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Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

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Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#471

Post by jordigh »

lmm wrote: post #117
jordigh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking something like what São Paulo implemented, https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/73/Sao_Paulo_A_City_Witho... Or, perhaps, you only get ads when requested. "I'm in the market for a new refrigerator. Please show me ads for refrigerators." But still, I have a fundamental problem with how all advertising has a slant, and at least a hint of a lie or manipulation. I do not like being lied to or manipulated, but…

The followup article I saw here a few months ago suggested that Sao Paulo hasn't found that entirely successful, and has allowed a significant amount of advertising back.

I tried looking for this, I really did, but I couldn't find it. Can you find this information and put it in Wikipedia? I tried reading both the English and Portuguese articles, and I couldn't find what you are talking about. The only thing I saw in the Portuguese Wikipedia is that 8 years later they're having problems with illegal electoral flyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lei_Cidade_Limpa

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#472

Post by dkarapetyan »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #460
logingone wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need. Interesting. I'm the opposite. I've yet to encounter an ad that has a hope in hell of manipulating me at all. I couldn't be more dismissive of them. And if I encounter one too often my dislike of the company starts to grow. "It's show time, and you've b…

You're ignoring subconscious ad effects, which largely are the main effects that advertisers are seeking to use. You scan quickly over some innocuous-seeming ad for Product-X-that-of-course-you'd-never-ever-buy, and now you are psychologically primed -- the shade of blue in the ad was chosen because it tested best for users who also viewed page Y and whose IP addresses place them in your area -- the ad contained a hu…

I mean you're just taking it to conspiracy levels now. Priming is indeed a thing but those kinds of associations are very short-lived. I don't know of any priming effect that lasts for months and years or at least I haven't read any study that indicates that.

If advertisers really knew what they were doing there wouldn't be so much advertising spam. They are just blasting the speakers as loudly as they can and then tracking every little thing possible because they think they can optimize the pipeline somehow. There is no science behind any of it.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#473

Post by magicalist »

_wmd wrote: post #238
NelsonMinar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question the legality and ethics of selling new ads on top of other people's content.

It worked for Google

only when using that content under fair use (snippets and image thumbnails) or was transformative (e.g. book search, which doesn't even directly have ads)

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#474

Post by magicalist »

Animats wrote: post #371
anotherhacker wrote: post #45

I'm doubtful of this taking off. People stick with the default apps and settings. The average person just really doesn't care that much about this kind of thing. Maybe enterprise or businesses will like it - so they can avoid their employees visit whitelisted sites that mistakenly have malicious code in the ads. Eg. Flash

Mozilla uses that fact to exploit its users. They keep pushing a "clean your browser" button, which reverts the search engine to Yahoo, which pays them for this.

To be fair, one of the top actions adware/malware takes is changing the search engine to some monetized zombie search engine, so resetting it to the default makes sense.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#475

Post by geoelectric »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #465
theg2 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point that people are paying for Netflix/HBO as a premium/luxury service while many in this thread claim they won't even pay for content they like and will instead just ad block. You can bitch all you want about the poor state of journalism, but the institutions that are trying to maintain it in a market where no one wants to pay for it are struggling. People won't pay subscriptions (the majority),…

I'm not totally convinced that people actually "want" all that ad-supported content, if in this case we're talking about Internet articles and television programs. We consume it when it's there and easy to obtain, but that's a pretty low bar in terms of wanting something. Who's to say that we wouldn't find better uses for our time if all of that content disappeared? Maybe something we actually cared about enough to p…

Find a better use of your time and, for you at least, the content will disappear. Voila.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#476

Post by mirimir »

BrendanEich wrote: post #141
jordigh wrote: post #70

I will repeat this one more time, because Eich seems to be missing the point.[1] I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need. I wonder what would happen if, as a society, we said, "enough, no more ads". Would it really be the capitalist apocalypse that the ad industry is trying to make us believe…

I get your point, and it is a good one. We have a micro payments channel to publishers, frictionless and anonymous, under construction, for folks who want no ads and who will pay. Other users than you will be able to mix and match, too: better and more private ads on sites they don't support, with a revenue share to these users that they can spend on sites they do. We aren't saying "only ads". We do see ads as a nece…

I would also love to see micropayments replace ads. I block nonessential scripts, ads and trackers for privacy, security and speed. I also block ads to avoid mental pollution.

To use micropayments, I'd need to fund via Bitcoin or another anonymous method. Even cash in the mail, I suppose. Also, I'd want to buy per article, but I wouldn't want to substantively interrupt the flow of browsing, or think very much about the amount. Ideally, I'd like to be quoted payment amounts that just won against bids by advertisers.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#477

Post by mirimir »

commentzorro wrote: post #436
untog wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments already exists for journalism in the form of Blendle and others. It isn't as effective as you might hope: https://medium.com/@wfederman/micropayments-for-news-article... (key takeaway from that article: people are moving away from micropayments where they already exist (e.g. music) to subscription models. It doesn't work)

Blendle is NOT micropayments. I looked at Blendle the other day when someone posted about it. Blendle wants you to pay 25 cents for an article and then, after reading about it, think and decide if it was worth the money or if you want a refund. First, micropayments are less than a penny (the "micro" part). Anything 25 cents is just a payment. Second, 25 cents means I can quickly bump into my monthly/yearly maximums a…

Right. The micropayment needs to be about the same as the ad income would have been. And it needs to be virtually automatic. Just a pop-up saying that reading would cost $0.013 and asking for confirmation. There'd be a browser plugin that handled payments. And payments, of course, would need to be anonymous and not trackable.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#478

Post by p4wnc6 »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #472
p4wnc6 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring subconscious ad effects, which largely are the main effects that advertisers are seeking to use. You scan quickly over some innocuous-seeming ad for Product-X-that-of-course-you'd-never-ever-buy, and now you are psychologically primed -- the shade of blue in the ad was chosen because it tested best for users who also viewed page Y and whose IP addresses place them in your area -- the ad contained a hu…

I mean you're just taking it to conspiracy levels now. Priming is indeed a thing but those kinds of associations are very short-lived. I don't know of any priming effect that lasts for months and years or at least I haven't read any study that indicates that. If advertisers really knew what they were doing there wouldn't be so much advertising spam. They are just blasting the speakers as loudly as they can and then t…

I'm baffled that you feel this way. I actually worked on some of the science behind it when I was in grad school. Here was one of the well-known projects in the field at that time:

http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/doc/Itti_Baldi06nips.pdf >

There are also many other kinds of psychological manipulation research. For example, this article from Gamasutra talks about techniques for monetization in games, and this is obviously applicable to many ad formats:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949... >

The idea of excessive ad repetition is not at all new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency#Thomas_Smi... >.

Even just a cursory Google search for whatever popular advertising journals there are, then looking at what articles are in their current issues, turned up some pretty quantitative work on allocating to different media formats:

http://www.journalofadvertisingresearch.com/content/55/4/443 >

Or this article on determining what cognitive factors are related to the avoidance of OTC drug ads:

http://www.journalofadvertisingresearch.com/content/55/4/401 >

That one, in the introduction, also links to many other studies specifically about psychological factors contributing to negative ad reactions.

I'm really baffled that you think advertisers do not conduct extremely specific threads of research to determine whether they are getting their money's worth from a certain ad or not.

I don't consider any of this to be remotely like a conspiracy theory -- in fact I thought this was commonly understood to be obviously the case, and I'm very surprised to hear that you feel otherwise.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#479

Post by feedjoelpie »

munificent wrote: post #267
rorykoehler wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fall into the camp of blocking all ads because frankly I don't like them. They are visual pollution. I also doubt I would pay for written content (maybe on a very rare occasion I might) if given a micro-payments solution because it doesn't seem worth paying for. I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. Honestly I…

> I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. I do the same thing, but I realized a while back there is a flaw in this model. It means the available creative works—which in turn effectively means the engine of culture—is determined almost entirely by people who are well-off enough to have the free time to do that. I do…

> I do the same thing, but I realized a while back there is a flaw in this model. It means the available creative works—which in turn effectively means the engine of culture—is determined almost entirely by people who are well-off enough to have the free time to do that.

I'm not about to claim that it's in any way an ideal or better, but isn't this how 90% of the literature, and maybe more often art, that we know hold as sacred parts of history, were created?

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#480

Post by mirimir »

jordigh wrote: post #97
logingone wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need. Interesting. I'm the opposite. I've yet to encounter an ad that has a hope in hell of manipulating me at all. I couldn't be more dismissive of them. And if I encounter one too often my dislike of the company starts to grow. "It's show time, and you've b…

> I've yet to encounter an ad that has a hope in hell of manipulating me at all. If you know what "just do it", "the happiest place on Earth", "think different", or "the world's most advanced operating system" refer to, you've already been manipulated. A lot of ads are just about making sure you have a particular brand in mind and you're keenly aware of that brand's existence. Then, when time comes around to actually…

I maybe know one of those ;)
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