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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#441

Post by GordonS »

garmaine wrote: post #325
ibudiallo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one place I thought ads were relevant was on google search. After all, I was searching for the product they are advertising. But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator. For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads o…

Well that, and the fact that it actually says “Advertisement.”

No, as the parent mentioned, it says "Ad". As this is so short, I also find it easy to miss this

It's clear Google removed the previously obvious demarcation between ads and results specifically to make it less obvious.

I'd prefer a different background colour (like the parent's extension), but it would also help a bit if it said "Advertisement" instead of "Ad".

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#442

Post by TeMPOraL »

cameronbrown wrote: post #334
intopieces wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website. This is not the case. I have visited thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of websites in which the content was not valuable to me, and I blocked those ads, too. When I block ads, I send the signal that my attention is not for sale, and moreover, the content creators' business model is not my conce…

Except you're also blocking their analytics scripts, so you don't send any signal at all.

They should learn to do the job correctly and look at the server logs too.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#443

Post by egdod »

tatersolid wrote: post #386
tylerl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android phones do it automatically, assuming your carrier hasn't monkeyed with the phone app. I think Google keeps a spam probability score for callers' phone numbers based on how many people have marked a call as spam.

Spam call numbers are randomly generated. Blacklisting can’t work without collateral damage.

I’m surprised it helps at all. Why wouldn’t a robocaller generate a new random number every time?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#444

Post by KozmoNau7 »

amelius wrote: post #55

Did 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…

Advertising exists to increase consumption, because capitalism requires constant growth. On order for it to sustain itself, we need to buy more and more, consume more and more.

When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.

And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#446

Post by skunkpocalypse »

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…

> How would fraud detection work in this model?

Your business model is not our problem.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#447

Post by skunkpocalypse »

majewsky wrote: post #214
air7 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> data collection for trend analysis Of course that's going to be met with the same hostility. It's 99.9% the same thing. > crypto mining in the browser Of course that's going to be met with similar hostility. Climate change is even more present in the public consciousness.

Yegads, I think we need some sort of climate change corollary for Godwin's Law.

Difficult as it might be for you to believe, there are some discussions it isn't relevant to.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#448

Post by manigandham »

egdod wrote: post #443
tatersolid wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam call numbers are randomly generated. Blacklisting can’t work without collateral damage.

I’m surprised it helps at all. Why wouldn’t a robocaller generate a new random number every time?

They do. The common strategy is to pick numbers with the same area code to pretend to be legal, and some advanced callers try and pick numbers that match even more recognizable digits (like your office). All this traffic is a major source of revenue for VOIP operators.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#449

Post by lazyjones »

How about we just don't let the advertising industry develop or fund our browsers and web standards? Users need to be able to control what kind of content their device will load and display, so it's probably time to develop technology that supports it (and scrap the current web, which is now basically billboard ads for the internet).

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#450

Post by lazyjones »

lastpingstandin wrote: post #385
slang800 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.

> targeted psychological manipulation to you This seems exceedingly hyperbolic. With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge. Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc all provide tremendous value to their users while being ostensibly free. Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.

> Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.

Nonsense. OSM exists, HN exists, Linux exists. And just because some services need revenue to pay bills, it doesn't mean advertising or users paying is the only way to get it. Google Maps gets revenue from businesses using it on their websites, for example.

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