What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#121

Post by KozmoNau7 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #79

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for website access by needlessly wasting CPU power. Doesn't sound like a particularly good idea, especially for laptop users.

I understand this point. But on the other hand, it is not necessarily wasting cpu power. It is converting CPU power to payment for content, as a type of seamless micropayment, not requiring punching in credit card numbers, 3rd parties, setting up accounts etc. Some browser-based standardization of a unit of cycles per view might be established. I don't know, just exploring. The current state of the internet kind of s…

It's wasting CPU/GPU cycles and battery power, vastly more than would be used for a simple micropayment with actual currency.

I refuse to participate in the degradation of my devices' performance as "payment".

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#122

Post by KozmoNau7 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #105

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather do neither. My CPU, my bandwidth, I decide what runs. If they want money, they can put up a paywall.

> I decide what runs Exactly. No-one is forcing you. You are confusing this with sites starting the miner without consent.

When sites are specifically proxying their miners, to act as if they're running in a first-party context, that is deceptive, and done specifically to get around adblockers and mining blockers.

Make it 100% opt-in and tell people in no uncertain terms up front what they're signing up for, then maybe.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#123

Post by johmac00 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

Are they mining monero? Seems like it w/ CPU usage and apparently being profitable

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#124

Post by speakeron » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #86

wskinner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called proof of work: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The giant pile of dirt on my back yard is proof that I did hours of hard work with a tea spoon. Much less efficient than a shovel would have been, as a metaphor for hash algorithms designed to be difficult. Why is that proof of work of any value, to anyone? Hard work, just for the sake of hard work, is a great ideal to the the previous generations - but we traditionally have based our economy on how much your work be…

> The giant pile of dirt on my back yard is proof that I did hours of hard work with a tea spoon.

It isn't proof: you could have used a digger. The point of Bitcoin-style proof-of-work is that everyone has to use a teaspoon, and if you want to 'go back in time' and rewrite transactions you have to do more work with a teaspoon than everyone else is doing.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#125

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

cribbles wrote: post #109

For those unfamiliar, Salon.com is a new media company that publishes articles on current events from a left-leaning perspective - for example, "Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future" [1] [1] https://www.salon.com/2017/12/06/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-c...

Holy hell. This is the new best in terms of conflicting viewpoints in a single media outlet.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#126

Post by castle-bravo » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #96

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can control how much is "spent" with with a cap on CPU utilization.

I'm not sure if that would slow the page down and make it unusable though. Prioritizing non-mining activity seems like it might be trickier than simply capping processor usage. Although it's not quite the same thing, it makes me think of how bandwidth heavy pages are now. Once upon a time, I browsed the web on 56K, or even 14.4K. Now, when my phone gets throttled to 128K many sites are unbearable.

My phone is currently throttled to 8kB/s. The only thing I can read is Hackernews; this is a well-built site.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#127

Post by dkarl » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 3:22 PM UTC

imron wrote: post #95

dkarl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything . But having this appear out of nowhere after years of waiting for micropayments for journalism is enough to make me gush like that.

Check out brave and brave payments.

The top Google result for them seems to be a broken page. https://www.brave.com/blog/introducing-brave-payments/

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#128

Post by tepmoc » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

seanwilson wrote: post #24

jnordwick wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather pay 10 cents than waste 20 cents in electricity. There just isn't good way to really do that easily and transparently.

Half-baked thoughts here, but the way I thought of it is you'd "top-up" your browser with say $10 a month and it would be distributed to sites you've viewed or chosen to donate to. There's obvious questions with privacy though and sites trying to game the system if it's view count based. I think most people wouldn't be against a small monthly payment to avoid seeing ads but you'd need to do it in a way that was simpl…

https://github.com/priestc/Autotip

was nice back in days when fee was low

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#129

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

cribbles wrote: post #109

For those unfamiliar, Salon.com is a new media company that publishes articles on current events from a left-leaning perspective - for example, "Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future" [1] [1] https://www.salon.com/2017/12/06/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-c...

> Salon.com is a new media company

Salon was founded in 1995 (and its close analogue Slate a year later). I guess that "new media" can encompass anything that was primarily digital from the start, but it still feels weird to see that tag applied to something that has been around for over two decades now.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#130

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #62

apatters wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem at all with websites using browser mining as an alternate monetization strategy to ads, as long as: 1) Permission is requested first 2) The UX is good (it stays out of my way and doesn't slow down my device) 3) The mining finishes when I leave the site Most of the problems with the modern web stem from the failure of browser vendors to implement a good user-centric permissions model. They all hold a…

> Most of the problems with the modern web stem from the failure of browser vendors to implement a good user-centric permissions model. I suggest that such creating a proper permission model isn't possible , because it isn't possible to determine the behavior of Turing complete programs without running them[1]. Browsers are currently chasing the impossible[2] goal of trying to enumerate badness - often only the known…

> I suggest that such creating a proper permission model isn't possible, because it isn't possible to determine the behavior of Turing complete programs without running them.

You don't need to solve the halting problem to have a good user-centric permission model; permissions are about resources, not computation, the halting problem doesn't address use of resources. Whitelisting APIs, firewall-like control of access to external network resources, and possibly CPU usage limits would be sufficient, with he right UI.