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

LA Times and ads

nelsonslog.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 192 posts

Re: LA Times and ads

#181

Post by amluto »

gruez wrote: post #28
amluto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to a see, or at least think about, a system in which everyone pays for egress and no one pays for ingress. That way the LA Times is welcome to throw as much crap as they want at you without charging you much. (One issue is that egresss is involved in every request. Some UI work would be needed to make this work well.) Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too.

>Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too. How? By charging the owners of infected machines?

Why not? If you have a water leak, you get a high bill and then you can ask your water agency to refund you if you fix the leak. ISTM being infected and spewing data could be handled similarly.

Currently there is effectively no incentive to avoid having a gadget that joins a botnet.

Re: LA Times and ads

#182

Post by amluto »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #70
amluto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to a see, or at least think about, a system in which everyone pays for egress and no one pays for ingress. That way the LA Times is welcome to throw as much crap as they want at you without charging you much. (One issue is that egresss is involved in every request. Some UI work would be needed to make this work well.) Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too.

I'm curious what you're thinking of specifically, because I can't imagine any remotely reasonable way to make egress fees work from a technical standpoint, let alone widespread acceptance and adoption. You browse to a site, you can read all the articles you want, but you can't load any other sites until you pay?

I'm a bit confused by your question. I'm saying it might be reasonable to charge per byte sent, that's all.

Re: LA Times and ads

#183

Post by Niten »

SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on,…

I happily disabled my ad blocker for the LA Times when they requested it, but I eventually closed the page when they decided to load enough ad content to make my Chrome tab unresponsive on my Xeon workstation. I won't be back.

I'm not even really adverse to ads, or to paying for content. (I subscribe to three newspapers, two of them in print.) I just want a browsing experience that isn't terrible.

Re: LA Times and ads

#184

Post by intrasight »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #168
intrasight wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you block all third-party resources?

I don't think so. I have not extensively reconfigured uBlock Origin. What setting are you thinking is relevant? BTW, this custom filter rule seems to work around the LA Times blocker blocker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527

You have to enabled "advanced user". Then on the "third-party" line you can select to block. Be forewarned that your browsing experience will default to a mid-1990s experience as you'll likely have no JS nor CSS since those are now often served by different domains. But for each domain you can now select which third-party sites to enable and then persist those settings. I have Firefox setup this way. In Chrome I have a default uBlock Origin install, so it is not so aggressive with filtering.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-feature...

Re: LA Times and ads

#185

Post by tripzilch »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #180
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do know you don't click on ads. They just show you ads for people who are going for exposure rather than clicks, because you count as an impression even if you can't be used to generate clicks.

True. But if you've never clicked doesn't that mean something? Even if the goal is impressions wouldn't you prefer someone who has shown to be influence-able over someone who isn't? (Hint: I would de-target non clickers.)

Yes, if online advertising was strictly a deal between the media (online newspapers etc) and the advertisers.

But there's a useless middle-man industry that is the cause of all these problems: the ad-networks. They don't quite care that the impressions are no good to the advertisers, and they care only very little about the brand-damage to the media, caused by malware and bandwidth-waste. Or (dangerous) inconvenience to the consumers.

We wouldn't have any of these issues if the media were just to strike deals with advertisers themselves (like newspapers used to) (or maybe hiring out to an advertising agency, but still keep full editorial control, no newspaper would regularly allow an ad agency to inject their content last-minute before press, without any editorial oversight).

They would basically just self-host the ad banner, with a click-through link, self-hosted analytics for the advertisers, and everything would be fine. Ad blockers don't block self-hosted banners. No viruses, no malware, not as much privacy risk, no bandwidth wastage.

The ad-networks are really bad for all parties involved.

Re: LA Times and ads

#186

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #180
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do know you don't click on ads. They just show you ads for people who are going for exposure rather than clicks, because you count as an impression even if you can't be used to generate clicks.

True. But if you've never clicked doesn't that mean something? Even if the goal is impressions wouldn't you prefer someone who has shown to be influence-able over someone who isn't? (Hint: I would de-target non clickers.)

What makes you think people who don't click aren't influenced?

Repeated spaced exposure seems to have an impact on people, even if they don't think it does.

Re: LA Times and ads

#187

Post by NelsonMinar »

intrasight wrote: post #184
NelsonMinar wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. I have not extensively reconfigured uBlock Origin. What setting are you thinking is relevant? BTW, this custom filter rule seems to work around the LA Times blocker blocker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527

You have to enabled "advanced user". Then on the "third-party" line you can select to block. Be forewarned that your browsing experience will default to a mid-1990s experience as you'll likely have no JS nor CSS since those are now often served by different domains. But for each domain you can now select which third-party sites to enable and then persist those settings. I have Firefox setup this way. In Chrome I have…

Oh I see what you mean. Yeah, that's crazy, I'm not doing that.

Re: LA Times and ads

#188

Post by NelsonMinar »

greglindahl wrote: post #50
NelsonMinar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?) I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thin…

Someone just posted a comment on my blog they managed to leave it running for 3.2 hours and got 1.4GB of traffic. Then devtools crashed. I realize this is still terrible methodology, but perhaps we literally lack the technology to measure this webpage.

https://snag.gy/6UtJDA.jpg

Re: LA Times and ads

#189

Post by intrasight »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #187
intrasight wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to enabled "advanced user". Then on the "third-party" line you can select to block. Be forewarned that your browsing experience will default to a mid-1990s experience as you'll likely have no JS nor CSS since those are now often served by different domains. But for each domain you can now select which third-party sites to enable and then persist those settings. I have Firefox setup this way. In Chrome I have…

Oh I see what you mean. Yeah, that's crazy, I'm not doing that.

Yeah, that's what my wife said too. That I go to the trouble shows how fed up I am with all this tracking.

Re: LA Times and ads

#190

Post by andai »

good_vibes wrote: post #177
andai wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more like, you didn't do anything right! It sounds mysterious and all, but does not really benefit anybody else.

In that case, HN should brighten up. Cynicism for it's own sake rarely leads to innovation. Thinking based upon First Principles and original insight does correlate with innovation. This will get downvoted probably because it hurt someone's ego but it's true if you look the history of science and technology.

I mean, if your note-to-self system is leaving cryptic comments, you should probably invest in finding something more appropriate.

I'm very happy with Notational Velocity at the moment (not sure about cross platform solutions, but I think most systems do similar things nowadays).

Post reply on HN