Hacker News Reader

Comment by MatthiasPortzel | Hacker News Reader

You clearly use an ad blocker. That page is over 50% ads.

Wow. I just loaded it and then turned off the adblocker and reloaded it. It's like you need another search engine just to find the content in the page hidden amongst all those ads.

I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.

Yes people are. And it’s the least technically literate people with “outdated” machines and bad connections that slug through the web like this. They don’t know what to trust and often fall prey to deceptive tactics.

There's also a class of people who can just filter out all those distractions much better than many of us, and have a high tolerance for slowness.

Strange, I don't see a single ad for this query (current time in javascript), using Chrome logged into my Google account. Results are good as well.

Well I did not see any thanks to Brave and the content was spot on and that is all that really matters to me

My goodness, I thought you were exaggerating. I've been using ad blockers for so long, I forgot the web had this many ads. Or has it just gotten worse over time?

Well, I still remember times when 50% of google results weren’t ads.

Interestingly, Bing almost doesn’t display search ads, and the search results are becoming even better than Google. I haven’t had a need to use google for a few months now.

I wonder if adblockers have contributed to this. In theory we users can reward non-horrible advertisers by whitelisting their ads, but in practice we tend to block as much as possible. The remaining ad-viewing audience will be partly composed of people who are ethically opposed to adblocking or are held back by a lack of tech knowledge, but it will also be relatively insensitive to ads (both in the sense of being able to put up with a lot, and in the sense of requiring a lot to attract their attention).

> ethically opposed to adblocking

How can you be ethically opposed to something that ruins your experience? It’s obviously their choice, I just can’t imaging browsing without adblock, I’m ethically opposed to the pages filled with crap I guess.

Those who go through the effort to make good web content, and who pay the costs for a web server deserve to be paid. So ethically I should not block ads.

I block them anyway because ads also have an ethical contract with me that they have broken. They need to not take up too many resources on my computer, not make noise when the website otherwise has no noise content, not install malware, and be for legitimate products not scams. Probably more as well, but the above are things I regularly caught ads doing before I got an ad blocker.

If Chrome, Edge, Safari all came with uBlock by default, what percentage do you think would be "ethically opposed" enough to disable the extension? How many would turn it right back on?

I think it depends on the site. I remember early 00s where many download sites would have ads with a download button, or pop-ups that blasted sound like YOU JUST WON. Now I think that sorta thing has been normalized to even non shady sites. My primary use of ad blocker is so that I don't get random autoplaying videos.

It has gotten significantly worse.

And by that, you are telling google you liked that result (by clicking on it), even if in the end ads revenue is not increased by your visit. Maybe Google consider less important signals coming from ad-blocking browsers, that I don't know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com