How I survived one week without an adblocker | Hacker News Reader

How I survived one week without an adblocker

bitboxer.de

51 pointsbitboxer76 comments

There are two things wrong with this article.

First, it doesn't even mention that without an adblocker your being tracked all over the place by advertisers. (A practice that is btw clearly illegal in many countries, even if they haven't explicitly wrote it into the law yet.)

Second, but this is more subjective, I have a rather different experience with turning off adblockers. Almost every website becomes several times (!) slower, and is full moving distractions trying to get my attention. Sorry, I can't read that way offline, and I won't read that way online. Only when advertising stops disrupting my experience and is only passively present (like it is in old-fashioned dead tree publications) will I turn off the adblocker.

I the mean time, I only make exceptions for sites that a) understand I have no obligation to download their ads, and ask nicely, and b) are very careful about the ads they put on their site.

Opt-out here:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

Or disallow cookies from ad networks, so they can't track.

Firefox addon that does the same thing, albeit on a superset of advertisers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-tar...

I use an ad-blocker mostly for self-defense, but also because corporations generally play hard-ball with the populous and so I generally enjoy passively disrupting their systems.

There's no other way to deal with zero-day exploits that are delivered via ad networks. I also wouldn't mind seeing ad-supported services mostly die off, unlikely as that seems :)

I agree. For me the moving ads are the worst. It makes it impossible to concentrate on anything.

Anyone know what percentage of browsers are running ad blockers?

> A practice that is btw clearly illegal in many countries, even if they haven't explicitly wrote it into the law yet.

How is something illegal if it's not written into law?

There are data protection laws in lots of countries. It's written into law.

According to the post to which I was responding, it is not. At least that's what he said, and that's what I am questioning.

Apologies for the late response. I wrote "explicitly". What I mean by that is that privacy laws already very likely make it illegal, but those laws don't mention "new" technology, so it's kind of open to interpretation until it's tested in court.

Politicians looking to score will often introduce new laws that explicitly make certain practices illegal instead of waiting for jurisprudence.

In this particular case: if you were to register people's visits to a wide range of locations IRL and sell that information, that would be a clear violation of privacy in many countries. It doesn't take a brilliant lawyer to argue that principle also applies online.

I see; thanks for the clarification.

Am i the only one who never uses an adblock? I have two reasons for that, first is that it seems unfair to use a site and not pay back in a meaningful way. Almost like stealing. Second is that i don't visit a huge number of unique sites every day and the ones i visit are respectful enough to not make nuisance. I rarely come across any super annoying ad. I am kind of surprised how others simply take it for granted that everyone else uses an adblock. I have been living very well without an adblock for last 5 years.

I've never used and adblocker for slightly different reasons. First, I'm kind of fascinated by ads, from Google's ads to the obnoxious fake news reports about the latest miracle cure.

The other reason I don't block ads is that most of them just don't get in the way of what I'm doing. If I'm on a web site where they have ads I disapprove of or make the site difficult to use, I leave that site.

It's my way of voting with my feet about those ads and that site's practices. Of course, there also seems to be a strong correlation between the quality of the content and the quality of the ads, so I usually end up not reading something that's of low value anyway.

Guilt is not a business model.

If you're a content creator, you have the right to be lazy. Slap ads everywhere, just don't get upset when I call you out and tell you it sucks.

I don't use adblock either. One reason is that I like seeing how people advertise their products: a good learning experience.

If I mute the TV during the ads, am I stealing? If I record a show and skip the ads on playback am I stealing? If I use Lynx am I stealing? If I disable JavaScript/Flash for security reasons, am I stealing?

I'm not obligated to look at adverts. Adverts are displayed with the hope that some of the users will see them, and that some of those users will spend money.

If there are enough people willing to view your content with the ads, then you make money. If there aren't, you don't. Theft and morality have nothing to do with this issue.

Well muting TV or skipping ads on recorded shows is different from using adblock. Ad block reduces the ad impressions, recorded or muted TV still counts as an "impression".

Why does fast-forwarding through an ad count as an 'impression' to you?

What about if somebody else fast forwards through the ad, or as is more often the case, cuts the ad out completely and republishes the content?

Actually, it may be that in properly formed TV ads, muting and/or fast-forwarding still creates an impression. http://www.cs.bc.edu/~gips/BreakingFF.pdf

i am talking in a "technical" way since website owners are sometimes payed per impression, and adblock blocks that impression, hence my point.

I don't use an Adblocker per se, but I do use NoScript, mainly for security and performance. That does block quite a few ads, but frankly, good riddance; you shouldn't need JS or, even worse, Flash to display an ad. The web is slow enough already.

I don't use an ad blocker because the ads don't bother me very much, and because I'd like the sites I enjoy to stay open.

If one doesn't want to see it as a moral choice, on a practical level, if the sites which bring you content you enjoy do not receive revenue, they will either close, offer degraded service, or start charging.

But don't you actually have to click the ad to help the site?

Not really, ad impressions count!

There's three main ways people buy online advertising:

- cost per thousand impressions (CPM) - cost per click (CPC) - cost per action (CPA), where the action is something that takes place after the click, like signing up for Netflix.

If the ad buy was CPM, using an ad blocker takes revenue from the site they'd otherwise receive. If not, not.

You're not. I never used and never would use an ad blocker.

If I open a web site with annoying ads, I simply hit the back button or close the browser tab.

I've never installed an ad blocker, nor have I even thought of doing so.

While I don't agree that using an ad blocker is stealing, I have similar feelings towards their use and find it mostly pretentious of people that use a free web and then complain of ads as if they deserve a web free of them.

I don't mind advertising, and often find it useful, especially as someone making software and looking for new ways to increase sales.

I believe it was after reading a discussion here on HN that I began a similar experiment. It's been almost a week and I agree with bitboxer's assessment overall. Most of the ads seem to stay out of the way.

Some are overwhelming or at the very least a bit annoying. The first that pops to mind is space.com - which kept showing a footer ad even though I clicked the "X" - but that's only my immediate example because I'd been to that site more yesterday due to the Mars launch than I have in quite some time.

I noticed that a lot of newpapers seem to have ads that make me want to turn and run away. The full page ads with the "Click to continue" link at the top right. Forbes.com comes to mind immediately. Those ads are repulsive and make me never want to return. And while on the subject, any site that shows a 10 - 15 second video ad before a 15 second video clip will no longer get any of my attention, links, clicks, etc.

If I'm going to continue to try to use the web with ads enabled, I have to draw a line as to what is and isn't acceptable. I haven't tried bitboxer's fork yet, but it sounds like a step in the right direction. To take it further, it might be useful (to owners and visitors) to have a means for site owners to find out whether they are explicitly being blocked and hence losing potential income due of obnoxious advertising.

Yes, an information for site owners why they are blocked would be great. But I don't know how we could implement this in a good way. If someone has Ideas in this direction I would love to hear them!

Since most ad blockers are whitelist-only, I assume that people using a blacklist ad blocker are explicitly blocking sites with annoying ads. Of course that's merely a generalization based on how I think I would use it.

If the stats are shown historically, a site owner could see that after a redesign or some changes on their site, or maybe after signing up with a new ad vendor, that there was a spike in their ad blocks and rethink their design or deal with said vendor.

I don't know if any of this would play out as I'm visualizing it, but I do feel opening up the conversation between site-owner and visitor to figure out what can be considered useful advertising is good for everyone.

Did you see the discussions on the AdblockPlus blog a while back around trying to be fair to sites with reasonable advertising [0]? That approach does seem to be the reverse of your idea (whitelist sites you frequent, rather than blacklist the bad guys). Maybe if there was an easy way to mark advertising as good or bad, similar to a spam filter?

[0] http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking

> I noticed that a lot of newpapers seem to have ads that make me want to turn and run away.

The top offender on my list is NYTimes.com, to which I am a paying subscriber (unfortunately there was no "pay for ad-free NYTimes.com" option). I am particularly annoyed by flash ads that shift DOM elements all over the place; my favorite was a recent full-screen ad that mimicked the appearance of the real NYT frontpage.

I think the reason that sites like this do not give you an option to pay for an ad-free version, is that their selling point to advertisers is their large nation-wide reach. They would shoot themselves in the foot if they did that.

They could still negotiate a price

Yes. The other problem: you're siphoning off the most affluent customers, which are also the most valuable.

Now there's an interesting statistic. What does each newspaper make of each of it's subscribers/readers in addition to direct fees.

I don't know about this feedback idea.

While there's certainly the matter of personal taste and preference involved, a general idea on what is acceptable and what not should be part of the site owner's common sense. If you present ads with sound / huge overlays that I need to click away in a weird way you are trying to screw me. Why would I _not_ block the ads or (better) ignore the site?

If we would have a good and standard way to give feedback, wouldn't the sites just gravitate towards the maximum of tolerable advertisement abuse?

You're probably right. I personally have no idea. I've sustained a site with ads once in my career and I've never understood why anyone even bothered looking at the ads much less clicking them.

I figure if a site's ads are annoying I can still block the ads - just that it could be helpful for the site owner to know that I am Explicitly blocking their ads. I suppose my thoughts on opening a channel of communication is to say that I don't mind ads as long as they're respectful of my purpose for visiting a site, and that communication is better than trial and error.

Some sites I use detect AdBlock, and either ask for me to switch it off or to give them a donation.

I've always assumed they detect it by noticing that a function defined in the ad-serving js is not present in the page.

Most just wait a bit and detect if the ad is hidden (`display:none` or `visibility:hidden`) using javascript.

It shouldn't be too difficult to write a small bit of JavaScript to detect if your ad is being displayed, or if it has been hidden/removed from the DOM.

I spent a long time browsing without an ad blocker. I only started using one a couple years ago after getting hit by a 0-day exploit in an advertisement on a major website.

Now I whitelist the sites that I know don't host third-party script/media content (basically, text/image-only). There aren't many of them, unfortunately.

At present my two choices are: Send ad revenue to websites I like and get my machine owned by exploits, OR, browse without worrying about those exploits AND without the annoyance of advertisements. The latter is a vastly superior choice, even if there is some moral argument to be made about how I'm depriving those websites of revenue.

If someone has a sound technical solution for this problem, I'd love to be able to uninstall adblock plus. It tends to erroneously hide non-ad content sometimes.

Ad networks are very valuable targets for hackers as they tend to exist by being able to execute arbitrary javascript on thousands of sites. Hacking one gives you the perfect platform to launch XSS and CSRF attacks, and to exploit browser vulnerabilities across large numbers of users quickly.

I've always surfed without an ad-blocker and have never had any sort of infection. I'm not doubting your anecdote, I'm just doubting how commonplace it is. To me it seems as rare as an airplane crash.

I know someone who got off a plane at the last stop before the flight where it crashed and killed most of those on-board. They still fly just as often. There's no such thing as a zero-risk life.

The exploited ads issue is a difficult one to solve, but it is not as bad as it used to be. As a website owner, there are certain "remnant" networks that I know to avoid - even though they are now owned by significant brands.

Even the premium ad networks who directly represent websites are occasionally tricked by new clients who sign up as one entity, but their ads contain a payload which only selectively reveals itself once it's out in the wild.

>If someone has a sound technical solution for this problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux works pretty well. I'm not trying to be pedantic, of course - Linux is immune to Windows exploits, of course, and cross platform exploits, such as for Flash, generally don't work unless specifically targeted against Linux, which in practice doesn't happen on a scattershot distribution method like an ad network.

That's not a sound technical solution if you prefer or need a different OS, like Windows or one of the Apples.

Nothing is a sound technical solution if you prefer or are required to be in a situation where it is not possible to employ.

As I began reading this, I thought "ugh, someone making hyperbole about how terrible they thought ads were on the web" (I seriously doubt anyone has been able to do NO adblock-free browsing in 10 years, while using VMs, other computers, family computers, etc.). And then I read the part about clicking an ad, and... wow. I've never thought to click an ad before. Even an ad for a product I want to buy right then, I assumed would take me to some shady site or the main site only via some shady pop-up or something. I kind of really want to see what clicking ads does now.

Same here. Most of the time the sites with the most annoying ads are ones you wouldn't want to frequent anyway so you rarely deal with it. To me ads are just there and I skip over them. Sometimes they catch my attention but they're really not all that annoying. It seems that adblocking is something that was more useful back in the 90's. These days ads are pretty unobtrusive for the most part. There's a bit of pop over here and there for some newsletter they want you to sign up for but it takes less than a second to click out of and they load fast and only display when fully loaded. I thought this was a lot of hyperbole too.

Even if ads are less obtrusive then they once where .. the thing that really annoys me when using a browser without an ad blocker is page loads getting hung up waiting on responses from ads.somedomain.com

So ads are less annoying now than they were a couple of years ago...

Is it perhaps because they've adapted to the increasingly common practice of adblocker(and browsers which prohibit unprompted javascript popups)? Let's not forget that adblocker is a great thing, if only because it incentivized a move towards less obtrusive ads.

Another thing: ads may be less visibily intrusive but things like tracking cookies are still widely (100%?) used. So if privacy is any sort of a concern, an adblocker is probably still a good thing to have.

I don't understand how such thing could be on the front page of Hacker News - this is ridiculous. It's sooo hardcore to browse the web without an adblocker... and survive. I'm sorry, but this is not what a site like HN should be about...

I like this article. I'll have at look at the forked ad-blocker sometime.

It depends on the type of site you visit, but most sites realise that ads are hated and obnoxious ads can cause visitors to leave.

Punishing bad ads, and letting site owners know that they lost a visitor because of the obnoxious ad, is important. Whether that'll counteract the hordes of idiots who'll happily click those ads (see "evony" my lord) is another matter.

> I actually clicked on an advert that interested me. It was the ad for a computer game I wanted to buy. And after seeing the trailer on the ad-site I bought it.

I would not be so sure about that. Without seeing the ad, you might have never watched the trailer. Or maybe a week later when you see the trailer for a different reason you suddenly realize that there is a better game you want to buy. Advertisements are sneaky that way.

I have Adblock enabled and don't ever want to disable it. Those few times I am on a different computer/working inside a virtual machine are enough to stumble upon many ads that are intrusive and annoying. I really wish advertisement would go away alltogether. Of course this won't happen anytime soon, but alternative ways to reward website creators like flattr, paypal donations, beerware license or a simple subscription model are getting more common.

I also use adblock to blacklist everything facebook. I don't have an account, and was often waiting for some fb.com stuff loading on pages. I've whitelisted ads on a handful of sites that explicitly and politely asked their users to do so (reddit, osnews,but NOT arstechnica).

The world on its head, we need an article on hackernews to tell us how 90% of the users are experiencing the web. ;)

Adblock for Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjoc... have an option where you can "Show ads everywhere except for these domains..." (screenshot - https://skitch.com/brajeshwar/gmw2e/adblock-options). Isn't that what you're looking for?

That is the manual approach the Adblock Plus had, too. But I have added a nice gui method for that in my fork :) . In my fork you can simply click on the adblock plus icon in the url bar and activate the adblocker for that site. Behind the scene that will add the site to the list you show in that options screen.

Glad you found out that just because a small minority is abusing the system, its not a good idea to destroy the income stream of all sites. I would love to block people that block the ads on my sites. I respect my users by placing only relevant and non-intrusive ads. If a user doesn't respect me by blocking all my ads, they can find their information or entertainment somewhere else, for all I care.

You lose the chance to prove your value to someone if you block them. I usually whitelist sites that I find useful. I've had Penny Arcade whitelisted for years.

I can't block them, there is no way to do that reliably.

But if I had a brick-and-mortar store, I also wouldn't hand out free products to people who tell me "I may pay the second time".

You've given me nothing if your site didn't make me want to whitelist it. You had no chance of monetizing my visit, so there's no loss to you.

The vast majority of ads (Adsense excluded) are sold on an impression basis. So, yes, you are in fact opting out of helping monetize whichever sites you're browsing. Make your own choices, whatever, but that's the way it works.

I know how it works. I'm not interested in the ad if I'm not interested in the content, so the impression is invalid. And if the content is interesting, then I'll whitelist it and provide more impressions over however many years the site lives.

You lose the chance to earn those long-term impressions when you block people who use ad blockers. And you can run CPM ads on AdWords, so I'm assuming some AdSense ads are CPM-based.

Detecting a hidden DOM element, as described in a comment above, that wouldn't do it?

But that's only asuming JS is enabled.

My 'adblock' is simply not having flash enabled. I haven't seen a particularly annoying ad in ages.

This. I don't really have the conscience to block the only source of revenue a webpage might have. But it's the Flash ads that make my otherwise silent 2009 Macbook Pro 17" (w/ SSD drive) roar like a 747 taking off, and that's where I draw the line. So I use FlashBlock and I'm fine. I think Google Ads (and in fact most ad providers) can detect this and display non-Flash ads instead.

That's fine for now, but with Flash disappearing from mobile devices, and browser enhancements, we're going to see a move from using Flash to just using JavaScript for ADs.

Is there a way to disable flash but whitelist domains whose flash assets I will display? (Meaning I want to whitelist the domain actually serving the asset, not the page displaying them.) I suspect that approach would get rid of 90% of flash ads, while still allowing me to watch youtube or play the occasional flash game.

Flashblock (for Firefox) does this.

An easier solution than forking Adblock Plus to add per-site configurations would be to create a custom filter list. Instead of subscribing to popular Adblock lists like Fanboy's List or EasyList, create a minimal filter list that just blocks the most egregious ads. I'm sure quite a few people might opt for such a list because they hate annoying ads, but feel like that want to support sites they like (by viewing their ads).

I don't understand why you would single out ads. For me the whole experience of a site is what counts. If a site gives me a bad experience, whether due to ads or something else, I don't visit it anymore. Most news aggregators put the site you'll be visiting next to the link, so if you keep an eye on that you can use your brain as "negative experience blocker".

adblock is a waste of time.

i use 3 browsers, a mobile phone, a tablet... i would go insane with something unpractical as adblockers.

Just use this instead: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

work with any browser, any OS.

Interesting concept. I see this list has been updated recently, do you know if it gets updated regularly?

Please look up "where" and "were" in a dictionary. I couldn't focus on the content of the article because I had to reread every sentence containing one of those words.

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