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Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

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Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#11

Post by eof »

saagarjha wrote: post #4
eof wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems obvious without thought to me that it’s mostly moot. Very few people will be running machines like we have for the last 30-40 years, most will be on Android/iOS where ad blocking will be minimal. Savvy users will continue to block on machines that aren’t walled gardens and through pi-hole style blocking. I think the cat and mouse aspect will be completely overshadowed by tech giants continually neutering their…

> most will be on Android/iOS where ad blocking will be minimal Safari on iOS allows for content blocking, and Firefox for Android allows users to install extensions.

Safari on iOS allows limited content blocking. It doesn’t allow ad blocking anywhere else, which is most of the platform.

And, I was referring to the future and trends rather than the current situation. System wide ad blocking used to be possible on iOS without jailbreaking, now it’s not.

I expect in time google will go similar and change android APIs, or play store rules, to do similar.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#12

Post by yellowapple »

jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

I'm hoping in 10 years the world will have figured out that allowing arbitrary Turing-complete code to automatically run on one's personal machine is a terrifically terrible idea, and that the World Wide Web will instead orient itself around something that doesn't make security and privacy extraordinarily difficult to achieve (whether that's still HTML/CSS or something entirely new).

At the very least, though, eventually advertising agencies will hopefully figure out that this sort of tracking is pointless; "newspaper-style" ads are more likely to actually engage with the people encountering those ads (since said ads would be selected based on the page content rather than the person reading that content). This is how DuckDuckGo's ads work; the sponsored results are selected entirely by the actual search query. If content-driven ads (plus affiliate links, but I somehow doubt that's enough of DDG's traffic to be a deciding factor here) is enough to pay for enough computational power (and the development team to run it) to serve up 30+ million queries a day, then there's no reason it can't be enough for any other site.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#13

Post by apetresc »

superasn wrote: post #8

Maybe it's to identify users behind a VPN as this is fingerprinting the device, not the connection. That's why I think the idea of running each site in a container is so effective. And while we're at it the container should just spit out random shit like different resolution, audio api, user agent, once in a while (unless the user turns it off) to thwart such attempts. Unfortunately when the creator and maintener of…

> And while we're at it the container should just spit out random shit like different resolution, audio api, user agent, once in a while (unless the user turns it off) to thwart such attempts.

Wouldn't that break the legitimate feature-detection uses for these APIs? Asking the user to identify and whitelist each call is impractical, especially since the fail-case in this scenario would be subtle (you'd still see the page but it might randomly be in the wrong mode, or images might be scaled incorrectly, etc). At that point you might as well just turn Javascript off.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#14

Post by lifeeeeee »

jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

Neural networks scan the final rendered image of the page for ads and remove them. You can't dodge that.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#15

Post by Gibbon1 »

jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

I think ad blocking is a misnomer. What people are trying to do when blocking ads is prevent marketing people from spying on them. And the performance and resource consumption that comes from that.

Personal opinion: Laws are needed to make what advertisers are doing illegal. Advertisers are spying on people to the extent where if the government did it they'd need a warrant.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#16

Post by keithwinstein »

jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer space) and ends up building the working copy of the Machine made his fortune by selling tools to detect and block ads from television.

There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid detection and blend in with the regular programming. In this version of the future, the ad blockers eventually win and network television is destroyed. (The book also features networked computers and email ("telefax"), but the concept of ads appearing on them was still too futuristic for 1985.)

https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=go...

Adnix and Preachnix were the essence of capitalist entrepreneurship, he argued repeatedly. The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives.

"Well, the _absense_ of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaching people to be stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and direct mail business will boom, and that'll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don't see what the problem is."

Adnix, much more than the innumerable libel suits against the original commercial networks, led directly to their demise. For a while there was a small army of unemployed advertising executives...

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#17

Post by ceejayoz »

lifeeeeee wrote: post #14
jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

Neural networks scan the final rendered image of the page for ads and remove them. You can't dodge that.

Sure you can, the same way TV shows have done it - by subtly incorporating it into the text of the article.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#20

Post by yoz-y »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #15
jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

I think ad blocking is a misnomer. What people are trying to do when blocking ads is prevent marketing people from spying on them. And the performance and resource consumption that comes from that. Personal opinion: Laws are needed to make what advertisers are doing illegal. Advertisers are spying on people to the extent where if the government did it they'd need a warrant.

I disagree. The tech crowd is using adblockers to prevent spying and resource consumption. But majority of people running adblockers just don't want to see ads.
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