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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#541

Post by dwild »

xfs wrote: post #53

I used to not use ad blockers as I'm not bothered by ads. But it's getting increasingly difficult not to because the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs. It has got to the point that ads and analytics are being added so mindlessly (I saw it first hand as random CPU hogging battery killing trackers were pushed onto my single-page web a…

> the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs

Where are you going for that to happen? Not only does a tab crashing is extremely rare for me, even on my low 8 GB of RAM which I got 8 years ago. It seems a bit crazy that it happens quite often for you.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#542

Post by kgwxd »

distances wrote: post #480
kgwxd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only using JavaScript required a license to operate and came with a set of rules enforced by fines and jail time :) If every browser had done the sane thing from day 1 (no third-party scripts and no cross-domain communication) we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. Sites could still use all the power that comes with scripting, ad networks just wouldn't be feasible.

Sites would collect the data with first-party scripts and tunnel through their own servers to ad peddlers.

That's fine. Now the first-party and ad peddlers have to work with and trust each other instead of using my machine, my ignorance and my disinterest in their dealings as an intermediary.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#543

Post by dwild »

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…

> It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need;

My SO opened an escape room a year ago. I though similarly as you before that (not that it make people consume more, but that they'll buy the inferior product), but then after a few weekend without any reservation... it made me realize how things aren't just found.

You need to be reminded that something exist to even consider it. It's not even a question of whether that's the best thing for you.

She always ask people what they think once they done and recently she got as a comment "but you aren't visible enough". We pay for ads, a few thousands, we are probably not too far from having spend 5 digits in ads. I couldn't imagine how people could be aware of our existence without ads at all.

> and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.

We are paying for it, sure, but at least we are paying, aren't we? I like that I can get any ads on a channel. I love DIY channels, I seriously hate how almost all of them hide that all their tools were given. They say it from time to time, but on most videos, they'll just keep using the one from the past videos without mentionning getting them for free. That's an ads by the way, they may even directly get paid for using theses tools. With adsense though, the ads I get aren't necessarily related to the video, I'm AWARE they are ads, they are made FOR ME (thus more profitable for the channel, because I may need tool, but I may be more likely to buy a new computer for example).

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#544

Post by komali2 »

chachachoney wrote: post #500
komali2 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I emailed him about this, and his response was essentially, it's not within the ability of publishers and their writers to get rid of these kinds of ads. Pop up ads went away because the consumers worked around them - that's why advertisers stopped demanding publishers put them on their sites. So, wanna get rid of tracking cookies, continue as a consumer to block them and make them pointless. Advertisers will then st…

>> it's not within the ability of publishers and their writers to get rid of these kinds of ads Sounds like a failure of imagination.

Sure, but it's not what got rid of pop up ads.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#545

Post by dredmorbius »

taf2 wrote: post #530
dredmorbius wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are obstacles to this, for advertisers. Tracking impressions (something advertisers seem to want) is facilitated by third-party servers. Self-served ads defeat this and raise fraud concerns. Standardised advertising units (display sizes) mean that blocking elements strictly on dimensions is possible. One of my early userContent.css stylesheets, borrowing from online souces, did just this, and was highly effecti…

That is why the edge computing - changes this trust issue... It's just a matter of time before you have a advertising module you can install in cloud flare as a service worker implementation that both parties can trust... this with obfuscation could make it really hard to block and pretty viable for advertisers... let alone the fact that you can shift the analytics into the cloud edge servers... this both eliminates…

What seems to happen in practice is that infrastrucure domains and hosts used for advertisig are blocked by default. Amazon's aws & s3 domains come to mind, and they're rather horribly abused (Bezos's own WashPo have covered this). Which may be why generic buckets are going away.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#546

Post by butterNaN »

Here in India you might have heard of this little service called Hotstar. To start with, this is a paid subscription service, and I believe at the time I purchased it it cost me something like ₹1000 a year. This would lead you to expect that they aren't interested in Ads, wouldn't it?

No. This service is so adversarial to anyone who doesn't want to be tracked, it doesn't even work in Private windows. It stops working itself when you open the Browser's debug console. If this wasn't enough, this service stops working when you have uBlock origin (which finds that there's a /track request going out a hundred times every minute).

I responded by creating a new browser profile just for this website and routing all tracking domains (mostly segment.io) to 127.0.0.0 in my local hosts file.

I haven't used that service for a long time, but recently I heard they are now showing in-content ads between programming! So basically they've taken cable TV and put it on the internet with higher fees and shittier service.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#547

Post by cwkoss »

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…

I wonder what percentage of mobile data bandwidth is used to transmit ads vs actual content.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#548

Post by themacguffinman »

shawnz wrote: post #540
themacguffinman wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chrome team has already evaluated the change and explain why the benefits are not miniscule [1]: > In addition to these safety concerns, there are also significant performance costs. In most cases, these costs are not from the evaluation of the extension script processing events, but rather from everything else coordinating the script. That overall performance impact can be very large, even for an extension writt…

This blog post is highly misleading. For example, they start off with several paragraphs about security/privacy implications, but this change doesn't have any security/privacy implications. That's because they have explicitly stated that they will not deprecate the observational webRequest API, which has exactly the same privacy considerations as the content blocking API. However because the observational API provide…

None of this is particularly convincing.

> That's because they have explicitly stated that they will not deprecate the observational webRequest API, which has exactly the same privacy considerations as the content blocking API.

It's still a substantial improvement if popular extensions that don't need to use observational webRequest (ie. content blockers) no longer use this more expensive method. It's a leap of logic to suggest that supporting observational webRequest means that the simpler content blocking API has no benefit.

> Furthermore here you can see a tweet from Justin Schuh, lead of security and privacy on Google Chrome, where he claims that the "sole motivation is correcting privacy and security deficiencies" (which I just debunked as being a possibility), not performance (...) So between Justin Schuh and Simeon Vincent (author of the post you linked), who is lying? It must be at least one of them.

Neither. The change may be motivated by privacy and security but as Simeon Vincent explains, it also has substantial performance benefits. I'm not sure how you logically leap to the conclusion of "this has no performance benefits" from "we did this for privacy/security reasons".

It's also extremely misleading to compare the performance of a content-blocked site to internal browser performance. You know what has the best overall performance? An extension that blocks the whole page; 0ms speed, the best performance, almost zero battery drain, except that this hypothetical extension consumes substantial resources on its own. But hey, the 0ms page speed makes up for it. It'd be pretty silly for the Chrome team to base their decisions on the performance of rendering an incomplete webpage depending on both random extension makers and random website creators.

> Note that last one: 1.8 MB memory consumption. And they're arguing that we need to be "setting up and tearing down this component as needed" to conserve that "valuable" 1.8 MB.

Ghostery is only one extension among them, and all the adblocking extensions in that performance study ran a pre-pruned set of EasyList rules when popular adblockers run more rules in practice.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#549

Post by egorfine »

jefftk wrote: post #158
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat. Or just charge flat rates.

>You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat. That massively increases the barrier to entry. Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads. No one involved needs to trust you (much) since the ad network is in a good position to detect cheating. Remove that, and big trusted publishers (NYT, FB, Google) are still fine, but smaller ones wouldn't be able to demo…

> Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network

and spend the next two weeks delivering explanation after explanation to the ad networks and Google that you are indeed a real person/company and indeed created a site with unique content and indeed plan to generate leads, etc, etc.

After two weeks of back and forth you are approved by Google only to be indefinitely temporarily blocked for "additional traffic verification" in a couple of days despite purchasing only the best traffic for start of the site.

> smaller ones wouldn't be able to demonstrate to the ad network or advertiser that they should be trusted

It is already very, very complicated and is rapidly getting close to impossible.

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