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

Adblock Plus announces members of independent Acceptable Ads Committee

acceptableads.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 105 posts

Re: Adblock Plus announces members of independent Acceptable Ads Committee

#22

Post by iLoch »

JTon wrote: post #13
anilshanbhag wrote: post #4

I am surprised Google does not have a seat at the table.

Maybe to Google attending such an event legitimizes the use of ad-blocking tech. As far as I've seen, Google has either ignored it or been hostile towards it.

They already do that with Google Contributor.

Re: Adblock Plus announces members of independent Acceptable Ads Committee

#23

Post by jasonkostempski »

There are really 3 separate things lumped into the word "ads". Advertisements (obvious); annoying UI/audio/video (modal dialogs, video, etc); and 3rd-party tracking.

Advertisements in general I accept and I don't have any desire to prevent people or companies from including it in their own content, although, if included, I'll likely view the content as less reputable and the creator as having less integrity. Some people flat-out hate all ads and that's why they have an ad blocker. Their acceptable ad list would have 0 entries.

Tracking is a non-starter for me, advertising is possible without tracking but it's not generally done that way, it works for TV and radio. Most "ad" networks don't actually give a hoot about advertising, they care about tracking and tricking companies into footing the bill for collecting the data. I use my ad blocker as a tracking blocker, I wouldn't have bothered to install it if tracking weren't possible. I have no qualms about preventing someone from collecting information about me. I'd want anything ads that come from a third-party to be off the acceptable ad list (effectively an empty list).

Annoying UI I can tolerate to a point. Most of this is blocked by my "ad" blocker so I only see how bad it really is out there in the wild when I forget to install it. Assuming the ad blocker didn't do that, if things get too annoying I'd leave the site, if I find myself returning to the site and getting annoyed often, I'll filter out links to the site wherever I can. There are handful of really annoying sites that come up often enough that I've made a browser plug-in for myself to do link filtering on. Right now most of the sites on the list have a pay-wall or "ad" block blocker and keep playing the cat & mouse game and winning (good for them, they must imagine Sisyphus happy).

This is how I wish "ad blocking" worked: Community driven list of "bad players", bad being any tracking, dark patterns, or very annoying UI; links to bad players get removed from all pages, I never want to see them or their click-baity titles ever again; white-list for site you want to let track, trick and annoy you; grey-list for sites you want to see but still block in the traditional way. This would also provide feedback to bad players, giving them a chance to change their ways and new players would fear getting added.

Re: Adblock Plus announces members of independent Acceptable Ads Committee

#26

Post by manigandham »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #23

There are really 3 separate things lumped into the word "ads". Advertisements (obvious); annoying UI/audio/video (modal dialogs, video, etc); and 3rd-party tracking. Advertisements in general I accept and I don't have any desire to prevent people or companies from including it in their own content, although, if included, I'll likely view the content as less reputable and the creator as having less integrity. Some peo…

> Most "ad" networks don't actually give a hoot about advertising, they care about tracking and tricking companies into footing the bill for collecting the data.

Where did you get this info from? Ad networks care very much about the ads.

Re: Adblock Plus announces members of independent Acceptable Ads Committee

#28

Post by danudey »

COMPUTERLOSER wrote: post #18

No ads are acceptable if I choose to have an ad-blocker installed.

I don't adblock because I don't want ads; I adblock because the vast majority of ads are garbage, distracting, noisy, and frustrating, blocking huge swaths of the page and making the content harder or impossible to see, and because tracking pixels, third-party JS, analytics, and so on all make page loading 10-30 times slower (or worse).

If a company is serving good, simple ads, if they don't take up an inordinate amount of space, slow my computer, waste massive amounts of bandwidth, and overall ruin my web browsing experience, I'm fine with it.

But no one is. So I adblock.

If the end result of adblock is that websites stop being slow, user-hostile blobs of ads and third-party analytics, then I'd consider that an overall win. If the result is that websites start relying on reasonable subscription or access fees and that people become willing to pay that, then even better.

Re: Adblock Plus announces members of independent Acceptable Ads Committee

#30

Post by makecheck »

Well, the definition to me is quite simple: “a non-animating image or line of text that occupies no more than 2% of available space, served directly by the displayed web site domain”.

Also, it’s definitely not just advertisers these days that make me go straight for the uBlock Origin settings panel. I’d say on 50% of browsed articles, some obnoxious component halfway down the page auto-plays a VIDEO with SOUND. This isn’t advertising, this is just some web site’s utterly misguided thinking in what a person might want when visiting a written article online over a limited data channel! And yet, “ad”-blocking tools work just as well: select obnoxious element, turn it off. (And you can sort of tell they expect you to do this now, because some of these video players are buried in about 6 layers of HTML components that appear to have no real value other than to make it harder to find the element that actually makes the video go away.)

Post reply on HN