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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best content I’ve found in recent years has been either on sites that don’t contain advertisement (because they’re someone’s personal hobby blog, for example, or HN) or from videos where the person was supported directly by fans through Patreon. Anecdotally, the advertisement-supported content is mostly garbage.

You should check out Neil Degrasse Tyson on YouTube. Or virtually any podcast.

I listen to maybe a dozen podcasts. None have ads; most of them I support on Patreon.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also “Brave” but that seems to be a Crome clone.

Any "browser" without its own engine isn't really relevant here, as 95% of their product is being maintained by a third party. This includes Brave, Opera, Gnome Web, and now even Edge. (I'm admittedly not sure how I'd classify stuff like Pale Moon, which is primarily based off someone else's engine but now backports its own patches.)

But isn't it? Google Chrome is trying to reduce ad blocking by changing webRequest API, but others that use the same engine can simply undo that change.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#253
post #116
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…

Another possibility would be to create ad blockers that do that, i.e. block third party javascript but not pure text or images. Then you get the same result, simple ads get through but ad scripts don't, so the people who use ads without scripts are the only ones who make money from them.

umatrix does that, but third party is the problem. so many domains put their js on a separate domain. even if they own it.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#254
post #67

I 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…

If you are fine with ads so that content creators make money, where do you draw the line? How much money should they make? Having more data about you allows them to pick out 'better' ads and make more money. Wether this money goes to ad networks or content creators depends on how much leverage one has over the other.

It's not a question of how much money they make, but how they make it. An advertisement should be a one-way channel from the publisher to the audience. If information is flowing in the other direction (particularly if without the audience member's express permission) then it's become something more than an advertisement and that's a good place to draw the line.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#257
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! All the replies here are missing the point completely. It’s not that JavaScript is somehow uniquely bad among programming languages. It’s that the entire idea of putting a general purpose programming language into the system was a bad idea. 99% of my web browsing shouldn’t need it. Every site I visit uses it, but almost all of them could be built just fine without it.

The web has long-ago graduated beyond just serving up documents, and having a capable language and platform was key in enabling it. There are downsides to everything, but we cant dismiss that positives that came from it.

The problem is that document delivery is still the main function, but the platform wants to be a fully capable app platform.

Yes, it’s great that the web is capable of stuff like Google Docs. But all those capabilities are actually liabilities when it’s a news site.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#258
post #196

There are more countries besides United States. I don't know why people here always refer to it as if it were the only ruler of the internet. It's not. In fact it does a piss poor job at playing its part.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's tedious and leads to worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542805 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#259
post #196

There are more countries besides United States. I don't know why people here always refer to it as if it were the only ruler of the internet. It's not. In fact it does a piss poor job at playing its part.

You mean, aside from the fact that we invented the internet? You are welcome.

Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd be grateful.
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