361–370 of 421 posts
Even that is blocked by uBlock Origin with default settings. I wonder how it knows it is an ad?
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> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: 1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked…
The usual way people have tried to solve the microtransactions problem is through aggregation/centralization. eg, everyone who wants to gives HN $K/mo, and then HN distributes that money proportionally to sites clicked. Unfortunately, I think the incentives are too loose. Users aren't obligated in any way to pay for links; as usual, humans aren't charitable enough to actually sustain public goods voluntarily. Secondl…
The 'microtransactions problem' using 'aggregation/centralization' you're describing would be readily identified as the newspaper industry a few decades ago. Nowadays you have to wrap it up in a healthy dose of cryptocurrency scamming, federated networking bullshit, and other huckster lingo to make it seem like a radical approach.
Newspaper companies, which allowed patrons to exchange a few cents for a daily source of vital information curated by professionals across a wide array of expertise, distributed money received in patronage towards the journalists, editors, fact-checkers, you name it.
Of course, that isn't the full story. What newspaper companies did was become the mouthpiece of the government and eliminate any useful information, filled nearly all the pages to the brim with huge obnoxious ads with little text remaining, started some perverse incentives with journalist pay forcing the smart ones to abandon ship a long time ago, and helped build a mass culture of frantic zombies who cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, parroting whatever they read as a sort of social lubricant, and trained to resort to looking on a page for the local weather information yesterday that could be far more accurately sourced now by looking up to see if there are clouds above.
Good riddance to 'content creators.' Don't let the door hit you on the way out, and HN will never receive a cent of my money. :D
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I'm confused. You want people to write all content for free? Whilst that works for a lot of people who do it in their spare time, it does restrict anyone looking to write professionally from contributing.
Not parent, but I would absolutely _demand_ people to write all content for free. I refuse to pay a single cent for anything that is even remotely accessible on the Internet and does not result in a physical tangible good being delivered to me, of which I pay $15/mo as acceptable rate-limited mobile LTE bandwidth -- my only communication related recurring cost. There are several reasons at play here: - Content qualit…
It’s economics. It’s requires modeling, strategies, and thinking equally about all parties because it doesn’t matter whether you like them or not it matters what the future would look like a few years out.
This is not personal I have no ties to ad revenue or professional writing. It’s about putting emotion and philosophy in one basket and solutions in another. You’re allowed to have both, but the latter should be dispassionate.
Just one example on the facts, writing professionally is provably a useful skill. Take even what you may consider a mundane job of writing instruction manuals. if it weren’t useful there wouldn’t be jobs and people being paid money to do it. There’s all kinds of writing jobs that require little independent domain expertise. That’s before we even discuss original or creative content.
I've been using Privoxy. Killing two birds with one stone here: proxying access through a VPS to hide the home IP address && blocking ads. Apart from it occasionally blocking legitimate sites that begin with the word "ad" (something like, say, "adrian.blog.thing"), it works great. Because it's an HTTP proxy, it offers an interface for bypassing these unintended blocks.
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> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described. All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too. I'm all for blocking intrusive or malicious ads. But quality content depends on ad revenue. The author dedicated an entire paragraph on donating to the…
All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too. The ads are not malicious, granted, but in the case of NYT at least they're still "blinky". They get blocked at the Pi-hole now. I do subscribe, however. I'd like to turn the ads back on because I view the NYT to be a quality publication, but I'm not going to have something moving out of the corner of my eye while I try to read the paper.
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I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Brave browser, which operates exactly on the model you describe: https://brave.com/
Initially, Brave was set up so a user could add bitcoins to an account and set a monthly spending target. Then Brave would split up that monthly amount and send it to sites based on how much time the user spent at each site. But as far as I can tell, they discontinued that model, and now they also sell ads.
"[Brave] browser blocks ads and website trackers. Currently, the company is developing a feature that allows users to opt in to receiving ads sold by Brave Software in place of the blocked ads. Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software, ad partners, and browser users would each be allocated 15% of the revenue. Users could donate their revenue share to bloggers and other providers of web content through micropayments. The browser claims to improve online privacy by sharing less data with advertising customers, but will target web ads by analyzing users' anonymized browsing history." -- Wikipedia
I consider this ad-replacement scheme extraordinarily scummy. It sounds like the plan is to use protection racket strategies to get the target publishers to buy in.
So I have tried using pi-hole in past and I think one of the problems is - some websites refusing to function if ads are blocked. IIRC - British Airways website uses some javascript that requires ad to be disabled for finishing checking in. It may have changed now but there are other websites too which may or may not work as expected. With browser extensions it is typically easy to disable the ad blocker one time and…
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Back in the day (also before ext4) we solved this by mounting the root filesystem read-only. Depending on any other application for the machine, you may not need filesystem writes at all once it is set up. Bonus: it’s even friendlier to the flash.
This is how I've solved the problem in the past. Too bad systemd discourages this. It also doesn't protect the partition where your database and log files are kept.
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It’s essentially dnsmasq which can be run directly on your wireless router if you are using custom firmware. No separate hw needed, no need to horse around with dockers or containers or any of that stuff. I’d guess a lot of people are already running dnsmasq for other purposes, so adding the blocklist and periodically updating it should be trivial.
And Hacker News is essentially just a bit of HTML, CSS and lots of words.
(I.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) )
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My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked Where in THE hell are you going on the Internet? Wait, don't answer that. I only wonder because we sit at around 20-30% at our house (which is still ridiculous). But approaching 90%? Maybe I need to crank the blocklists up a notch, but I can't imagine even surfing porn sites all day that I could get anywhere n…
Ever visited Forbes or Business Insider? Easily 90% of those sites are third-party scripts served from other domains.