Remember that the formal name for a web browser is a User Agent . This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.
Not when the User Agent is built by the world's largest online advertiser.
Adblocking: How about Nah?
141–150 of 549 posts
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Safari's (Webkit's) declarative adblocker is really good while optimizing for performance and battery life. Have you tried 1Blocker X? Though, for fun, I've rolled my own Safari extension for content blocking. You get 90%+ of the way just concatenating lists of ad domains and feeding them into the blocker. But, for example, you can encode all of Easylist as content-blocker rules.
Chrome is now moving to a declarative model and it is widely considered to be a downgrade purposely meant to stifle ad-blocking technology. I think the ideal system would support declarative and non-declarative modes (since a fully declarative system could never account for every possible use case).
I can see that given the choice between declarative rules vs. a "onRequest(req)" handler, almost every developer would just opt for the latter because it's more general and open-ended.
And there's no pressure from users to choose the more restrictive but performant option because people basically have zero insight into what's killing their battery, much less which competitor is better in that regard.
Given the gulf between Safari vs Chrome battery performance, I'm not all that convinced that the declarative api is pure downside like HN cynicism and Twitter outrage might suggest.
I can agree that it would be nice to have competing implementations, but that's just the result of browsers being so complex that once your hobby horse feature is removed from one, you basically have nowhere to turn.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762450... , https://www.jstor.org/stable/3003609
Advertising has also been proven to be bad for your sense of life satisfaction, which is an externality not paid for by advertisers. "The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of be…
I don't see how the study is establishing causation. It does not prove that advertising is creating an externality, as you claim.
In fact, it explicitly says that it does not show causation and recommends further research.
It's easy to come up with theories to explain it that don't have anything to do with the one you proposed. For instance, higher advertising could be caused by weakness in the economy that doesn't show up in other data (or at least not GDP) but which leads to less satisfaction later, which wouldn't show up in their controls.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#144Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…
> because ads are used to make people consume more than they need
Not necessarily. An ad for a restaurant doesn’t necessarily make you eat more. An ad for a hotel doesn’t make you go on more trips.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, agreed. Ads are a great way to finance things where there is value in being accessible by everybody - I'm not happy about seeing podcast episodes locked behind Patreon walls, for example. While it's great these creators are gaining an additional revenue stream, it still means I or others are priced out of accessing their content. I don't have any natural right to access it, of course, but I prefer the open acces…
Podcasts are a great example. They've had to do advertising the old fashion way, by market research and trying to figure out which ad campaigns are more effective without mass surveillance. Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.
Some podcasts do algorithmic auction style ad sales with targeting based off geolocation on the downloading ip address. This works by generating a new audio file for each download. I think the industry calls it "dyanmic ad insertion".
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#146Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…
I worked briefly in a marketing department as programmer. Learned the following there. The benefit of advertising is to inform the consumer of products they may not be aware of. "Messa thinks Messa might have Mesothelioma!" Most of the time advertising is a waste of time, and there certainly are better ways of learning about products. However, the function of informing consumers of products they may not be aware of i…
Another way of looking at it: What are better alternatives for helping people learn about available products? Or better yet, good ways of solving different problems in life, which may not always involve buying a product.
There is an inherent problem with advertising in that the incentives are somewhat misaligned. Company X doesn't want me to learn about the best way to solve problem Y. They want me to learn about _their_ solution to problem Y.
Or even worse... Company X wants me to believe that Y is a problem for me — when in fact it may not be, or at least not how they claim — and that only they can solve it.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#147We’ve made full circle again. Were back in 1999. Tons of ads pace being bought with clickfraud (facebook). Zillions of scripts etc, when all you want is someone to put a text link + a pitch which is relevant to the page (current search, current article, type of content in the video), not the user. Problem is they can’t. Publishers earn through the massive amount a low quality traffic, bots, and even misreporting impr…
I really like https://tab.gladly.io/?u=antupis which raises money for nonprofits through adds.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#148I'm amazed that all the interested parties haven't got together to flesh out a microtransaction standard. The whole ad-blocking debate would be moot if we could pay a few cents to read an article free of distracting ads. If you choose not to pay, you get the ads and don't get to complain about ad-blocker-blockers because you were offered an alternative.
I know it has been attempted in the past with little success, but all those attempts were just companies going it alone and hoping for the best. If the W3C, browser makers, banks and publishers all got together a standard could be developed. Something that would be core to web standards. It wouldn't be easy, but it would solve a lot of problems.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at…
I don't really care if ads stop being profitable. If ads stopped being a good source of revenue, the tech industry would adapt, and my guess is that the end result would be much more favorable to society. I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model. Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Googl…
I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs.
It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very carefully before we remove services they need.
Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?
#150I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…
Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the adver…
good idea! your ad tag is exactly the type of compromise we’ve been asking for since the web (and online ads) became a thing: first-party-served ads with only basic first-party analytics and clear delineation of the ads. unfortunately competition happens around targeting, segmentation, and conversion, which pushes us way past that.