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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

#81

Post by ziddoap »

radisb wrote: post #79
ziddoap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its disconcerting at all. Articles are supposed to have a point, a goal, etc. The goal might be persuasive, it might be to establish facts, it might be to argue for a specific change or against one. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with what the article has laid out. But we need something to agree or disagree with. In this case, I had no idea what the point of the article was (beyond a vague f…

Why does an article necessarily have to have a point? Why cant it just lay the facts and let the reader process them and judge them and feel about them how ever the reader wants?

In your example, the point of the article would be to "establish facts", which was an example I gave.

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

#82

Post by ziddoap »

auslander wrote: post #74
ziddoap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> .. it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests They responded and removed amp-analytics. I'm not that impressed. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/8311

Impressed that they respond in a timely manner, as per the article. The part you excluded from the quote is sort of the crux of my statement. I made no comment to the how they respond.

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

#84

Post by pavel_lishin »

barkingcat wrote: post #75
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 used to work at a commercial website host where the primary product they sold was "promo pages for your xyz business and abc products" and each and every single page was manually updated down to the head/footer and statically served. They had "templates" in a notepad, and you copy and paste it out and edit as needed. Which means that after you make the initial creation, any subsequent edit (including things like he…

This is all just speculation, but this attempted hit-piece on EasyList appears to be slowly pushing AutoTrader in front of the approaching bus.

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

#85

Post by CivBase »

> the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages

Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using .

EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for the project. Both of these impacts are small, but they can't afford to accommodate for every website like that.

If they want their users to use their site, they should make it work on their user's environments. I doubt they would demand Google or Mozilla accommodate for them like that.

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

#86

Post by jrockway »

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.

You would be surprised. Many years ago I worked on a CMS for a large household-name client. Their entire website was made up of individual HTML pages. No shared header, footer, or anything; if you wanted to update one of those, you would be updating it thousands of times.

My task was to move all of that into a very minimal CMS. All the content would be in flat files, and the page itself would load the header, footer, content, etc.

Because every page was different, but mostly similar, I wrote an Emacs extension that let you identify the content areas (it tried some heuristics and you could guide it) and it would do the extraction and emit the flat content file and the replacement JSP file.

What you have to realize is that many people have systems that are designed for 1 "thing" and have since "scaled" that up 1000x. People still treat their website as a directory of arbitrary HTML. People manage 1000 servers like they managed their one and only very first server. It is the natural way of growth. Engineering is figuring out when that model doesn't apply anymore, and changing it. Engineering is in short supply, however, leading to stories like mine above or the "thousands of pages" blocked by EasyList.

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

#87

Post by danShumway »

targonca wrote: post #25

>But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes. They were elected by people voluntarily installing EasyList. We had enough of you experts™, thanks.

Seriously -- every Adblocker will allow you to subscribe to custom lists, there's no vendor lock-in, there's no network effect, there aren't significant regulatory or commercial barriers to entry. This isn't like Facebook.

Blockers like Ublock Origin also don't benefit from legitimate sites breaking; if they're turning on EasyList by default it's because they think it's currently the best balance available for their users.

If anyone can make a better list than Easylist, then they should just go do it. In fact, companies already tried to make an alternative with the Acceptable Ads initiative -- and if their list is better, people will switch to it. The only barrier of entry to displacing EasyList here is quality over time.

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

#88

Post by jrockway »

ryandrake wrote: post #55
bredren wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been working in big tech companies for too long. When I got to that part, I thought to myself, "Wait, they think hundreds of thousands is a lot of content? That should be fixable over someone's lunch break!"

What big tech company do you work at that can edit other people's websites to link to renamed URLs? I am sure that "mv /www-data/adverts /www-data/foobar" is a trivial operation. Making links work (adblock will block the 302 you skillfully put in place) is harder.

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

#89

Post by jcoffland »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #73
GordonS wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked. I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content? I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long t…

My users were complaining they couldn't see some avatars on my forum. I realized it's because I generate a UUID for each upload and bucket the files into folders such that a hex ID of "ad73a7a8b9" has the URL of "/ad/ad73a7a8b9". I realized the blunt force approach of various adblockers will block anything on "/ad/...". Some would even block "/ad...". I found that a bit annoying.

You should fix it. You would be helping in the fight against ads.

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

#90

Post by ksangeelee »

donarb wrote: post #67
FussyZeus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is is that AutoTrader is a website that advertises cars, they don't even have any other advertising on their site. And because EasyList doesn't like a word in their URL, the website breaks through no fault of their own. If the owner of the website is doing nothing wrong, the onus is on the owner of the blocking technology to come up with a system that works correctly.

I just visited the AutoTrader site (from the UK), and uBlock Origin blocked 34 requests related to ads and tracking. I recall in the past having been surprised at the number of extra requests being made via their site. They don't serve only vehicle listings.
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