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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#281

Post by 18pfsmt »

tshaddox wrote: post #233
okr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say, "google makes a fortune and content creators make fuck all", then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it. And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i d…

> then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. Why do websites exist that don’t have ads? Why do people have personal websites and blogs? Perhaps it is, in fact, physically possible for a website to exist without serving third-party JavaScript ads.

> Perhaps it is, in fact, physically possible for a website to exist without serving third-party JavaScript ads.

This was never in dispute. If a website owner chooses to do so, it is their own choice.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#282

Post by ralphm »

Baeocystin wrote: post #213
sgeisler wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a massive drive to consolidation: people don't want to have a lot of subscriptions to manage. Imo subscriptions aren't viable at all. For me to subscribe to something I need strong evidence that I will use it enough. Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution. They remove the friction of making the subscribe decision and keep the content creators in check by only payin…

There is a company called Blendle that offers a curated source of news/op-ed/etc to read, where you pay some fraction of a dollar per read, usually in the 10-25¢ range. If you feel the article wasn't worth it, you can click a link to get an immediate refund, no questions asked. I like the idea, and I do use their service. They have plenty of room to improve- the articles they pick tend to almost always have a certain…

Blendle has stopped pay-per-article, moving to subscriptions entirely.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#283

Post by Godel_unicode »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #251
Godel_unicode wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's unclear to me what that has to do with my point; the existence of high quality patreon-backed podcasts doesn't mean anything about the supply of quality advertising-supported podcasts. You should look into it, there are a lot of them.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#284

Post by bangonkeyboard »

themacguffinman wrote: post #219
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So obviously the correct response from the Chrome team is to continue avoiding an approach that is known to save battery life /s

To clarify: Safari was already beating Chrome on battery life before _Safari's_ extension API was neutered.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#285

Post by ohithereyou »

manigandham wrote: post #221
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #148

I'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, bu…

It's been tried countless times. We tried as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038540 The issue isn't the payment tech, it's human behavior. People don't want to or can't pay for all the content they consume.

I don't think this is down to human behavior. Some content has zero or negative value.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#289

Post by Thriptic »

acdha wrote: post #182
tossAfterUsing wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ublock origin (in advanced mode), umatrix, and noscript each enable this functionality. Umatrix has the best UI of the three once you get used to it in my opinion. Go on YouTube and look for "the hated one" for great tutorials on JS blocking with umatrix and ublock origin.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#290

Post by ksangeelee »

kreetx wrote: post #252
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there's more involved than simply undoing a change. Apart from the obvious tedium of chasing upstream code changes, the extensions themselves have to be installed from a willing (and trusted) repository. The chrome web store can omit extensions that use an API in an unsupported way.

Brave already integrates ad-blocking at a lower level than the webRequest API, so this is less of an issue, but you sacrifice your choice in blocker.

https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/

The recent Chromium’s Manifest v3 controversy around the overheads of the various extensions using the WebRequest API to inspect and potentially block undesired requests did not affect Brave as requests are processed natively, deep within the browser’s network stack.

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