Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten).

I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on, I have two) to download ("unlimited" plans actually aren't, when used as a hotspot, though T-Mobile now seems to actually have a mostly unlimited hotspot option, I haven't tried it yet). So, not only are ads intrusive, disrespectful of privacy, and generally of negative utility for me as a user...they're also ridiculously costly.

So, yeah, I use an ad blocker. Oddly, I tried disabling it earlier today for an LA Times article (because of their blocker blocker), but it didn't correctly detect that I'd disabled it, so I closed it and went elsewhere. Now I know I should never disable ad block for LA Times, no matter how interesting the story seems.

The LAT ads are so fat and intrusive, and their blocker blocker is so infuriating, that I recently just turned off JavaScript completely for their site.

It means I don't get images or videos, but I can read the occasional article without going through unnecessary gyrations.

It's not that I'm unwilling to pay for good journalism. I subscribe to the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. But the LA Times has chopped back their newsroom so savagely that they have very little investigative journalism or foreign corespondents anymore.

It's just not worth enduring their abusive ads and nagware to read what little content is worthwhile.

I just use ublock's advanced mode to block scripts. Nicer than having a separate extension to do it (on Safari and like to keep it light) and is more or less a permafix. If (when) it breaks the layout I just click that built-in reader mode thing.

I recently (past year) bit the bullet and began ad blocking myself. My primary concern is the recent proliferation of malicious content through the common ad networks. Supporting websites is great, but not at the expense of your own security.

I've been using adblockers since they where a thing (and DNS blocks longer than that) since back then you could rely on the adnetworks feeding your malware at some point.

I'm trying to think if I've ever clicked an advert on the internet intentionally and it's probably under half a dozen accidentally.

I wonder sometimes, with the amount these advertisers know about me, how come they don't know I don't click on ads? It would increase their profits to not target me.

They do know you don't click on ads.

They just show you ads for people who are going for exposure rather than clicks, because you count as an impression even if you can't be used to generate clicks.

True. But if you've never clicked doesn't that mean something? Even if the goal is impressions wouldn't you prefer someone who has shown to be influence-able over someone who isn't? (Hint: I would de-target non clickers.)

Yes, if online advertising was strictly a deal between the media (online newspapers etc) and the advertisers.

But there's a useless middle-man industry that is the cause of all these problems: the ad-networks. They don't quite care that the impressions are no good to the advertisers, and they care only very little about the brand-damage to the media, caused by malware and bandwidth-waste. Or (dangerous) inconvenience to the consumers.

We wouldn't have any of these issues if the media were just to strike deals with advertisers themselves (like newspapers used to) (or maybe hiring out to an advertising agency, but still keep full editorial control, no newspaper would regularly allow an ad agency to inject their content last-minute before press, without any editorial oversight).

They would basically just self-host the ad banner, with a click-through link, self-hosted analytics for the advertisers, and everything would be fine. Ad blockers don't block self-hosted banners. No viruses, no malware, not as much privacy risk, no bandwidth wastage.

The ad-networks are really bad for all parties involved.

What makes you think people who don't click aren't influenced?

Repeated spaced exposure seems to have an impact on people, even if they don't think it does.

Obligatory: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...

Maybe we need smarter ad blockers.

Publications right now have little incentive to improve their ads with regards to security, readers' resources or quality – because if the LA Times motivates you to install an ad blocker, the NYT is getting hit as well. The tragedy of the commoners, so to speak.

If ad blockers would aggressively judge each publisher, ad network and/or advertiser and rewarded good behaviour by showing the ads, I could see publishers prioritising the user experience. I'm pretty sure the publishers and journalists themselves look at these websites with horror, and they'll jump at the chance to regain some quality.

The adblock+ model is tangentially similar, but charging the publishers is simply too close to blackmail to be acceptable.

> Maybe we need smarter ad blockers.

And maybe we ad purveyors who don't suck.

I occasionally do tech support on relative's computers and am appalled by how slow they are without an ad blocker.

I'll go even more extreme, if my browsing experience on your site invokes more than your domain and a single CDN domain, you FAIL.

If you want to serve ads, you should have to put your resources and the reputation of your domain at risk to serve them.

In other parts of the world they would find who is making those ads and who is in charge of those and burn their houses down or chop them with machetes. Suddenly the number of people willing to produce ads for clients and said clients is dramatically reduced.

I'm not suggesting this kind of extreme response, my point is there's no punishment for putting up those ads so there's no incentive to behave correctly and we're stuck in a spiraling vicious cycle. Breaking this cycle and turn into a virtuous cycle requires a paradigm shift and I'm afraid this is not going to happen by itself. Moving away from ads as a business model means wiping out google, facebook and a few others big players so whatever effort to emerge a new business model will be resisted by those who have the power and can burn money for years without even noticing it.

Until then I have two solution, the first is a combination of noscript[1] and ublock origin[2] in my browser and the the second is wallabag[3] which for the LAT page given as example gives this: http://share.pho.to/AegpU

[1]: http://noscript.net/ [2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [3]: https://wallabag.org/en and https://wallabag.it/en

Those are some pretty racist stereotypes you have of wherever you think people are going around chopping each other with machetes.

I don't think he singled out a specific race. I would say that it's not too far put though. The world is a pretty ugly place in some parts.

I think we in the tech community need to work on smarter ad blocker. The history goes that ad folks abused window.popup and then browser vendors blocked that. Then came chrome who is supported by world's largest ad engine, but they were nice to give us extensions. So we had adblock extensions that gave us a ton of CSS injected in every page. Now need smart js to fool the page thinking it has ads.

I would love to see browser support showing a big fat red icon when you're being tracked and page is misbehaving.

For me it's not so much about seeing ads to help support a site, it's the fact that ad companies use all sorts of crazy black pattern ways of tracking you all over the web. It's just not safe to have any ads enabled.

I genuinely do want to turn off my ad blocker and whitelist some sites, but the ad placement and intrusiveness is abhorrent nowadays. And now we have ad blocker blockers, as if that'll solve the problem. I'm in no way entitled to reading the article, but I've since resorted to just blacklisting JS from loading on some websites -- LA Times being one of them.

I happily disabled my ad blocker for the LA Times when they requested it, but I eventually closed the page when they decided to load enough ad content to make my Chrome tab unresponsive on my Xeon workstation. I won't be back.

I'm not even really adverse to ads, or to paying for content. (I subscribe to three newspapers, two of them in print.) I just want a browsing experience that isn't terrible.

> I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads.

So did you spend time looking at them ads on purpose of guilt???

No, on purpose of wanting to aupport the creatirs of the content being consumed.

I think maybe you're reading too much into it. I made no mention of "guilt". I merely stated that I was willing to trade seeing ads (not explicitly taking time to look at them or click them) for free access to content...when those ads were much less intrusive and privacy-invading and bandwidth intensive than they are now. Ad networks have since convinced me that was a mistake, but I feel no guilt about using an ad blocker.

> I think maybe you're reading too much into it.

how could I make that more clear than using ???

OTOH, you use the word trade which does imply guild on both sides

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