Adblocking: How about Nah?
eff.org
eff.org
But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.
That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.
I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.
Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.
Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum.
The problem is it’s not in Google or Microsoft’s interest to implement this. This has to come from legislation at US gov level. So it’ll never happen.
I’ll continue ad blocking.
How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)
This way you also avoid the arms race between ad networks, ad blockers and clickbot farms.
I've personally made much more money producing content (YouTube and podcasts) by directly working with brands than I ever have from Adsense anyway so I'm not convinced that the advertisers "paying more" is helping content creators much to begin with. Patreon seems to be a symptom of that.
Edit: Also, on the subject of advertisers paying less. Isn't part of the problem the fact that adtech giants like Google are saying "look, we have this awesome tracking and targeting tech so you can pay less for ads to reach your target audience". Thus reducing the potential ad money that those people would pay into potential revenue for content creators to reach their audience?
Patron seems to be a symptom of that
I hate English sometimes, and its my native language.
I don’t really see problems here outside of encouraging an entire industry to move on from tracking and/or DRM the way an entire nascent industry moved on from the popup and pop-under ad, or invasive screen takeover and annoying animated ads.
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 demonstrate to the ad network or advertiser that they should be trusted.
> Or just charge flat rates.
Adverse selection will kill you.
With the tiny payout you get from Adsense, unless your site is really popular to begin with, you're not going to make much of anything. Pennies maybe (which you won't receive until hitting a threshold anyway). So I don't see how it helps with entry.
By the time your service is popular enough to make real money you could approach smaller brands and advertisers to get better deals than Adsense.
Adsense exists to make ads cheaper for the advertisers and there's no way around the fact that that means content producers will be making less money as a whole. You can't have it both ways. It's lowering the amount that advertisers are willing to pay content creators by giving them the perception that their money stretches further, aided by online tracking and targeting. Meanwhile Google caches in on their cut of the deal and all of the piles of data they collect with their monopoly while content producers get shafted.
My understanding of your argument is that no publisher should be using Adsense etc today, and they should all be negotiating direct deals instead, is that right? What would you say to publishers (and I've talked to many) who are happy to have the "collect bids from people who want to advertise on my site" portion automated for them so they can focus on running their sites?
(Still speaking only for myself)
My experience, especially with media content producers, is that those ad platforms are never sufficient and it's always advisable to rely on partnerships or Patreon. Because, yeah, it's more work to create those relationships, but the alternative is relying on a low-revenue platform where a small update from the whims of Google might destroy you without warning.
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.
Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Google's wellbeing. :)
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work on ads: are ads actually essential in the software industry, or could we do just fine without them?
It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very carefully before we remove services they need.
The current allocation of human productivity enablement is not the only one possible (and an "is" is not an "ought to be" as per Hume).
Vimeo requires the person creating the content to pay, yes? So if I want to do a series of videos on Kibana, or Active Directory, or astrophysics, I need to pay Vimeo in addition to the effort of creating my content.
Basically no one outside a philosophy lecture has ever suggested that the current state of anything is the only possible one, that's a meaningless strawman. Please avoid the condescending suggestion that others can't imagine things being different, it's as patronizing as it is pointless.
Anecdotally, the advertisement-supported content is mostly garbage.
I'm not sure I understand the point of saying you listen to non-ad-supported podcast, and not mentioning how they are supported or if it's pure hobbyist stuff you listen to.
Advertising comes in many forms (i.e. native content), and unless you link your .opml file, I can't ascertain the value of your statement. I do not recommend doing so, but young tech people think it's OK to put your real name on the internet (which is contrary to the ideas I was taught in the 90s; the use of pseudonyms has proven sound given our current circumstances).
If one looks at the history of the HBO cable channel vs. broadcast channels (i.e. ABC, NBC, and CBS), and also Netflix, I think one can see there are similar dynamics at play.
The chaos of freedom is a beautiful thing, but using the government to enforce your version of utopia is scary.
Perhaps justifiably so, but we have to keep in mind that any producable "value" will have to "hurt" in some way. We have to give something in exchange for "free" services. Yet the focus is only on the price paid instead of the fairness of the transaction (or lack thereof).
Either we give up the "free" model alltogether and shift back to paid services only, or we choose the lesser evil and live with it.
This is true in a specific way, and it is sometimes useful to use this frame. But in this case, I think the frame obscures more than it focuses.
"We" aren't getting together and voting or bidding or whatever. I think the closest thing to a choke point for decision making about some of this is in Google's hands, with Chrome. At least until the browser monopoly wheel spins again.
> We have to give something in exchange for "free" services
Eh? No. The requirement is that services need resources to exist. If you immediately extrapolate to pseudo-moralistic finger-wagging at "consumers", you're ignoring a lot of ways various organizations have found to exist. It is either self-blinding or a heavy thumb on the scale.
Of course that's going to be met with the same hostility. It's 99.9% the same thing.
> crypto mining in the browser
Of course that's going to be met with similar hostility. Climate change is even more present in the public consciousness.
This mutual hostility has worked for the entire life of the internet and probably has another decade of life if not more.
The industry would definitely adapt, but I don't think it would be more favorable to society. Here's what I would expect to happen if we stopped letting third party ad networks detect ad fraud:
* Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc and other huge sites are already big enough to run their own ad serving, and keep doing that. They are still in a position to detect fraud as a first party, and they're big enough that advertisers trust them.
* Current ad networks build first-party integrations, where to the browser everything comes from the publisher's site. This could be designed as a newspaper licensing an ad serving system. This would provide high levels of trust, but not as high as the current system because you lose the protection of cross-origin iframes.
* Ad networks don't find it worth it to integrate with long-tail sites, the sites make less money, we have fewer of them.
If we went far enough to functionally remove ads from the internet, either by banning them or by ads losing the adblocker-blocker-blocker-blocker arms race, then I'd expect a different pattern:
* Everyone moves to subscriptions of various kinds, probably with slightly porous paywalls.
* Right now ads are effectively a progressive tax: the publisher makes more money from you in proportion to how valuable it is to advertise to you, which is roughly in proportion to how much money you have. To raise the same amount of money from subscriptions you need to charge more than what people can afford to pay at the low end, so some people get cut off.
* There's a massive drive to consolidation: people don't want to have a lot of subscriptions to manage, so we get things where one subscription covers many people. The economics of how small sites get included in this are complicated, and I suspect this also hoses the long tail.
* Free sites are popular, making money through some combination of product placement, charitable funding, and funding to push worldviews. The latter worries me a lot.
Imo subscriptions aren't viable at all. For me to subscribe to something I need strong evidence that I will use it enough.
Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution. They remove the friction of making the subscribe decision and keep the content creators in check by only paying for interesting content. Subscriptions can be easily forgotten or aren't annoying enough to bother to cancel them even if the provided content isn't worth it anymore.
I like the idea, and I do use their service. They have plenty of room to improve- the articles they pick tend to almost always have a certain political slant, and I find more puff than meat more often than I think a curated service should offer.
But. It's a real attempt at a new model, and they're trying. I do get enough value out of it to keep using them to the few-dollars-a-month level, and I hope they improve their system over time.
Which is precisely why companies prefer the subscription model. See gyms, cable TV, and insurance companies.
How do you ensure some content quality that goes beyond a headline and a catchy teaser paragraph?
Kindle Unlimited had this problem when they started distributing payouts based on pages read, which led to a proliferation of books with catchy first page, instructions to skip to the last page and a bunch of junk in between.
I’ve managed to find value from Kindle Unlimited, but pretty much nobody but self published authors (which I have no problem with, but there’s effectively zero bar to entry meaning quality is over the place) is available on the service because of the KDP Select issue. It doesn’t seem to be evenly enforced either, since the Harry Potter books are available via Kindle Unlimited yet are available for sale on other eBook stores, for example.
How about a simple button that makes a view/visit not count?
> instructions to skip to the last page
That happened because it didn't count pages read or time spent.
This is already happening in the advertisement world of today, where certain topics—some political but some not—are not "friendly to advertising", and so get demonetized on various platforms. How is that different from the scenario you worry so much about?
I think they're pretty different. If you look at the AdSense prohibited content policy [1] or the ones for other general-interest networks they don't allow their ads on sites about porn, drugs, gambling, etc. If you run a standard newspaper, for example, covering the full breadth of what a newspaper typically covers, you should be able to put ads on ~every story.
In a world without ads, the newspaper would probably be a subscription site, and would be competing with non-subscription sites that are funded by people who want to push a perspective. The current dynamic effectively prioritizes perspectives in terms of how much people want to read them (because that's where the advertising money is) while in this new dynamic there would be more prioritization based on how much money the people with that perspective have (because that's where the funding is). I think that's probably worse for the world?
That is great, but who are the people paying you? Are they end users, or are you selling a service to other web companies that DO rely on ad dollars to make money?
Regarding usability of ads, in 20 years I never bought anything shown. When I need something I search for relevant product solving my need and I buy it. And trying very hard to avoid fake reviews. If your product type showed on ads is what I need, I will still do my best to check the market and find best product type for me with lowest price I can get. Which is typically not what is shown on ad. At the end they dont change anything for me.
Now the question is - would internet without ads really be that bad?
My personal expierience with one of the news sites (cant remember which it was) after GDPR was somehow refreshing. If you didnt agree, they disabled all javascript and throw you into same website but with only text and images relevant to the article. I loved it.
That was probably NPR.
Text version: https://text.npr.org/
(Disclosure: I read book each week and I am thrilled by anything new I learn. I dislike pictures of cute animals and I do all communication with friends over the phone or going out.)
Is this like intrusive DRM in PC games, where all the studies show that it increases producer costs and complexity, annoys consumers, and doesn’t actually improve sales revenue, but some companies do it anyway because “what about piracy?”
For advertising however, you can first of all incur a cost to an advertiser (since costs are calculated per click, view, etc), but furthermore, pirates can even profit from it by having a website and generating fake clicks for that website. If you would not try to prevent this ad fraud you would have bad actors siphoning off complete company advertising budgets to their accounts.
You still need to measure your audience to get advertisers to pay the price, but this is decoupled from the individual ad buys so it can be done differently.
the people buying the pirated software would not have otherwise spent the money on the official/real version. This is the stickler - counting "loss" from this kind of sale is at best immaterial and at worst fraudulent.
I have heard the opposite. Every day you can stop a game from being pirated is quite a lot of sales earned back.
Dunovo has been quite effective at this in the past.
If you can stop your game from being pirated for a week a lot of people who want the game right now will switch to buying instead.
After it’s been cracked a lot of publishers will then patch out the DRM since it doesn’t matter anymore.
This does not happen nearly as much as you think.
And before you say that the content creators need to get paid, just looks at the situation on Youtube, where Google makes a fortune and the content creators make fuck all, and big companies can take what little ad revenue the creators would have got for copyright claiming over 5 seconds of audio that falls under fair use. Many content creators now rely either on sponsorship or direct support through things like Patreon. Sorry, but Google can go suck it.
(I’ve also started just not consuming content from hostile sites. It’s mostly trash anyway.)
But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it.
And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i dont have to pay a dime. And that they are still able to make it a platform, where i get a lot of interesting things to see. And it is somehow sustainable.
Why do websites exist that don’t have ads? Why do people have personal websites and blogs? Perhaps it is, in fact, physically possible for a website to exist without serving third-party JavaScript ads.
This was never in dispute. If a website owner chooses to do so, it is their own choice.
Ah. I see for example netflix. And now it splits up into many sites again, who offer their own things. The technology is now there, maybe it becomes more and more a commodity, organizing payment is easy, maybe it all gets more diversified again. Does no one remember, how popular internet shops once were? But then amazon became way more convenient.
Ah, iam ranting :>
Not everything is about the almighty dollar. Did you get paid for participating in this discussion?
Exaggerating only slightly for argument, YouTube is presently a great force for evil, actively chipping away at collective privacy and promoting the creation and dissemination of Worthless Garbage so that they can sneak in ten second promotions for Even-More-Worthless Garbage like Grammarly, whatever horror movie's coming out soon, etc.
This won't be the case forever, I hear more and more people (creators and viewers alike) complaining about Youtube, its monetisation and it recommendation algorithms.
On the flip side, many creators have tried to go towards the subscription/patronage angle and far fewer are ever successful at that, with many making what amounts to a tiny trickle of supporting income while being burdened with much more responsibility to deliver. It's a hard bargain.
Advertiser: dont block my ads because the business depends on it
Consumer: here's a solution that works for me
Advertiser: but then that solution doesn't work for me
Consumer: i don't care, im still blocking all ads until I feel like i don't have to
Publisher: Don't block ads or I will go out of business.
Consumer: Then please allow me to contribute in some other way (subscription, Patreon, microtransactions).
Publisher: Hm, I dunno, that sounds like work.
But I also see a lot of people saying they'd like to contribute to the sites they visit frequently. I built a proof of concept website to let everyone do just that:
There are several similar concepts (Mozilla with Scroll, quid, even patreon et al), but I think mine reduces friction because signing up is as easy as on HN. Oh, and there's absolutely no tracking or selling of information to third parties.
Any feedback is welcome.
Ultimately the world did everything it does now without internet marketing and ultimately could do so again.
A sizable share of a smaller pie is better than all of nothing. Essentially your concern is both correct and irrelevant.
Nobody cares if Google has to make less money to have a less crappy internet the same way nobody cares if the newspaper industry makes less money.
The internet has seemingly decided that without tracking ads don't work. No. Serve your static ad or I will continue to see nothing. :)
Those older mediums were also just inefficient and create a lot of wasted spend, whereas the internet has allowed far more businesses to start and thrive by lowering their customer acquisition costs. These companies would never survive if they had to still rely on older ad models.
I think people like me who argue that web advertising should return to dumb/static/contextual ads also accept that it might kill a huge fraction of web revenue/jobs/content.
The downside is that advertisers move to the walled gardens of a few big players, and to native advertising. I’m still more ok with that than with the way the ad industry works now.
Honest but blunt answer: We (my businesses acting as advertisers) don't rely on your (Google's, or any other ad network's) claims anyway. The only thing that matters is the metrics we measure on our own sites, and we're going to be able to separate those by ad campaign anyway. We don't care about getting more Facebook likes or how many Instagram views some image gets or how many impressions Google claims to have shown on third party sites. We only care whether a given campaign gave a good return on investment in terms of direct benefits and/or actionable leads.
The thing is, only a very small fraction of the ads ecosystem works this way. Coke wants to show ads to people to position their brand, not to get people to buy soda over the internet, which means they're not able to measure the efficacy of channels on a per-publisher basis and figure out if they're being cheated. Brand advertisers typically use third-party fraud detection services like Moat to inspect the environment their ads are running in and see if they look legitimate.
Then there's a large range of people doing things where you could measure the effect of channels, but the site just isn't that sophisticated. Some pizza place somewhere buys some ads, they don't have the tech staff to measure conversions and optimize their channels, instead they trust the ad network to make sure they're not being cheated.
Even sophisticated performance advertisers rely on ad network fraud detection, just indirectly. Yes, you run your ad campaign, and you bid what the traffic is worth to you based on your measurements. But the existence of that traffic stream comes from fraud detection. Imagine some publishers on an ad network start spamming it, and the ad network isn't able to detect the fraud. The money from advertisers now isn't going to publishers in proportion to the value of their traffic, but instead in proportion to how much they're cheating. The publishers that were the source of your good traffic go out of business, and the ad network collapses because it doesn't have valuable traffic to send to anyone.
We're talking about a built-in feature to safely and transparently include ad content from a third party in your own site. It seems possible that advertisers could set up standardised content to work with that feature. Then the kinds of hosts who make enough from advertising to be worth keeping it anyway could either delegate to an advertiser's own server or self-host. Payment could be either a direct transfer or use some new, simpler and more transparent service just to handle that aspect.
Leaving aside that this isn't the problem of end users:
Link to a site, use an ID for that campaign (analogous to an affiliate ID), and don't pay unless a purchase takes place. Bots can't fake that.
I have put an ad on your site, it took up space for some time. The ad was bad and nobody bought anything even though a hundred thousand people saw it. The publisher is still owed money because they did their part.
Once you're at the point where you are buying traffic to meet goals, you're not going to scrutinize the origin of that traffic beyone anything that would appear to be flagrant fraud to your customers.
Your business model is not our problem.
Maybe the dominant adops model was a mistake? To throw back to an older, simpler time: what would thinking outside the box look like for this?
I do this on my iOS device. It's a bit of a pain to not have JS enabled in safari, but I can always share a page from Safari --> Duckduckgo's browser which i have installed for just such occasions.
Settings > Safari > Advanced > Javascript off
You can wholly block JavaScript in uBlock Origin without having to enable advanced mode, by using the per-site JavaScript master switch.[1]
* * *
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
It’s completely obnoxious and there is no way to stop it. Safari takes control of sound even if the video does not have audio toggled on and pauses your Spotify. Then if you use control center to start it again, it plays iTunes. I can’t believe this hasn’t been fixed.
EDIT: Just tried Brave Browser and this is pretty great so far. Seems to be the best compromise. Thanks!
Either way, do you find that the Adblock detection / nags are less reliable when you do it DNS based instead of the client?
I don’t suppose there’s a config setting in Chrome that discriminates between the website’s JS and the JS from my extensions?
It has been a cat and mouse game. The tech changes, but the game goes on.
Hell at that stage Mozilla could probably justify rolling ad blocking lists in as a default as long as they allow the labeled ads through.
As you say the game will go on but maybe it the will be a more pleasant one to play.
The more worrying ones I've seen don't rely on JS but are just links to bad sites. Downloading software can be a bit ridiculous these days with alongside the main download button about five ads saying "Download Now" linking to god knows what iffy software.
But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us.
The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond subscriptions or the perpetual cat and mouse game of blockers, blocker-blockers, blocker-blocker-blockers and so on.
In an industry full of innovation the monetization aspect is stuck in the newspaper model created 150 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jYMQx2RuVs
Relevant (and somewhat humorously self-aware) take on the matter from youtube channel Wisecrack-which is a channel that likes to look at the deeply classically philosophical aspects of how we react and inform ourselves through the lens of modern media.
Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.
Bringing it to a physical example, if I walk into a store and see a product placement or physical sign advertisement, I'm not that offended by it. But if they started fingerprinting me and taking my picture under the premise of selling me more stuff... I'm offended by that.
But, yeah, I'm still offended by that. It doesn't justify the widespread behavior on the internet to me, they're both bad.
Source: I set up this tracking for a retailer.
This is not the case. I have visited thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of websites in which the content was not valuable to me, and I blocked those ads, too.
When I block ads, I send the signal that my attention is not for sale, and moreover, the content creators' business model is not my concern. Eventually, if they get the enough of these signals, they'll find a new way to make money.
Anything that remembers anything about me or my behavior is distinctly off limits. I don’t care if your site or business depends on it. If you use a an ad network that uses tracking cookies to show ads, you’d business model is flawed and your business should die.
Heh, do you really think that static ads would be a small portion of the page?
Look at small local newspapers for what a business driven by revenue from non-targetable ads looks like. The ads take up more than half the page!
https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/media/unfetter/press06.htm
https://jimmycsays.com/2017/01/13/is-the-daily-newspaper-thi...
I would be more than happy to accept that and I do see it from time to time. But I still won't be disabling my adblocker - allowing ads served from DoubleClick et el is just far too dangerous from both a security and privacy perspective. Even if they're not responsible for the actual ad content they're at the very least complicit in all of it.
All it takes is one of these tech giants pulling a Equifax and who knows how much data spills over.
Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.
I just hope ALPR/facial recognition/etc doesn't get combined with digital billboards to bring internet ads into physical locations.
Imagine reading something about, say, a particular lawnmower and the article has a link to that lawnmower at the top as an ad from Flymo with a discount. No tracking just a link to buy it with a tracking Id in the URL or something.
Can someone answer me this: Are there studies, not funded by those who benefit from mass-tracking, that show the benefit of all this data-gathering to show ads? Or that show it doesn't work perhaps?
My gut tells me the difference in success rate is minimal and couldn't possibly justify the data collection but I'd love to be proven wrong.
At this time, I believe the whole scheme to be a con. (there, I said it!)
And now I have the tools to do so.
But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator.
For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads.
It's clear Google removed the previously obvious demarcation between ads and results specifically to make it less obvious.
I'd prefer a different background colour (like the parent's extension), but it would also help a bit if it said "Advertisement" instead of "Ad".
Having more data about you allows them to pick out 'better' ads and make more money. Wether this money goes to ad networks or content creators depends on how much leverage one has over the other.
I decided a few years ago to disable ad blocking for awhile. The result was frankly, a parade of shit. Google was probably best at showing the occasional relevant ad, mostly in GMail.
Beyond that, the automated crap that does the targeting tends to hit the lowest common denominator topic. What I actually do online barely registered, but if my kid used my laptop, it would immediately take over the ad experience.
If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that blocked out billboards and other kinds of non-digital advertising, I would do so in a heartbeat.
It's maddening that advertisers can be allowed to destroy culture like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Have_They_Done_to_My_Song...
I believe undisclosed ads should be illegal, I would ban music in ads, I would ban color in ads, I would ban sexuality in advertisement, I would ban appeals to emotions in ads.
If a product truly makes the life of the purchaser better, then no gimmicks are needed to sell it.
Edit: ok endless is hyperbole, but content targeting is hardly useless.
I went and disabled personalized advertising, and for the first time in years I started seeing ads that tempted me to click through, ads from tech companies about tech. Why the difference? Because YouTube started showing me ads related to the content I'm actually watching rather than based on their faulty neural network profile of me.
Obviously this is just one anecdote, but it's illustrative of the point: don't try to advertise either beer or iPhone covers on a car maintenance site. If I'm on a car maintenance site, you know all you need to know about where my interests are at that exact moment. Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic?
If there's only space for one ad, do they show you an ad for tools, exterior mechanic, engine mechanic, or a new car ad? All are valid options for both you and the advertiser.
This is where invasively tracking your online behavior can help you.
I imagine folks serving up the JS have figured out ways around whatever simple blocking tech I have. If their JS wouldn’t eat up so much battery, I’d mind a lot less, since I leave tons of tabs open.
For years I allowed google text ads because of non invasion and distracting they were. However the of amount tracking taking place forced me to also disable them.
That's what I've been harping on. I'm not blocking ads, I'm trying to protect my privacy and keep ad companies from effectively DoSing my browser.
Nothing about 'ad blockers' prevent advertisers from showing ordinary magazine style ads.
This is the first step to reducing fingerprinting, remove distinctions between different browsers and only have the level of web version or timestamp they can support.
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 plane at least once an hour due to insane advertising on a website consuming all the CPU.
I literally installed ad-block to save my computer hardware.
The ads don't even bother me that much. I used to always say, "my brain is my ad-block". It was the slow loading, CPU heavy ads that got me to turn.
If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. But how about not melting my computer in the process?
And then sometime around 2015 or 2016, I started noticing ads that would lock up my CPU, or get my laptop's fan running, or prevent the page from loading entirely, or increase page loading time by 10x. And then I decided enough was enough, and installed an adblocker.
It's not the general concept of advertising that I object to. It's when the advertising makes the content that I initially came to see unusable. Fix your goddamn Javascript and maybe I won't block you, although at this point I'm kinda enjoying the ad-free experience.
I a specific instance there was no way to use the site, every link would redirect directly without opening the correct page at all.
I literally needed an ad-blocker to be able to use the website.
For web apps that need it, it could be an explicit permission, like webcam or location access.
I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.
This seems exceedingly hyperbolic. With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge.
Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc all provide tremendous value to their users while being ostensibly free. Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.
I know someone who is in debt (and in denial) because she can't resist buying something that is "on sale". Her house filled with things she does not need but that were a bargain.
No, "targeted psychological manipulation" is not an hyperbole, you just are not the target. You, when you see "YOU HAVE WON A PRIZE!" blinking you think "Yeah, right, who falls for these anyway?" The answer is, a few people whose life is pretty miserable.
I'd rather have the internet financed in a sane way through microtransactions than the thing we have now.
That money isn’t being spun out of thin air, it’s being extracted from you somehow.
Whether that method of abstraction is getting you to buy something you otherwise wouldn’t have, or by using your data to manipulate others to do the same; they exact their toll on you.
It's not free of charge, you're just paying in a different way. These services are able to operate because they deliver content that changes your mind in a way that benefits the corporations who pay for ads. They alter your purchasing habits, sway you politically, and change your emotions. If they were not able to manipulate you then they would be worthless.
Nonsense. OSM exists, HN exists, Linux exists. And just because some services need revenue to pay bills, it doesn't mean advertising or users paying is the only way to get it. Google Maps gets revenue from businesses using it on their websites, for example.
Google gets much much more than just showing you ads. You surrender all your digital life using Google free services, and that info is priceless, because 95% of people did the same. What would you say if in 10 years, government, police and businesses will routinely use google data for background checks? It is just one use case.
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.
Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.
(Of course, if you measure the success of an economy by the GDP, then it might seem that ads have a positive influence, but that seems a bit like a broken-window fallacy to me).
Interesting idea. I just read that over £20bn is spent a year on advertising in the UK. The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
Netflix is an interesting example of a new model of entertainment that generates revenues through subscriptions instead of advertisements. Lots of newspapers have also shifted to a subscription-based model, though only The Guardian has done so without placing their website behind a paywall. Another alternative is public service broadcasting, like the BBC.
I'd be surprised to hear they were selling viewing data though. A few years ago, they were making a lot of noise about how that data gave them a unique way to make decisions on what content to produce that other studios lacked. Seems like the kind of thing you'd hold close if that were the case.
When you search, it's also clear they have shadow profiles for content they don't have (e.g. before they had Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they'd autocomplete to "Things like Monty Python and the Holy Grail" pretty early in the autocomplete results). I wonder how heavily that search data is weighted in deciding how much to offer to license existing content.
Probably quite highly, as it’s well known that Netflix also watches what’s popular on torrent sites to help decide what to licence next.
I think calling journalism "socially valuable" is debatable.
I remember reading Paris tried this, but that’s a long way from “common in Europe”.
By this logic, many public transport centres such as train stations wouldn't be public spaces either (not unheard of for a train station to have a ticket barrier too). There are adverts in places other than the airport too!
It is not. I have seen a ramp-up in the amount of advertisement everywhere. Maybe poorer countries like Romania - I have been just to Bucharest - are not so affected. But, Sweden, or Spain, - the countries that I spend more time - are just installing more and more advertisements everywhere.
Gambling advertisements are quite common in Stockholm. I remember specially one telling people to buy lottery tickets because they live sucks and the only lottery can save them from their horrible lives. It was disgusting.
Cities have a high amount of cognitive pollution.
"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed."
https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dis...
In fact, it explicitly says that it does not show causation and recommends further research.
It's easy to come up with theories to explain it that don't have anything to do with the one you proposed. For instance, higher advertising could be caused by weakness in the economy that doesn't show up in other data (or at least not GDP) but which leads to less satisfaction later, which wouldn't show up in their controls.
That or I marvel to those around me at the amazing production value of some stupid commercial that’s aired to them countless times is.
I have no doubt a barrage of ads day in and day out, regardless of economic condition is bad for a person’s well being.
If anyone has any literature on the other effects mentioned by the parent, I'd be highly interested as well.
1. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cag...
I assure if you the industry disappeared tomorrow, I would certainly find some other way to continue making the world a much worse place.
I'm not dismissing the possibility of conversations about whether advertising for services is a type of transaction that's difficult to reason about, and that users need to be protected from themselves by regulation. But looking at only the outflow half of a transaction and asking "I don't benefit from this part, we should ban it" is utter gibberish.
"Did anyone ever investigate what benefits payment systems have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, since payment systems cost money to operate and in the end all they do is reduce the amount of money a user has. While payment systems may allow you to 'buy' services, we are still paying for these systems directly and indirectly
Why then, doesn't the government bring currency and bank accounts and credit cards to a halt?"
My presumption is that if advertising was banned, and you were still dealing with a relatively free society, that many more resources would go in to PR and marketing. At least an ad you know is an ad.
A good exercise is to go back and look through magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, especially Playboy. The advertising seems much more transparent in its shallow promises and we actually know what the long term outcomes were from following them -- e.g. alcohol, tobacco, and cars no one gives a shit about anymore. The editorial bridges between advertising and content glaringly stick out. These things aren't necessarily no longer true, but the obviousness of time shines a bright light on it.
To me the biggest story in ads isn't ad blockers or Google, it is Facebook getting consumers to spend gargantuan amounts of money creating content for free and then making tens of billions of dollars from it. Youtube/Google at least has revenue sharing.
Barely. It's not like a person can create an account, upload an original video which becomes extremely popular, and receive a single penny in compensation.
True. In some countries, mixing content and ads (see social media influencers) is already forbidden, especially when targeting children. I suppose the law could be extended here.
A better question than what benefit is advertising might be, "How can advertising be made more beneficial to the viewers"
There is an inherent problem with advertising in that the incentives are somewhat misaligned. Company X doesn't want me to learn about the best way to solve problem Y. They want me to learn about _their_ solution to problem Y.
Or even worse... Company X wants me to believe that Y is a problem for me — when in fact it may not be, or at least not how they claim — and that only they can solve it.
Imagine firing off hundreds of ads at a vegan about how eating meat is good. That's essentially what all the "buy this shit" ads are doing to someone who explicitly buys as little as they can to get by.
Not necessarily. An ad for a restaurant doesn’t necessarily make you eat more. An ad for a hotel doesn’t make you go on more trips.
Simon Kuznets, a Russian emigre to the US, developed the concept of the GDP in 1934, and according to Bregman, tracking the GDP was a significant factor in the US's ability to harness its manufacturing capability during the war effort; most countries had a significantly inferior understanding of their own production dynamics.
As useful was it was for the war effort, Kuznets warned that the GDP should be redefined after the war, as the country's needs had changed. Instead, military spending is part of the GDP. No party wants to significantly cut back on military spending because it would affect the GDP. So not only does the GDP encourage increased military spending, it doesn't reward so many things that would be beneficial to society, and thus little effort is spent optimizing for those things.
TL;DR: if the GDP doesn't measure it, there is no political will to address it, and if the GDP does measure it, it is a political necessity to boost spending in that area. Thus, needless military spending, rent seeking money shuffling on wall street, and advertising are richly rewarded as they are included in the GDP.
The feeling has to do with the fact that where I live, nearly every software engineer you meet works for a defense contractor, an issuance company, or a finance company. These jobs, and the dollars that come from them, seem somehow hollow to me. I'd accept a significant pay cut if my code were somehow contributing to something like growing food.
I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way.
Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are loathe to do investigative journalism or negative reporting on the companies that provide their bread and butter and because they also want to run stories that don't offend or antagonize their advertisers -- stories from that point of view that capitalism is bad or advertising is bad, for instance, are off limits to many outlets partially because of this.
Advertisers also routinely lie about the products they're selling, so people are being deceived about the products they're buying, sometimes with very serious negative consequences (such as advertising of cigarettes or medical products that are actually harmful).
Advertising and advertised products have and do do tremendous harm. It's just generally indirect by one or more degrees. Tobacco, alcohol, petroleum, gambling, leaded paint. Just off the top of my head.
When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.
And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.
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).
This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.
"To Serve Man."
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.
JavaScript is the same. We'd have a cleaner, safer web without it. And only a small fraction of people would be happy with that.
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.
Sometimes you need a car, but usually an ebike will be more than sufficient. Going on a road trip or doing a large Costco run? You probably want a car. Just picking up some eggs from the grocery store or making a visit to the library? An ebike is probably the best option, and is also likely faster (closer parking, can ride on roads, sidewalks, bike trails, etc).
I use a static site generator for my blog and personal web site, and there's absolutely no JavaScript involved. I use JavaScript with a web framework for webapps because otherwise we would need to build a desktop app, which would limit our reach to those platforms we have the resources to support.
I'm of the opinion that you should use the simplest technology that will get the job done. It's far easier to make a static site secure than a dynamic one. It's far easier for a customer to vet your server-rendered site than your pile of JavaScript (nothing runs locally, so they just vet form actions and HTTP headers).
You might be missing how expectations change after the introduction of a technology. I wouldn’t guess that people would be unhappy about not having cars before the car was even invented.
Isn’t this like saying atoms are to blame for nuclear warfare? Atoms enabled nuclear weapons?
It's certainly possible.
99% of my web browsing shouldn’t need it. Every site I visit uses it, but almost all of them could be built just fine without it.
There are downsides to everything, but we cant dismiss that positives that came from it.
Yes, it’s great that the web is capable of stuff like Google Docs. But all those capabilities are actually liabilities when it’s a news site.
I think JavaScript should have to request access to use browser APIs, and you should be able to disable access to any of all of them. For example, I should be about to disable:
- network access (disables adding script tags, XMLHttpRequest, fetch) - 2d canvas access - 3d canvas access - WASM
And so on, just like mobile apps, but perhaps more granular. The app should also be able to put a note as to why it needs each specific feature.
If you're a total tech-novice, sure, but as a power user it's fine. I'm blocking ycombinator.com right now. I can still submit this. If something doesn't work, just click the icon and trust its domain. If pictures don't show, trust a CDN. Amazon, Paypal, 99% of sites work with an initial adjustment of trust settings.
Things like React are accelerating that curve. Even for sites that could function without it, they are throwing up hands with "welp, they can't disable it anyway because other sites...so let's not test that use case anymore."
I don't like it, but it is what it is. Technical people aren't going to drive the decision to work without JS. In the end, it's a cost decision, with the usual PHB[1] outcomes.
I found uMatrix easier to use and more configurable than NoScript.
I used noscript until Firefox changed to the new web API and noscript stopped working briefly. I switched to ublock origin in medium mode and haven't looked back. More compatible and practical nowadays.
Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations.
Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more complicated than you're making it seem. I don't need Javascript to put a tracking pixel in your email.
Aside from CSS and redirect links, all of these features are fairly straightforward. The consequences of disabling the Referer header, for example, are pretty small and easy to understand: you'll stop sending sites information about what links you used to get to them, but some very picky websites that check the header (e.g. image hosts that try to prevent hotlinking) might not work. This means browsers can provide options to let the user choose their preferred balance of privacy, functionality, performance, and "helping us improve your experience".
With JavaScript, on the other hand, it is very difficult for end-users to tell what a given website is doing. Are those hundred kilobytes of minified code a tracking/fingerprinting script, a crypto-miner, or a Hello World app in the UI framework du jour? It's hard for even an experienced developer to know for sure, and it's basically impossible for browsers. Your options are (1) allow everything, (2) use really crummy heuristics like "what domain is this file being served from", or (3) disable JavaScript and give up on using half the websites on the Internet.
JS has a few stupid design decisions, but the fundamental reason Javascript is hard to run safely is because it's a turing-complete language that exposes a lot of powerful features.
You can argue that the web doesn't need a turing-complete language that exposes a lot of powerful features. Can you argue that phones don't? Can you argue that personal computers don't need that?
All of the tracking that happens on the web right now also happens on mobile phones and desktops. Users have broadly shown that the "only download code you trust" security model doesn't work (see recent articles on both the Android and iOS app store for reference). Even something basic like adblocking on Android is kind of terrible -- the best app I know of is AFWall, and that's maybe half as powerful as something like UMatrix because it's relying on static firewall rules.
You get rid of powerful applications on the web, and users will go back to downloading apps like crazy just so they can order pizza from their phone. Since currently, all of those platforms are pretty terrible for privacy; it is very hard to argue that a world where people could only download native apps would be more private than the world we have now.
We could also keep the web and switch wholesale to a SaaS model for everything, which is broadly bad for consumers, and carries its own privacy risks (there are some computations like password generation that I don't want to be done on a 3rd-party computer). Switching over to using forms and remote computation for everything on the web would also greatly increase the prevalence of 3rd-party cookies, making them much harder to block.
The point I'm getting at is that I don't see a world where Javascript vanishes and privacy gets any better. In fact, it might even have the opposite effect if the deprecation of Javascript means people download more Android apps. Privacy is a really hard, complicated problem and there probably isn't any single solution.
If JavaScript vanished, it would accomplish one huge win for privacy: it would split the "reading content and submitting forms" part of the Web out from the "powerful applications" part.
It is cool that you can use JavaScript to build a collaborative 3D modeling program. It might even be better for privacy than a native app. But it is less cool that Facebook and every news site you read gets access to the exact same capabilities and attack surface as the 3D modeling program.
And personally, I think ordering pizza would land on the "content and forms" side of the divide.
A native app collaborative 3D program could be worse for privacy if it were closed source. If it were open source, then no way. For one thing, unlike a Javascripted one, it wouldn't update behind your back. Its code wouldn't be obfuscated, and wouldn't be dynamically pieced together from the four corners of the world.
On the other hand, I don't think the Open Source argument holds at all. This is pushing for something that just isn't going to happen. Now we need to not only get rid of Javascript, we also need to convince Facebook to Open Source its native app?
I run mostly Open Source native apps, but the only way I can do that is because web-apps take the place of many native apps I would otherwise need to install on my phone or computer.
> For one thing, unlike a Javascripted one, it wouldn't update behind your back.
Most people's phone apps are set to auto-update, and most PC apps have the ability to download and execute additional code on the fly. I like to think I run a pretty tight Linux system, but all of my programs have write permissions to their own personal install directories.
It sounds to me like your problem isn't so much Javascript as it is 3rd-party requests/assets and mutable web-pages. These are also interesting problems to talk about, but they're largely unrelated to Javascript. It would maybe be helpful to see the web move more towards a DAT/IPFS model where webpages could be versioned.
On the Javascript side of things, all of this boils down to the security idea the users should only run code that they trust. Users have broadly rejected that idea -- both on the web and on native platforms like phones. They want the ability to safely run untrusted and semi-trusted code.
We can argue over whether that's a reasonable thing for them to ask, but that's the position we're in. The web is trying to figure out how to let you run untrusted code.
Originally I used NoScript (and Firefox 'View>Page Style>No Style'), now I just tend to use uMatrix, with appropriate media types disabled.
It makes for a faster, and easier to read web, where I still see the occasional ad, but once configured, usually not.
I'd guess that use with Javascript disabled seems to be accepted in part due to Safari on iOS supporing it - possibly it was the default (I can't remember).
Something like the unholy child of RSS Feeds / Podcasts / NNTP / Email / Pub-Sub / Gopher / Google Reader
A new language (or two complementary languages) separating content and presentation, limited, possibly not Turing-complete but expressive. Specifically less powerful than modern web browsers.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...
I won't ever apologize for doing so. As far as I'm concerned, any advertisement that depends on JavaScript is malware, and I think that my right to protect myself online outweighs the need of publishers to turn a profit.
IMO, profits are like respect. They must be earned, and if the only way you can turn a profit is by spying on people then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place. If the only way you can get me to use your product is by giving it away and selling my data, then maybe your product shouldn't exist?
As far as I'm concerned, the data I generate by using a search engine should be treated with the same care as my medical records. It should not be mined or traded. It should not be kept longer than 30 days.
And if that breaks the internet, so be it. You brought this on yourselves.
On the whole network: pi-hole
Why Dnscloak: doesn't route your traffic through a third party with dubious motivations.
So sure: maybe someday un-adblockable content will be a thing. Do I care about that content? Turns out maybe I'll just walk away entirely. The internet has a lot of utterly ad-ridden services with far too high an opinion of how important they really are.
So sure, make your sites, services, and content so annoying that I stop using them, and close copying loopholes, somehow. Or ban spyvertising and let it all go down in the flames of the prophesied ad-pocalypse. I really don't care a bit either way.
There is very little on the internet that is completely unique and of interest to me. If you try to put up a barrier to your content I will go somewhere else almost every time.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
I often use firefox reader mode just because websites use custom fonts, and to remove all the clutter, even when there is no ads.
Also, it won't be long until reddit is sued and must remove comments where people copy-paste the entire article because of pay walls and ad blockers. Same for outline. I guess website will start findings ways to prevent copy pasting, and maybe someone will create some app that just let their users browse a PNG rendering of websites.
It's almost as if normal newspapers might be considered a good alternative.
This is already a thing in some places. I wanted to use a table of data I found on a website but found I couldn't copy and paste it into excel. Instead I downloaded the webpage and parsed it to extract the table and rebuild it manually.
I know it has been attempted in the past with little success, but all those attempts were just companies going it alone and hoping for the best. If the W3C, browser makers, banks and publishers all got together a standard could be developed. Something that would be core to web standards. It wouldn't be easy, but it would solve a lot of problems.
The issue isn't the payment tech, it's human behavior. People don't want to or can't pay for all the content they consume.
Regardless, the action of consuming the content itself means that it has inherent value. I believe whether it's worth it is a decision for the user instead of dictated by someone else.
The user. That’s the context – the user deciding who gets their money.
> And how can it have "negative value"?
Zero value, plus the time it took to find out that it had zero value.
> Regardless, the action of consuming the content itself means that it has inherent value.
Not really.
For example, blocking ads (even though most know that is the trade-off for the content) instead of refusing to visit the site. If the content has no value, why visit the site at all? Surely not ever pageview has zero value?
It would not. You're worth more to the advertisers than a few cents, so even if you and everyone else chipped in, many ad-supported sites would see their revenue plummet, and close their doors. Consumers spend a lot of money buying things, from groceries to appliances, and a percentage of each of those sales goes to the ad budget to steer that buying. Unless everything in every store got a few percent cheaper, consumers literally don't have the money to distribute to the websites at anywhere near the level advertisers pay. Every single American would have to pay Facebook $15-20 per month to match the advertising revenue Facebook generates per user, not a few cents. The cost of using Google's services would be similar to a cable or cell phone bill, assuming every single person that uses them continues to and signs up for that bill.
The relationship is direct between reader and publisher; making quality content becomes important again, there's no adoption friction, and ad networks become a thing of the past.
It's no wonder Google blocked browser mining quick-smart.. it had the potential to bring down the entire house of cards.
The reality of humanity is that people operate via incentive. The internet is no different - publishers are incentivised by money. There must be a mechanism to provide that - today's interpretation is increasingly aggressive advertising, which makes noone but the advertisers happy.
Crypto-mining provides an incentive for publishers to invest in their content, knowing they will be duly rewarded, without a middle-man. Users know that they are providing revenue to publishers simply by the act of viewing content.
It has the potential to be empowering for everyone involved.
However, to riposte as glibly as you did: If you don't feel like compensating a publisher for their content, they may not feel like serving it to you. It's lose-lose for everyone. What do you propose, then?
I've written on this several times:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=micropayments&...
Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Andrew Odlyzko far more ably:
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html
http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen... (PDF)
A vastly more sensible option: a means-based, universal fee (a/k/a tax) and payments to creators based on both UBI and quality + access distributions -- a universal content syndication mechanism:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
$100 per person per year from the world's richest 1 billion inhabitants would match all present publishing income, and present ad spend. Truth is we're already paying for the content, we're just not getting it.
This is why the way web ads are served is utterly farcical. How can you build a person's trust by invading their privacy in a hundred different ways just so you can be sure the ads they're seeing are a little bit more targeted than what's on TV?
People often say that they would be happy to have reasonable ads that don't interfere with website function and which respect their privacy, but it's been so bad for so long that it would likely be very difficult for an ethical, privacy respecting ad service to get off the ground. Many people have been burned too many times to believe and unblock such an ad service. EME shows that there is no interest in even trying this approach. They're just going to continue escalating the arms war.
They're going to lose.
Companies advertising on the internet need to wake up to the fact you can't support a war against the privacy of your potential customer base and expect them to trust you. Yes, you've dug quite the hole for yourselves over the last couple of decades. Why keep digging?
Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.
(I'm admittedly not sure how I'd classify stuff like Pale Moon, which is primarily based off someone else's engine but now backports its own patches.)
Brave already integrates ad-blocking at a lower level than the webRequest API, so this is less of an issue, but you sacrifice your choice in blocker.
https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
The recent Chromium’s Manifest v3 controversy around the overheads of the various extensions using the WebRequest API to inspect and potentially block undesired requests did not affect Brave as requests are processed natively, deep within the browser’s network stack.
What I find much more scary is the prospect of the entire web stack becoming much more locked down as a consequence of both (1) ad blocker prevention and (2) the consolidated browser market. Think Encrypted Media Extensions, but for everything.
If there were ten browsers in active use today, getting them all to agree to something like this would be almost impossible. Unfortunately, there's only 2–3 browsers, and if Firefox loses any more marketshare...
Have you tried 1Blocker X?
Though, for fun, I've rolled my own Safari extension for content blocking. You get 90%+ of the way just concatenating lists of ad domains and feeding them into the blocker. But, for example, you can encode all of Easylist as content-blocker rules.
I think the ideal system would support declarative and non-declarative modes (since a fully declarative system could never account for every possible use case).
And there's no pressure from users to choose the more restrictive but performant option because people basically have zero insight into what's killing their battery, much less which competitor is better in that regard.
Given the gulf between Safari vs Chrome battery performance, I'm not all that convinced that the declarative api is pure downside like HN cynicism and Twitter outrage might suggest.
I can agree that it would be nice to have competing implementations, but that's just the result of browsers being so complex that once your hobby horse feature is removed from one, you basically have nowhere to turn.
Safari was already beating Chrome on battery life before its extension API was neutered. This is post hoc revisionist rationalization.
It could also be that because of the reduced expressiveness of the adblocker, more ads are missed, and you might therefore end up with a net increase in the amount of code that has to be executed by the browser. So the declarative API could actually lead to a performance decrease in practice.
> 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 written as performantly as possible where the JavaScript execution time is negligible.
> As it’s designed today, the blocking version of the Web Request API requires a persistent, long-running process, and is fundamentally incompatible with “lazy” processes - processes that can be set up or torn down as-needed, conserving valuable system resources. There are also significant costs associated with the serialization of the request data, the inter-process communication needed to send that data to the extensions, and the processing of extension responses.
You are free to dismiss the writeup as lies, of course. You're also free to handwave it away by saying "well I don't like the trade-off". But you can't discuss this as if the benefits are not apparent.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-declarativ...
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: https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1134092257190064128
So between Justin Schuh and Simeon Vincent (author of the post you linked), who is lying? It must be at least one of them.
But let's ignore the misleading claims about security/privacy and just focus on the performance issue.
In this post, they include absolutely no numbers or measurements of the performance effects of using the content blocking API. They give some explanation of what is technically required to implement each approach, and certainly the declarative API is a simpler approach, but you made that point already. And I responded to it. Just because the API is "obviously simpler" doesn't mean the performance advantage is in any way significant, and could even be outweighed by the increased ad load due to the less powerful API. It's just not at all obvious from what they are saying here that the change is worth compromising user functionality over.
If you want a source with actual measurements, you should check the Ghostery team's response to the manifest v3 changes: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
Here are some highlights:
> All content-blockers except DuckDuckGo have sub-millisecond median decision time per request.
> Time to Process a Request in Ghostery (median): 0.007 ms
> Loading Ghostery's Blocking Engine (from cache): 0.03 ms
> Memory Consumption of Ghostery's Blocking Engine (at startup, in Chrome): 1.8 MB
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. Nonsense.
> 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.
Do you have a source for that?
> Mozilla Foundation philanthropic programs and activities are funded by public support from individual donors and foundations ($13.8M), as well as from royalties earned that are paid by the Mozilla Corporation ($8.3M). Total revenue and income support to the Mozilla Foundation in CY 2016 was $23.4M.
> The majority of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue is from royalties earned through Firefox web browser search partnerships and distribution deals around the world. Mozilla Corporation’s revenue and income support for CY 2016 was $506M
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2500712/google-to-pay-...
> Google to pay Mozilla $300M yearly in new search deal, says report
I think the solution is a new web protocol that does not require an OS in a box (browser). It will be supported by decentralized (mostly p2p) protocols. It probably will not have any JavaScript.
Attached applications could be web assembly with I/O abilities such as a simple canvas-like UI.
If you can find or create a suitable and high performance p2p system (or group of systems) for enabling people to load and publish these lightweight links, you could provide a useful and viable alternative to the traditional web that would be approachable by small development teams.
Built in p2p search could be a killer feature for such a system.
EDIT: made a github for it and submitted to HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20544892
Eventually we may make a hard break from the old internet into a new one. I'm looking for practical and scalable cryptocurrency and smart contract solutions to become popular. After that you may see a new type of browser protocol that does not have a full operating system in it and can be implemented by mere mortals. It might depend on one or more decentralized protocols such as IPFS or dat or even one of the many less popular academic content-oriented-networking systems. There is a strong possibility it will not have any JavaScript.
Let's see who wins.
Users innovate new ways to block them. Its a never ending cycle.
money won by enlisting the corrupt law makers. from now on, content will have DRM (e.g. netflix) and if any adblocker even tries to touch it, the creators can be jailed.
now if you want to create/contribute an adblock, besides time, you must have impeccable opSec or also be willing to do time in jail.
Right now Verge created a wordpress website put google ads on it and can afford a team to right some content. If all third party ads are blocked option left would be `paid content` or go to Google/FB platform to publish wherein you'll have lesser control but more revenue as all ads are first party.
Is that not what Google Ads is?
I actually do pay for some websites, including for not seeing ads on Youtube (with mixed results now that ads are just baked in the video, when the entirety of the video itself is not an ad) and I want an easy way to do so : I want to be able to access the content I want while its creator gets paid.
So far, ads have been a successful way to do micro payments (the only ?).
Instead of waging this increasing war between ads and ad blockers, I would rather see organizations that try to find a better solution (with privacy somewhere at the top of the checklist).
If you are running an ad-dependant website and struggle to make money as a result of the campaign people like me are running, then you'll have to adapt. If you fail to adapt and your website closes, it's fine : as a society, we didn't need your services.
Targeted ads are another kind of problem. I don't really want to be told or suggested what I should or could buy, I can make up my own mind. I know some people don't mind them and that's fine.
In all honesty I preferred the annoying pop ups.
I’d guess that you are looking at a different page or your machine is compromised.
Between malicious code ending up on ad networks and ads that take people to malicious sites, it only makes sense to block connections to things that are not actually needed for the display of pages. Most people who get a take-over-the-screen "We are Mikrosoft and have discovred that your computer infected call us helpful people at Mikrosoft and we will fix your comptuer" messages aren't getting it because they're visiting dodgy sites or even ones that have been hacked - they're getting them because either someone got that into an ad network or because they clicked on an ad that turned out to route them to one of those.
I can't babysit everyone and really don't want to, but I can at least cut down on some of the crap that hits their computers.
Wouldn't it be far better if instead we focused on identifying content and finding ways to serve it more efficiently? Why download the whole page and then hide 95% of the data?
I'd like to see a system where we crowd source the identification of content. If 100 people all view a page and see 100 different ads but the same article each time, a smart browser extension should be able to conclude that the uri actually refers to the static text. Store that on ipfs or somesuch and when I click the link, don't waste my bandwidth downloading the site, just serve up what I wanted in the first place.
I'm not sure how such an approach would play out--but all we're getting out of the current strategy is smarter and smarter ads. I can't imagine we're gonna look back in 100 years and be glad we aligned our incentives in such a direction, so I think trying something different would be worthwhile.
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 effective, for a time.
Obfuscated content and JS can get around some of this, thou stylesheets whitelisting elements would be yet another workaround.
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.
Could you imagine if cable companies could control your Smart TV when showing ads and collect data about your viewing habits?
A minority of us have been saying this for years, WHEN will the tech industry cry loud enough for change?
1. As a user, you set your preference: no mining - ads will show instead. No ads, there will be some mining.
2. The longer a user stays on a page, ie the more engaging the content is, the more money the publisher earns. In theory, this would trigger a natural correction for dark publishing patterns: click bait would diminish, articles split over X pages would reduce. True, engaging content would win.
Hitherto all alternatives for remunerating publishers have flopped (an engaged user has no easy way to remunerate aside from pulling out a credit card..) .. so we have been stuck with ads.
I was truly sad to see in-browser crypto mining get banned. For a brief moment, it seemed that pleasing everyone was going to be possible.
Donating directly is a much nicer solution for me, and there’s so much room for improvement there too in the areas of privacy, fees, and convenience. (In a world where in-browser mining were a good idea, an out-of-browser miner could provide the equivalent for this kind of manual donation.)
Obviously, there need to be intelligent structures in place - and these can be enforced by the browser (as they already are today) - CPU limits for inactive tabs, CPU limits based off the computer's power-mode. The ability to disable mining at the cost of seeing advertisements.
Make an ad blocker that just dishonors cookies, clears localStorage, etc for the ad domains, rather than blocking the requests altogether. Publishers won't make as much money since advertisers won't be able to track you. But at least you could give the publishers the ability to make some money from ads served to you.
If this approach gained adoption, you might see a growth in the market for non-tracking ads (analogous to the growth in the market for non-popup ads described in the article).
Why not?
Also, Firefox has a good deal of tracker blocking[2] built in that tries to go after browser signature recognition. I think the problem with that is it can break some sites, though I have it on and don't see a lot of problems.
Beyond that, many ad blockers let you customize the lists, and there are tracker blocking lists. But I think they all default to standard ad blocking, so the hindrance is configuration.
[1]: https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads [2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking
You can pay the makers of Adblock Plus to have your ads declared "acceptable". However, I do not want somebody else deciding for me which ads are "acceptable".
Yes, it is. Publishers and advertisers have overstepped time and time again. They must be reminded of their place, and nothing short of grabbing them by the scruff of the neck and rubbing their noses in the mess they made will suffice.
> But at least you could give the publishers the ability to make some money from ads served to you.
I could, but why should I? The publishers had a chance to be reasonable, and they just kept pushing. I'm done being reasonable. The publishers should be glad they aren't facing the Internet Death Penalty[1].
1: http://catb.org/jargon/html/I/Internet-Death-Penalty.html
The story of how Internet grew and what made it valuable to users and what threatens it – it is worth articulating and illustrating and repeating each year as more and more people take Internet more seriously but don't know about these happenings under the covers.
Also, for the business model innovation to happen, existing business models need to be studied with care and deeper and broader understanding needs to prevail over more and more users.
> When you visit a site, the deal on offer is, "Let us and everyone we do business with track you in every way possible or get lost" and users who install adblockers push back. An adblocker is a way of replying to advertisers and publishers with a loud-and-clear "How about nah?"
YouTube's gotten a lot more shitty about it, too. I wouldn't block ads on there but they treat their creators like crap and they treat me like crap. Nowadays if I don't block them I get two ads in a row and if I don't skip the first one, I have to wait on the second one, too. And often some ads go on for minutes. The longest I've seen was a 50 minute ad. Or ads that scream at you, as loudly as possible. Especially when you're trying to enjoy more laid-back content. Ugh.
And a lot of that revenue doesn't go towards paying the creators their proper share. I would gladly pay for an ad-free YouTube but they're dead-set on shafting creators, making their lives as miserable as possible. Random demonetisations, horrible handling of fair use, etc. All this without ANY kind of proper support. If I pay for a service or rely on something to make a living, I expect to be able to at least somehow talk to a human being, etc. They've gotten more and more and more hostile towards creators and users. So now they get the Brave-treatment (since they fiddle with adblock on Safari, I use Brave just to watch YouTube. If they detect adblock and can get through it, you get actively punished with longer and more frequent ads.)
Little wonder that most small people without VC investment backing them have looked for alternatives to this, they understand how sites that host content being hostile towards the userbase is a race to the bottom. With off-site patronage and superchat and burnt-in ads they're in control. Sadly you do have to be of a audience certain size to take advantage of these but they're far more pleasant for everyone involved (except the firms that host the content).
For sites in general that model seems to be viable, too. But you do depend on your audience for this which can be a good thing generally as often it seems to keep the content more honest. The content that panders is very often just going to slowly die off.
I would be okay with ads if they weren't disgustingly obnoxious and consistently trying to intrude in my life and take my data.
Lots of bigger websites have an insane quantity of ads, some even have their entire backgrounds replaced with clickable ads. One accidental misclick and you're pissed off. There are sites where the occasional ad is sometimes interrupted by content.
I simply can't take it. Performance-hogging, data-stealing, annoying, time-wasting ads. They're everywhere.
I look forward to reading in the history books about how some of the world's greatest minds spent their time and energy figuring out how to build businesses on manifestly bad UX.
I get wanting to have style to your writing but not at the expense of clarity.
I liked the term "adversarial interoperability" that they used in the article. I think it is an interesting concept. Although I might want to reframe it as protecting individual autonomy.
That ship sailed in 2001, hit an iceberg, and sank with all hands.
Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.
> Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.
This a nice idea but on the rare occasion that your filter incorrectly blocks the wrong person, you might be annoying someone who really needs to talk to you.
I think Google keeps a spam probability score for callers' phone numbers based on how many people have marked a call as spam.
Everything else is just a band-aide.
But these are incorporated entities. If proper privacy laws are/were put in place and enforced, they would have to honor DNT. This is as much a failing of these companies to respect privacy as it was the failing of governments to protect privacy of their citizens.
Besides violating privacy, ad networks have also been a proxy for malware. They should have been sued into oblivion for that as well.
I agree that since the proper means have failed, blocking is the best solution. Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
I understand that some people come from the opposite direction -- they try to stop the obvious bad actors with laws, and if those laws fail, then they'll look for solutions that put control in the hands of individuals.
I don't dislike those people, but my perspective is that people who focus on tracking by corporations don't have a good perspective of the entire problem.
> Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
Amen on that. I'd like to see the ad industry collapse, but that's a separate conversation.
I'm not convinced that pervasive advertising to the degree we currently see is good for society as a whole. I would encourage people to block ads even if they didn't include any trackers at all. I would even block ads off of one-way mediums like the radio if I could.
The one and only reason that browsers (with the exception of Google's) don't block ads out of the box (like they do for pop-ups) is out of concern that ad-supported websites will explicitly blacklist their user agents, driving away their users and causing the browsers to lose marketshare.[1] DNT was the shot across the bow that said "we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way". The obvious outcome was that the ad networks would choose to ignore it, which formed the foundational justification for gradually introducing ever-stricter policies reining in ads by default.
[1] The inverse is true as well: the nuclear option of any browser whose marketshare sinks to the point of unsustainability will be to immediately introduce on-by-default adblockers, since at that point they have nothing left to lose.
If I like a company, I tend to scroll down in Google Search until I find their organic result. Hopefully that makes a difference to their bottom line.
I'm not interested in logging in to the paper's website so that it can 1. feed me yet more ads and 2. track in minute detail exactly what I'm reading and for how long.
I use a domain block list in `/etc/hosts`: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
It sends another signal, that this person is an aware contrarian, and may be receptive to this or that source or style of engagement.
Sort of like laying the phone down when a telemarketer calls.
Can someone please explain this?
Here's an article on it: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre...
Advertisers are pushing too much and they are overheating their market.
Problem is they can’t. Publishers earn through the massive amount a low quality traffic, bots, and even misreporting impressions and clicks.
I want ads, if they’re relevant.
(Wow, this must be one of the most discussed HN posts.)
The author of this article, Cory Doctorow, is an editor of BoingBoing and has some level of control of this.
In contrast, I got zero tracking from the EFF site. Exact same content, completely different privacy experience.
I'm not an absolutist that you can't criticize a system you benefit from (it's ok to criticize Apple's labour practices if you own an iPhone), but there is a big difference between admitting participation in a flawed system and passing yourself off as an objective critic of a system you benefit from.
Doctorow knows where his paycheck comes from.
Nobody said advertising wasn't paying the bills.
There’s something to be said about being a trustworthy source.
I've seen people banned, and have been banned myself for drawing attention to these things on their bulletin boards.
>> I'm not an absolutist that you can't criticize a system you benefit from (it's ok to criticize Apple's labour practices if you own an iPhone), but there is a big difference between admitting participation in a flawed system and passing yourself off as an objective critic of a system you benefit from.
Exactly. Also, given the site's legacy, political slant, and access to technical talent, if they don't choose to explore ethical modes and models of behavior and publishing, what hope should we have for the rest of the industry?
(The only positive thing one can say about BoingBoing on these matters is that they do not block ad blockers.)
So, wanna get rid of tracking cookies, continue as a consumer to block them and make them pointless. Advertisers will then stop demanding BoingBoing uses them.
Sounds like a failure of imagination.
Does the US do a poor job of regulation of monopolies in tech? You don't have to look hard to find supporters of that statement. But we're at a point in time where things are finally starting to bubble up and garner traction. Will it be perfect in the short term? Definitely not. But I'm hopeful the US can and will bring their portion of the blame back into check which is advantageous to a sum that's greater than simply the US.
You are welcome.
"Existed": had actual users. (The US government started funding continuous research into packet switching in 1960.)
Also, if Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) hadn't created the web, someone else would probably have used the internet to create something like it in a few years whereas if the US hadn't invested heavily in packet-switching in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a much longer interval of time probably would've gone by before someone created anything capable of enabling an ordinary programmer or sysadmin like TBL was to create something like the web.
"Ordinary": not able to command a lot of capital or labor.
TBL persuaded his boss to let him create the web during working hours. His boss agreed largely because he thought that the project would be a good way for them to evaluate a new computer the boss had bought (by NeXT). In other words, the existence of the internet (which in turn enabled the existence of a community of programmers interested in donating code to innovative projects, a community that got a very big boost when Stallman started publishing on the internet in 1983) enabled the creation of the web without any serious commitment from government, corporate executives and people with lots of money.
In contrast, the creation of a network that allowed an ordinary programmer to recruit open-source contributions to his project and to easily deploy server and client software of his own design required massive outlays of capital over 3 decades. It easy for such massive outlays to go awry in various ways. The US government avoided its going awry. In contrast, the French government retained so much centralized control over Minitel that at no point in Minitel's history could an ordinary programmer have used Minitel to create something as innovative as the web.
(It wasn't until the internet had been almost completely turned over to the private sector in the early 1990s, for example, that any software started to track users more than absolutely necessary for the operation of the network: in the early 1990s, anyone could send and email with president@whitehouse.gov in the "From" field. The reason it worked that way was to maximize anonymity of senders. There was no way for the sender of an email in the early 1990s to know whether the recipient read it, the reason again being a desire among the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure to maximize privacy.)
What was your contribution to it, exactly?
Unless you did really create the internet, in which case thank you.
What ever they do, running the most viewed sites is quickly taken up by everyone else
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542805 and marked it off-topic.