Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

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Ideologically, I am inclined to agree. I have an epidermic reaction to advertising in general. However, these extensions exist in a context where they depend on the majority of users not using them. If every browser had them, the economy of the web would change completely. Very few users who take active steps against ads want to pull a Stallman and relinquish entire parts of the Internet altogether; they want to see the content they are seeing, content that is most of the time supported by ads, without ads. The word 'blocker' is thus appropriate because the explicit goal is an asymmetric relationship based on other people making ads profitable.

In reality, the more interesting question would be whether we shouldn't limit our media consumption to begin with, or form a culture that is less dependent on advertising. If browsing with ads becomes mandatory some day, I will probably make the choice to severely cut the amount of Internet I gorge on. It will take some willpower, but every time I switch off the blocker and see what websites really are like I want to gag, so I won't be that difficult.

How much would be gained if every piece of content actually had to actively earn your patronage versus passively pulling your eyes. I feel like that's the dynamic most AdBlock users see.

I personally don't care if click bait tabloids and exploitative re-hosters we're to crumble overnight.

This sounds very reasonable on paper. The elephant in the room, however, is that most people and even those who claim to want to move past ads don't want to pay that much for what they consume. The barrier between consuming something for free and paying even a tiny sum towards supporting the author is an enormous psychological chasm. The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too.

The case of HN is particularly enlightening because the community is very hostile to ads and for the most part has the technical ability to avoid them with a higher degree of sophistication than just installing Ublock. But there is also the majority of the focus and admiration placed on SWEs and companies that are directly and indirectly tied to the ad ecosystem. The energy given off is similar to McDonald's executives yelling at their children if they see them with a processed patty in hand.

I feel like it's only a psychological chasm because ad-supported content exists at all. If such sites did not exist, I feel like people might have to pay more, they would be more choosy, but then sites would also have to really put more effort into their content. That would eliminate the phenomenon of a thousand sites writing an SEO-farmed article on every possible topic imaginable, and bring it back to 1-2 sites that really put in effort because they care about the topic. Honestly I think the internet would suffer a bit for the first little bit but it would actually stabilize into something a lot more useful.

The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be. The educational and practical resources are there, and are not that hard to find assuming you have gained minimal technological literacy and a certain understanding of internet culture and critical thinking relating to the content available.

There is a ocean of addictive distractions to wade through, but at the same time we know the following things:

- We have to be constantly mindful of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

- News sources and journalism have always had significant quality problems when they venture beyond just reporting basic news, even in the case of business-oriented publications that as Chomsky has pointed out have a vested interest in delivering quality reporting

- Understand topics requires delving into the academic literature in many cases. In this scenario, the internet becomes the line towards that literature or those long-form articles but most of the users' time has to be spent reading and thinking instead of just browsing

- Identifying skinner boxes and addiction traps is easy. You usually know when you are in one. We have to just be honest about what our goals in life are and how much progress we are making towards them

What this does not solve is the problem of focusing on the wrong things in life or embarking in a career or interests that are ultimately deleterious to your life. But the internet at least makes it far easier to pivot and refocus as long as you let it do so and use it towards a conscious goal. This mindfulness is easier said than done but it's far from an impossibility.

Good point, I agree. I did not think of that. However, it's a bit hard to find certain things now. To take one example, sometimes I like to read reviews of camera equipment. I like to read reviews written by individuals who just use it rather than the SEO junk by most major websites. However, even if those small-time reviews are usually much more informative, they are VERY hard to find in search engines. The SEO junk just overwhelms page after page of search.

That's why I think the internet would be better off without a lot of the intense duplication that is out there today.

> The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be.

Sort of. Many of the useful (not ad-driven) sites of the 90s are still around. Mine are. So in that sense, yes.

But they are drowned by the flood of ad and SEO-driven junk. Finding the good parts, if you don't already know, is becoming harder. Search engines no longer return most of the useful sites on any given topic.

It depends on what you define as useful. 90's style personal websites/Usenet/BBS forums can be useful. People certainly gathered there to make significant things happen and to create useful resources. That said they're still pretty infotainmenty, the signal to noise ratio is still pretty low compared to a focus on an actual topic of interest that comes through deeply engaging with the literature and/or delving into making or building things with it. We have to keep to the logic that the internet is a conduit towards real life actions and the internet of the 90's already cut into that. In a sense, being bothered by the SEO means you are still in an infotainment mindset anyway or at least surfing the shallower waves.

Today's internet has astoundingly accessible resources on all sorts of things. A motivated person can still sidestep all of the crap with relative ease. Or to put it another way, if they get lost in the shrubs, they weren't gonna make it in any case. Motivated people now have many more tools and platforms at their disposal to gather alongside one another and make things happen. The pre-September internet was more private, yes, but that was actually a massive flaw in an absolute sense. Now you can have a bright middle class Mongolian kid become an electronics expert on his own and the greybeards aren't barred from finding their watering hole either.

> The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too.

The web in the late 90s was in most ways far more pleasant and useful place than today. Content was a labor of love, not driven by advertising.

I wouldn't hesitate for an instant go back to an internet which bans advertising. It would be far better than what we have today, not just the ads but all the toxic data collection and spyware that those fuel.

I’m fine with the funding engine of the internet dying.

The way those ads get put these is massive privacy violations happen to fuel an engine that’s smarter than you with data. Then this engine shows the perfect ad at the perfect time in the perfect moment of weakness to get you to do what the advertiser wants.

If these ads were merely roadside billboards I don’t think I would care as much. These are internet ads connected to an extensive surveillance infrastructure. Manifest v3 indirectly means an increase in surveillance activity and the biggest companies and governments on earth expanding their power. Let’s also not just say that content blockers merely block ads, I use them to block scripts all the time which are there to expressly mine your data to manipulate you in the future. I’m not smart enough to not get manipulated if I give these companies my data.

If I block ads to prevent all that and we have less 6 figure FAANG jobs and convenient services on the internet - oh no! P2P is a thing, community run websites are a thing, alternative funding models are a thing, open source is a thing, lower wages are fine, we’ll be fine.

I for one would be happier if every site that relied on ads simply vanished. The whole reason we have an "attention economy" is the monetary gain from showing people ads, which encourages quantity (ie spam) over quality.

There was a link posted to HN today: "Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto". I remember when a web search about any topic would find you a few similar pages, of people diving deeply into topics and DIYing experiments and publishing everything they'd learned simply because they wanted to share hard-won knowledge.

On my projects-to-do-someday list, I would like to try mashing up a search engine to filter out results that contain advertising (load the page, check if anything matches adblock list, if so, discard). Obviously in today's adcancer-filled web, that is going to discard the vast majority of results. But I'd hope that it would eventually surface some interesting results that have been drowned out by spam, assuming they're even still indexed. But it certainly couldn't be any worse than all the false positives that drown the results these days.

I pay for kagi search, it has some features that do this very well. Well not exactly the same but you can focus your search better where ads are less of an issue

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