Comment by chuckdries | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chuckdries | Hacker News Reader

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You're hurting the publishers. I'm a software developer at a local newspaper. We've been dealing with floods of fake ad clicks for about a year now, and they severely hurt our bottom line. We don't even use an ad network a la google, we sell our own ads to local businesses and such. You're not sticking it to the man, you're punishing me and my colleagues and friends for writing content that you wanted to read. You're directly hurting us.

To be clear, I'm not sure a browser should have a say on this in general, but I understand the argument they make on a personal level.

EDIT:

1. I misread OP

2. I don't work directly with our ad handling, as I work with the editorial team and generally advertising and editorial are separate for a reason, but I went digging just for fun. We sell our ad space to individual businesses. Our ad sales team does approve every ad we run. We use Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and both the newsroom and ad team have access to those analytics. The ads we serve vary - one ad from a housing complex down the street is literally just an image with an affiliate link, but one ad from our the ASU Foundation appears to load content from doubleclick.net.

On the one hand, I agree with your sentiment in general. However, it's a double edged sword here. LOTS of people are so sick of advertising networks, tracking, privacy invasion and malware from compromised ad networks that the underlying issue, the idea that click and impression based advertising is fundamentally flawed, is something that people are going to continue to protest. If the system is so broken that it's susceptible to this kind of click-jacking, then it was never a really good system to begin with.

Do I think this is the right way to go about it? Probably not. But I do think the long term solution needs to be for publishers to move away from the third-party advertising banner model. While forcing your hand isn't the right way to do things (and will, you're right, cause more harm than good) if nothing else AdNauseum has sparked a much needed conversation about ad-based revenue, one that we as a publishing and content consuming internet community desperately NEED to have. Because content isn't free, and publishers SHOULD be compensated for their work. We need to develop a better system to take the place of the obviously flawed model we've come to rely on, so that everyone comes out on top, publishers included.

My understanding--and I pretty much hang out in the virtual duck blind studying vile people as a hobby, this isn't second-hand--is that this is largely being pushed by the 4chan/alt-right/white-supremacist crowd that's mostly mad at Google for not partying down with them. (People in the comments are referring to 4chan's /g/ board in that thread.)

You are right that we need to figure out how to evolve advertising--which is never going away--to a better place, but reactionary destruction does not seem like fertile ground for "y'know, ads kind of suck, how do we make this work better for everyone?".

How come?

The originator of AdNauseum is https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/

I didn't say that the writer of AdNauseam was of that crowd, but the folks pushing it sure are.

Only some of them are. There is a very broadly diverse resistance to Google's influence on terran politics.

Those people are free not to visit our website. Or even to block all ads if the site gracefully allows it (most do, mine do).

> Those people are free not to visit our website.

If you meant that, you'd have a paywall up.

Do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.

Even though i hate advertising, I'm against weaponizing clicks on ads to punish sites. Boycott, or block ads.

"publishers SHOULD be compensated for their work"

with respect...

_employees_ should be paid for their work

_businesses_ OTOH are not entitled to ANY income regardless of the cost to create their products or anyones opinion on how valuable those products are.

I think Pale Moon in particular was at least in part marketing itself, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to people who take objection with browser authors presuming to make this sort of moral decision on behalf of the user, independently of whether it is right. More generally, hardware and software being neutral tools in the hand of the user rather than forward-deployed submarines for the vendor's agenda (a morally righteous agenda is still an agenda, no matter how negative a sound that word has acquired, just to be sure) has been a sticking point for the Free Software movement pretty much since its conception.

People installing AdNauseam probably want to hurt you and your colleagues, so it's working as intended.

That is, there are people who believe ad-supported publications on the web should die. If their choice causes your ad-supported publication to die, mission accomplished.

Nailed it. If your business doesn't have a product so you only profit through advertising, you shouldn't be trying to make it a business.

Good, if you don't like fake clicks you should fight for it. Me on the otherhand don't like ads so I will too fight/support ways to avoid it.

Irrelevant of OPs point. Disallowing an extension that a user might want doesn't seem like "your way"

True, I misread OP. I don't know that I think the browser should have a say in this discussion.

It isn't "disallowed". You make a change in about:config.

What's the point at which it can be said to be disallowed? Editing a file with notepad? Editing it with an hex editor? Compiling from source?

The change is to allow addons marked as malware to be installed. So you are opening yourself up to real harm if you do that.

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