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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#311

Post by yoz-y »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #303
jefftk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Except many ads are not directly linkable to purchases. Coca Cola won't track you to a local grocery store and an ad for a musical won't track you when you buy the ticket a week later.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#312

Post by okr »

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.

Definitly. And hosting is very cheap. But i would argue, that if you were a band or a big company like disney, and suddenly you have millions of people interested in your stuff, because you have a new release or constant demand, that you then must have some kind of model, that pays for it all. Who can do this with their own pockets?

Ah. I see for example netflix. And now it splits up into many sites again, who offer their own things. The technology is now there, maybe it becomes more and more a commodity, organizing payment is easy, maybe it all gets more diversified again. Does no one remember, how popular internet shops once were? But then amazon became way more convenient.

Ah, iam ranting :>

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#313

Post by KozmoNau7 »

kelnos wrote: post #248
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 do want to block ads. I hate advertising in all its forms. I despise the psychological games that advertisers play with our minds. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that blocked out billboards and other kinds of non-digital advertising, I would do so in a heartbeat.

There are certain pieces of classical music I cannot hear without immediately thinking of the product it was used to advertise.

It's maddening that advertisers can be allowed to destroy culture like that.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#314

Post by ilaksh »

ilaksh wrote: post #232
ori_b wrote: post #25

Something is different in the arms race this time. Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.

Right and also encrypted media extensions are a new development. I think the solution is a new web protocol that does not require an OS in a box (browser). It will be supported by decentralized (mostly p2p) protocols. It probably will not have any JavaScript.

Just another few thoughts on this: this new browser could support a much more limited and high performance default protocol. For example, markdown. Media and applications could be attached to links, but carefully controlled -- for example only displaying or loading media and applications when the user switches to that tab and launches them.

Attached applications could be web assembly with I/O abilities such as a simple canvas-like UI.

If you can find or create a suitable and high performance p2p system (or group of systems) for enabling people to load and publish these lightweight links, you could provide a useful and viable alternative to the traditional web that would be approachable by small development teams.

Built in p2p search could be a killer feature for such a system.

EDIT: made a github for it and submitted to HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20544892

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#315

Post by bcaa7f3a8bbc »

FYI, The title doesn't suggest one to stop blocking ads, but means the opposite.

> When you visit a site, the deal on offer is, "Let us and everyone we do business with track you in every way possible or get lost" and users who install adblockers push back. An adblocker is a way of replying to advertisers and publishers with a loud-and-clear "How about nah?"

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#316

Post by intopieces »

la_barba wrote: post #304
intopieces wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website.

This is not the case. I have visited thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of websites in which the content was not valuable to me, and I blocked those ads, too.

When I block ads, I send the signal that my attention is not for sale, and moreover, the content creators' business model is not my concern. Eventually, if they get the enough of these signals, they'll find a new way to make money.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#317

Post by [deleted] »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #245
wybiral wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make the same argument about podcasts, television, radio, magazines, billboards, etc. At some point you rely on statistics that someone is giving you in all of those mediums but they still made money. I've personally made much more money producing content (YouTube and podcasts) by directly working with brands than I ever have from Adsense anyway so I'm not convinced that the advertisers "paying more" is helpi…

Patron seems to be a symptom of that Wouldn't Patreon be more an indicator of said symptopms? I hate English sometimes, and its my native language.

[deleted]

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#318

Post by jefftk »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #293
jefftk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work on ads: are ads actually essential in the software industry, or could we do just fine without them? The industry would definitely adapt, but I don't think it would be more favorable to society. Here's what I would expect to happen if we stopped letting third party ad networks detect ad fraud: * Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc and other huge sites are alr…

> funding to push worldviews. The latter worries me a lot. This is already happening in the advertisement world of today, where certain topics—some political but some not—are not "friendly to advertising", and so get demonetized on various platforms. How is that different from the scenario you worry so much about?

> certain topics—some political but some not—are not "friendly to advertising", and so get demonetized on various platforms

I think they're pretty different. If you look at the AdSense prohibited content policy [1] or the ones for other general-interest networks they don't allow their ads on sites about porn, drugs, gambling, etc. If you run a standard newspaper, for example, covering the full breadth of what a newspaper typically covers, you should be able to put ads on ~every story.

In a world without ads, the newspaper would probably be a subscription site, and would be competing with non-subscription sites that are funded by people who want to push a perspective. The current dynamic effectively prioritizes perspectives in terms of how much people want to read them (because that's where the advertising money is) while in this new dynamic there would be more prioritization based on how much money the people with that perspective have (because that's where the funding is). I think that's probably worse for the world?

[1] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1348688

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#319

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

I think the ad blocking arms race is unfortunate because it's converging on recognizing/disguising ads so that they can be hidden/served despite what the other side wants. That's lame. I don't have any need for a hyper evolved system of coersion/rejection.

Wouldn't it be far better if instead we focused on identifying content and finding ways to serve it more efficiently? Why download the whole page and then hide 95% of the data?

I'd like to see a system where we crowd source the identification of content. If 100 people all view a page and see 100 different ads but the same article each time, a smart browser extension should be able to conclude that the uri actually refers to the static text. Store that on ipfs or somesuch and when I click the link, don't waste my bandwidth downloading the site, just serve up what I wanted in the first place.

I'm not sure how such an approach would play out--but all we're getting out of the current strategy is smarter and smarter ads. I can't imagine we're gonna look back in 100 years and be glad we aligned our incentives in such a direction, so I think trying something different would be worthwhile.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#320

Post by jefftk »

dkersten wrote: post #193
Godel_unicode wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs. It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very…

The best content I’ve found in recent years has been either on sites that don’t contain advertisement (because they’re someone’s personal hobby blog, for example, or HN) or from videos where the person was supported directly by fans through Patreon. Anecdotally, the advertisement-supported content is mostly garbage.

HN does have ads. They're job ads for YC companies, and they're the entries you see without an option to vote on. Ones like "Come eat – I mean build with the ZeroCater (YC W11) engineering team".
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