Adblocking: How about Nah? • Hacker News Board

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#301

Post by okr » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #269

okr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say, "google makes a fortune and content creators make fuck all", then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it. And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i d…

That’s a good question. People do it for free, because they want to contribute to society. That’s why people contribute to open source, or Wikipedia, or write blog articles, participate on StackOverflow or post to HN. Not everything is about the almighty dollar. Did you get paid for participating in this discussion?

Of course they also want to contribute to society. It is a great thing. And behind all this, someone has to pay for the other stuff. Its not only the content creator. On what hardware is this all running on? Who provides for electricity? Who is writing the software? Who makes sure, that we have internet cables deep below in the ocean. Someone has to pay for it. There are people having jobs. So of course i want that people can contribute. But it is only a part of the calculation, its a give and take. Everyone is in for something.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#302

Post by beloch » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

A huge part of advertising is getting users to feel that they can trust in a product or service enough to spend their money on it. Spend a bit of time watching TV commercials and see how many methods of establishing trust you can spot.

This is why the way web ads are served is utterly farcical. How can you build a person's trust by invading their privacy in a hundred different ways just so you can be sure the ads they're seeing are a little bit more targeted than what's on TV?

People often say that they would be happy to have reasonable ads that don't interfere with website function and which respect their privacy, but it's been so bad for so long that it would likely be very difficult for an ethical, privacy respecting ad service to get off the ground. Many people have been burned too many times to believe and unblock such an ad service. EME shows that there is no interest in even trying this approach. They're just going to continue escalating the arms war.

They're going to lose.

Companies advertising on the internet need to wake up to the fact you can't support a war against the privacy of your potential customer base and expect them to trust you. Yes, you've dug quite the hole for yourselves over the last couple of decades. Why keep digging?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#303

Post by JoshTriplett » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #119

deanc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the adver…

> Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at…

> How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots?

Leaving aside that this isn't the problem of end users:

Link to a site, use an ID for that campaign (analogous to an affiliate ID), and don't pay unless a purchase takes place. Bots can't fake that.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#304

Post by la_barba » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

intopieces wrote: post #101

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

> I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.

By "we" do you mean only people who agree with you? Or do you accept that in a democratic society there can be ads? Personally, I don't block ads on principle. I simply don't visit websites that feature blaring over the top ads or otherwise feature annoyances. When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website. I prefer to not send that signal.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#305

Post by ImaCake » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #198

How is that still a debate? I often use firefox reader mode just because websites use custom fonts, and to remove all the clutter, even when there is no ads. Also, it won't be long until reddit is sued and must remove comments where people copy-paste the entire article because of pay walls and ad blockers. Same for outline. I guess website will start findings ways to prevent copy pasting, and maybe someone will creat…

> I guess website will start findings ways to prevent copy pasting

This is already a thing in some places. I wanted to use a table of data I found on a website but found I couldn't copy and paste it into excel. Instead I downloaded the webpage and parsed it to extract the table and rebuild it manually.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#306

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

zrm wrote: post #116

deanc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the adver…

Another possibility would be to create ad blockers that do that, i.e. block third party javascript but not pure text or images. Then you get the same result, simple ads get through but ad scripts don't, so the people who use ads without scripts are the only ones who make money from them.

It's for this sort of reason that I like Privacy Badger. It tries to block tracking and trackers algorithmically, rather than ads per se.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#307

Post by yoz-y » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #233

okr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say, "google makes a fortune and content creators make fuck all", then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it. And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i d…

> then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. Why do websites exist that don’t have ads? Why do people have personal websites and blogs? Perhaps it is, in fact, physically possible for a website to exist without serving third-party JavaScript ads.

Nobody disputes that. But then there is website and website.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#308

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

afiori wrote: post #294

nostrademons wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, for many years I figured "Let the website owners make money, I get to use their service for free anyway, and I can always mentally tune the ads out." And then sometime around 2015 or 2016, I started noticing ads that would lock up my CPU, or get my laptop's fan running, or prevent the page from loading entirely, or increase page loading time by 10x. And then I decided enough was enough, and installed an adblock…

For me the moment was when some websites started putting popup ads in every single link and navigation. I a specific instance there was no way to use the site, every link would redirect directly without opening the correct page at all. I literally needed an ad-blocker to be able to use the website.

The uh, seedier parts of the web never stopped using popups it seems.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#309

Post by wybiral » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #292

wybiral wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads. With the tiny payout you get from Adsense, unless your site is really popular to begin with, you're not going to make much of anything. Pennies maybe (which you won't receive until hitting a threshold anyway). So I don't see how it helps with entry. By the time your service is popular enough to make real money you could approach s…

AdSense and other networks primarily exist to automate matchmaking. Publishers and advertisers can already find each other, but this requires a lot of work. By automating this work, it can make more money for publishers (in aggregate) and make things cheaper for advertisers at the same time. My understanding of your argument is that no publisher should be using Adsense etc today, and they should all be negotiating di…

I'm not saying that there aren't content producers who want that or would benefit from it. I'm saying that they probably won't make as much money that way. And if the only way to do it is to use pervasive tracking and digital surveillance (which users are increasingly blocking and lawmakers are becoming skeptical about) then it's a business model on unstable ground to begin with.

My experience, especially with media content producers, is that those ad platforms are never sufficient and it's always advisable to rely on partnerships or Patreon. Because, yeah, it's more work to create those relationships, but the alternative is relying on a low-revenue platform where a small update from the whims of Google might destroy you without warning.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#310

Post by Anders1234 » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:13 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #189

air7 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In recent years we, conscious consumers, shot down several viable business models that could have replaced ads such as data collection for trend analysis and crypto mining in the browser. They were met with outright hostility. Perhaps justifiably so, but we have to keep in mind that any producable "value" will have to "hurt" in some way. We have to give something in exchange for "free" services. Yet the focus is only…

Game theory. In a world with network effect and a choice to make money from ads or subscription, the companies that choose defect (bad ads) win. We have to change the environment to get a different outcome.

Agree! Anders / https://pickuplineninja.com