Hacker News Reader

Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

I cannot understand how people accept ads. It triggers me so much when I open an article and between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends. YT is crazy with their multiple ads unskippable sometimes 30 mins long wtf.

Thank you UBO

regarding tracking: I guess I don't care about that since I get these updates from Google about where I've been in the year with dots on a US map.

View on HN

> between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends

And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.

Part of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.

This. It's not that the Firefox is ignoring your video auto-play settings, it's that it isn't video, courtesy of the industry's greed and lack of any respect for people.

I want to block anything that looks like autoplaying video.

This also brings the fastest computers to their knees because it bypasses hardware acceleration.

Yes, it was the technique but many years ago, like 2015.

I somehow managed to do it completely and flawlessly in Firefox after a day of effort and sheer hate for the fact that checking the box to keep videos from autoplaying didn't keep any videos from autoplaying. I've now forgotten how I did it and I'm afraid to change any config settings. I think I recall some diffing utility for firefox settings that I could hopefully use to figure out what I did.

It burns me up that the fact that I blocked autoplay reliably means that Firefox could do it, they just don't want to.

edit: I might have gotten the settings from a blog, but I have a strong feeling they might have been from combing the firefox bugtracker.

Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio unless the user has clicked to play a video on the same page. There is definitely an arms race for ads that find holes in the autoplay heuristics.

You might try setting the about:config settings “media.autoplay.default” to 5 and/or “media.autoplay.blocking_policy” to 2:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78...

If you think there is a Firefox bug, you can file a bug report and link it to this autoplay bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376321

> Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio.

I want a reliable way to block autoplay of all videos, whether or not they have audio.

Readable view in Firefox is pretty reliable and builtin.

I wish it worked on more sites.

Because they have never experienced anything better or been very slowly gotten used to it (5 second ad every 10th video, then every 9th and to whatever we have right now). That's pretty much it. That's also the reason why us, people who don't see that many ads, can't go through a single ad. Because we haven't gotten used to the other side.

> I cannot understand how people accept ads.

Advertisements have been around for thousands of years. The concept predates industry, democracy, and (depending on who you ask) capitalism itself.

Yes, but now the ads watch us.

Widespread and significant use of advertising dates to the latter half of the 19th century, most especially as a principle revenue basis for periodical publications.

There's an excellent, short, readable, and information-dense source on this, by Hamilton Holt (a magazine publisher himself) published in 1909, describing roughly the prior half-century's remarkable development of an advertising-funded publishing industry, and the absolutely corrosive effects visible even then, Commercialism and Journalism. Quoted in the first pages an observation from the 1880s, already nearly three decades prior:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>

Holt doesn't name his source, I've since learnt it was John Swinton, himself a journalist (chief editorial writer of the New York Times in the 1860s):

<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)>

In the past, an advertisement would be more like something printed in a newspaper or magazine next to the articles.

Nowadays, it is more like the people running the airport security line, who record down their observations.

I cannot understand why most of "ads" are even legal. It has to be the case of whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com