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AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

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Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#241

Post by sintaxi »

chc wrote: post #232
literallycancer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think it's a joke, but I agree with parent completely. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, since I get to choose what runs on my hardware, and I choose not to see ads. Whether something is sustainable for content creators is not the users' concern, you don't go around worrying whether Walmart can make profit, why do you worry whether a random internet blogger can?

I don't steal from or scam stores even if I can get away with it, because while I don't deep-down care if they make a profit, I do feel it's wrong to cheat them out of it. If I want what a store is offering, I feel like I should deal with them fairly. If I don't want it, I just don't patronize the store.

My program (Browser) can ask their program (Server) do things. It may deny ANY request it wishes based on ANY criteria that THEY get to set. Their program is under no obligation to do anything my program asks.

Their program (Server) may ask my program (Browser) to do things and my program may deny ANY request based on ANY criteria that I get to set. My program is under no obligation to do anything their program asks.

This is all perfectly reasonable and fair.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#242

Post by sanswork »

dang wrote: post #238
sanswork wrote: post #194

You sound like a child who is trying to sound like a lawyer right now. There is no contract required nor have I indicated there needs to be. I don't know why you lot keep going back to "I didn't sign a legally binding contract!". Why did you walk in if you had no clue what was in there? Why did you click the link if you had no clue what was on the other side? Because you wanted the content. I'm not saying to have to…

> You sound like a child > as you would know had you read the thread Comments like this break the HN guidelines by being uncivil. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226458 and marked it off-topic.

Apologies.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#243

Post by sintaxi »

sanswork wrote: post #204
NickNameNick wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they become a problem for advertising networks when they are no-longer able to proved enough money to be worth the content creators time to accept/administrate. And when a network ad-spots start drying up, the advertisers will have to switch. at least, that's how I'd hope it would work.

Where do you expect the advertisers will switch to? Nah whats going to happen is that sites will just start doing one of two things. a) they will start blocking users that appear to be using ad blockers. b) they will start including ads in ways that make ad blockers ineffective. Embedding them in content or proxying the ads to come from the host itself. Ads aren't going away.

> a) they will start blocking users that appear to be using ad blockers.

Fine by me. I'll simply mark it as the malware that it is and never return to that domain again.

> b) they will start including ads in ways that make ad blockers ineffective.

This technology already exists but its ignored because harvesting and selling user data is a cash cow. This is perfectly possible today...

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#244

Post by rasz_pl »

megous wrote: post #161

I approach this differently. There are a few use cases I go to the web for. For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that never executes any code from the web or uses any external style. It only uses XHR to fetch html pages/json data/other static stuff and then transforms that data and uses it in the custom UI designed for the use case. For example one use case is collection of news. My…

This sounds exactly like what I do .. for pr0n sites. Sadly I dont share your enthusiasm, its unmanageable in the long term due to all the changes and tweaks webmasters do constantly. Scripts break all the time, something that worked yesterday needs new regex today etc.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#245

Post by sintaxi »

mdekkers wrote: post #239
lvs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I pass a street musician, I haven't implicitly signed a contract to pay her for the show -- either in currency or by transferring any other valued commodity. I don't have an obligation to support her business plan, even if I enjoy the music. She may perhaps claim that we entered into an implied contract. Or the musician could post a placard reading her terms-of-service. But in simply walking down the street, like…

> walking down the street, like clicking on a link these two are not even close to the same thing. clicking a link is a very specific action "show me this stuff". Your analogy would be more apt if it involved going into a venue where music is performed.

Lets be honest, a link is just an attempt to catch a fish.

Is a fish obligated to swallow a hook that is cast into the ocean?? No reasonable fisherman would think this.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#246

Post by dumb-saint »

sanswork wrote: post #139
Karunamon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you said is not meaningfully different. You imply there is some implicit relationship between the person who clicks on a link and the person who made the content behind the link. No such relationship exists.

There is a relationship though or else there would be no communication. You want something, they have something. You communicate your desire and they provide you with something. That is a relationship.

You are using the concept of "relationship" with two different meanings.

When I click a link, there is a relationship between me and some entity in the same sense that the term is used in computer science to describe relational databases.

This is not a relationship in the legal or ethical senses. By clicking a link, I did not agree to anything at all. All I did was react to an announcement that there is some resource somewhere, and deciding to take a look at it. If I decide to do it from a terminal and read the HTML directly without rendering, that is no one's business and my actions are not unethical in any way.

The advertisement industry is starting to behave like the music industry in the early days of the web. They are willing to destroy the best tool ever created for global human communication and knowledge sharing for the purpose of protecting an obsolete business model.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#247

Post by lvs »

mdekkers wrote: post #239
lvs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I pass a street musician, I haven't implicitly signed a contract to pay her for the show -- either in currency or by transferring any other valued commodity. I don't have an obligation to support her business plan, even if I enjoy the music. She may perhaps claim that we entered into an implied contract. Or the musician could post a placard reading her terms-of-service. But in simply walking down the street, like…

> walking down the street, like clicking on a link these two are not even close to the same thing. clicking a link is a very specific action "show me this stuff". Your analogy would be more apt if it involved going into a venue where music is performed.

Surfing from link to link is very much the essential and original behavior of users on the web. A user often has very little idea what's behind the next click. I don't know what I'm getting behind the link, so a "show me the stuff" mentality would yield a deeply uninformed transaction, even if we were to think about every click that way. But from a founding perspective, the idea that every click is a fee-for-service proposition is not a basic tenet of the web or a reasonable assumption to be made of every user.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#249

Post by davidgerard »

nradov wrote: post #151
eloff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments have never worked well on the internet, not for technical problems, but likely more that the market isn't really there. I know I just want free stuff and I'm not going to pay to read a news article or blog post no matter how well written or researched. So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, bec…

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote a solid proposal for micropayments back in 2001. I don't think anyone has ever seriously tried to implement his idea, so until someone does try we won't know if it could work well. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-payments-predictions-f...

I think the fact that zero people, including Nielsen, have made a go of Nielsen's proposal in the fifteen years since speaks pretty strongly to its viability.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#250

Post by pjc50 »

megous wrote: post #161

I approach this differently. There are a few use cases I go to the web for. For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that never executes any code from the web or uses any external style. It only uses XHR to fetch html pages/json data/other static stuff and then transforms that data and uses it in the custom UI designed for the use case. For example one use case is collection of news. My…

This sounds like an astonishingly large amount of work for web browsing, but it's definitely using the full freedom of HTML.
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