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Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

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Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#91

Post by speedplane »

hakfoo wrote: post #83
gwbas1c wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article. We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.

The problem is that per-article adds a lot of friction. If I buy a newspaper, I don't have to buy it by article or section. Nobody wants to think about "this is 3 cents to read the article linked on HN" and they also don't want a surprise $80 bill at the end of a month. However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very na…

NYTimes is $16/mo Washington Post is $10-15/mo WSJ is $15/mo

Seems like the price range is $10-25/mo for many periodicals, so a bundled plan of $20/month might be a bit low.

But I can imagine a $50/mo plan for including two national newspapers, a local newspaper, and a news weekly (e.g., economist) being pretty popular.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#92

Post by speedplane »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #65
ilovecaching wrote: post #61

For those of you advocating for a payment model over the ad model, I want you to consider two perspectives. First, consider the people who will be denied access to information on the basis of class. People who consider it a luxury to be online at all, let alone logging on to find a paywall for basic news. Now consider the editors at the Washington Post, who now have to cater the demographic who can pay their fees. In…

> First, consider the people who will be denied access to information on the basis of class. People who consider it a luxury to be online at all, let alone logging on to find a paywall for basic news. I am confused. Haven't (good) newspapers been paid products for a long time? Whats different about the internet version of newspapers?

> Whats different about the internet version of newspapers?

High quality newspapers used to be the only way of getting information. Today, those same newspapers generally still serve high quality material, but they now compete against tons of low quality material.

So in the past, if you were poor and didn't have access to high quality newspapers, you were simply ignorant. Now if you're poor, you have access to low quality news, which can lead ignorance, and much worse.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#93

Post by gaius »

Bud wrote: post #47
bscphil wrote: post #30

Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?

But do you have an alternative model ready?

I was a subscriber to the NYT until recently, had been for over a decade. They don’t track subscribers any less, or show fewer ads. So I tried the alternative but they were too greedy.

Also you can’t cancel a sub online you have to phone them! Or just cancel it on the credit card side...

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#94

Post by simion314 »

Bud wrote: post #47
bscphil wrote: post #30

Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?

Letting trackers track you gives them a lot of information including what pages you visited, some sites can put your email in the url like site.com?email=myemail ... so this trackers will know exactly who you are and what websites you visited. If they fingerprint your browser then they can de-anonymise your private session and will know what you visited in private mode too (this works only for pages that include the respective trackers obviously)

So here is an alternative, browsers will save your private history too, then you go to the website and they will ask for your history, you will have a big button named "Pay with my history and identity", after that you can visit the website without extra JS tracking, in this model all is transparent to the user, you also gain no tracking but you lose the ability to clear your browser history and private mode won't be private.

I personally prefer to block tracking and fingerprinting. When I get the GDPR popup I will close the tab, I don't even try to work around it.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#95

Post by TeMPOraL »

ilovecaching wrote: post #61

For those of you advocating for a payment model over the ad model, I want you to consider two perspectives. First, consider the people who will be denied access to information on the basis of class. People who consider it a luxury to be online at all, let alone logging on to find a paywall for basic news. Now consider the editors at the Washington Post, who now have to cater the demographic who can pay their fees. In…

Upvoted. As much as I'm against ads, this is a strong point. Hell, your "first perspective" is what I consider to be the only redeeming aspect of ad-driven models. And it's not just about people who can barely get on-line at all. It's also about kids, who would like to peruse the same content on the Internet as adults do, but have no means of paying for it.

Still, this is a problem to be solved, not an unsurmountable obstacle. Ad-driven model, the way it looks today, is unacceptable.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#96

Post by TangoTrotFox »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #12

This is the problem about sites that want to show ads. I don't mind reasonable (not annoying) and responsible (I want to be sure ad links don't lead to frauds or viruses so I won't have to deal with any kinds of problems if I stop blocking ads on my mom's computer) but I absolutely do mind any kind of tracking. Why do ad-funded sites insist on tracking so much? I understand tracking adds value to advertisers but are…

Since you can buy targeted ads in many places, venues that only offer untargeted ads are not competitively attractive unless they happen to appeal directly to a specific demographic you're after. And building extensive user profiles on massive numbers of people is something that can be monetized and otherwise exploited in a practically countless number of ways beyond advertising. For instance many news sites have now become overtly partisan and these profiles can be used to manipulate the general political process through razor sharp targeting and 'customized' messaging.

Another thing is that even though most sites say they will not sell user information, the main motivation for that is economic, not moral. It's not a sustainable business model. Sell that information once and you've mostly blown your load, as the incremental improvements on that information are only going to be worth a fraction of the initial payload and it's something that will be get 'shared'.

If a profit model emerged where selling user information could be a sustainable business they'd go back on that in a heart beat. In the terms alongside any promises of protection for your information will be a clause stating that, 'We can change these terms whenever we like to whatever we like. You agreeing to use our site/software signifies your acceptance of the changes.'

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#97

Post by robocat »

speedplane wrote: post #91
hakfoo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that per-article adds a lot of friction. If I buy a newspaper, I don't have to buy it by article or section. Nobody wants to think about "this is 3 cents to read the article linked on HN" and they also don't want a surprise $80 bill at the end of a month. However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very na…

NYTimes is $16/mo Washington Post is $10-15/mo WSJ is $15/mo Seems like the price range is $10-25/mo for many periodicals, so a bundled plan of $20/month might be a bit low. But I can imagine a $50/mo plan for including two national newspapers, a local newspaper, and a news weekly (e.g., economist) being pretty popular.

Should foreigners (or anyone really) be able to access the single article that interests them?

I really don't want to read a anything about American politics. I am not interested in the vast majority of "news" in newspapers.

I am willing to outbid advertisers to read an article - if there was a convenient way to do micro-payments.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#98

Post by TeMPOraL »

munchbunny wrote: post #33
noobermin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you or proxygeek by chance subscribers to WaPo? If not, I'm not sure why. Also, opening articles in private windows also has it pop up on my laptop. BTW, if the take away is subscription is the answer for their sustainability over having to serve ads that utilize tracking, that's an argument to be had. Of course, inherent in that argument is that non-tracking ads are simply not profitable enough for them, which s…

I worked in ad tech for a number of years, so maybe I can address this one. Ads that are annotated with tracking/targeting capabilities are in fact substantially more valuable. There's the obvious aspect (targeted ads in general) but there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. Analytics requires tracking too. This is an oversimplification, but let's say you're buying ads at 10 cents per…

> Maybe not at those exact numbers, but you'd probably be willing to pay some substantial amount more, because that strategy (retargeting) works measurably better for converting an ad view into a purchase.

I do believe that, but I also wonder... Retargeting, i.e. ads of particular product stalking you everywhere you go, is the single method that so far guarantees I just won't buy the advertised thing, out of pure spite. It's also the one aspect of ad experience that I see regular people noticing and getting angry about. I wonder how big an impact of such reaction there is on retargeted ad performance, and if ad people even factor it into their calculations.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#99

Post by flukus »

Bud wrote: post #47
bscphil wrote: post #30

Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?

Nearly all of it. My country and many others have a national tax funded news organisation that does a far better job of informing than any of the commercial operators. This is a much better funding model that doesn't rely on sensationalism or pandering to a particular audience to drive eyeballs.
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