The ads help fund writing and research into technologies that restrict ads without blocking them outright. You choosing to block ads is your choice, but it takes away incentives for researching and writing about the topics you care to read about. You can sign-up for Flattr if you prefer not to see ads and still support writers. https://flattr.com/contributors
On what grounds do you make this sweeping absolute statement? I'm personally willing to accept lots of tracking by Google, Facebook, etc. in exchange for free or cheaper services.
(note, I don't use an ad blocker, just a tracking blocker)
I don’t mean to be so snarky. Your comment seems so hypocritical to me, though.
Google Analytics (GA) on the site is configured to delete data as early as possible and it’s configured to not store IPs or link activities. However, its the only way to get any page-level reporting (like which pages are profitable) out of AdSense.
They can very well pretend not to do it while secretly still tracking & storing everything.
I appreciate the difficulty of considering how to monetize content that you put a lot of effort in to, but spreading misinformation on the very same topics you are writing about is harmful and short-sighted. Your responses here moved me from “this seems like an interesting blog to follow” to “nope”.
[0] https://developer.matomo.org/guides/tracking-javascript-guid...
If this is still too slow for you, you could try the official QueuedTracking plugin [1], which tracks into a redis or mysql database and processes the requests afterwards. That way you should get to about 30ms for the request.
You may want to look into why Tracking Protection doesn't like your ads.
Firefox and Privacy Badger should want to promote the use of non-personalized non-tracking ads, but allowing well-behaved ads isn’t really a priority.
Technology alone actually does allow us to choose between "send data to Google and trust that they won't do anything bad" vs. "don't send data to Google and know that they won't do anything bad".
EDIT: I appreciate that you care about privacy. You care about it a lot more than most websites seem to, so it does seem unfair that you're getting more flak in this thread than most websites do even though they run more trackers than you do.
I notice this pattern a lot, in myself and others. When there's a choice between a solution that solves no problems, and a solution that tries to solve the problems but only manages half of them, the latter solution tends to get criticised for the half of the problems it doesn't solve, and the first solution doesn't get criticised at all.
Don't really know what I'm trying to say. Just that the criticism you're getting in this thread (some of it from me) isn't entirely justified, and I'm glad you care about privacy, even if you don't go about it the same way I do.
Just look at the market for “Linux news” websites. Linux usage is up across the board (including desktop installations), but the target audience are all blocking ads so there are barely any websites left that cater to people who’re interested in that content category.
People don’t like paying for content. There is few feasible micro-payment schemes around (because of the high payment service fees) and the few that try have few users. Ads enable free content to be produced in great quantities on the most niche subjects imaginable. Unless you have a great funding model that can replace ads, we have to find ways to limit what tracking ads can do (FPI) without outright blocking them.
Adblockers don’t just block ads. It blocks funding to creative efforts.
This is what we're trying to do at Snowdrift.coop (I am a volunteer). There's already a good introduction at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop, so I'm just going to link there and quote the beginning:
> Snowdrift.coop [is] a non-profit cooperative platform for funding freely-licensed works everyone can use and share without limitations.
> Our core feature is a new fundraising approach we call crowdmatching. Patrons donate together by all agreeing to match one another instead of donating unilaterally.
We also have a new 1 minute intro video[1], if you'd prefer that format. Note: the low streaming quality is a quirk of archive.org; you can get higher by downloading the webm.
It comes out as criticism, and I agree you're right to critique it, but I think it's intended to be persuasion. People completely write off the "solution that solves no problems" and just look for a way to bypass it. If they see a half-solution, they see potential for improvement, and naturally try to realize the potential. But most people aren't very good at being really persuasive; they just see their own point of view and become critical/forceful.
It's called "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics", and it's a problem.
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
TL;DR: "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."
In our current world the advertising industry has demonstrated their inability to self-regulate, and even Google isn’t any better (see the recent issues regarding Android tracking locations even when the option was set to off).
GDPR is irrelevant in that case. If the tracking happens in such a way that it’s impossible to tell from outside Google then nobody will have grounds to sue.
Hell, it's the only thing that can.
FWIW, that's what every website will say. I don't have any reason to trust your site any more than I trust any other site. I don't want to be tracked by anybody, regardless of their intentions.
> The ads help fund writing and research into technologies that restrict ads without blocking them outright. You choosing to block ads is your choice, but it takes away incentives for researching and writing about the topics you care to read about. You can sign-up for Flattr if you prefer not to see ads and still support writers.
I'm sorry, but merely putting something online doesn't entitle you to make money from it. Posting an article or tweet or picture or other content on the public internet is an inherently non-profit activity, and it always has been. It doesn't entitle you to follow me around the internet.
If you want to make money posting online use a paywall.