Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson • Hacker News Board

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#41

Post by Karunamon » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #25

Karunamon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was an offense that would get one either severely de-ranked or delisted from search outright?

What do paywalled sites do, then? They don't seem to have a problem ranking just fine.

They show the abstract or the same bit of the headline and maybe a paragraph you see when hitting the page. Googlebot doesn't get the full text.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#42

Post by aSplash0fDerp » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

Is part of a digital detox turning off java by default and enjoying the Text Web in its full glory?

What do you estimate the cost is annually for all of the wasted bandwith (especially mobile data) on predatory marketing?

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#43

Post by krisroadruck » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

slig wrote: post #30

jaywalk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's actually a great way to make Google penalize your site. It's explicitly against their Webmaster Guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

Big properties do that and Google doesn't care.

You sure about that? How big qualifies as big in your eyes? Medium implemented homepage cloaking in November of 2019 and within a month they lost 40% of their overall search visibility:

https://www.onely.com/blog/medium-lost-half-visibility/

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#44

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

It's always a game of cat-and-mouse. No new technology will enable displaying ads that the ad-blocking crowd can't get ahold of eventually.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#45

Post by boring_twenties » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #18

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uBlock Origin is shockingly competent at defeating those "please turn off your adblocker" warnings.

On most sites, at least. There are a few out there that go well out of their way to be annoying. Facebook likes to construct their ad text out of multiple randomly-named divs. TVTropes uses randomized IDs on their ad popover.

They seem to do this for more than just straight ads. I use uBlock Origin to filter out the "Stories" div. It comes back every week or two.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#46

Post by throwaway55554 » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

Websites started off with a glass storefront and an open door. You kinda had to poke your head in the door to look around to see if you wanted to go in. Then the glass storefront had some sales prices shown. Then slowly you could no longer even see the glass storefront for all the ads. Then the spinning sign men showed up to annoy. Now, there's a bouncer with a clipboard blocking you from getting in.

It's mostly just not worth the effort any more unless you have an ad blocker in some form.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#47

Post by bubblethink » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

So a survey article about adblocking without mentioning the main ad blocker in the world (and their competitor), ublock origin. Well played! As for the history lesson, the main meta lesson is that adblockers need to be completely detached from any monetory incentives. No company, however noble, should be trusted at all. Only open source + community ad blockers have survived and flourished. Time and again, people have tried to make a quick buck by becoming the middlemen in the adblocking industry by promoting their flavour of ads, whitelisting ads, or just hijacking ads.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#48

Post by vbezhenar » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

Don't paint webassembly as something terrible. Webassembly does not add anything substantial to what's already in web. You could compile C code to JavaScript before. Webassembly does not provide new API unavailable from JavaScript. Webassembly is just an optimization. Some code will work faster and consume less memory, that's all. You could write website which paints itself on canvas with JavaScript years ago. The fact that nobody goes this route means that there are inherent problems with this approach. For example that website will be completely inaccessible for Google.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#49

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

II2II wrote: post #28

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

A lot of the future of ad blocking will depend upon why people are blocking ads. Some of us have nothing againsts ads in principle, but do not like the practices of the advertising industry. This includes things like tracking people across websites, intrusive advertising, excessive bandwidth usage, deceptive advertising, and so on. Blocking the "analog hole" would be irrelevant in most of those cases.

[deleted]

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#50

Post by bobajeff » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

It doesn't bother me if ad-blocking moves towards OCR and computer vision. These things need to be created anyways because as blockers don't always filter everything I want anyways.

Personally, I would prefer to browse the web in reader mode. While we're at it we could do the have the same for PDFs.