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‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

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Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#21

Post by tru3_power »

hnaccy wrote: post #10

>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.” Why would you ever want your adblocking lis…

Yea seriously.. that dude seems so out of touch. Unfortunate that they set cadence of adding exclusion rules when they really could have leveraged this situation to make a real change on a lot of websites.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#24

Post by GraemeL »

hnaccy wrote: post #10

>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.” Why would you ever want your adblocking lis…

I elected them when I turned on EasyList in my ad blocker. I certainly never elected Mr. Kratky-Katz to balance publisher monetization for me.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#26

Post by grive »

hartator wrote: post #22

It always amazes me that journalists still have no clue how open source work. And also they should talk about uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock Plus or UBlock.

This is not journalism. This is a hit-piece on EasyList, with a clickbait and false title.

It seems even plausible, reading it, that the author knows about uBlock origin but avoids naming it, instead listing the two sellouts that are morally shady.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#27

Post by FussyZeus »

luma wrote: post #6

This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.

Also as a quick aside, they mention that AutoTrader would've had to fix "hundreds of thousands of pages" and I'm calling bullshit. No site of that magnitude is using straight up HTML pages. Even if it's a jekyll thing where you'd have to change a bunch of templates, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the required changes could be done in a few seconds with any decent text editor.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#28

Post by pavel_lishin »

> But there are occasions when those changes are hard to make. In Autotrader UK’s case, for example, the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages.

I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask about why exactly that's a big task.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#29

Post by dastx »

gen3 wrote: post #5
Operyl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. More information from the source: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-comp...

I knew it was owned by someone else, I didn't expect it to have been sold to Adblock Plus though! I wish they would just hand the domain over to gorhill. It feels shady that they squat on it for the name recognition.

AdBlock Plus is different from AdBlock. AdBlock is owned by an unknown entity and the source has been based on ABP since 2016. ABP is owned by Eyeo Gmbh (which I think was founded by the original developers of ABP).

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#30

Post by eli »

patd wrote: post #8

I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore. I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website. But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussio…

This looks interesting. We had problems with AdBlocks breaking functionality on the parts of our pages that talk about ads. Super annoying. We basically had to rename all the assets and file paths to words with no meaning.

I'll be taking a closer look at the tool.

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