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AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

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111–120 of 282 posts

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think that all content costs only the creators time to develop. I think that says a lot.

Stating an untrue statement as fact and hoping your opposite number will debate it, thus tacitly accepting it, is an extremely low quality argumentative technique, sitting somewhere between "responding to tone" and "ad hominum" on the hierarchy of arguments[1]. You strike me as a standup chap who would not resort to such techniques, so I'm sure you'll now be willing to explain to me how you came to such a conclusion,…

You're calling for a minimum income for them or suggesting they just do it as a side project(supplemented with a regular income).

The fact is a lot of great content is expensive to produce.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, they are not paying me for anything. Again, I did not enter into any agreement. I just clicked a link. They are expending their resources in an attempt to capture and profit from my attention. Those are very different things. Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.

>I just clicked a link. Because you want to consume what they've produced. That is how they are paying you. You keep saying "I did not enter into any agreement" like it changes anything. It's juvenile.

So what you are saying is that, simply by clicking a link, I become obliged to execute whatever piece of code is served to me on my machine or render any media on my display without knowing in advance what it contains?

That is not how the web works, and that is not the social contract that it was built on. Sorry if it doesn't fit advertisers' needs, but that is really not my problem. Maybe advertisers and payed content could go to some other medium that accommodates all the restrictions you desire, and then we can all be happy?

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I just clicked a link. Because you want to consume what they've produced. That is how they are paying you. You keep saying "I did not enter into any agreement" like it changes anything. It's juvenile.

So what you are saying is that, simply by clicking a link, I become obliged to execute whatever piece of code is served to me on my machine or render any media on my display without knowing in advance what it contains? That is not how the web works, and that is not the social contract that it was built on. Sorry if it doesn't fit advertisers' needs, but that is really not my problem. Maybe advertisers and payed conte…

No, that isn't what I said at all.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I just clicked a link. Because you want to consume what they've produced. That is how they are paying you. You keep saying "I did not enter into any agreement" like it changes anything. It's juvenile.

The foundation of the Web - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - is that I request a piece of data from a given address, while also providing relevant information about my capabilities and media I'm willing to accept, and then you send me back that data. What I do with that data isn't up to you . That includes viewing all, parts, or none of the information I received from your server. That especially includes deciding a…

>What I do with that data isn't up to you.

I didn't say it was.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I just clicked a link. Because you want to consume what they've produced. That is how they are paying you. You keep saying "I did not enter into any agreement" like it changes anything. It's juvenile.

The foundation of the Web - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - is that I request a piece of data from a given address, while also providing relevant information about my capabilities and media I'm willing to accept, and then you send me back that data. What I do with that data isn't up to you . That includes viewing all, parts, or none of the information I received from your server. That especially includes deciding a…

>The foundation of the Web - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - is that I request a piece of data from a given address, while also providing relevant information about my capabilities and media I'm willing to accept, and then you send me back that data.

So Facebook says that the foundation of the web is sending data to the server (such as cookies) and receiving information back.

Nowhere in the protocol does it say they can't track you. Ergo, tracking is perfectly legal and moral.

The foundation of the internet is that the server sends you data. Your browser happens to have a security hole and you got a virus.

Totally ethical and legal. Nowhere in the HTTP protocol does it say not to send viruses.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#116
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments have never worked well on the internet, not for technical problems, but likely more that the market isn't really there. I know I just want free stuff and I'm not going to pay to read a news article or blog post no matter how well written or researched. So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, bec…

> Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it Good. Let it die. There's enough better content available for free and without ads. Somehow, it so happens that people who have something interesting or meaningful to say tend to say it anyway, and either pay for it themselves or ask nicely for something in return. I honestly do believe the content quality is inversely proportional to the amount and obtrusiveness…

The problem is the "long-tail" of content.

Sure, Wikpedia will stick around post adblock, and so will big conglomerates (they can afford to put up paywalls, like WSJ and others).

Many content-farms will just stick to being a "review for hire" gig.

The problem is that the small shops will close down.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#117
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

clicking all the advertisers links seems like an awfully nice thing to do for them, assuming they're paid per click

It may seem nice at the beginning, but as you saturate the service with fake clicks, the PPC value will drop to near-zero.

Some keywords are so competitive that they have PPC rates that are close to $100 PER CLICK

For example, anything related to pyramid schemes like Xango, Avon, etc. Keyword space is SUPER competitive for "indenependent distributors" and so their PPC rates are through the roof

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you just follow random links people send you? That seems like a horrible waste of your most precious commodity. YouTube offers a way to pay for an ad free experience. Are you a paying member?

> So you just follow random links people send you? That seems like a horrible waste of your most precious commodity. See my point about social objects. > YouTube offers a way to pay for an ad free experience. Are you a paying member? They don't offer it in my country, so no. But I do am a paying subscriber of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime Video, FWIW.

So you're willing to trade your time for feeling connected?

That's a shame. They offer Prime video in Poland? I don't even think we get it in Australia :/

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#119
post #27

Hm... From the perspective of the ad network: Lower click quality drives up the merchant's cost of sale (COS). Sitting between the merchant and the publisher, the ad network tries to balance this out, by - mixing good and bad traffic sources - encouraging the merchant to spend more money so they can buy better traffic and/or rank the offers higher on their publisher's sites - punishing the publisher for sending bad t…

> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... The hope is that publishers will understand why they're getting hit by the collateral of the fake-click barrage and move out of the blast range by changing their ads into unobtrusive ones, or even moving away from ads entirely into models like: - treating your webpage as an investment - sponsorship / patronage - subscriptions - paywalls Additional hope is…

How naïve. You think the entire advertising industry is going to throw their hand up and say "Hey, you got us. We'll just cave to your demand and drastically reduce our profits"?

This will just be another volley in the ever escalating ad arms race.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#120

I'm out on this. 1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it. 2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take…

yeah, that's great thanks.

Internet advertisers are almost 100% reprehensible and fully deserving of what happens to them. They've spent years pissing in the pool, there is zero reason they shouldn't be force-fed the results.

The key moral argument in play in this entire matter is: "fuck these people and fuck everything about them." I owe advertisers nothing. They are loathsome abominations and have turned the Internet into surveillance capitalism malware soup. Causing them pain is pretty much an ethical obligation.

(BTW, I was surprised and pleased AdNauseam didn't act against Project Wonderful, the closest I've seen to a non-reprehensible advertising network and one I unblocked specifically in uBO. But the rest can frankly go and get fucked.)

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