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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

#131

Post by ksangeelee »

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…

I struggle to see how the past five or ten years could ever be seen as a "golden age", if so then the future must be bleak.

I would argue that too much of the content that is paid for is created purely to generate page-views to carry advertising.

Those people who are motivated to share knowledge and opinions sincerely are crowded out by click-bait.

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

#132

Post by xorcist »

x0x0 wrote: post #14
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.

I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.

It's probably not that it's hard to type sed -i but that they can not change URLs so easily. It might be price indexing engines, external partners authorized to edit certain paths, and any number of other things.

If parts of your audience blocks ads then it's probably a good idea to test your web site with uBlock installed, just as you already test with Safari and MSIE.

It's specifically not a good idea to rely on the block list maintainers who will have a hard time separating earnest bug reports from all the bogus ones who think they've found a clever way to avoid blocklists.

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

#133

Post by kgwxd »

gmanley wrote: post #106
derefr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uBlock Official I’m pretty sure Eyeo did register the uBlock trademark, and has a good case to sue for someone implying through their product’s name that it’s “the official” uBlock.

There definitively isn't a good case for Eyeo. See: First To File vs First To Use. The US is a First to Use country for trademark law. I'm not saying it's a clear and cut case at all but I'd actually bet on a Judge siding with uBlock Origin if it ever went to court, which is unlikely.

I had this backwards. How in the world did AdBlock end up with rights to the uBlock name if 'uBlock' is a fork of what was originally called 'uBlock' but then became 'uBlock Origin'? Seems like the fork should have been required to change it's name. EFF should get in on this and resolve it once and for all.

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

#134

Post by yepguy »

papln wrote: post #130
yepguy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Isn't that a Browser feature that was/is fixed in 2019? Unrequested audio is flat-out absurd behavior in a browser.

I was responding to the possibility of YouTube just embedding ads directly into the video to thwart current ad-blocking techniques. If that happens the audio would already be playing before an advertisement started. Something like Adblock Radio is a more sophisticated approach that could still detect ads like that.

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

#135

Post by Nextgrid »

cat199 wrote: post #100
x0x0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.

why should an e-commerce focused site do anything at all to avoid the term 'advert' in the first place? anyone there is ostensibly interested in commerce/advertising.. list maintainers should be responsible regression test their lists for normal content and not do dumb things this is also a problem with bad/unscrupulous spam listings which list domains based on unsubstantiated requests, etc

You can choose to buy things online without being exposed to the cancer that is advertising.

I am against advertising and marketing and yet spend a considerable amount of money online, and I’m confident most of HN does the same.

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

#137

Post by hinkley »

Raed667 wrote: post #20

This is basically a hit piece on Easylist. My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka adman)

In nature, the best parasites divert a 'balanced' amount of resources from the host so as to prolong the interaction for as long as possible.

Sometimes reading about things like "balancing publisher monetization" puts the picture in my head of a bunch of anthropomorphized tapeworms trying to have a public policy debate.

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

#138

Post by hinkley »

luke0016 wrote: post #64
papln wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad. However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.

> Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad. Maybe your moral fiber. Definitely not mine.

Kinda had the same reaction, but if you went to your friend's house every week and drank all his beer an never gave anything back, eventually that would make you feel bad.

If I'm getting something that required skill and labor, 'moral fiber' suggests some quid pro quo. How are you going to reciprocate?

At some point someone observed "we can profit off of audiences" so that answer was "by being an audience member." But now it's kind of a mess, and either we haven't found a better model or inertia and collusion have prevented it from arriving.

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

#139

Post by luke0016 »

hinkley wrote: post #138
luke0016 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad. Maybe your moral fiber. Definitely not mine.

Kinda had the same reaction, but if you went to your friend's house every week and drank all his beer an never gave anything back, eventually that would make you feel bad. If I'm getting something that required skill and labor, 'moral fiber' suggests some quid pro quo. How are you going to reciprocate? At some point someone observed "we can profit off of audiences" so that answer was "by being an audience member." Bu…

I'm not sure I really agree with the analogy, but there are other approaches that don't involve assaulting my senses. For instance, they could just flat out charge money for it.

On a tangentially related note, I think there's a special place in hell for the engineers that created gas pumps that display ads while fueling. Those things are pure, unadulterated evil.

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

#140

Post by therealx »

dilutedh2o wrote: post #91
randomstring wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Autotrader has hundreds of thousands of template, CSS, and JS files with those paths hardcoded. Imagine the hell it would be to work on that website. Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.

I would love to see an example of something like this. Please.

I've seen backends that were that horrible. Updates were often done via regex's.
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