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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#181

Post by tomrod »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #149
jacobobryant wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But they can afford LibreOffice, Wikipedia, and Vimeo.

The current allocation of human productivity enablement is not the only one possible (and an "is" is not an "ought to be" as per Hume).

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#182

Post by acdha »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #154
deanc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether I do this on my iOS device. It's a bit of a pain to not have JS enabled in safari, but I can always share a page from Safari --> Duckduckgo's browser which i have installed for just such occasions. Settings > Safari > Advanced > Javascript off

Possibly the best feature of the Brave browser is having that be one tap away, remembered per-site. I really wish Firefox would copy it since I’m not optimistic about Brave’s longevity.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#183

Post by dkersten »

jefftk wrote: post #119
deanc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Honestly, I don’t care. It worked in print, it can work in digital. Adverts would bother me less if advertisers hadn’t proven again and again that they can’t be trusted and that they don’t care about my privacy. I also believe that advertisement is a cop out for a real business model and the lowest form of business. Besides, as Banksy said: “You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

And before you say that the content creators need to get paid, just looks at the situation on Youtube, where Google makes a fortune and the content creators make fuck all, and big companies can take what little ad revenue the creators would have got for copyright claiming over 5 seconds of audio that falls under fair use. Many content creators now rely either on sponsorship or direct support through things like Patreon. Sorry, but Google can go suck it.

(I’ve also started just not consuming content from hostile sites. It’s mostly trash anyway.)

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#185

Post by zamadatix »

butz wrote: post #175

Google and other ad businesses need to create "AMP for ads". Ads should allow only basic HTML elements without javascript. Figure out a way to track only what's really necessary, maybe even get allowed tracking level set by user in browser settings (an improved version of Do Not Track). That might be even used to check if user agrees to have cookies set. It should solve the annoying cookie banners issue too. Finally,…

> Google and other ad businesses need to create "AMP for ads".

Is that not what Google Ads is?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#186

Post by bangonkeyboard »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #142
shawnz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> 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.

Safari was already beating Chrome on battery life before its extension API was neutered. This is post hoc revisionist rationalization.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#187

Post by tomrod »

nkozyra wrote: post #136
Waterluvian wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember Gmail ads from like 2006? They were very minimal and on point. I was so optimistic thag the future of advertising was that.

This describes AdSense in general - the original point was some text ads. But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us. The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond s…

You put your finger on the pulse of it. Ads give little net positive to society in general, because their sole value add is to inform. But with information acquisition cost drastically reduced due to good search engines, the value add becomes nil. So advertisers create company value by other modes. This is not a net good.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#188

Post by Nebasuke »

c256 wrote: post #176
jefftk wrote: post #119

Earlier 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…

Do you feel like advertisers know that now? I feel like I hear about clickspam/ad fraud operations getting closed down (and nigh-instantly popping up elsewhere) on a constant basis. Is this like intrusive DRM in PC games, where all the studies show that it increases producer costs and complexity, annoys consumers, and doesn’t actually improve sales revenue, but some companies do it anyway because “what about piracy?”

I think one big difference with DRM for PC games, is that piracy of PC games is normally not a money making activity for the pirates. It might prevent companies from selling a game to certain people, but there is no clear cut evidence that person would have otherwise bought it.

For advertising however, you can first of all incur a cost to an advertiser (since costs are calculated per click, view, etc), but furthermore, pirates can even profit from it by having a website and generating fake clicks for that website. If you would not try to prevent this ad fraud you would have bad actors siphoning off complete company advertising budgets to their accounts.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#189

Post by coryrc »

air7 wrote: post #163
jacobobryant wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In recent years we, conscious consumers, shot down several viable business models that could have replaced ads such as data collection for trend analysis and crypto mining in the browser. They were met with outright hostility. Perhaps justifiably so, but we have to keep in mind that any producable "value" will have to "hurt" in some way. We have to give something in exchange for "free" services. Yet the focus is only…

Game theory. In a world with network effect and a choice to make money from ads or subscription, the companies that choose defect (bad ads) win. We have to change the environment to get a different outcome.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#190

Post by CannisterFlux »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #34
dontbenebby wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence my use of NoScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript

It's crazy Steve Gibson (of all people) calls this too impractical to use. If you're a total tech-novice, sure, but as a power user it's fine. I'm blocking ycombinator.com right now. I can still submit this. If something doesn't work, just click the icon and trust its domain. If pictures don't show, trust a CDN. Amazon, Paypal, 99% of sites work with an initial adjustment of trust settings.

Steve Gibson is ... well, he used Windows XP until fairly recently. He's not some one you should take advice from.

I used noscript until Firefox changed to the new web API and noscript stopped working briefly. I switched to ublock origin in medium mode and haven't looked back. More compatible and practical nowadays.

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