Live data from Hacker News

Insane state of today's advertising part 3

plus.google.com

241–250 of 435 posts

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#241
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.

My iPhone has them just fine, and Android being less locked down makes me think it probably does too

How? I can't install plugins into my Chrome on iPhone 6s.

And you can't switch the default browser so it only helps in 30 % of the cases (when you are not inside Facebook/Twitter/etc and when you are not clicking a link that opens the default browser)

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#242
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.

But you can install Brendan Eich's ad-blocking Brave browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

I'll try this one on all my phones. Thanks.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#243
I recently tried to browse Groupon to see whether they had any interesting deals. After opening a couple of deals in new tabs, the site became completely unresponsive and every page that I opened to ages to load. I noticed that uBlock was blocking hundreds of things and only after the counter stopped increasing, the page would become responsive.

Solution was to open a browser that doesn't have an ad blocker and the site became pretty responsive.

I understand that it's probably a bunch of tracking to predict what I want to see. But why would they need to much stuff if I'm probably there to buy stuff anyway?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but what I read from that story is that advertising saved your company from its own incompetence, since it should have someone responsible for managing those servers and subsequently for doing research upon noticing the problems. For me, that example actually serves as an extra argument against ads.

Crikey, guy shares an anecdote of how an ad helped him and all you can do is be really nasty about it, it's completely unnecessary. I bought a piano course from Udemy because of advertising on FB (and then spent an additional £150 on a keyboard). I'm really enjoying it. Please tell me what a horrible human being I am.

Honestly, in the context of the thread, I see the comment as downplaying and trivializing the serious concerns raised by oasfboasbfos. Besides, I didn't insult anyone, but the company as a whole; it seems absurd to me to take personal offense. Every company has its fair share of incompetence.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but what I read from that story is that advertising saved your company from its own incompetence, since it should have someone responsible for managing those servers and subsequently for doing research upon noticing the problems. For me, that example actually serves as an extra argument against ads.

I think you're being uncharitable, advertising led the company to have a higher degree of competence and understanding.

Fine, but it seems like a terrible tradeoff for the drawbacks mentioned by oasfboasbfos.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#246
post #96

In related news, uBlock Origin has finally (today) been converted to a WebExtension and is now fully compatible with Firefox 57 and beyond. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

I’ve switched to Ghostery, and it seems to work fine. Should I go back to uBlock Origin?

I personally prefer privacy badger over both. You can't add trackers to Ghostery, and I don't much care about ads that don't track me (I don't watch internet videos, I might not have this opinion if I did), and any particularly annoying ads just get blocked manually in privacy badger.

On mobile, there unfortunately is no such thing (no user scripts on chrome or Firefox, no privacy badger either), so I usually just disable JavaScript or use whatever privacy browser I have installed (currently Firefox Focus).

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#247
post #164

Might be off-topic. It seems a majority of people are against ads. What are the top few reasons why people dislike ads, excluding reasons such as them just being a nuisance? My own guesses are: * People don't like the idea that the platform serving the ads is making money through ads which is not directly tied to the main value they derive from that platform * Maybe people feel that they are also indirectly contribut…

I think for me it's mostly about not being in control over the content I choose to view.

I'm the kind of person who want involuntary ads to disappear entirely (so basically all ads on the internet). But at the same time I don't mind reading about new products, services, cheap offers etc as long as I can control when.

I look at ads in real life in grocery stores. Here in Norway (and I would assume elsewhere but I don't know what it's called) we have a wall at the entrance where people can put up things. It's usually missing cats, piano lessons, local cleaning services, etc. It's there at the entrance but you have to get close to read anything.

Maybe instead of ads disappearing entirely I just wish they were put in one place.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#248
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike relevant ads the most because they are most likely to influence my behaviour.

But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place. Any decision we make is the result of a lot of stuff influencing our behaviours, and the border between researching information on a product and being targeted by an ad for this product is not really black and white. If I had to chose, I'd rather be influenced by logical arguments t…

>But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place.

No, people research to make informed decisions.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that not fraud?

It absolutely is fraud. I worked on one of those big video exchanges and we'd sometimes see ads run through our own system multiple times. We couldn't spot it until after the ad ran because of the way the ad actually plays. It ends up a bunch of black box Russian dolls, where the spec says you call methods on the ad unit you are playing, which will just wrap another ad unit, which in turn wraps another ad unit. We co…

As an example, I'm currently diagnosing an issue where an ad refuses to play in our player as it incorrectly identifies itself as being adblocked. We load the advertiser provided ad (really a DoubleVerify fraud protection module) which loads a custom video player which eventually loads the advertiser's media file. The DoubleVerify script is downloading a bootstrap JavaScript file from their server, which then randomly chooses some other JavaScript to eval to check for whatever they think indicates fraud. It's this JavaScript, dynamically downloaded from their server (possibly even dynamically generated) that thinks our ad player is an ad blocker.

And that's just diagnosing a bug, now imagine if you were trying to find some malicious JS.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means it will work in Edge out of the box as well?

There has been a uBlock version for Edge for quite a while now; or am I missing something? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ublock-origin/9nblgg...

Yeah but it's a fork to work with Edge. But AFAIK Edge can work with all webextensions because it is using exactly the same APIs as Firefox.
Post reply on HN