A cartoon butt clenching a bar of soap has invaded my online ads | Hacker News Reader

A cartoon butt clenching a bar of soap has invaded my online ads

arstechnica.com

30 pointsstalfosknight48 comments

Every time I use a computer where they don't have adblock, I feel like the days when we installed chrome for those IE users.

At the same time, telling someone who doesn't use adblock to use them feels like telling them to use limewire to download free music. Yes, it's the way to go. But every time it breaks one of their websites I have inadvertently volunteered to become their lifetime tech support.

The only time recently that I noticed my ad blocker breaking a website was the UI for adding a DNS glue record on Namecheap. It looked like it was working, but the update didn't take. Their support immediately suggested ad blocker, and that was it.

Are others seeing frequent issues where ad blockers break sites?

Stereogum won’t work with ad blockers.

The comments section of the Washington post didn’t work with my ad blocker until the last month or so.

It's not frequent, but it does happen, and usually in unexpected ways. If the whole site is completely broken I usually turn off ad-block and everything is fine. The problem is when the site mostly works but doesn't do some little important thing, like save your changes, that it gets really frustrating.

I setup a pihole for my parents, and my dad would mention that every now and then a whole website just wouldn't work. I eventually got him to show me an example, and he was clicking on the top google results which, to me, were obviously ads and therefore went through the blocked ad.doubleclick.net domain, but to him they were legitimate search results.

It's a reminder of the decades of lessons in cynicism that us tech folk take for granted (and the dim view of the world that these lessons impose on us).

This occasionally annoys me. Sometimes I'll actually be searching for a product and see just what I'm looking for in the sponsored results. It doesn't annoy me enough to get rid of the pihole, though.

The best part of the article is the fact that they have to label each screenshot as “ars technical screenshot” because otherwise a reader will not be able to follow the article because of all the other ads they themselves show on almost every other paragraph.

It's nice that they invite you to subscribe to "contribute to our bottom line"; but it's a pity they didn't take the occasion to label the screenshots as "arse technica".

Yes, this might be one of the few articles where I spent time looking at the ads, just so I could compare. They were all things I would never be interested in, although thankfully none of them were butts.

This is a perfect reason to install uBlock Origin.

Sidenote: your site's SCSS file 404s - https://lorendb.dev/css/main.scss (Firefox, macOS)

Thanks, I've fixed it.

Seriously. If you have enough time and self actualization to complain about the content of online ads, then you have more than enough time to install an ad blocker and be done with that particular form of malware.

This might be a fine solution for individuals, but of course won't help the ads/publishing industry recover from its current death spiral.

It's not intended to help anyone who runs ads.

What is your suggested economic model for internet content? Do you prefer paywalls?

What’s the economic model for hacker news commenters?

Commenting on Hacker News is fun. But I'm really glad the internet has professional journalists as well.

Yes

I tend to pay for quality content, yes.

Somehow, TV and newspapers survived and thrived on non- targeted, not-filthy ads for decades.

I'd have little problem with static ads in webpages that looked like the ones in magazines I grew up with.

Yes, involving a third party with interests contrary to the producer or consumer of the material just adds poor incentives that inevitably lead to poor outcomes.

Is it our job to figure out someone else’s business model?

Not per se. But I think you should in general think about the consequences of your actions. I am concerned about the future of journalism.

To be clear, I also use an adblocker and I don't have any good answers.

Who needs more Internet content?

By "help" I'm assuming you mean the same thing as what I would mean, that is: the acceleration of said death spiral.

> This is a perfect reason to install uBlock Origin.

For anyone who isn’t running Chrome, that is.

And anyone not on iOS stuck with webkit.

They knew what they were getting into, it's never been a secret that iOS is advertising hell.

Add the AdGuard DNS configuration profile to your iDevice as a whole (no need for any separate app), and ads are blocked for everything except apps whose ads are drawn from the same source as their content.

https://adguard-dns.io/en/blog/encrypted-dns-ios-14.html

So yeah. While it won’t kill ads in apps like YouTube or Pinterest, it will kill nearly all ads in web pages and apps that source their ads from external providers.

Complaining about annoying ads while having ads literally every paragraph.

This article was written by someone who has never heard of ad blockers ever.

I assume that since they write for Ars, they want to support the site via ads.

One thing I miss from paper newspapers was the placement of ads based on content on the page. So, for example, if I was looking at the calendar of theater events, or theater reviews, the page would be plastered with ads for performing arts events. It made a lot of sense. They weren't targeted to me as an individual, they were targeted to a reader interested in theater. They weren't off the wall ads about random things, they were focused on what the person might be looking for.

This piece reminded me of this mainly because it shouldn't happen. Not just because it's annoying and disgusting but because the ads should be relevant and interesting to a reader of that content.

I've noticed some similar things with podcasts sometimes, where the ads seem smartly relevant to the podcast focus. But it feels like for a lot of things on the internet, that insight is lost.

I wouldn't hate ads so much if they were respectful of my bandwidth, electronic and mental, and actually respected me enough as a reader to try to put something there that's of interest to me, instead of constantly acting like I'm a random person, selected at random from everyone out there. You can figure out something about me based on what I'm looking at, without tracking me or anything.

Eh...

My adverts are all related to various people in my and my partner's friend circle and past, but it's really weird overall.

My ex-wife ran off with a man who offered to 'help fix our marriage'[0], that man became a 'preacher'.

There were a few periods where I would get lots of adverts telling me to go to Israel to 'get closer to my religion' after that.

When I became friends with someone on discord I started getting a lot of ads for Schizophrenia meds.

During Covid, I had a conversation with a colleague about 'getting tested for covid' and the fucking ad engine decided to slip in ads where a bunch of men in a bar are chatting all happy and the announcer politely talks about STD testing in the foreground.

Speaking of, the last few days I've been getting lots of ads for PReP. It took me a minute for that one, my best guess at present is some friends that are swingers got engaged recently so they've come up more in conversation.

-----

The most shocking to this day however, was way back when Youtube ads got the juxtoposition of "You looked up how your boss's boss was a goat breeder" and "Watching Periodic Table of the Elements" as backgroudfall-asleep audio, led to a a few months straight of advertisements for a company selling Tanks to hold insemination material, 'SemenTanks.com'. Still in business despite the garish font they used 11+ years ago.

[0] - I knew what was happening off the get go but the progression afterwards is hilarious to me considering how he bragged about all of his piracy and hackintoshing.

Pro tip: install an ad blocker and don't be bothered by any of this ever again.

Just wash your butt, man. No Wipe November isn't for another month.

I have exactly this problem of gross online ads, sometimes featuring ways to clear my bowels by eating/not eating bananas. The graphics are, well, graphic.

I never click ads and I turn off personalisation wherever possible. Could it be that the system is punishing me somehow? Is this some dystopian algorithm?

> I turn off personalisation wherever possible

Think about it: if the ad auction house knows nothing about you, then you'd expect to only get least-common-denominator ads. Everyone has a butt, after all.

A saner solution would be to target based on the content (like advertisers did for centuries before the internet).

If someone's reading an article about guitars, there's a good bet they'll respond more favorably to a guitar ad than to a picture of someone's ass. Common sense was a casualty in the transition to the internet.

Sure, that’s obvious. The problem is the tons of content that isn’t easily associated with a product or service. Like news and opinion (many of the article’s examples are from The NY Times)

News about crime -> advertise a home security system

Opinion piece about politics -> advertise a book of the same political leaning

I guarantee, no matter the topic, there's always a more relevant option than someone's ass.

There's books about everything, sure. It doesn't mean this approach is profitable enough to support the news gathering in the first place.

>more relevant option than someone's ass

That's a pretty low bar. I'm not arguing for this kind of ad. I'm only saying that keeping all ads exclusively topical would be highly unprofitable for many categories of information you find on the internet.

>News about crime -> advertise a home security system

That would create some pretty perverse incentives for news organizations to fear monger about local crime (more than usual that is). What could go wrong?

I've always figured that these are the lowest common denominator form of ads.

"Since we have no idea of who you are, this is the drek that targeted to you -- i.e. 'everybody'".

This is also the reason I don't log in to YouTube, and if I do find I video, I open it in a "private tab".

If I don't suddenly my "feed" explodes with even more stuff I was barely interested in when I wanted to watch the video in the first place.

Never let it know you might be casually interested in anything borderline controversial, or you'll be overwhelmed with every fringe dingbat clickbait video that's, perchance, even barely related to the video you watched.

I dunno though, surely the lowest common denominator would be a car ad? Or an advert for pizza? This seems -worse- than that.

Yes, it's worse than that though. These news sites are pushing ads at paying customers. I saw an ad at wsj.com the other day-- a site I pay an exorbitant sum to browse-- that disappeared the entire article as I scrolled through it. I get it, they used to have ads in printed newspaper and everyone shrugged and read on. However, this is different, and I regularly find myself exasperated by-- when I click on a show in PBS's paid subscription app, they immediately launch a 30-second ad, not the show; Peacock launches a 3-minute ad, not the show. The New York Times shows other reporters the backsides of dogs. I read about Ford prioritizing development of technology they acknowledge their customers will hate to show them similar tripe unbidden in their cars.

This is clearly a dystopian development and it turns on its head the old adage that when you pay for a product you become the customer. These businesses are abusing their "customers" by treating them as something less.

When cable TV originally launched it was ad free, in exchange for the subscription. Eventually commercials got added back in, and very few people cancelled their subscriptions.

> Could it be that the system is punishing me somehow?

Yes. The system is punishing you with ads for not having an ad blocker.

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