221–230 of 253 posts
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It's not the same thing, because leaving a tip doesn't cause any privacy or security issues. If all ads were just static images, no scripts/tracking, I wouldn't mind them.
well, there is a closer parallel than you'd think. Every McDonald's you eat at, has the ability to track your purchases, likes, etc. You are, after all, swiping your card with your name, etc.
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No one is advocating anything except not tracking users. I already block ads like most people here. They are a vector for malware, they track users, they sell that data. Make money by charging for content. I miss the old days when people had to pay for stuff with tangible money, not with their anonymity. I would gladly pay to access content I found useful, just no tracking. Be content with the money and move on. No n…
> No one is advocating anything except not tracking users. Did you read the submission before commenting? Because that piece of software clicks all ads, which has potential to harm ad-funded sites. Just use an ad-blocker if you want to avoid tracking.
We'll look back at the 2000's and 2010's as the golden age of the web, when it was economical to publish content for free without relying upon the DRMish guarantees of the major mobile OSes. In five years the desktop web available to general-purpose browsers will be dominated by pay services (Netflix), micro-payment supported sites, NPR-like fund drives (Wikipedia, Internet Archive), academics who don't need to raise revenue, and sites with super-low cost structures due to their reliance on user-generated content (Reddit).
I honestly feel that blocking ads is a win for both the audience and those serving the ads. I don't mean this to sound insulting but if you're not (let's say) "wise" enough to block ads, then you're exactly the target audience for 99% of the stuff out there. This is similar to the way Nigerian scammers purposely use bad grammar to target the less sophisticated. It's a win for the ad network because they're not wastin…
Installing AdBlock Plus = smart? Doesn't looks like a lot of thought went into this comment...
Ad servers get a somewhat smaller but receptive audience.
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Agreed. People forget, we half-stumbled into this ad supported content idea. The only thing keeping it that way is inertia. I think we've finally started to feel the limits -- it means being tracked 24-7. Enough already. We can do better than this.
I'd be interested in a "Kickstarter for articles" sort of site. Interesting article pitches presented to an audience, those that are most useful, interesting or unique are funded and writers get paid slightly more directly for their work. The difficulty would be determining whether to cut off certain types of content from the site, and where the line gets drawn on extreme material.
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This is pretty close to ad fraud. However, I agree with you that display ad networks suck. I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. The happy medium is to have users pay for content, making it so advertisers don't need to track users to verify that they're real humans, and improving the web for everyone except poor people. One way that this could be done is to use bitcoin for tiny micropayments, bil…
Frictionless billing is harder than it sounds, because it opens the door to frictionless fraud. If I can automatically bill you for a thousanth of a dollar I can automatically do that hundreds of thousands of times. If it's with bitcoin I can obfuscate the destination of the money.
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This is pretty close to ad fraud. However, I agree with you that display ad networks suck. I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. The happy medium is to have users pay for content, making it so advertisers don't need to track users to verify that they're real humans, and improving the web for everyone except poor people. One way that this could be done is to use bitcoin for tiny micropayments, bil…
> I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. I see it exactly the opposite way. The web IS free, it works that way (unless someone erect a paywall, which I find perfectly acceptable), and no entity is entitled that the web should "provide" it a profitable business avenue. If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right f…
>If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.
No, they're not. As this trend continues, the assumption that underwrites a lot of free content will stop being nearly as true. When the assumption stops being accurate, that business model fails, and more free 'content' winds up being ads gussied up as content. This is not exactly what the visionaries of the web had in mind, but them's the breaks.
In print, there are free publications handed out on street corners and in boxes. They tend to have low ad rates because the distribution is unverifiable. On cable, ad rates are still super-high, because the distribution is verifiable, and the cable networks have all the data they need about you on your cable bill + viewership surveys to aggregate for sale to advertisers.
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Ex-Advertising layout designer here for Hearst. Ads in a newspaper are typically laid out in a pyramid fashion to specifically avoid breaking up news articles into more difficult to read formats. 'Flow' is important when laying out every page. Ads on the web adhere to no such flow and often inhibit the experience of reading. Newspapers want their ads to be as unobtrusive as possible while still being seen. Advertiser…
It seems like your complaint is about the poor design of news sites (which I generally agree with) more than it is a philosophical objection to advertising. (There are some print publications with quite terrible ads too. Not everyone has the standards or resources of Hearst.)
"AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas." Is it really a privacy issue to track what ads you click and use that information to target advertisements to you later? I never understand the outrage against targeted ads. You are going to get ads no matter what. That is how "free" content works. Would you rather t…
The problem is that out of these three choices:
* highly intermediated advertising ("adtech")
* user privacy
* fraud control
...we can only have two.
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I guess, they feel pretty secure, because there are many devices with no or limited ad-block capabilities like phones and tablets. (Or are there addons for my ios Safari that work without jailbracking the device?)
I wonder what the viability of setting up a subscription service proxy that mobile users (and others) could point their mobile phones to that strips out all the dreck? I know there are VPS offerings that do this. Webhosting companies do offer unlimited bandwidth, so theoretically, bandwidth is not a problem.
Mmmmh, but I could use a proxy on my own server, through which I route my VPN traffic anyway. Of course, such a proxy product must be light-weight and easy to use. It should be a proxy that I can trust - OSS or self-written. It should enrich a page with a button which sends me to a block configuration for that domain - like that one you would get from a adblock plugin.... git init... ;)