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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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will wait till we get a micro-transaction system built directly into the browser (same system for every browser) that allows me to pay 1 cent per news article - maybe 5 cent for a super duper long essay. I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. My personal information is not for sale or distribution and I refuse to allow any computations on my computer that enable someone to gather it.

That's already existed. In many iterations. Even specifically for newspaper websites. Why aren't you already using one of the many options?

1. Not built into the browser. Requires logging into yet more websites to get only a handful of newspaper websites.

2. They still track you. See, for instance, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18202382

3. Prices still too high. I don't a single story on https://www.washingtonpost.com/ that I would pay more than 2cents for.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered." I'm curious is there any practical fallout turning JS off completely? Do you just switch it back on for things like e-commerce, web UI's etc? I always find the context switching to the settings menu a bit of a pain. Do you have some recommendations for things that make JS-free web…

I've attempted to keep whitelists working, but now I just use a separate chrome profile with javascript+cookies disabled that is for random blogs/news sites/etc. If you have 2+ chrome profiles open, there is a menu item for "Open link as > No Javascript" that does wonders.

I see, this makes sense. I'm sure there is something similar I can do with with Firefox. Thanks.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, all of it. Honestly, it's not our job to find a business model that works. It's literally the job of a company trying to make money. Find a way that works. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cooperating and working together to solve things. But the ad industry is so out of control that there's no cooperating with that. If they find a way to serve ads that are not privacy-invading, do not expose users to malw…

The problem is that the management at traditional media outlets have been conned into believing that they need tracking in order to serve their advertisers. Advertising worked fine before internet tracking was a thing. Everything from Coca-Cola and the New York Times down to Fred's Corner Dry Cleaner and The Podunk Tribune survived and thrived on the old, low-tracking model. It's companies like Google and the other i…

> Advertising worked fine before internet tracking was a thing. Everything from Coca-Cola and the New York Times down to Fred's Corner Dry Cleaner and The Podunk Tribune survived and thrived on the old, low-tracking model.

Completely agree with this. I actually preferred ads that would be directly related to what I was viewing at the time. For instance, if I'm viewing a local bicycle club, I'd much rather see ads for a bicycle repair shop than for the Airbnb I glanced at last night. The current ad model is hugely distracting in that way, and I find it really annoying.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. This is false. The internet ad tech companies didn't invent marketing demographics. Advertisers who want to sell things to old people advertise on TV shows and in magazines that appeal to old people. Advertisers who want to sell Product X advertise in places where people who want to b…

> But there's a reason that an ad in print has more gravitas and impact on the reader than an online ad. Digital ads are ephemeral, and are forgotten as quickly as they are seen. With the exception of writing an ad in the sand on a wave-washed beach, every single other advertising method has more impact than online ads. This seems to be an argument for "an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view…

Every ad I see is writ across my retina. It fades as the photosensitive opsin chemicals replenish.

Every ad I hear is injected into my phonological loop. It fades as the neural activity drops back to normal.

An ad is an ad is an ad is an ad is an ad. It does not matter whether it reaches my brain from a computer monitor, a television screen, a radio speaker, or newsprint. I have the choice to attend to it, or not.

The argument here is that ads viewed or heard by robots will probably never reach a human brain. The computer-delivered ads make different types of metering and targeting possible, but they also make the advertiser vulnerable to automated exploits and automated blocking.

In print, you can extrapolate from statistical modeling and circulation numbers. In television and radio, the same can be done with ratings numbers. On the Internet, there are so many possible metrics. The problem is the advertisers started an arms race they cannot win, because they had to make themselves more useful than the media companies' internal advertising departments.

Those guys could sell fractions of a page of static ads. Those ads get served with the same content, every time someone reads the paper. Any targeting has to be based on the predicted audience for the content itself. Men's razors advertised in the sports section; the exact same razors but marketed to women advertised in the lifestyle section. Car, boat, and RV dealers advertised in the business news section. If the online edition of newspapers embedded their own non-scripted copy of static print ads, served from their own servers, from the same places as their article images and stock photos, nobody would bother trying to block them. That's just what newspaper articles look like, to everyone that remembers when they were actual papers that got delivered by kids on bicycles.

The ad services that sucker media companies into using them are worth 1000 times less than the ads served in-house, because of all their clever nonsense they attempted in order to trick the media-companies into using them. I don't need to block dumb ads; I might want to, but I don't need to. I do need to block ads that run scripts and set cookies, because they hijack my own resources to make my experience across the entire web worse. There is nothing inherent wrong with writing an article that has a permanent, static set of ads in it.

Old media had the full-page, half-page, quarter-page, per-column-inch, and classified ads. A new media article can be pasted into a template, with a fixed number of advertising slots. Show the article template to your registered advertisers, who know your standards for the slots, and let them buy specific slots for specific articles, categories of article, or anywhere on the site. Paste the approved ads into the slots for them, and archive the article page. That's now what the site serves whenever the URL is requested, forevermore. It's the same as going to the library and looking up a newspaper microfiche page from October 15, 1985; the ads are still the same, and just got one more impression.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data. I think it's a little bit of both. Internet commoditized newspapers and unbundled them, allowing us to peruse individual articles wi…

Then again, were they wrong? The model works. I think you're mistaken there. If the model worked, then thousands of newspapers wouldn't have closed, downsized, or worse. We'd be back in the 80's when cities like Cincinnati and Chicago had FOUR real daily newspapers, and just about every single radio station had its own news department. What happened is that the internet ad companies convinced newspapers that an ad th…

No. Advertisers were unwilling to pay the same amounts because 1. there were 100 other places where they could reach as many eyeballs for 1/10th the cost, and 2. there were indications that people's attention is completely different between screen and print, and thus the effectiveness of the ads was much lower per viewer.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the institutional infrastructure that allows journalists to do their jobs with some measure of job security and editorial integrity? (not that there's a whole lot of that left... but its still better than getting news from facebook and youtube vloggers)

The integrity lies in the people and connections between same none of that lies in the building or the dead weight.

By that argument you could say that Silicon Valley and its clustering of technology firms are dead weight. All that matters is the people and their connections right?

The journalism that we aspire to today requires a lot of personnel and material resources. Independent vloggers and Facebook/blog randos simply do not have the resources to report like NYT

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

#287
I have to say it again and again, that `web tools` may use JS but plain `web blogs` should not.

Those designer people don't care anything about performance, they aren't programmers still call themselves to be. Why does a blog site even need Javascript? Perhaps no AdBlocker may recognize a non-intrusive ad like good olden days without computer vision.

Anyway, I thought I was only one worried about use of JavaScript by `nonprogrammers` as Crockford puts it.

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

#288
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If targeting works then why do I keep seeing ads for products that I've already purchased and have no intention of buying again any time soon?

It doesn't run on telepathy. Some people do rebuy those products. And maybe this is just the best ad (of nothing great) that happened to be available at the time. If you want to have any idea of how well advertising works, you have to approach it from the perspective of an advertiser, not an ad target. Then you can get real data. You are a data point of one.

I'd love to see that data, because my current pet theory is that adtech applies the same morals internally that they do externally - i.e. everyone tries to scam each other, pretending their tools work.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered." I'm curious is there any practical fallout turning JS off completely? Do you just switch it back on for things like e-commerce, web UI's etc? I always find the context switching to the settings menu a bit of a pain. Do you have some recommendations for things that make JS-free web…

I've attempted to keep whitelists working, but now I just use a separate chrome profile with javascript+cookies disabled that is for random blogs/news sites/etc. If you have 2+ chrome profiles open, there is a menu item for "Open link as > No Javascript" that does wonders.

I think of it the other way around. I have a profile for the World-Wide Web and a couple for work and non-work javascript apps.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's a bad implementation on the part of the site, under GDPR you should have the option to opt-out as well.

Why? If I'm a site owner that wants to track where you come from and where you're going, even within my own site, then I have the right to ask you to gtfo if you don't like it. GDPR allows for this.

> A data controller may not refuse service to users who decline consent to processing that is not strictly necessary in order to use the service.
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