Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UBlock Origin

addons.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 333 posts

Re: UBlock Origin

#121

Post by Aissen »

mavhc wrote: post #61
frik wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you like to go back to Internet stoneage where you had to pay per page view in Microsoft Network '95 (MSN v1) or Germany's BTX from 1980s. Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall? The WWW got popular because it's friction-free and many sites are paid by advertisement money. At the moment many ad networks are just stubborn (bad ads) and greedy taking big chunk of the ads money…

Would you like to go back to the AOL model, where sites got a proportion of the user's AOL subscription?

In fact, this exists. It's called Flattr.

Re: UBlock Origin

#122

Post by piyush_soni »

glesica wrote: post #105
JohnTHaller wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people use ad blockers to block ads. That's why almost no ad blockers block GA, etc by default. Plus, from my other comment: "Many sites rely on Google Analytics to be able to do their own promotions and sponsorships, which is the only way they make money other than ads. By blocking GA, the site doesn't see you as a visitor. So, you use the site resources, don't see ads and don't add to their use…

> By blocking GA, the site doesn't see you as a visitor. They can still use server analytics to see me as a visitor. I even show up on Cloudflare. I don't want them tracking what I do on their site, it should be enough to know I showed up and asked for a specific page. If their business model relies on knowing more, then they chose a lousy business model. Why is there so much sympathy for ad-supported sites on HN but…

Yes, ads remain the major e-business model till date (and will probably remain for a long time to come). I guess one of the problems is, everyone needs money to maintain a website and to make a profit, but not everyone has content (or products) that could sell. It's a difficult problem to solve in theory. I think simple text based (or even small images based) ads should be fine .. it's the flashy ones or the ones that delay my workflow that I hate to the core.

Re: UBlock Origin

#123

Post by bhouston »

gpvos wrote: post #116
untog wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my computer, I pick what I want to display and which code I want to execute. If you really wanted to take a principled stand you just wouldn't use those web sites. Ad blockers are just lazy activism.

The sites are being lazy and/or cheap by using GA. They can use piwik instead. As long as they are lazy, I have an equal right to be lazy.

uBlock also blocked piwik last time I checked.

Re: UBlock Origin

#124

Post by bhouston »

DatBear wrote: post #111
JohnTHaller wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many sites rely on Google Analytics to be able to do their own promotions and sponsorships, which is the only way they make money other than ads. By blocking GA, the site doesn't see you as a visitor. So, you use the site resources, don't see ads and don't add to their user/page view numbers. Plus, there's the fact that lots of sites use GA to handle inter-page click tracking so they can see what paths users take to…

>blocking GA may break your ability to actually use the site at all (many travel sites, for instance). What? How does that even work? If GA goes down, their site just stops working until it's back up?

The travel sites I saw blocked didn't fail because of GA blocking I believe, but they were depending on various other scripts. I believe they just had messy code that relied on callbacks from third party scripts -- some of which were blocked by uBlock.

Re: UBlock Origin

#125

Post by iamcreasy »

Why it removing the youtube logo on the top left corner? Just because it's showing that youtube is streaming E3? :/

How do I let the extension know that some adds are part of the page?

Re: UBlock Origin

#126

Post by jhead »

glesica wrote: post #105
JohnTHaller wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people use ad blockers to block ads. That's why almost no ad blockers block GA, etc by default. Plus, from my other comment: "Many sites rely on Google Analytics to be able to do their own promotions and sponsorships, which is the only way they make money other than ads. By blocking GA, the site doesn't see you as a visitor. So, you use the site resources, don't see ads and don't add to their use…

> By blocking GA, the site doesn't see you as a visitor. They can still use server analytics to see me as a visitor. I even show up on Cloudflare. I don't want them tracking what I do on their site, it should be enough to know I showed up and asked for a specific page. If their business model relies on knowing more, then they chose a lousy business model. Why is there so much sympathy for ad-supported sites on HN but…

> If their business model relies on knowing more, then they chose a lousy business model.

I must disagree. I certainly understand a desire for privacy and it's definitely within your right to block GA if you feel so inclined, but to assume that sites using GA to track visitors is some sort of shady business model is simply not true.

I've used GA and Heap (Analytics) to obtain extremely granular information about how users traverse a website. This information can be invaluable to businesses in order to understand the thought process that people go through on a website. The underlying goal may be more conversions (sales), but simply using and analyzing data from GA or any other analytics platform isn't going to magically force you to purchase my product/service. These types of insights help identify critical issues with your website - issues such as pages with information that isn't as clear as it could be, or other possible barriers preventing users from signing up. This can be purely technical (i.e. a bug on a specific page), or it could be a lack of information/understanding about your product or service, or many other possibilities.

If you don't trust Google or other similar companies with your data, then you're welcome to block them from tracking you. But I personally don't believe that you should equate the use and analysis of such tracking data as evil in every instance, because it's not.

Re: UBlock Origin

#127

Post by pmontra »

gpvos wrote: post #43
bhouston wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget that uBlock blocks Google Analytics, breaks most popular travel sites if you try to actually purchase, and also error reporters like NewRelix. Most of this is the fault of the default inclusion of EasyPrivacy I believe.

Blocking Google Analytics is the main point of any blocker I would consider using.

You can also use NoScript for that.

Re: UBlock Origin

#128

Post by pmontra »

forgottenpass wrote: post #115
frik wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you like to go back to Internet stoneage where you had to pay per page view in Microsoft Network '95 (MSN v1) or Germany's BTX from 1980s. Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall? The WWW got popular because it's friction-free and many sites are paid by advertisement money. At the moment many ad networks are just stubborn (bad ads) and greedy taking big chunk of the ads money…

Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall? I don't rely on hundreds of ad-supported websites now. If all the ad-supported websites I use went behind paywalls, I'd be fine with that. I'd pay for google and one or two more news orgs in addition to the ones I'm subscribed to. The rest of the websites I depend on and don't pay for are non-profits and/or don't run ads in the first place.…

> I don't rely on hundreds of ad-supported websites now.

I don't know if I do but I might do. The reason I don't know it is that I use AdBlock but whenever I google something I go to a few well known sites and to hundreds of random blogs. If I had to pay for each of them I'll probably use the Internet very differently.

Re: UBlock Origin

#130

Post by ryan-c »

DatBear wrote: post #111
JohnTHaller wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many sites rely on Google Analytics to be able to do their own promotions and sponsorships, which is the only way they make money other than ads. By blocking GA, the site doesn't see you as a visitor. So, you use the site resources, don't see ads and don't add to their user/page view numbers. Plus, there's the fact that lots of sites use GA to handle inter-page click tracking so they can see what paths users take to…

>blocking GA may break your ability to actually use the site at all (many travel sites, for instance). What? How does that even work? If GA goes down, their site just stops working until it's back up?

I used one site which would throw an javascript exception and break because it called part of google analytics from some other function that was needed to make the site work. I ended up opening it up in a private browsing session, and I've got my script blocker disabled there.

Yes, the site would be unusable if GA went down.

Post reply on HN