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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

#31

Post by eli »

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'd prefer if it were run with the aim of never breaking functionality instead of never seeing an ad, but I understand I'm in the minority.

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

#32

Post by bredren »

FussyZeus wrote: post #27
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.

I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth here.

I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages.

The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav.

I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups of pages used subtly different html it was a real mess.

It took a long time for them to get all the pages replicated in a templating system to avoid seo loss.

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

#33

Post by sus_007 »

grive wrote: post #26
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.

I got similar vibes going through the article and after finding out that they are actually a Ad-centric company, I am almost sure you're right.

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

#34

Post by yepguy »

Causality1 wrote: post #17

I fear that with adblocking nearing 25% market penetration we're going to see fundamental changes in the way ads are delivered in response. Maybe a transition from third party ad servers to locally hosted ads that have to be added to block lists individually. Maybe YouTube will start inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream. Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder…

If that happens, projects like Adblock Radio will hopefully step in to make "unblockable" ads more tolerable, by automatically turning the volume down for example.

https://www.adblockradio.com/en/

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

#35

Post by FussyZeus »

bredren wrote: post #32
FussyZeus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth here. I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages. The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav. I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups…

The thing is though that's a bad system, whether EasyList is prompting the changes, or the SEO, etc. and it feels like they're trying to pin "we had to fix thousands of pages" on EasyList as though their shit workflow is EasyLists' fault.

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

#37

Post by skybrian »

ziddoap wrote: post #11
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.

Indeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I think they want us to be angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure. My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.

Isn't it a bit disconcerting that we're so used to articles telling us what to feel that, when they don't do that, we get confused?

Maybe it's good just to have a reminder that much of our infrastructure is maintained by volunteers. Sometimes important policy decisions get made by whoever showed up and started doing the work in a way that looks competent to others.

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

#39

Post by simias »

gen3 wrote: post #2

> UBlock, another Adblock-owned blocking extension TIL According to Wikipedia: "In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by AdBlock"[1] This is not uBlock Origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin

I really think it was a mistake not to rename the project completely after the Origin fork. It's super confusing, especially since most of us still refer to Origin as "ublock" for short.

On both Google and DDG ublock.org is still the first match when you search for "ublock". I wonder how many people install this crap extension by mistake every day.

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

#40

Post by papln »

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.

Aljoudi hijacked the "uBlock" name from gorhill (apparently because gorhill was more concernted about building a good tool than maintaining trademark protection, and I guess no one volunteered to donate (para)legal work), so handing it back would be a "wish" indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock

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