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

Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

pi-hole.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 320 posts

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#201

Post by nugator »

zeta0134 wrote: post #192
QuadrupleA wrote: post #186

I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an avenue to get some income in exchange for their efforts, and possibly be able to devote their full attention to a free project and not have to support themselves with other income. Ads give creators some incentive to create stuff - although the income generally is…

I've maintained for a long time that the ad networks themselves are the problem, not advertising as a whole. There is a place for video advertising (around content that is also video), there is a place for audio advertising (on the radio, around podcasts, on music services), and there is even a place for animated, interactive advertisements, on sites that are expected to dance and move anyway, like online games. The…

Organic like: "Vote for the Snickers Play of the Week"

For me that is quite funny in a way Americans might not get since brands and commercials are more or less everywhere.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#202

Post by LordKano »

zeta0134 wrote: post #192
QuadrupleA wrote: post #186

I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an avenue to get some income in exchange for their efforts, and possibly be able to devote their full attention to a free project and not have to support themselves with other income. Ads give creators some incentive to create stuff - although the income generally is…

I've maintained for a long time that the ad networks themselves are the problem, not advertising as a whole. There is a place for video advertising (around content that is also video), there is a place for audio advertising (on the radio, around podcasts, on music services), and there is even a place for animated, interactive advertisements, on sites that are expected to dance and move anyway, like online games. The…

I can't tolerate ads that mangle content.

If the ad floats over the content. If the ad overlays my screen. If the ad forces me to do something to dismiss it, I don't care what the product is. I'm going to be less inclined to buy.

Put a normal, rectangular ad on the screen that doesn't dynamically resize itself while I'm trying to read the content and don't spread the content across 31 different pages just to increase the number of ads you show me.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#203

Post by hire_charts »

nugator wrote: post #201
zeta0134 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've maintained for a long time that the ad networks themselves are the problem, not advertising as a whole. There is a place for video advertising (around content that is also video), there is a place for audio advertising (on the radio, around podcasts, on music services), and there is even a place for animated, interactive advertisements, on sites that are expected to dance and move anyway, like online games. The…

Organic like: "Vote for the Snickers Play of the Week" For me that is quite funny in a way Americans might not get since brands and commercials are more or less everywhere.

I wouldn'tve found that funny before I stopped watching broadcast TV. Now that I've cut cables I notice "organic" ads like that right away.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#204

Post by dmix »

promofaux wrote: post #77
crorella wrote: post #63

When I tried pi-hole I often noted some urls were added 'automagically' to the whitelist, they will show up a few days after I removed them. All of them were weird domains.

Pi-hole Dev here. The only domains added to the whitelist are the domains on which the source lists are themselves hosted. It's probably complete over-kill, but the reasoning behind it is just in case one list tried to blacklist another. Compare the "automagical" whitelist entries ( http://imgur.com/a/rxgsC ) to the Default whitelist here: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/adlists.defau... Edit: The code…

Looks like your comments were getting killed with [dead] automatically. Maybe because of a new HN account combined with linking to the same site a couple times cause it to flag some spam detector? I vouched for your comments so they appear. Thanks for the project!

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#205

Post by ashark »

7ewis wrote: post #161
nkkollaw wrote: post #30

With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even someth…

I believe Pi Hole have tried to block YouTube Ads but Google randomise the domains they serve those ads from, and also from what I have read, they also serve some fundamental features via those domains too. So if you kill the ads, you kill YouTube.

Could youtube-dl the video then redirect the browser to a locally-served (locally from the pi-hole device, that is) page embedding the video, provided you've got the disk space to cache it and don't mind waiting a bit for the video to download (admittedly a lot of caveats here, but could work for many people). That'd actually be a better experience for most sites youtube-dl supports, I'd think, not just Youtube.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#206

Post by stagbeetle »

SamBam wrote: post #179
stagbeetle wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with "I believe that I am pretty much completely unaffected ads, but then so does almost everybody else." This is in the same vein of inductive reasoning as "just snap out of your [insert mental illness/addiction/etc.]." "People," in this context, isn't defined either. If however we were to say that by "people" you mean millennials, then you would be wrong. But if you meant "the population at large" you wo…

...? I think you're misreading my comment. I was suggesting that most people may think they are unaffected by ads, but probably are overestimating their immunity. My second statement was highlighting how ones own opinion of oneself is not objective.

> My second statement was highlighting how ones own opinion of oneself is not objective.

And I retorted that ones own view of oneself can not be extrapolated onto the population at large if it is not objective.

But I should have been clear, when I mean "second statement" I mean so inside my own post. Ex:

1st Statement: "People," in this context, isn't defined either. If however we were to say that by "people" you mean millennials, then you would be wrong."

2nd Statement: "But if you meant "the population at large" you would be correct."

Which was in defense of the tech-literate and the young, but after researching some more my statements were based on old information.

The only people that come to mind who are easily susceptible to ads are the old and tech-illiterate, i.e those who don't have much experience with ads. Though this is just conjecture.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#208

Post by Nugem_ »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #186

I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an avenue to get some income in exchange for their efforts, and possibly be able to devote their full attention to a free project and not have to support themselves with other income. Ads give creators some incentive to create stuff - although the income generally is…

Let all the users in the world that are not tech savvy support the ad networks then. Ill use AdAway, Block-This.apk, pi-hole, and others.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#209

Post by legulere »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #186

I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an avenue to get some income in exchange for their efforts, and possibly be able to devote their full attention to a free project and not have to support themselves with other income. Ads give creators some incentive to create stuff - although the income generally is…

Generally almost everything also has positive consequences, so you have to take both the positive and the negative sides into account.

Ads are not the only way to support free content, and in most cases free content is paid for with advertisement (at least not amounts you could see as a payment).

On the other hand ads lead to consumerism, overconsumption, poor spending habits, waste of resources for the adverts and the products they sell, and they reduce our attention to things that actually matter (like the traffic while we're driving cars).

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#210

Post by kirubakaran »

neoeldex wrote: post #117
zakk wrote: post #113

Stupid question: how does it work when the majority of traffic is through SSL, making a request to an ad and a request to actual content indistinguishable? I don't think all websites serve ads from a different host. Do they?

No such thing as stupid questions, but ads are usually served through a specific domain, which can be blocked, even with SSL

How about this? https://twitter.com/officialjaden/status/329768040235413504?...
Post reply on HN