Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Ad Blocking Wars

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 236 posts

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#171

Post by kazinator »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #152
deelowe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally: 1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries…

But, can it go too far in the other direction? Can ads be abusive or is anything a content publisher does to monetize fair game? For instance, apps that use dark patterns that make it difficult to dismiss an ad without "accidentally" clicking through the ad...are these cool? Or would you say that one simply should not use the app?

> apps that ...

An app is not analogous to a junk page with no useful content. You installed and use it repeatedly in spite of the ads because it provides some sort of benefit.

Any app which contains a clickable element which leads to malware infestation, or shows children inappropriate content, is malware. Regardless of whether that button is on an ad or elsewhere, and regardless of whether it is contrived to make it easy to press by "accident" or not.

An ad that constantly interposes itself to be clicked by accident is merely annoying, and probably counterproductive (users will give the program a bad rating).

To annoyed users, I would say "don't use the app".

To malware purveyors, I'd ideally like to say, "3 to 5 years".

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#172

Post by kbart »

hellbanTHIS wrote: post #85

I don't know why they don't just show what's on sale near me geographically. You know, two for one Kraft mac and cheese up at Publix. You'd never know that I might buy mac and cheese by data mining me, I don't even really like mac and cheese, but shit man two for one! The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads show…

Yes! Now I have to to actively search for grocery and various small stuff sales on my local markets by visiting their sites one by one. The main problem with ads that they are irrelevant. If I did a research on Google before buying a new laptop, please, don't spam laptop ads for the next 6 months or so, I already have one, thanks, I don't buy them daily. Especially from sellers that don't ship to my country anyway.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#173

Post by iamphilrae »

colmvp wrote: post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

Ironically, how did you find out about those services in the first place?

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#174

Post by tracker1 »

chowells wrote: post #135
tracker1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.

uBlock Origin runs just fine on Firefox Android.

Too bad my experience is Firefox Android doesn't run just fine on its' own.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#175

Post by ddeck »

colmvp wrote: post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

I think there's a distinction to be made between advertising and marketing, at least the way I define them.

Advertising is about making consumers aware of a product or service that they may use if they were aware of it. This seems reasonable and generally beneficial.

Marketing is about using psychological techniques to manipulate consumers preferences such that they want to consume products and services that they otherwise wouldn't.

Unfortunately this segment of the industry had grown rapidly over the past few decades and techniques to exploit our cognitive deficiencies have improved tremendously.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#176

Post by mrexroad »

tracker1 wrote: post #126
seanwilson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar t…

Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

This.

Consumption of advertisements should have age restrictions similar to cigarettes.

We haven't had cable/etc since 2005 and there was a period between '07 through maybe '13 where out kids weren't exposed to any TV commercials except for while visiting grandparents during holidays. The few commercials they saw over the years left a terrifyingly strong impression and desire for those products; they'd remember many, many months later. We still don't have cable, but unfortunately the expansion of content available on AppleTV has meant commercials jammed into everything. Contemplating returning to Netflix disc-only service and ending subscriptions to streamed content.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#177

Post by majewsky »

dredmorbius wrote: post #133
majewsky wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the application. I'm using uMatrix and always allow all content (including JS) that's served from the same domain. The problem for me really is tracking and visual clutter, and I assume that a first-party ad will not track me across domains and likely integrate well within the page layout. I'm fully aware though that I'm not the mean audience for adblocking.

uMatrix isn't an ad-blocker. It uses ... a matrix ... of domains/hosts and content types to determine what is or isn't allowed to be presented/fetched by a client. Dedicated ad-blockers, such as uBlock Origin, apply heuristics which are specifically tuned to advertising signals -- hosts, domains, and, as noted in parent to your post, various HTML and other entity clues to advertising content.

Well, even if it technically isn't an adblocker, it's a darn good one in practice. And it sets up domain blocking by default, probably using the same lists as uBlock Origin.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#178

Post by forgotpwagain »

mrexroad wrote: post #176
tracker1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

This. Consumption of advertisements should have age restrictions similar to cigarettes. We haven't had cable/etc since 2005 and there was a period between '07 through maybe '13 where out kids weren't exposed to any TV commercials except for while visiting grandparents during holidays. The few commercials they saw over the years left a terrifyingly strong impression and desire for those products; they'd remember many,…

I'm curious what the effects of my seeing lots of TV ads during my childhood are. I honestly can't remember specific ads very well, but I'm sure that seeing thousands of soundbites glorifying instant gratification must have had some sort of an effect on me.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#179

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

cbhl wrote: post #150
colmvp wrote: post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

Subscriptions lock out people without credit cards (children, less affluent) from the Internet. This makes me sad.

I used to go to the library for this sort of thing.

My mom works in a library and they are in the process of throwing all the books away, and creating 'social spaces'.

As much as the Internet has made information easy to get, there are a lot of high quality publications that I can no longer access eg research papers, art and design books.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#180

Post by ljk »

colmvp wrote: post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

There are many other ways to advertise other than showing a commercial. I also try to protect myself by avoiding ads, but other tactics like product placements in tv shows and movies is making it hard to avoid everything..
Post reply on HN