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AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

literallycancer wrote: post #153
sanswork wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content creators have gone with not blocking blockers up until now because it's not an issue. As it becomes more of an issue you start seeing more and more anti-blocking scripts. Once or twice in all your years online you have agreed to an alternate funding method and you think that is sustainable for content creators? You can make a lot of arguments for ad blocking. I ad block because it slows my computer down. Maki…

You can think it's a joke, but I agree with parent completely. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, since I get to choose what runs on my hardware, and I choose not to see ads. Whether something is sustainable for content creators is not the users' concern, you don't go around worrying whether Walmart can make profit, why do you worry whether a random internet blogger can?

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by chc »

literallycancer wrote: post #153
sanswork wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content creators have gone with not blocking blockers up until now because it's not an issue. As it becomes more of an issue you start seeing more and more anti-blocking scripts. Once or twice in all your years online you have agreed to an alternate funding method and you think that is sustainable for content creators? You can make a lot of arguments for ad blocking. I ad block because it slows my computer down. Maki…

You can think it's a joke, but I agree with parent completely. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, since I get to choose what runs on my hardware, and I choose not to see ads. Whether something is sustainable for content creators is not the users' concern, you don't go around worrying whether Walmart can make profit, why do you worry whether a random internet blogger can?

I don't steal from or scam stores even if I can get away with it, because while I don't deep-down care if they make a profit, I do feel it's wrong to cheat them out of it. If I want what a store is offering, I feel like I should deal with them fairly. If I don't want it, I just don't patronize the store.

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

#233

Post by Smaug123 »

literallycancer wrote: post #157
dispose13432 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>social objects - other people are visiting those pages, so I have to check them out too in order to participate in the conversation. So maybe that's the cost of not seeing ads, you don't get to participate in conversations. It's like if Stallman would, instead of making GNU, hack into MS and put the source online because he "just has to". Most of the time, taking a moral stand requires sacrifice.

You seem to imply there is something questionable about blocking ads. The cost of not seeing ads is the time I spend setting up and configuring the ad-blocker. It's a lower cost than the attention spent on ads, so I block them. Your analogy doesn't work, because this is about ownership. I own my machine, so I get to decide what will run and how.

"The cost of not seeing ads is the time I spend setting up and configuring the ad-blocker." - there is also the externalised cost that the sites which rely on ads will eventually go bust if everyone does the same thing as you do. Given the current state of things, you are defecting on a massive Prisoners' Dilemma.

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

#234

Post by PudgePacket »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #193
hxegon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a repo up with the code?

Seconding. I totally want to start doing this myself. That, and finally write a decent Hacker News suite for Emacs.

Browsing HN with the built in web browser is surprisingly nice due to HN's simple structure.

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

#235

Post by chc »

woogiewonka wrote: post #172
eloff wrote: 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…

I for one think killing content is a good thing. The web is full of garbage and it would be great to rid of 90% of it. Content for the sake of content does not deserve to exist.

What if that 90% included 99% of the good content? When you make web sites almost universally unprofitable, you're not going to just kill "content for the sake of content." You're going to kill content indiscriminately, including content that relies on a paywall rather than ads for revenue, because sites like that need to be featured on other sites (i.e. run ads) to get visitors.

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

#236

Post by sintaxi »

dispose13432 wrote: post #107
_m7bj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You set the price when you consume the content that you know is funded with ads. You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price". The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model. The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place…

>The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative. So would you suggest (or would you even use) AdBlockers identify themselves to the website (so I can write "if($_SERVER["AdBlocker]){echo "Sorry, see ads or leave…

No need. Every web request implicitly has that header set already. Its completely within the content providers power to deny me content with that understood.

When you buy a magazine from Starbucks do you tell the clerk what part of the magazine you intend to read what what you intend to ignore? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. The clerk & publishers are well aware I may ignore or even rip out any or all of the magazine pages and the magazine is priced accordingly.

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

#237

Post by chc »

fapjacks wrote: post #209
woogiewonka wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one think killing content is a good thing. The web is full of garbage and it would be great to rid of 90% of it. Content for the sake of content does not deserve to exist.

Absolutely! The web is FULL of garbage! I get humor out of these posts on HN, because it's pretty clear there's the group of people (myself included) that see advertising as a kind of assault on free will (which it is), and then there's the group of people who are obviously running some kind of content or business supported by advertising who are reeling at the thought of people out there that are so militant against…

I don't run a business, and my employer doesn't even do advertising on the web AFAIK. But I do use the web quite a lot, and I wouldn't want to see it all go away. Even this site is basically a giant ad for Y Combinator that features smaller ads for Y Combinator companies. All of the news sites I read are supported by ads. Most of the discussion forums I've used have been supported by ads. I don't value ads — I value the web that they support.

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

#238

Post by dang »

sanswork wrote: post #194

You sound like a child who is trying to sound like a lawyer right now. There is no contract required nor have I indicated there needs to be. I don't know why you lot keep going back to "I didn't sign a legally binding contract!". Why did you walk in if you had no clue what was in there? Why did you click the link if you had no clue what was on the other side? Because you wanted the content. I'm not saying to have to…

> You sound like a child

> as you would know had you read the thread

Comments like this break the HN guidelines by being uncivil. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226458 and marked it off-topic.

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

#239

Post by mdekkers »

lvs wrote: post #152
sanswork wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. You see the ads when you are receiving something with them. The ad companies are paying for your attention with the content you consume.

If I pass a street musician, I haven't implicitly signed a contract to pay her for the show -- either in currency or by transferring any other valued commodity. I don't have an obligation to support her business plan, even if I enjoy the music. She may perhaps claim that we entered into an implied contract. Or the musician could post a placard reading her terms-of-service. But in simply walking down the street, like…

> walking down the street, like clicking on a link

these two are not even close to the same thing. clicking a link is a very specific action "show me this stuff". Your analogy would be more apt if it involved going into a venue where music is performed.

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

#240

Post by chokma »

davidgerard wrote: post #127
chokma wrote: 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... I posted it to my Facebook earlier. So far the response has been unbridled glee. I think you're tremendously underestimating the sheer joy people have at being handed a method of striking back at the people making their lives a misery, and need to recalibrate your model of how people will react to this.

Okay, I see the appeal of sticking it to the man (in this case, the privacy invading tracking agency). If I could have an addon that _reliably_ hides my web browsing habits from advertisers and evil government agencies while making their life harder, that would be cool.

I just do not see how this act of online vigilantism is going to change things or help. The cost that merchants encounter are opaque, they have mostly no control over the publishing side, if they even know where their ads are shown at all. So, advertising gets more expensive, but as one commentator here said: "I must advertise, else I will have no sales at all."

Lastly, to click on an ad, the user will most likely need to execute the javascript associated with the ad. At that moment, they already have been tracked, and any malicious drive-by-downloads will run on their machine. Clicking on all ads you encounter will just make your browsing trail that much wider (user reads HackerNews, browses late in the morning, stays long on sites with cat memes), and your unique browser footprint will be associated cross device with your profile so you get more targeted ads on your mobile devices.

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