AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to

I personally view all forms of advertisement as a parasite or cancer on our eyes and ears. People disregard it as not that important, but I feel like it's way more impactful than most people think. It's constantly invading our spaces of work, casual enjoyment, transit, etc. It's a mental tax we're constantly paying.

Public funding for a noncommercial web. Websites that sell things have no problem paying for themselves. The noncommercial web would be a place for people to socialize, share media from their lives, and enjoy their hobbies.

Amateur radio is noncommercial. We should be able to have a similar regime on the web. It shouldn’t even really be that expensive to host. With peer to peer protocols there should be no need for paid hosting companies. Government could mandate that ISPs facilitate self hosting. With IPv6 every device should have static, publicly-routable IPs.

The answer was simply: we earn $35/mo per user from ads. Do you think people pay that much for an ad-free experience? Our most valuable users might can afford that fee, but we earn way more from them.

The proliferation of terrible ads and ad formats fueled the rise of adblock. Adblock is how users fight back.

Adblock companies could collectively start to influence what ads are allowed through, but most attempts at this have been corrupted in the usual and predictable ways.

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0. content-addressed data (e.g. IPFS) and a web of trust where trust means "not a bot, not a malicious human"

1. participants have a team number (0-255)

2. either participants are running a node, or they have a provider running one on their behalf.

3. every time your node requests data from another node by CID, it hashes the data twice (to get something other than the CID) and divides by 256. If the remainder is your team number, your node pins that data for a month. Otherwise it pins the data for 24h.

4. randomly, the nodes check to see if their neighbors are actually pinning the data they're supposed to, and make a naughty/nice list.

5. at the beginning of the month, participants put $10 into a smart contract, unless they have money left over from last month

6. at the end of the month, your node directs the contract to split $5 among the top 50% best citizens (re: pinning), paying nothing to the bottom 50%

7. your node also has kept track of which content you've requested. If you haven't +'d or -'d any content it just splits the other $5 evenly among the users who created the content that you requested. Otherwise it splits it according to your +'s and -'s.

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You can make money if your node is reliably helpful to its neighbors, or if you're a content creator. On the other hand, if you don't care to run a node, the contract ends up at $0 for you at the end of the month and you can just pay $10 again next month if you want access to the content. If you run a node but your internet connection is unreliable (or your node is offline), maybe you end up paying $8 per month because for 80% of your neighbors you were in the bottom 50% on the naughty/nice list

Probably there's also reward money for people who sniff out bad actors and cause them to be excluded from the web of trust on the next go-around.

In summary: reciprocity, with a little $ on the line to keep people honest. And since power corrupts, so it can't be managed by a corporate entity since the corruption would kick in before it got big enough to be "the" go-to place for content on the web--it's got to be a protocol without privileged roles.

In my mind, if companies get a few of their products out there and get people to talk about them, it's better than random advertising in several ways. The only downside to companies is that it doesn't rake in as much profit, but I think they can still be profitable, just not as much as they are.

But then again, it'd be much better if we had a society where people bought things only if they really needed them, not if they are assaulted with ads left right and center. In my opinion, such a model is more along the lines of people buying things that really improve their life, rather than accumulating stuff because it seems in vogue.

One consequence is that advertising companies like Google and Facebook will be vastly less profitable, and that's okay. Too much wealth is concentrated to them anyway, and their employees are vastly overpaid in comparison to the value they actually deliver to society.

At the moment I only have the following options:

- clicking on ads on that page, to hopefully intirectly generate income for the author (but more likely will cause some profiling AI to wreak havoc on my reputation)

- having a paid account upfront, which is usually connected with the entire site and not this specific article

- create accounts for numerous payment and donation systems (patreon, paypal, buymeacoffee, ...)

- manually reach out to the author and ask them for their bank connection.

For me the perfect solution would be a browser-plugin, where I click on "Donate for this Article", enter an amount and maybe an optional comment and click "ok".

The devil is in the details.

"If a different model existed where users could pay for tv shows..." and then Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, etc. came.

I subscribed a bunch, the cancelled. Why? Different reasons, but in general: I wasn't able to really vote with my wallet. Shows that I liked very much got cancelled or, more often, degenerated horribly in subsequent seasons.

So any kind of fine-grained payment would be greatly appreciated. Not only for web content, but also for any kind of media.

I guess it would come with its own set of problems, trying too hard to content the public. But I feel that's better than the current situation, more on the top-down educating the unwashed masses.

A website placing a well intended ad and being respectful of your experience and attention is fine.

Dark patterns and Casual evil are not.

Whether that's the right to solve the issue or not is another matter altogether, but the fundamentals of this extension are sound.

It sends bogus search requests in the background. And it seems like it works as intended, as the extension is banned entirely from Google's Chrome store.

A personalized bloom filter may be useful. That shouldn't be hard to implement in either JavaScript or Emacs Lisp.

   Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

   Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.