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What we break when we fix ad blocking

tonyhaile.com

131–140 of 226 posts

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#131
post #124

[deleted]

Except for the html page you didn't specifically request anything. javascript, images, Css, cookies keeping you logged in, favicon, video, music, game assets. None of that is explicitly requested by the user. More over, there is no technical reason why ads needs to be loaded from a third party by the browser. You could easily include them server side.

[deleted]

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#132
post #2

Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers/publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire. It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through const…

Criminals? Really?

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#133
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are, it's called Patreon. Which would be a good model, too, for "free but we need our salary paid" content.

There's also Google Contributor. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ I'd be fine with websites requiring a Google Contributor login for unlimited access.

Also Beacon: http://www.beaconreader.com

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#134
post #117
post #4

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's onl…

> I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. As it turns out, you're guilty of the same thing everyone else is, because you've absolutely missed the point of enabling ad blockers on iPhone For Apple, it serves two purposes, both of which are hugely anti-competitive. They'll most likely get away with it, due to the fact that they have a minority share of the global…

Ad blocking is not an attack on the open web. Ad blocking is the open web.

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#135
post #17
post #4

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's onl…

>everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has bee…

[deleted]

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#137
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has bee…

But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there. Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.

Five years ago, Sao Paulo, Brazil, banned all outdoor advertising. All. Not just billboards, large business signs had to go too. It worked out very well.[1]

[1] https://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#138
post #4

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's onl…

ISPs should be legally required to pay a fixed percentage of their profits per subscriber to the owners of the sites that those subscribers visited. No one seems to have a problem with 70/30 these days, so how about that? The 70% of former ISP profits could instead be distributed in a fair way to site owners based on total time the user spent interacting with their site in the frontmost tab, as calculated in an agreed-upon manner by all the major browser vendors. It would also be auditable by the site owners, because they could run their own page activity analytics and see whether they match up with the level of activity claimed by the detection built into the browsers.

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#139
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not slavery; it's volunteerism. No one is forced to produce content for the web. Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.

Let me put that another way: People currently try to monetize by putting ads on their sites. Other people use adblockers, denying them payment but benefitting from their labor. If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people. I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of peo…

Wikipedia wasn't written by "victims of theft".

I don't see how I exploit them by reading their articles - more likely the opposite is true, and the authors actually hoped that many people would read their article and that their readers would get something out of it.

Maybe you are idealizing wage labour? The economy isn't fair, it's more like "winner takes all". There is a blurred line between work and joy. Some people just write for the recognition (which is not a synonym for pay), or because they really care about the topic. If only 0.01% of the internet population is motivated like that, then content will always be produced no matter what.

If they were full of existential fears, with no idea how to pay their bills, they wouldn't have the energy for writing at all. Or maybe they would be writing about their problems instead.

Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking

#140

My issue is with advertisements that break web pages, or slow them down dramatically. Or even worse, take up real estate on my phone, and just plain break my mobile experience further. Sometimes I forget to install an adblocker whenever I do a fresh OS install and forget just how bad things can be without an adblocker (well really my biggest peeve is pop ups, just why are they still around?) and they get worse when s…

> just plain break my mobile experience

I installed Firefox on my Android recently since it allows extensions and I could install UBlock Origin. I've found it helps quite a bit.

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