single-page apps. (Looking at you, gpt.js.) Even if you call their cleanup methods after destroying an ad, you'll have a memory leak on the browser side if you don't completely reload the page/app. So users complain about the SPA "bogging down" as they use it, and they'll often (correctly, even if accidentally) blame the ads. So the ad systems have got to buckle down and fix their own problems if they don't want to drive users toward ad blockers.