Hacker News Reader

Comment by HaEB4zcjbp | Hacker News Reader

After having used adblock plus for like the last 2 years, I disabled it the other day and have been amazed at how terrible the Internet is without it.

Whenever I use someone else's computer I'm always amazed and wonder how can they stand it. I have noticed people actually getting frustrated at ads making sounds and what not.

You should read this: https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-by-the-numbers

after hearing a talk Robert Hansen gave at AppSec USA, I then realize why adblock plus has been doing a poor job :( it can't stop most of the pop ups and ads anymore.

It does if you uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising"

I think you misunderstand. AdBlock doesn't force this whitelisting, it merely defaults to using it.

Did you just say they default to use the whitelist ad program?

Yes, I believe if you just blindly click through the initial install for the extension, the limited whitelisting (for 'unobtrusive ads') will be in effect. That's the whole idea, isn't it - to whitelist for the majority of users who don't read the fine print or tweak things, while still allowing anyone who cares to shut it off.

Could not agree more. Its almost frighting.

It kinda reminds me, as a long standing Formula 1 fan, of what NASCAR looked like on TV when I first started watching it. It was like being assaulted with brand names. Quite a culture shock.

However, these days, I try to be oh so generous and disable the adblock for sites that I, in my "wisdom", want to get the ad revenue. Hell, I'll even click a few if Im feeling especially generous!!!!

Don't you know it's your solemn duty to brainwash yourself so that others can get paid?

Personally, while I'm almost frustrated enough with YouTube ads to use an ad blocker, I'm hesitant to do so because the authors of the videos I watch are often precisely the kind of people I want to support, and I've heard YouTube is hard enough to depend on for income without people blocking ads. I'd love to have an option to directly pay money instead, but I doubt it'll ever happen.

Twitch.tv is similar but considerably more annoying - but it provides such an option, and I'm considering buying it, although (unlike YouTube) I probably don't watch enough Twitch videos for it to be worthwhile.

check out subbable.com , they sure trying to make content the same way npr does. thru donations and funding drives.

I would guess most full time producers would have swag shops where you can spend money on them.

For people who are missing your second link: youtube-dl is a video downloader, and it works on far, far more than just YouTube.

The benefits: you download videos at your discretion and preference. You can archive them if you want (I do this largely for documentary / lecture videos), and play them back locally using the video player of your preference. I generally prefer either mplayer or xine, both offer keyboard controls over playback, vastly better rewind / forward control than YouTube's default player (or anyone else's for that matter), consistent video controls for all videos, and the ability to speed up (I run most straight presentation videos at 120 - 160% of normal) or slow down (things going boom) videos as desired.

Embedded players are OK for getting a quick sample of something or very brief content, but not for serious viewing.

Also, using clive, I noticed that I get much more consistent download speed.

FF/RW problems may be your ISP and not YT. TWC is notorious for routing YT through its own servers and it's terrible; others may be just as bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276772

Not using TWC. It could be my ISP's peers, but my ISP itself is both rather competent and very network neutral.

Give AdblockEdge a try. It's a true open source clean fork of AdblockPlus, and it doesn't have the "acceptable ads" whitelisted, which are only whitelisted in some cases because Google/etc. paid them off.

Agreed, "Adblock Edge" is the way to go. Original "Adbock Plus" gets money from Google to not filter their ads:

    Google has tried to fight back against Adblock, partly by paying Adblock to whitelist some of their ads. 
    Google’s business model is all about ads but as awareness of Adblock grows it’s increasingly difficult to get ads in front of online users.

src: http://socialtimes.com/youtube-pre-roll-ads-drive-users-inst...

Also: https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-by-the-numbers

I work on Adblock Plus and would like to clarify some things:

1. Adblock Plus is fully open source, has always been, will always be. Everything else we do is open source too, including our infrastructure and backend systems. (https://hg.adblockplus.org/)

2. Adblock Edge is an unmaintained (edit: Not true, there've been some changes lately) fork of an old Adblock Plus version, with the Acceptable Ads feature removed.

3. Acceptable Ads are an opt-out feature which whitelists ads that comply with the Acceptable Ads criteria. Large sites have to support the project in return, but there's no way around the criteria. (https://adblockplus.org/en/about)

As an aside, we're currently looking into a way of making it easy for users to whitelist ads on YouTube channels they like automatically. Pre-roll video ads will never be acceptable and hence never will be whitelisted for all users by default, but many people still want to support individual YouTubers.

I don't think it's fair to say that Adblock Edge is unmaintained when it has more recent updates than Adblock Plus:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...

Oh wow, you're right, there've been some changes lately. Edited that above. Last time I checked it seemed pretty dead.

I don't mind forks at all, that's why ABP is open source. Just thought it's a pity it was unmaintained, but it really looks like they're putting some effort into it now.

Acceptable ads should be opt-in feature and not opt-out. You are just building an ecosystem where you hold ad networks hostage. And you are being paid by Google.

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995140

The opt out rate is below 5% right now - that's what the opt in rate would be, probably even a bit less. There's no way to get any site interested in improving their ads like this. It's definitely controversial, I wasn't a fan of this at first either, but it really wouldn't change anything the other way around.

Also, we're clearly communicating this on our website, the first run page and in the settings UI and make it dead-simple to opt out. We're even planning to show a little notice next to whitelisted ads in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com