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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I theory, I don't mind ads. For years I avoided ad-blockers. Then...

Ads make pages load slower. Ads on mobile browsers make the text jump around while I'm trying to read it. Ads put giant pop-ups over the text that I'm trying to read. Ads start playing loud music, or flash.

The problem isn't ads, it's a lack of bounds about what ads can and can not do.

The web ran fine for years with ad-blockers as a niche; but ad-blockers only got popular when the ads themselves overstepped their bounds and became too intrusive.

I'd be much happier if ads were reasonable and I didn't feel like I needed an ad-blocker just to view the %$#%@ website.

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I'd be mostly fine with ads if they were:

* first-party hosted: no needing to fetch content from 10 different servers

* verified by the site publisher: all ads are relevant and are not obviously malicious

* predictably sized: this goes with the other two, ads must conform to a size that fits in the content and does not push content around

* oh and of course they must never, ever autoplay video or audio

I don't particularly care if this is all too hard to do. If it's just too much, make your product a paid service. Or just don't make it at all, that's fine too.

edited: formatting

Yes! Ordinary people like ads. They put magazine ads up as posters in dorm rooms. They quote TV commercial catchphrases and jingles to one another. They watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People talk about podcast host read ads and do parody versions. And people love "influencers," who are just advertisers who say sassy things on Instagram or whatever.

But no one likes web banner advertising. It's just a bad experience! At best people like it when you search and the thing they wanted is at the top of the list because of paid placement. They don't care if the placement was paid or not, but they like seeing the thing they wanted. Banner ads make the experience of using a web page worse, but unlike TV ads or magazine ads, they don't contribute anything good back. It's just "here is an ugly square that disrupts your browsing experience." Publishers should think about other ways of engaging reader attention.

The worst offenders seem to be news sites run by traditional newspapers. Friends share links to these quite a lot, and very often I follow the link to an article that sounds quite interesting, and then... As you say, text jumping around, giant pop-ups, videos playing. I put up with it to a point, but if it's taking me three/four seconds and I'm still trying to close things down to read the article, then I'm thinking "That's a shame. I was interested to read the article... but not _that_ interested". I don't really understand why this happens. Isn't it just obviously bad web design at that point?

Agreed. Show me static images, loaded server-side. Everything else can fuck off and die.

I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me that allowing arbitrary code execution on my machine is an acceptable trade-off.

My problem with ads is how obtrusive they are nowadays: Ads in the middle of an article, banner ads while playing a video, etc. Those are the ones I hate.

Back in the day my wife was subscribed to Total Film (a UK film magazine), which had several full pages of ads related to sex phone numbers and other similar "services". These were pages at the end of the magazine that where full of ads. We really liked that format, because you could read the content without interruption and sure, if you wanted you could check the ads.

It's the same reason why I hate TV ads that happen at different times within a program, but I don't mind ads in the SuperBowl that happen during the half time. Also why I don't really care about Youtube Ads that happen before a video will start (but if it interrupts the video in the middle, it sucks).

I would be ok with pages that show you an ad when you load it, and then it completely goes away and leaves 100% functionality in the page to do whatever you are supposed to do there.

Yep. I can remember the exact moment I decided to install an adblocker. I was on a comic site, and my entire browser got minimized, to show me a popup. That was it for me.

Exactly. I am perfectly happy to view ads in a context like readthedocs.io- a simple image (with link, of course) placed prominently yet still out of the way. Unfortunately too many sites have decided to make their content impossible to view without an adblocker so I just use uBlock Origin on everything.

It's never going to get better. Sites are going to continue to squeeze every cent of revenue they can per user which will just drive more users to adblockers, making them need to make the ads _even worse_ to maintain income.

Advertisers, you did this to yourselves.

Ads also eat up a vast proportion of your monthly data allowance if you're on mobile.

Exactly.

I disable my ad blocker on certain sites like Reddit, Twitter,or forums I visit daily. I want to support those sites and I'm fine with ads as long as it's done respectfully.

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