Live data from Hacker News

Welcome to the ad-free internet

economist.com

311–320 of 334 posts

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#311
post #230

Doesn't this end up spiralling, though? As we've seen with Netflix, nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed. Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" sub…

Isn’t this just inflation in a different package?

Ah no, inflation is them increasing the price of the subscription as well.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this "adblocking culture". If you don't tolerate ads, you could just... not visit the site? Close the tab? I don't like paying for things, but I've never been in a transaction where I could say "you know what, I don't like the price of this, I'll just take it and give you no money. Deal?"

Most other things are fully a "take it or leave" it deal - pay or you can't get access. If I take food from the grocery store without paying then they will call the police. Most ad supported websites aren't like that. They let anybody access the content and only then try to insert ads. That's like trying to close the barn door after the horse has left, and it's a fundamental property of the medium of web publishing.…

I don't believe that. An image or music in the computer medium is just bits. It's still a copyright infringement to copy it and publish it without license. Text is just bits. So what is the point of GPL? The goods in a shop are just atoms. There's no law of physics that stops be from just taking all the stuff I want.

Just because the medium allows you to do something that doesn't mean it's right to do it. Anyway what do you propose? That every website with ads stops using the web, creates their own non-standards-compliant browser with their own transfer protocol, and tells users to just use that? You can still reverse-engineer and crack it, because everything in a computer is just bits. They've done something similar with smartphone apps and everyone hates that.

Then what instead? If you decided you can just do whatever you want because of the medium, the business will seek methods beyond the medium to get what they want. You'll have to pay for subscription to access any and all content. And guess what, users hate that too! And that still won't stop users from just abusing archive.org and other proxies to copy paste entire paywalled articles to post it on the internet. Blatant copyright infringement. Thinking they're right because it's still just bits in the end.

Honestly the more I think about it the more it feels like users just think they're entitled to free content and it's impossible to satisfy them with anything else.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but back in those days, the ads probably generated the lion's share of their revenues, along with the "classified ads" section (which is also ads, just not so commercial). That $0.10 you paid for the paper only really covered the cost of printing and distribution, if that. Unlike today, though, the ads in newspapers weren't annoying: they were just print, and didn't pop up dynamically in front of the a…

> That $0.10 you paid for the paper only really covered the cost of printing and distribution, if that. AFAIK for most newspapers and magazines, the cost on the label was mostly there so that readers would feel like the publication was serious - differentiating them from the free papers which were clearly spam and / or propaganda

Interesting, thanks for the info.

Yet, despite the newspaper being fully supported by plain, simple, black-and-white print ads (and maybe some color inserts later which were easily discarded), they managed to pay for serious journalists, and they didn't whine about how they need to track you and spy on you and force you to look at obnoxious pop-up ads to make enough money to survive.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad-blocking/privacy as a service has a problem in that it's only a matter of time before your data (DNS queries for example) will be logged and sold to advertisers. Enshittification is inevitable, the cloud can't be trusted, and neither can the state, so the people who want privacy focused products will naturally want to self-host instead of creating an account that can track them before handing over all their data t…

Isn't DNS over HTTPS and other DNS encryption schemes suppose to protect against this type of tracking since you can't introspect anything in transit?

If it's a DNS based privacy service (such as the mentioned "DNS service that essentially does what pihole does with easier configuration") they'll need to see your DNS traffic to know when to block the traffic.

If you use services like Google or Cloudflare to provide DNS over HTTPS they've got access to your traffic and you're vulnerable to being tracked by them anyway.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing some Invidious and Yattee for youtube there friend. Adfree and crowd-sourced sponsor segment skipping is a glorious experience.

I'm interested in running Invidious on my NAS. The docs make it seem relatively resource-intensive. Any experience with that?

I see it as pretty light. I installed via docker and it works great. The machine has a i7-1165G7

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody…

Good luck avoiding all adverts on bilboards in public places while riding your bike

I mostly ride on back roads and side-streets, my city banned billboards and is very small and close enough to the woods to not feel like one. But I get what you mean.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody…

And the V/R entrepreneurs are just drooling at the prospect of turning these last refuge places into ad-saturated environments too.

This is true, but I have to buy in to open myself up to it. Until they start giving away whatever VR headset it is, and until hell freezes over and I actually put it on, I’m safe. But the thought of it does make me sick/sad.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody…

The Ted Kaczynski approach works until you want to engage with the world outside your kitchen and you step outside and realize that the dynamic (personalized?) billboards are now across from your apartment complex. And the local park.

Yeah I get what you mean. I’m not like, a luddite, or anything, I just don’t agree with the authors notion that advertising is particularly all-encompassing, especially when you’re not actively using a computer.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#319
post #221

The 5 minute airplane ad is nightmare fuel for me. How long until they kick up the brightness to wake you up. Imagine you are stuck in the window seat, forced to watch an ad you can't turn off? I am exaggerating obviously, but I do find it egregious that they would dare show more ads when ticket prices are already extremely high.

You joke but I’m pretty sure I experienced this recently on a flight. Being shown ads when you have the ability to opt out is one thing. Being shown ads when you’re a captive audience in an already relatively high stress environment seems outright villainous to me.

We used to have a thing called TV Mobile on the bus here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVMobile

Anytime you wanted to get from A to B you would be subjected to noisy TV, and it was invariably something tedious like endless repeats of Ellen or Oprah with loads of adverts.

It was hell and I am so glad the service failed and was discontinued.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#320
post #253

I treasure my attention and so I've spent some time to opt out of ads. 5 years ago I couldn't tell what DNS was, now I've got an OPNsense router at home running ZenArmor/Unbound and I can can link to it from my phone over wireguard. Using ublock I've made a point to prune the pages I visit, so classes like "header" "breadcrumbs" "recommended" "sponsor" &c. are hidden. I self-host my media collection so I avoid spotif…

I need to get back on this. I ran PiHole for years which worked really well. Something broke with my network which messed up IP provisioning and the PiHole got permanently disabled. Is there a particular guide you followed or did you put this strategy together over time?

Check out NextDNS. It's easier than hosting your own DNS filter. It's got plenty of knobs and switches plus lots of blocklists to choose from. (The Hagezi lists are particularly good.) Also, if you run it on your devices (in addition to your router), it filters on any network you happen to join.
Post reply on HN