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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used to run a site that made money from tracking people by showing them ads (and we tried really hard to make those ads unintrusive and relevant), I have mixed feelings on this.

On one hand I totally get why people don't want to be tracked (I don't). On the other hand, for many of these sites, this is their only source of revenue.

Whenever I ask, "is it ok for those sites to block you if you are running adblock" usually people say "no, they need to find a different business model!". But my question back is always: until they do find a new business model, if they can survive by blocking people who use adblock, why shouldn't they?

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> But my question back is always: until they do find a new business model, if they can survive by blocking people who use adblock, why shouldn't they?

In this day and age, Adblock is a necessity for nontechnical users. I installed it on my parents' machines to protect them against drive-by-downloads, malware, etc.

Someone may say, "I know my ad networks would never do anything of the sort". But the fact is, ad networks get compromised, and even ad networks that have strict policies for acceptable ads sometimes have bad actors slip through. Even if it's not often, it's enough of a risk that it's simply not worth it.

FWIW, Reddit may be in a different situation, since I believe Reddit's ads are self-hosted. In that sense, I'd view it more as analogous to sponsored user-generated content, which I have other philosophical issues with, but don't suffer from this problem.

> since I believe Reddit's ads are self-hosted

I'm not sure where it is at now, but we had a mixed situation when I was there. We self hosted some, but one of the things we "self hosted" was an iframe to an ad network.

We had to be really careful because everything you said was (and probably still is) true. Bad actors slip through, networks get compromised, etc. This is spot on: "Even if it's not often, it's enough of a risk that it's simply not worth it.". That was exactly the conclusion we came to.

This was it for me. I don't really care about the stupid "hit the monkey and win" blinking animated .gifs, and lived with them for years without really worrying, but in 2015 ad blockers aren't sunglasses, they're condoms.

Furthermore, I installed uBlock in Firefox for Android because ads were getting so bad that it was essentially impossible to view some sites. It was a last-ditch effort to offer the content one last chance to survive. If publishers would prefer I not see their content at all, that's fine... I was almost already there, anyway.

In response to jedberg's question: I personally don't mind but I don't believe I'm as petulant and entitled as the typical loud mouthed redditor, but reddit made that bed, and now they get to lay in it.

> Furthermore, I installed uBlock in Firefox for Android because ads were getting so bad that it was essentially impossible to view some sites.

This in itself is enough of a reason for me to use Firefox on Android and recommend it to everyone who uses Android.

There are a lot of other great things about it, but the fact that it allows installation of extensions (and therefore allows adblocking for non-rooted devices) is huge.

Agreed. Not sure why Firefox on Android has such a low user base but I wouldn't consider anything else at this point.

I certainly would not use Chrome, despite its extensions.

Because Google actively work to make it a bad experience.

Look at GMail in Firefox Android. Now look at GMail in Chrome Android.

You should easily be able to allow self hosted ads in most good ad blockers, right?

  I totally get why people don't want to be tracked (I 
  don't). On the other hand, for many of these sites, this 
  is their only source of revenue.

There was an interesting article on here the other day [1] that points out the distinction between advertising and tracking, in terms of the interests of content producers.

In particular, if you have a valuable audience it's actually a bad thing if you let them be tagged as such, then retargeted on lower quality sites.

For example, let's say I run www.really-good-original-car-journalism.com - it's prime advertising space because loads of my readers are in the market for new high-end cars. I make $x per ad click.

But if I let ad networks tag my readers as 'shopping for a new high-end car' and retarget later, my readers get the same adverts on www.bobs-domain-parking.com but at a fraction of the cost per click - and with that much-reduced payment going to Bob, not me.

It's one thing to run adverts on a website. Letting ad networks track your readers is a different matter - especially if you're producing high quality content.

[1] http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

I find it really depressing that the only business model that seems to work online is ads. Paying for things by ads is so convoluted and distorting.

There should really be a open micro-payments systems. I absolutely don't mind paying $0.10 to read an article, I'm already investing much more, in a dollars/minute sense by reading the article anyway. I guess the trick is to do this in a very automatic and anonymous way.

Notice how there is no way to pay google for using gmail, maps, etc., even if you wanted to (maybe if you sign up as a business?). I'd much rather just pay Google $100 per year, than introduce all the problems associated with monetizing my data.

That's exactly what reddit did with reddit gold. You basically get to pay $4 a month to not see ads (and therefore not get tracked).

... except that the fact one is a reddit gold member has to be validated, and therefore one is tracked; every login is audited by Reddit itself.

I don't know whether they do it, but they could set a http-only cookie "gold=true" when you purchase a gold account. You could then logout and they would not habe to track you personally to check your gold status.

"Tracking" generally refers to third parties identifying you across websites.

Pointing out that Reddit "tracks" you with its authentication system as you browse Reddit just dilutes the term and the gravity of concern when organizations are able to connect your browsing history to you.

Put another way, a "has_gold" boolean field in the users table doesn't seem to be the issue that the EFF is attempting to address here.

That's sort of the point, though. Is there anything in the "do not track" policies that prevents the data owner (Reddit in this scenario) from just selling its own scraped data on the end-user to an ad network? Ad tracking is functionally equivalent; the tracking scripts just automate and simplify the process.

"Do not track" is a bit of a toothless concept when the very nature of the medium is to make auditable connections to remote servers.

>Notice how there is no way to pay google for using gmail, maps

There is; get your own domain and sign up for https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/. It's $50 a year for a single person, no ads, plus phone/email support.

It's technically business, but I don't think that's required to sign up.

>> "is it ok for those sites to block you if you are running adblock"

It's absolutely fine by me. I'll even be happy to broadcast in a request header that I'm doing so, to make it easy for you.

Then I get to decide whether your site warrants me unblocking ads or not.

Trackers, however, never.

Sure, it's absolutely your choice to block who you want from your site. IMO, once you have decided that you need to track users, then it is better that you put a block up for people who have set DNT rather than willfully ignore the setting.

> Whenever I ask, "is it ok for those sites to block you if you are running adblock" usually people say "no, they need to find a different business model!".

Of course it's OK for sites to block visitors running AdBlock. It's also OK for AdBlock to circumvent such blocks. No laws or contracts are being violated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002606

Not telling all your non-techie friends to run an adblocker is grossly negligent of their welfare.

"just run an ad blocker" is the new "just run a firewall". You need to check if you got something with real tracking protection (Adblock Plus doesn't, out of the box). http://blog.aloodo.org/posts/adblockers-myths-facts/

The question is not if its an acceptable tradeoff for the user, but if the developer can accept having a large group of people perceiving the site as broken/unusable.

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