Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web • Hacker News Board

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#621

Post by XorNot » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

whoibrar wrote: post #167

parsd wrote: post #130

I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers. I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process. Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't…

This has to be the most unpopular opinion so far I have a few questions for you 1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?

There's also 4: It's not possible to consume content and not be affected by it. How okay are you with the fact that corporate messaging is a dominant mode of influence in your life?

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#622

Post by hackerfromthefu » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #144

xyst wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

instead of paying for premium and all of that money going to a megacorp. I spent some money on a simple browser plugin that forces YT to use the HTML5 video player. Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.

Premium views help a lot more than ad-supported views for creators, on the scale of 10-20x the payout per-view[0,1] (and it pays out regardless of the advertiser friendliness rating). This has been a hot topic lately[2,3], but at what point is you watching YouTube for years without ads, without paying for Premium, ethically stealing or "piracy"? YouTube was buying petabytes of Hard Drive storage a day in 2012 to keep…

You're missing so much in this analysis - the big advertising companies do much more than show ads - they stalk you in excruciating detail, they resell your private life information to untold abusers who try to gain advantage from you.

Taking advantage of you, by manipulating your mind is one of the basic premises of ads.

In some ideal 'fair' world ads would just present information for you to make rational choices - but nope, the reality is the ads industry is based on emotional/psychological manipulation. If you seek to understand you can research about the evolution of the industry since the time of Freud where they co-opted psychological techniques to sell things by exacerbating people's psychoses.

Put another way, your arguments would only make sense if the advertisers played fair but they are abusive and try to trick you. You can't make a fair deal with conniving.

The reality of this is so bad that it is destroying our society - at what point is allowing massive scale psychological manipulation/abuse for profit destroying society?

My post here is a bit ranty but I get upset at the lack of fair context in the presuppositions of your argument.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#623

Post by aembleton » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC

souldeux wrote: post #233

Geee wrote: post #129

Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad before I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.

I've been using and loving this: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

That looks really interesting. Thanks

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#624

Post by commoner » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

schnevets wrote: post #431

jedberg wrote: post #276

For the longest time I refused to install an adblocker. I worked at a company that made most of its money from ads, and it felt hypocritical to run an ad blocker. Also I wanted to experience the website the same way as the users do. For a long time I told people "my brain is my ad blocker I just ignore it". But after a while I just couldn't stand the web without it anymore. Websites got so bad I couldn't find the con…

I'm very surprised the article went into the technical (web site sizes) instead of the psychological. People using the advertised web cannot visit a page without being bombarded by political surveys ("Are your gas prices higher under Biden? WE WANT TO KNOW"), extraneous goods (Show your love with a "My husband is a Rick and Morty fan born in March whose area code is 212!" t-shirt!), and deceptive practices ("Everyone…

> I was shocked when uBlock got flack for arranging an "Acceptable advertising" practice on their filter.

The Acceptable Ads program started in AdBlock Plus (owned by Eyeo) in 2011. In 2018, uBlock (not to be confused with the highly recommended uBlock Origin) was acquired by AdBlock (which was itself acquired by an anonymous buyer in 2015, not to be confused with AdBlock Plus) and then implemented Eyeo's Acceptable Ads program by default.

The complaint against the program is that it turns Eyeo* into a rent-seeking middleman that profits from giving its users a degraded experience compared to ad blockers that block without selling exceptions, such as uBlock Origin. Eyeo is acting just like an ad seller, taking money from advertisers in exchange for its users' attention.

* And other companies? We don't know for sure who acquired AdBlock and uBlock, but it wouldn't be surprising if Eyeo did or if they have a common owner.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#625

Post by TobTobXX » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

figbert wrote: post #561

fartcannon wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NewPipe let's you 'subscribe' to channels without giving it any credentials. You know, like how it used to be with RSS. The good way. The user empowered way.

> You know, like how it used to be with RSS. That, my friend, would be because it is RSS!

IIRC, think NewPipe actually requests the channel pages and parses the html.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#626

Post by recursive » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

whoibrar wrote: post #167

parsd wrote: post #130

I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers. I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process. Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't…

This has to be the most unpopular opinion so far I have a few questions for you 1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?

Not the parent, but I've been doing the same thing. For maybe a slightly different reason.

1. Since the 90s. 2. Needs to be solved by user agents. Ad blockers generally work by host name or css selector. This doesn't filter out any of the bad guys that are really trying. 3. Continue with ads I guess. This doesn't actually happen in real life as far as I can tell.

The reason I don't use an ad blocker is that I like being able to see what's going on inside of a web browser. Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#627

Post by pwython » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #595

ajmurmann wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is…

And even if you pay for YouTube, you'll still get ads, despite YouTube detecting and tracking advertisements in videos.

YouTube itself doesn't serve ads if you're paying for premium. Outside of that, sure, content creators can do their own "sponsored by" ad segments within their videos.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#628

Post by gwd » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #619

parsd wrote: post #130

I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers. I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process. Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't…

I no longer use any ad blockers. I'm OK with most ads. I understand why they exist. What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.

> What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.

Aren't there lots like this? At some point Ghostery did that: It would show you static banner ads no problem; it would only be the crazy javascript advert-bidding-based-on-surveillance things that wouldn't show up.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#629

Post by yreg » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

freebuju wrote: post #592

yreg wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I was eating in an indian restaurant and I noticed a muted TV on the wall playing MKBHD's review of some drone. I was very confused why would they decide to show that. As I was eating the video ended and I realised the full review was an ad that played inside a 10 hour atmospheric video the restaurant intended to play. I found it pretty smart, because I can imagine myself succumbing to watching a full…

No. You are just a MKBHD fan. There's nothing more to it. Someone else who doesn't know who Marques is will see a talking head interrupting the relaxation video. For the restaurant owner, it means they cannot rely on YouTube to play requested video content as commanded. This proves the point even further, technology instead of being smarter in the case of YouTube here, has grown to become an annoying anti-consumer pr…

You haven't understood me. I found it ridiculous playing in a restaurant. It was muted anyway.

However, if I was at home, opened YouTube just to entertain myself and opened one of the algorithm suggested videos, then – in that situation – an interesting video from a channel that is unknown to me, inserted as an ad could hook me and could lead to me subscribing to said channel.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#630

Post by Jensson » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #588

pwython wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?

I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is…

Google shows you content they have licenced just like everyone else. It isn't like Netflix made all the content they host etc, Netflix also licence content from third party creators so they can host it, Google just doesn't have a filter and instead accept everyone who wants to put stuff there, and then by paying you support those smaller content creators rather than just Hollywood or other big studious like you do when you pay for Disney.

So from my perspective paying for YouTube is more important than paying for Netflix, since with YouTube you help support smaller creators, while with Netflix money gets consolidated into big names and brands. The platform takes a cut at both, but it is still better to have some go to small creators instead of everything going into giant corporations.