The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive.
Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.
Maybe easy version could work exactly the same way as blockers do, except they'd invert the way the rules are evaluted, and of course the rules would need to be custom as well. And then if the rules would fail to find some actual content on the page, then I guess you might not even know about it :).
But isn't "filtering out all of the content" just another way of saying, "not loading any content" - until explicitly requested?
Can I tell uMatrix to only show a certain XPath from the page? If so, I agree it is a content selector, albeit pretty impractical :).
I do install uBlock Origin for all non-technical family members, but uMatrix is so much more capable.
"Blocker" implies a specific set of assumptions about a publisher having some say in how content gets presented. "UserAgent" entails a different worldview, one that the companies making browsers seem increasingly unwilling to defend against competing interests.
No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way.
When I first started browsing the web I didn't have a graphical browser at home. My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not. It was not "blocking" anything, it was rendering the available content according to the capabilities of my system.
> "Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive."
It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display, when the web was specifically designed such that they should not.
> "Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content"
I modify many aspects of webpage display to help me assimilate content. When a website has chosen difficult to read colors, I change them so they're easier to see. I change fonts and font sizes. I modify page layouts, sometimes collapsing many separate pages into one long page, and sometimes I use screen readers and I don't even look at a visual rendering at all. I often remove annoying, obnoxious or intrusive content which also make it harder for me to read a page, many of which are ads.
The web is specifically designed from inception to give this agency to clients. Websites provide units of content and suggestions on how to best display it. That is all.
It was designed with this technical capability. But the social contract was always that you went to a site for it to tell you what to display. And we have many very nice, very non-standard sites because of it.
There is nothing wrong on blocking part of that content, but everybody's state of mind is that by default, any site content is expected to load.
Source that this is just a side effect from other design decisions?
>My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not
Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard.
>It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display
They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS.
The source would be Tim Berners-Lee's original 1989 proposal for a hypertext information system. He specifically wrote: "We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."
These sentiments are also reflected in other technical documents such as RFC 1866. The intent is crystal clear.
> "Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard."
I think this is a common reaction from people who aren't old enough to remember a world before mega-complex browser platforms and non-portable websites came into being. My browser absolutely was standards compliant at the time, and it was expected that websites would be viewable without graphics.
Keep in mind: javascript had not yet been invented.
Again, HTML is specifically designed around portability, generality, and flexibility. This has been degraded by the rush of commercialization and related platform lock-in -- in large part due to things web 2.0. This is not a good thing.
> "They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS. "
I think you should read a bit deeper into the underpinnings of these standards you're referencing.
This would support the opinion that entire web sites should be protable as opposed to just a small subset.
Oops. I guess you meant to say user request selector/filter then if the term "block" is so loaded.
And if a user wants to have a policy of selectively choosing what content they want, but that content is hard to define or whitelist, then using a blacklist mechanism doesn't mean that the policy is to block. It's just the most common, practical method of choosing the content you want.
No one has enough time in the world to block all the infinite amount of useless content. We already do that perpetually by what we personally value the most and what we choose to ignore.
The client can interpret the data from the website however it wants regardless of the intention of the website.
A website, for example, can use tags that a client doesn’t comply with.
The client is and always has been opinionated. It does not and never has had to obey the websites intentions.
"One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps."
In reality, the more interesting question would be whether we shouldn't limit our media consumption to begin with, or form a culture that is less dependent on advertising. If browsing with ads becomes mandatory some day, I will probably make the choice to severely cut the amount of Internet I gorge on. It will take some willpower, but every time I switch off the blocker and see what websites really are like I want to gag, so I won't be that difficult.
I personally don't care if click bait tabloids and exploitative re-hosters we're to crumble overnight.
The case of HN is particularly enlightening because the community is very hostile to ads and for the most part has the technical ability to avoid them with a higher degree of sophistication than just installing Ublock. But there is also the majority of the focus and admiration placed on SWEs and companies that are directly and indirectly tied to the ad ecosystem. The energy given off is similar to McDonald's executives yelling at their children if they see them with a processed patty in hand.
There is a ocean of addictive distractions to wade through, but at the same time we know the following things:
- We have to be constantly mindful of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect
- News sources and journalism have always had significant quality problems when they venture beyond just reporting basic news, even in the case of business-oriented publications that as Chomsky has pointed out have a vested interest in delivering quality reporting
- Understand topics requires delving into the academic literature in many cases. In this scenario, the internet becomes the line towards that literature or those long-form articles but most of the users' time has to be spent reading and thinking instead of just browsing
- Identifying skinner boxes and addiction traps is easy. You usually know when you are in one. We have to just be honest about what our goals in life are and how much progress we are making towards them
What this does not solve is the problem of focusing on the wrong things in life or embarking in a career or interests that are ultimately deleterious to your life. But the internet at least makes it far easier to pivot and refocus as long as you let it do so and use it towards a conscious goal. This mindfulness is easier said than done but it's far from an impossibility.
That's why I think the internet would be better off without a lot of the intense duplication that is out there today.
Sort of. Many of the useful (not ad-driven) sites of the 90s are still around. Mine are. So in that sense, yes.
But they are drowned by the flood of ad and SEO-driven junk. Finding the good parts, if you don't already know, is becoming harder. Search engines no longer return most of the useful sites on any given topic.
Today's internet has astoundingly accessible resources on all sorts of things. A motivated person can still sidestep all of the crap with relative ease. Or to put it another way, if they get lost in the shrubs, they weren't gonna make it in any case. Motivated people now have many more tools and platforms at their disposal to gather alongside one another and make things happen. The pre-September internet was more private, yes, but that was actually a massive flaw in an absolute sense. Now you can have a bright middle class Mongolian kid become an electronics expert on his own and the greybeards aren't barred from finding their watering hole either.
The web in the late 90s was in most ways far more pleasant and useful place than today. Content was a labor of love, not driven by advertising.
I wouldn't hesitate for an instant go back to an internet which bans advertising. It would be far better than what we have today, not just the ads but all the toxic data collection and spyware that those fuel.
There was a link posted to HN today: "Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto". I remember when a web search about any topic would find you a few similar pages, of people diving deeply into topics and DIYing experiments and publishing everything they'd learned simply because they wanted to share hard-won knowledge.
On my projects-to-do-someday list, I would like to try mashing up a search engine to filter out results that contain advertising (load the page, check if anything matches adblock list, if so, discard). Obviously in today's adcancer-filled web, that is going to discard the vast majority of results. But I'd hope that it would eventually surface some interesting results that have been drowned out by spam, assuming they're even still indexed. But it certainly couldn't be any worse than all the false positives that drown the results these days.
The way those ads get put these is massive privacy violations happen to fuel an engine that’s smarter than you with data. Then this engine shows the perfect ad at the perfect time in the perfect moment of weakness to get you to do what the advertiser wants.
If these ads were merely roadside billboards I don’t think I would care as much. These are internet ads connected to an extensive surveillance infrastructure. Manifest v3 indirectly means an increase in surveillance activity and the biggest companies and governments on earth expanding their power. Let’s also not just say that content blockers merely block ads, I use them to block scripts all the time which are there to expressly mine your data to manipulate you in the future. I’m not smart enough to not get manipulated if I give these companies my data.
If I block ads to prevent all that and we have less 6 figure FAANG jobs and convenient services on the internet - oh no! P2P is a thing, community run websites are a thing, alternative funding models are a thing, open source is a thing, lower wages are fine, we’ll be fine.
If you don’t have moral qualms with using your eyelids to block ads then you shouldn’t have with software content blockers either. It just outsources the act of blocking from your eyes into the computer.
Ad blockers on the PC are the same thing.
Not everything needs to be analyzed to death for some sort of symbolism.