141–150 of 151 posts
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…
>but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age. Yes! I think what has staved it off is the lack of adblocking on mobile devices. I use uBlock on every computer I have, but on my iPhone? Not so much. I think as more traffic moved to mobile it has offset ad blocking…
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.
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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.
Here's the forum thread in question. The suggested fix from EasyList was to rename a folder on AT's server from /advert/. As AT explained this folder was part of the URL for hundreds of thousands of cars and that the URL was used not only by the website, but other systems as well that move data around. In the end of the thread, you can see that the problem was fixed between EasyList and Autotrader. https://forums.lan…
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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.
But we’re talking about moral fiber. For some people “they hit me first” is not ethically sound. There’s some ambiguity here about who hit first, but rather than a fair exchange we are getting what is rapidly approaching brinksmanship. Nobody is really in the right here.
But we also can’t seem to just go back to a paid model for high production values. We are satisfied with amateur work and underpaid professionals slowly burning a nest egg and hoping something changes. The advertisers are the only ones with a hand out, so they get to set the agenda.
I had hopes Brave was going to alter this trajectory but there seems to be some regulatory capture there. i kind of wonder if they hired some ad people and charisma won over the origin story.
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.
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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…
Depending on how they're implemented, buttons linking to your Twitter and Facebook pages can double as trackers for Twitter and Facebook. Anyway. People rarely intend to block legitimate content. At the same time, it's not always easy to tell what is and isn't legitimate when you're writing fairly general rules.
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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…
> buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked Was everything hosted on your domain there? If they have images hosted by twitter/facebook that's enough for them to track users which is what these lists don't like.
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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…
Fanboy's social list was explicitly crafted to block social media buttons a few years ago: https://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/31/how-to-configure-adblock-p... It's now part of a bigger "annoyances" list so maybe that was included somewhere in one of the filterlists.
Seems a bit heavy-handed to me personally. I absolutely want to block intrusive ads and tracking, but this was a bit OTT. It also must have been included by default with uBlock Origin, as I didn't add it myself.
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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…
>buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages So, was it simple elements linking to your Twitter/Facebook page? Or was it maybe a metric ton of obfuscated JS fetched from a Twitter/Facebook CDN, that would relay every bit of data about your visitor, and as a side-effect display a button?