Dev-Metal Shows Ads to Adblockers | Hacker News Reader

Dev-Metal Shows Ads to Adblockers

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18 pointscobeck2218 comments

"But ads are needed to refinance free stuff".

NO. They are not.

Donations are tax-exempt so you can finance free stuff like openbsd and libressl.

Advertisements are a sneaky way to sell your visitors eyes to sneaky businesses. They are pollution. In all kinds of media they appear in, TV, Radio, Internet, books. They destroy the media they target - until people move on to more greener freer pastures, then the advertisements come and pollute everything, until the information is so diluted of content it is no longer serving as a media of information and instead only serves, the people selling advertisements, disinformation.

If you cant finance your website, the first option should be call for donations, if that doesnt work then bankrupt it, call it what it is, unsustainable business, rather than selling it to advertisers and selling your visitors out. That is actually a form of bankrupt, its just slower and everyone looses except the people selling ads, and they are so ashamed of it they dont even call it advertisement business - theyre always switching names, from propaganda to advertising to PR and social media marketing.

A world without advertising is possible.

No, no they won't. Not my users, anyway, because I block your ads at the DNS resolver level by redirecting queries to my own Apache instance, which serves single pixel images or empty JS as necessary.

Despite protestations in TFA to the contrary, publishers CAN'T be trusted not to create a tunnel for bad actors via adservers. They don't have the level of control required to do so. If you want the $$$, change your business model. If it turns out that no-one wants to pay for your content, perhaps it's not worth anything?

Wikipedia is a good example, its been on donations for years and is still going.

Wikipedia is a great example of where donations DO work. I couldn't imagine an internet without it, and I'm happy to donate and support it.

Sadly the data suggests that for most websites donations are not a viable alternative to ads. Some numbers here: http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/introducing-pagefair-ads/

I think the challenge is that we use many different websites every day. I've probably visited sites today that I've never been to before and will never visit again. These guys are not getting a donation from me.

Maybe the future internet will consist of a small number of donation-supported sites, but wouldn't it be sad to lose all this variety?

If those sites aren't providing anything of value, what are we really losing?

I don't know how to break this to you, but this doesn't work. I'm running a completely standard installation of an ad-blocker with EasyList, and it blocks all ads on this site.

https://mediacru.sh/D8edJpM35tVb

The problem with ads is when they are abused. Pop-ups, videos, scams, and so on. I think it might be nice to have some high-quality ads, especially if it contributes to high-quality free content.

Am I missing something? Why won't AdBlock simply be updated to also block PageFair?

This new service is already blocked by an ad blocker with a subscription to EasyList. It doesn't work.

https://mediacru.sh/D8edJpM35tVb

The ads are only visible to Adblock Plus users who have Acceptable Ads enabled; other adblocking plugins block the ads

Can anyone explain how this works? Won't Ad-Block or other ad blockers block them out? I've heard you can pay AdBlock to unblock your ads? Is that what's happening?

Ars Technica shows an "ad" to people using ad-blockers. I'm not sure of all the details, but they have the ad image binary inlined in the HTML, which makes it much harder to block.

It's actually very clever. They're using a base64 encoded PNG to display an 'ad' that doesn't actually smell like an ad. It would be pretty easy to just kill this element without impacting the rest of the content, but that's a crude tool.

Yeah, they clearly aren't trying that hard because it can still be trivially blocked by Adblock after right-clicking. If they randomized the URL, it would be trickier.

Firefox has had a request open since 2006 regarding the blocking of data:image elements; not just for ad blocking but also for general image-free browsing.

Still no progress after seven years

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331257

It should be relatively simple to detect if an ad is blocked. Simply after load check for an element ID or such and see if it exists or not.

In my upcoming mysimpleads ad server release I've been careful not to use terms like ad or banner and keep it generic. I'm debating about using a per site key for element classes, but not sure if it's worth the little bit of extra overhead.

Is this already live on Dev-Metal?

I use the MVPS Hosts File + gas mask on OS X instead of an ad blocker, and I went to the Dev-Metal home page to see if I would get presented with the add on the left, and I did not.

Just seems like it causes an arms race.

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