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Comment by wanderfowl | Hacker News Reader

There was a time when the industry could have prevented the rise of widespread adblocking with "ethical advertising", which wasn't user-hostile, risky, creepy, intrusive, tracking, bandwidth and power heavy and didn't trash the UX of the sites. But, they didn't.

So, now, the ad industry trying to talk to the rest of the world about the ethics of blocking ads is like the drunk uncle who puked on last year's Thanksgiving Turkey talking to the family about the "ethics" of not inviting him this year. Sure, it's a sad situation, but you probably should've thought about that before you puked on the turkey.

If the ad guys spend a few years ensuring that advertisting is safe, lightweight, unobtrusive, non-creepy, and fast, maybe we'll invite you back to the party someday, and start to consider web advertising less of a threat-to-be-blocked.

But for now, we're not taking that risk. Sorry guys, but you've earned it.

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>If the ad guys spend a few years ensuring that advertisting is safe, lightweight, unobtrusive, non-creepy, and fast,...

Isn't that the point Gruber was making his Deck ads? Or do you not think those qualify?

There is no monolithic "ad industry" ... it's a bunch of people and companies with different methods and objectives and values.

This is a perfect case for disruption. Make a company whose ads are so unobtrusive, so free of tracking, so non-creepy, and so fast that I would actually want to unblock them specifically. Gruber's on that, which is great, but 99% of the rest of the ad industry is full of everything wrong with it, and there's no guarantees Gruber's service won't start running malware tomorrow.

If there's a door open to a room that's filled with 9900 assholes and 100 decent people, even though it's not fair to the 100, it's still a good idea to shut the door. Similarly, right now, the best bet is to set your adblockers in the least permissive way possible.

EDIT: Also, with regards to the decentralized "ad industry", look at what happened in the spam/commercial email industry. The bad companies have been chased out, and the good ones are well regulated. That was many disparate groups, but along with improvements in spam blocking, they've proved themselves ready to sit at the adults table. Advertisers now have a chance to do the same, and Adblock will help us keep them honest.

I'm not certain such a company would be successful.

I think the number of users willing to unblock ads that are already being blocked will be in the minority - and more than likely any such "ethical" advertising would be blacklisted as soon as possible. An ad blocker that does allow so-called "ethical" ads by design would probably be considered spyware.

Well, that's the thing: Nobody actually likes ads. At best, people like what ads allow (e.g. free content, services, etc), but they're a necessary evil even there. If given the choice between two universes, one involving ads and one not, which were equal in all other respects, there would be no line to get into the ad-ful one.

And I think the ad industry is going to need to give up on tracking as a concept. No matter how they do it, it's basically the same concept as the massive data collection the NSA is working towards which everybody hates, except ad companies don't even have the illusion of protective and pure motives.

I don't really agree with that.

The people who truly want zero ads are, I think, in the minority. If I'm reading a blog about Django and it's got an ad with a discount code for DjangoCon, I actually want to see that ad -- and not just because it supports the blog.

The other day I put an item in my cart on an ecommerce site and forgot about it until I saw a "retargeted" ad reminding me to complete my purchase. I wanted to complete the purchase, I just forgot. I want that ad.

For some non-tech examples: consider how many people would opt for an ad-free Superbowl or an ad-free fashion magazine. Some would, but certainly not everyone. Many people like those ads.

I think people hate ads that are not relevant to them. Third party tracking cookies have many problems, but they're one way to help make ads more relevant.

(Disclaimer: I'm cofounder of an ad-supported B2B news organization)

I don't understand your point. How would this new company you describe be different from Gruber's Deck?

It all went downhill starting with the X10 camera pop up campaign. People noticed the success and since, underhandedness has prevailed.

Now it's simply become a tragedy of the commons. Browsers of the web employ blockers die to the annoyance of shortsighted advertising tactics, in turn, advertisers, trying to extract more revenue from the remaining bare browsers of the web, utilize even more questionable tactics resulting in more people deciding to use ad blockers...

No one is winning this one.

I resisted using an adblocker for years. Finally installed ABP about 6 months ago, when a handful of sites I was reading started in with the double-underline-word ads and some of them would trigger malware warnings on mouseover.

"Threat to be blocked" is exactly right.

There are many sites who have taken this approach. The Deck is a great example. Also StackOverflow, reddit, etc.

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