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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#421

Post by nate_meurer »

jedberg wrote: post #96

For many many years I resisted installing an ad-blocker. As someone who worked at a website that made the bulk of it's revenue from ads, it felt hypocritical, and also, I wanted to make sure that the experience of our website was bearable without ad blocking, by forcing myself to experience it every day. I gave up about two years ago. The web just go so bad I had to install ad-block. My computer would spin like a jet…

This x2 for phones. I use AdGuard on my Android phone. Without it, my phone is so and bogged down by ads that it's essentially useless for internet.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#422

Post by marcthe12 »

oehpr wrote: post #419
realharo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this keeps being an issue, maybe browser vendors will eventually limit website CPU usage by default. For web apps that need it, it could be an explicit permission, like webcam or location access.

Hey I like this idea . This is something that needs to happen. Every website starts with aggressive CPU throttling, and then they can ask for permission to be unthrottled. "Our web page requires lots of CPU to deliver text, for some reason we would prefer you not think about, can you please unthrottle us?". This seems like an action browsers could take to significantly improve the web.

For memory and network usage too. Could solve a lot of issues of modern web.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#423

Post by stiray »

jacobobryant wrote: post #135
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…

I don't really care if ads stop being profitable. If ads stopped being a good source of revenue, the tech industry would adapt, and my guess is that the end result would be much more favorable to society. I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model. Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Googl…

I still remember the web when I got my first modem. What the ads changed is the amount of various clickbaits, useless sites, sites "for fun", garbage of the internet. All this would be gone without ad revenue, there wouldnt be any sustainable bussiness model for them.

Regarding usability of ads, in 20 years I never bought anything shown. When I need something I search for relevant product solving my need and I buy it. And trying very hard to avoid fake reviews. If your product type showed on ads is what I need, I will still do my best to check the market and find best product type for me with lowest price I can get. Which is typically not what is shown on ad. At the end they dont change anything for me.

Now the question is - would internet without ads really be that bad?

My personal expierience with one of the news sites (cant remember which it was) after GDPR was somehow refreshing. If you didnt agree, they disabled all javascript and throw you into same website but with only text and images relevant to the article. I loved it.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#424

Post by pmoriarty »

amelius wrote: post #55

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…

"Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt?"

I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way.

Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are loathe to do investigative journalism or negative reporting on the companies that provide their bread and butter and because they also want to run stories that don't offend or antagonize their advertisers -- stories from that point of view that capitalism is bad or advertising is bad, for instance, are off limits to many outlets partially because of this.

Advertisers also routinely lie about the products they're selling, so people are being deceived about the products they're buying, sometimes with very serious negative consequences (such as advertising of cigarettes or medical products that are actually harmful).

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#425

Post by 1000units »

pmoriarty wrote: post #424
amelius wrote: post #55

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…

"Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt?" I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way. Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are l…

The problem is, like me, you can be relatively unintelligent, work forty hour weeks, and make around a quarter million dollars a year peddling ads. That's tough to give up when nobody's dropping dead because of it.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#426

Post by colechristensen »

gergles wrote: post #3

Regrettably, nobody bothers to mention that JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this. If unnecessary use of JavaScript earned the same sort of derision that "best viewed in IE 6" banners did, we wouldn't be where we are today. That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it ena…

I would like to create something new.

Something like the unholy child of RSS Feeds / Podcasts / NNTP / Email / Pub-Sub / Gopher / Google Reader

A new language (or two complementary languages) separating content and presentation, limited, possibly not Turing-complete but expressive. Specifically less powerful than modern web browsers.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#428

Post by iamkroot »

XorNot wrote: post #162

The great thing about getting older for me is realising that nothing is indispensable. Everything eventually ends, we move on with our lives and do something else. So sure: maybe someday un-adblockable content will be a thing. Do I care about that content? Turns out maybe I'll just walk away entirely. The internet has a lot of utterly ad-ridden services with far too high an opinion of how important they really are.

I absolutely agree. Every now and then I open up a link that and me too disable my adblocker and if I can't bypass it in There is very little on the internet that is completely unique and of interest to me. If you try to put up a barrier to your content I will go somewhere else almost every time.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#429

Post by pessimizer »

okr wrote: post #312
tshaddox wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's a method of distribution called bittorrent that scales with popularity. If people love it, you don't have to pay to distribute it. If people want you to make more, they've shown themselves willing to send money even after they've consumed your product.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#430

Post by pessimizer »

okr wrote: post #301
chris_wot wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Let's not pretend that the distribution of things that people enjoy isn't free. People pay for an internet connection, they happily share media with each other. If you have a fanbase, you could make a film and put it on a high speed connection for five minutes once, tell people when it will happen on a message board, and rest assured that everyone who wants to see it will see it and it will exist in perpetuity with no further intervention from you.
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