I used to not do Adblock, because you know, ads make the internet go round and all that.
But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.
But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.
As someone with a browsing profile that isn't targeted by those kind of ads, I've found out second-hand that I've been running ads like that a few times. Trying to prune specific ads is an endless game of whack-a-mole that I've never been able to win, and disabling an entire category of ads just to prevent 1% of them from running is very tough on the bottom line.
There should be an easier way of black/white listing certain types of ads when setting up adsense.
Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someone in the industry that aggressively hostile ads are ruining their industry rather than being a staple of it.
If they don't... Then I don't mind seeing that industry die.
You may not mind seeing that industry die, but until you start paying for visiting websites, you'll have to amend that to say "I don't mind seeing the internet die".
I think you'll find in the absence of one solution, another presents itself.
As an example, github is not an ad based service, nor is it some sorta bait and switch. It's terms are reasonable and is generally useful to everyone.
That is ridiculously dramatic to say "The internet will die"
It's just the shitty part that will die.
THAT is why people install Adblock. Content owners crying butthurt because "Adblock hurts the sites you love" ignores that the sites you "love" can often just not be trusted not to accept ads that are shady, scummy, or worse. And there is no excuse for that. If your business revolves around spraying dog mess over people's windows, don't be surprised when people put up fences. You reap what you sow.
In addition to the NSA, GCHQ, SVR RF, Mossad and other n-letter agencies, there are some 30 corporations that know everything about what and where you browse, keep that data not-very-secure, sell it to the highest bidder - any bidder, actually.
Do you like that? I don't.
Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be somew immoral , violating the contract with which you're looking at someone's content. I have less sympathy for people who are basically showing stolen content (not technically stolen , but still), though...
http://marc.durdin.net/2012/08/rant-of-the-day-the-big-green...
Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)? Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the motto really should be all the news that fits, we print.
That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators, as they are on opposite sides of the building.
There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.
The papers I've worked on usually had a little flexibility in terms of extra copy or advertising to populate pages as required.
Well, that by definition would be considered an ethical violation at a paper like the Times. Not at a student paper, no, but at the New York Times, definitely.
What possible ethical issue is there?
I'm curious about what you think the ethical breach here is. Advertising and editorial departments have to coordinate on practical matters like page layout.
http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-...
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-p...
Though I just never bothered installing Flash. If I need Flash for a site, I use Chrome (which comes with Flash embedded, I believe).
I should note that I have no qualms about blocking ads I would never click anyway. I don't harbor ridiculous puritanical notions that I must suffer in exchange for "free" content. Nor do I abide by the notion that anyone else has the right to sell my attention merely because they make content. Monetization should be cooperative, not coercive (and I also support content creators directly quite often).
Not on a computer right now to try it out for myself, but it sounds like an interesting approach.
Fuck that. You pull that shit, your whole industry can just go and get fucked. If you need to pull that shit to live, you need to fucking die.
This laptop has 8GB because Firefox with ABP is really fat. It's worth every byte. I use FF for personal stuff, Chromium for work; occasionally I load a non-work page in Chromium and am bloody horrified at what the web looks like with ads.
You could blacklist them, rather than universally denying revenue.
I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it.
edit: While I agree that the blacklisting solution shouldn't be too much work, the charming "setup and forget" experience most adblockers provide will probably win through.
That said, thankfully the new design has fewer ads, which should help a lot. It really just depends, it's easy to go down a rabbit whole with ads... but we get 90% if our ad revenue from 40% of our ads. So cutting out a lot changes the layout of income without nearly so much impact on revenue.
This is possibly true, but not particularly relevant, as my comment mentions that I'm talking specifically about those who _do_ engage in moral justification. Among the people with whom I've talked about it, those who claim a moral justification are far more common than those who simply say "I don't like ads and I don't care about creators not getting paid". I would be surprised if there weren't many HNers whose sample is similar to mine.
Tangentially but not importantly, I'm not convinced that only a small portion of users openly think "yes I'm consuming a product without paying and I have no other justification other than 'i dont want to pay' ". Part of the reason you see such contortions in an attempt at moral justification is because one can draw a pretty clear parallel to "I would shoplift if I didn't think I'd get caught", with the only (somewhat dubious) distinction being differences in marginal cost.
Note that I have talked to people who have a moral stance on adblocking and piracy that _is_ consistent, but this is rare since it's usually accompanied by a pretty radical stance along the lines of "all information (music, art, writing, etc) should be completely free", which requires a pretty massive amount of philosophical baggage in terms of having a sense of how this affects the incentive to create said information.
"In the _absence_ of non-ad monetization for a given product, do I decide that the transaction (view ads, get the product) is not for me or do I unilaterally decide to take the product without compensation".
I don't want to download a trojan from a malicious ad-server. Not even once.