In FireFox I have my ad blockers disabled in Private Mode so nothing is getting in the way if I'm testing or some site is being weird. Sometimes it's SHOCKINGLY different how a page looks with the blockers in place. I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. The web is a much better place with a blocker in place.
(Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)
I'm using my own simplistic adblock at home (mostly because youtube ads driving me nuts) and I don't use any adblock at work (mostly because I'm too lazy to configure it). I'm not a fan of using browser extensions, especially those which require full access to every webpage, that's too much of attack surface in my opinion and ads are not that bad on websites I visit.
The last time I used AdBlock Plus, I was horrified to discover that they considered Taboola (the clickbait network that, at least at the time, used shocking images to draw attention) to be "acceptable".
I was browsing the web with AdBlock Plus and found myself assaulted by an image of someone's fungus-infected toenail or something similarly nauseating. I went to report it as a mistake on their forums only to find there was already a thread about Taboola, and they were firm that Taboola was "acceptable". The only way I can imagine ads like that made it onto their list was by paying really good money.
I went to uBlock that day and haven't looked back. Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.
I never said they didn't have a definition. I read it at the time and again yesterday. When I said "whatever definition ... they were using", I was saying that they were not using their own published definition. If they were, Taboola would never have been allowed through.
The policy on images is the one that is relevant to my complaint, so let's look at that one:
> Static image ads may qualify as acceptable, according to an evaluation of their unobtrusiveness based on their integration on the webpage.
> Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
It changed to the one with more wiggle room in February 2016, in the middle of a backlash against AdBlock Plus's continued tolerance for Taboola's antics. Here's that thread for context: https://forum.adblockplus.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991
Under either definition, it's hard to argue that Taboola's images were "acceptable". They were explicitly designed to grab attention, bore no relation to the text content of the ad, and frequently were disgusting specifically because gross images draw the eye. Adblock Plus kept insisting that Taboola was cooperating, but users (including myself) kept reporting over and over again that their garbage was getting through. After years of violations that get dismissed as "mistakes" (documented in part on the thread linked above), it's reasonable to assume that the only reason they weren't dropped like a hot potato was because they were paying to not be dropped.
They have been for jeez, I think almost 20 years now? That's what pushed me solidly into the adblock (and then ublock) camp; the fact that the advertising industry has never been willing or able to police itself against bad actors and malware.
Mozilla could do the right thing and endorse/review critical extensions so we know they are safer, but I don't think they have the guts to do it, or mention the word "adblock".
As a power user I also set JS off by default and whitelist specific sites, and also use garbage websites in private mode so their garbage tracking is hopefully purged.
What is the "Recommended - Firefox recommends only Add-Ons that meet our standards for security and performance." badge they put on some extensions if not an endorsement? Or the "Adblocker staff picks" on the front page of AMO?
Are those recommendation based on user ratings only?
The issue with extensions is they can get hijacked and get malicious.
A Mozilla created extension or endorsed would offer the warranty that there is no intentional malicious code in it. After your comment I checked the extensions page, seems there is something claimed about "security" but is too vague IMO.
It's exactly what you're asking for, a badge showing that Mozilla "staff security experts" have carefully reviewed the extension to ensure that it is free of malicious or unsafe code. The extension must also be effective at what it does, offer a good user experience, and be regularly updated.
I could be totally wrong, but ublock-origin just keeps certain things that match a pattern from appearing in the html. It can't remove the annoying "in-video" ads, right?
uBlock Origin blocks in-video ads too! Not sure if this has been referenced elsewhere in the comments but their 'element picker' mode is also fantastic and extremely useful in making webpages with huge banners and popups less annoying. Honestly, being on the web without uBlock Origin (and Vimium) just feels like a sub-par experience.
I tried this, but it didn't work on the vast majority of videos I watch. They always seemed to have some or the other product placement inside. So I stopped paying, and installed a couple of adblockers.
I feel zero guilt about ad blocking. There was some period of discussion on the subject back in like 2003 but the ad companies went to war against human civilization and there's been no going back. It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash and an entire generation has now reached adulthood knowing nothing but that hustle touching every bit of media they ever interact with. Who even knows what they'll do with that.
In 2005 or so there was a bunch of trojans going around for IIRC Blizzard games to steal account creds on various sites and my first response to that was "huh, that site has ads?"
People give Brave grief over BAT, and maybe with good reason, but it's one the few efforts to try and bring some sort of involvement to the public side of it as to where the money is flowing that seems to have a chance of going anywhere.
Why don't I get paid for my HN posts? Do I owe you for your reply? Do you owe me for this reply?
You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
This is maybe the one thing where Bitcoin or another blockchain-based payment network could have been a net benefit in theory (both as a measure to prevent spam and to reward content creators)... but in practice it turned out to be nothing more than a giant planetary heating system.
or any open micropaymemts type platform. I always expected the journalists to make such a thing-pay whatever $50 bucks a month and it is split between the content publishers you visit. Better than a few people like me subscribing to as many papers as i can and most people being the prey of the asveetisers and having terrible roadblocks to just learning the news.
I'd pay a monthly fee for unmolested search results.
I pay for Youtube Premium.
I only watch ad-free content that I pay for.
I don't want the content for free - the free stuff is usually worse in quality anyway. I just want to be left alone by advertisers. I don't need what they are selling and the reduce my ability to think. The sheer amount of noise they add to the world makes them a problem.
I disagree. I use an adblocker because I refuse to be monetized via freemium tactics. I pay to support some sites that are of interest to me, on most other sites I'm never even given the option.
Advertisements directly lower the quality of any content I'm consuming and I am expecting high quality content.
I both pay for my ISP to connect to the web. I also pay to host web sites that I own which are low cost to me. I also want people to see them and don't run any sort of advertising or data collection on them. It's worth it to me to have my work and information available on the web for other people to use, and even has resulted in me profiting indirectly from it.
If someone wants to turn a profit on their site, that's fine. Do I need to accept whatever they want to serve me when I visit their page? No. Do I need to buy a product from their store if it's not something I'm interested in, even though the payment may go to helping their hosting costs? No.
Do I also must feel obliged to read every ad page on a magazine? Can't change to another tv channel during the half time? Was I stealing when in the nineties I recorded movies on VHS skipping commercials?
I would say no, and I think websites are not different from media I listed above. If they make or don't make enough money it's not my business. I am free to consume their freely distributed products as I like.
Remember when the internet was just a bunch of weirdos dialing in and communicating with each other / creating documents about subjects of mutual interest? Who should have been getting paid back then?
I feel like there are some IRC channels that owe me some dividends.
I pay for plenty of subscription streaming services “ad free tier”. I buy in app purchases to remove ads. Back when I use to buy Windows PCs, I either bought from the MS store or business laptops to avoid adware.
If I were to ever buy an Android phone (I wouldn’t because Google). It would be a Google device.
I also pay more for an AppleTV than a Roku because half of the Roku screen and the hard coded buttons on the remote are ads.
This is just not true and is particularly obtuse. I am not expecting free content using an adblocker, there is often just no way to avoid ads with some products.
> No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.
It's not always possible to buy out of advertising. One of my fave sites anandtech.com has (I guess relatively reasonable) ads, and I can't subscribe or whatever to get rid of them.
I'm also generally OK with Adwords v1.0 ads, which had virtually no chance of autoplaying a super loud video, running malware on my machine, breaking the layout of a page as I'm trying to click on something, or masquerading as genuine content.
Ad blockers respond to the fact that users have very little ability to control their ad experiences, even in ways we probably think are appropriate like buying out of them. What you're implying here (ads vs. free content) is a false dichotomy.
it also doesn't matter whether a business offers subscriptions, because ads can (and will) always inevitably be layered on top as an additional revenue source. see newspapers, radio, tv, and even real estate for prior art in this regard, and cars, appliances, and other internet-connected goods as ongoing evolutions.
ads vs. free content is indeed a very false dichotomy.
I don't mind ads on broadcast TV or radio because they fund the content and don't insist on tracking me.
The privacy invasion that accompanies web ads leads me to treat them as malware and prevent their execution on my devices. I don't care about non-personalized ads (e.g. the 1P-hosted display ads on Ravelry).
I don’t expect free content, I expect that if your business can’t survive without ads it should disappear from the face of the earth.
Going without is better than ad funded. The goal of me running ad blockers is not just to make my life nicer but to make ad funded shit (i.e. most of the current internet) unviable.
Paywall away! If it’s good enough for the money, I’ll always pay for it.
> That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment.
Oh the irony! Likewise, the agreement between the content company and the ad company has nothing to do with my consumption of the content. The content company agrees to show ads for the ad company. The ad company agrees to make ads for the content company to show and pay them to show the ads. I make no agreement with either. I download the content and choose not to download the ad. It’s my bandwidth.
Why, life is full of free content. I sit on a park bench and talk to a friend we are providing free content to each other; when my son plays with our kids in the playground it is free content. When 22 strangers pay ball in the park they are providing free content to each other. Life is full of examples of people providing free contents to people around them, so why the internet should be the exception? This frame of mind that everything needs to be a transaction is rotten.
Ad-funded businesses are mostly bad for society anyway, hopefully if enough people get ad blockers their business models will become non-viable. So, those of us running ad blockers are actually providing a public service for free, it is quite generous!
It's not a question of being owed free content, it's a question of being able to access the content without being inundated with ads blocking the content from every direction. I give money to the content creators that matter to me (e.g., the very local newspaper, NPR, a few podcasts), but I remember the shock of seeing what life was like with a vanilla IE install on Windows with a work computer. After going to the website of the auto dealership to make a service appointment, I got continual ads for Chrysler automobiles (which means that for all the tracking the advertisers got negative value because I wasn't looking to buy).
On a similar sentiment to the GP's, I'm owed nothing.
I will take the content as long as they don't bother blocking me, and will try to get more people to do the same. Their business model does not work if they start blocking everybody, it also doesn't work if too many people take the content without the ads. That means I'm helping them fail, what is absolutely good. The sooner they all go away, the better.
I have complicated feelings on this — content creators need to be paid for their work but the ad networks have done a ton of collateral damage, too: I've had major sites like nytimes.com or youtube.com send me malware via Google's ad network, and ads make the web significantly slower and less reliable. I avoided using an ad blocker for years but installed Firefox Focus everywhere a while back after getting tired of ads breaking things or using half of my data plan and 45 seconds to deliver a crappy 32kb JPEG along with 8MB of JavaScript.
The big thing we need is some kind of action against Google: they currently are the best positioned to penalize operators of sites slowed by ads but the search team isn't going to cut into their ad business and Chrome is going to continue slow-walking attempts to make browsers restrict ad networks. It'd also be nice if there was liability for malware delivered by ads — something like they have to pay a fine up front and try to recover it from their advertiser, forcing them to actually vet people first.
What I'd like would be publishers self-hosting ads — forcing them to take more responsibility for the security risks — and more effort into alternative payment mechanisms. I liked the idea of Google Contributor but one big challenge for that is that even a less half-hearted version probably wouldn't generate enough money to be viable because most people consider ads a reasonable cost for free content.
Particularly since the prestigious sites like NYTimes are having their valuable users be tracked and monetized by otherpeople via the ad nwtworks. And the people paying for ads are paying for a lot of fraud. It is another industry where they got rid of scruples and now have bad actors up and down the whole ecosystem. fortunately/hopefully the whole experience is so unpleasant it is ripe for disruption.
I'm not sure content creators need to be paid for their work. At least, not all. What internet surveillance does is motivate people to create awful content that nobody in the market would pay for in order to skim dollars from what is largely a privacy invading, fraudulent vacuum of an industry.
People will pay for good content, they did for a long time before there was an internet or a surveillance industry. There were books, films, subscription TV services, paid for audio. There were also steady streams of novel manuscripts, demo tapes and screenplays that went straight into the bin because they were rubbish. Now the rubbish hangs around on a webpage surrounded by trackers, luring people in with clickbait titles and lies, and multiplying beyond the ability of even google to sort out.
That sounds like an argument for better payment mechanisms but people still need to be paid.
Yes, people paid for content prior to the internet but there were also problems — many good things went unnoticed because not enough discovered them while plenty of garbage got tons of attention because the creator had some personal connection to publishers, reviewers, DJs, etc. One of the things I loved about the rise of the web was that it provided so many opportunities to find things which weren't going to run in my local newspaper, be stocked by the local book or music shops (if you weren't lucky enough to have good indie options), or the pile of mud a lot of the big radio stations were often playing (this got a lot worse in the 90s when Clear Channel started buying all of the radio stations so questions about what got mainstream coverage in many markets came down to what one guy in Texas wanted).
I don't want to lose that — whether it's counterpressure to the huge race-to-the-bottom advertising market for more selective sponsorship, something like Apple/Stripe Pay to make it super easy for people to get paid for their work, etc.
> That sounds like an argument for better payment mechanisms but people still need to be paid.
Paying people for good content doesn't fix the problem. The internet is still cluttered with awful content drowning out the useful stuff. Not because people are trying hard and learning or just plain love their awful guitar playing even if nobody is watching, but because they're getting paid by surveillance. What we need is the absence of that incentive.
This is one of those cases where the free market would actually fix the problem if there was some sensible regulation applied. Sadly it'll never be quick enough to catch up with the technology.
To me it's not about getting free content, it's about not paying with my information and being unable to pay any other way. If a site wants to use ad networks that track me across the web, too bad for them. And also too bad if they don't offer a subscription model that disables ads AND tracking.
Also, ads can be served in ways that makes blocking much more difficult. It's just harder to do, and harder to track users across sites. (and therefore, probably less lucrative to the site owners).
What happened to serving ads based on site content? How is using poor algorithms that require a lot of tracking and then make bad guesses about your interests any better?
I'm not owed free content. What I am owed is the right to determine for myself what code runs on my computer. Ads are visually oppressive, violate privacy, and are frequently vectors for malware. I am in no way obligated to allow any website to run them on my computer.
When a website wants to make viewing their ads mandatory for viewing their content, that is their prerogative. Most don't, and I'm not obligated to volunteer my CPU for their ads.
I don't feel I'm owed anything. I just refuse to consume ads. Sometimes that means I pay a subscription fee. Sometimes I read it with my blocker on and the creator goes without revenue to get their message out. And sometimes the creator won't serve up their content unless I disable my blocker, so I shrug and turn my attention elsewhere.
The problem for creators is that there's a glut of content online. It's just way more than anyone needs. The best creators can afford monetize directly, the good ones can do custom ads integrated into their content, and the rest have to churn out clickbait, top 11 lists, and ludicrously "optimized" content laden with ad-network garbage. It sucks to be mediocre, but I don't feel I owe anyone that revenue stream.
There is, I think, a valid argument that we got here today because in the early days of the web:
1. People wanted content without paying for it.
2. Creators wanted/needed financial support to make and host their work.
Advertising filled the void between those two things. You can think of it as sort of a natural, emergent property. No one wanted advertising, but the way the individual actors behaved—web users preferring sites that didn't charge them, creators that didn't advertise going out of business—led to the rise of advertising.
I think that is part of why some people don't think of advertising as morally bad. No one deliberately nefariously foisted it onto the world, it just arose from the behavior of individuals. That behavior created an environment, and the environment evolved the dominance of ads.
You can use that exact same argument justify the use of ad-blockers now.
People using ad blockers are not actively trying to harm creators. They are just using the web and tools available in the way that makes the most sense for them. This is exactly the same as when they chose to prefer non-paid ad-supported content before. The system gave them options, and they chose the ones that they prefer.
Creators will in turn make the choices that make the most sense for them. If ad blockers mean that they no longer make money from ads, they'll find other ways to be sustainably creative. Markets aren't magic solutions to all problems, but in this case I think the market is working pretty damn efficiently.
People are using ad blockers because ads are bad for them. If consumers improving the quality of their own life is a problem for the system, the system should change. And in order to change, it needs systemic incentives to do so. Ad blockers create that incentive.
An argument against ad blockers is essentially an argument for forcing users to consume something toxic. Imagine if McDonald's stopped selling burgers in isolation, required you to buy combos, and then forced you to drink your entire soda. When people who wanted to cut back on unhealthy sugar complained, they were told that they're the problem because McDonald's makes most of its profit from drinks. If they don't drink the soda then McDonald's won't be as profitable and then they won't be in business. That's basically the argument against ad blockers.
But... a burger joint that forced you to chug soda should be out of business, or should at least have to change its pricing in a way that lets people eat in a healthier manner. Ad blockers enable consumers to "stop drinking the soda" in the attention combo offered by sites.
Reading some of your other content, it feels like you're presenting this false dichotomy between "free content" and "content supported by the most disgusting and shitty ads possible".
There's a world of a difference between a Linus Tech Tips style sponsored segment and some jarring ad that constantly interrupts your YouTube video to scream at you about KFC.
Same for text content where they'll insert outright scams that use disgusting or offensive images to farm clicks throughout the article.
If advertising wasn't so obnoxious, people wouldn't go to such lengths to block it.
I'm not owed content, I simply don't believe in copyright because it's impossible to actually restrict it practice. I base my morality on my conscience, not the law. I don't feel wrong at all to get information without paying to it.
"Information wants to be free" used to be part of the hacker ethos.
If they don't want me to have it for free, they should charge for it. And if no one would pay for it, it's not valuable content. Their poor business model isn't my problem.
> It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash
This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that are actually good.
The concept of "value" for consumers has been completely twisted and I am not looking forward to seeing where this race to the bottom will end up.
>The concept of "value" for consumers has been completely twisted and I am not looking forward to seeing where this race to the bottom will end up.
For a lot of consumer tech companies, it's less about providing value to consumers and more about extracting value from them. Between vendor lock-in, privacy violations, and arbitrary one-sided changes in service, it's straight out of an abusive partner's playbook.
A lot of consumer tech companies' entire business model is "growth and engagement" which is basically arbitrage between what the investors/advertisers will pay and what it costs them to produce this "engagement". Any useful output produced by the system is a mere side-effect and the bare minimum necessary for to get the victims to "engage".
The funny part is I remember a time when even on HN the majority defended ads for a myriad of reasons, and one of those reasons was that people actually liked ads and wanted them.
This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.
I remember this. "People want personalized information on products they are interested in. How else would they find out about them?" As if people would be at a loss buying a car or breakfast cereal or a pair of shoes without ads.
It makes sense in isolated situations, like Netflix recommending content based on previous content you liked on their platform. I think it becomes creepy once that data leaves the domain where I originally generated it.
It is and many get paid for it. You think those top prime picks are most viewed/best rate.. no they are picked by an editor for a variety of reasons some include clauses in deals or money spent/relationship with the studio.
I do think there's a reasonable argument for ads, since people don't always know what they could be looking for [1]. Independent magazines can serve a similar purpose, but the difference is between an organization that claims to be unaffiliated with the manufacturer, and needs to be constantly policed to make sure they aren't lying about it, and just being up-front about your affiliation, and only needing to be constantly policed to make sure you aren't lying about the product itself.
Unfortunately, web ads suck. Because there isn't enough Gatekeeping(tm), I can't buy things from web ads, because the probability of it being a scam is too high.
If they didn't know what they could be looking for, perhaps they didn't really need the thing in the first place. If the product is good enough, then it should grow in usage through word of mouth.
This exactly, most of this stuff will just end up taking up space in someone's basement for 20 years used maybe once or twice. Its not only a waste of money but raw materials and energy
I'm very anti-advertising but I think from a production standpoint this is yes and no. Without advertising, it doesn't make sense to put in the capital expenditure to create new products that require a high upfront cost because there's no demand for it. Advertising is used to create demand. Under a different economic model, this feature of the production environment would not be as necessary.
Perhaps the capital expenditure shouldn't have been made in the first place. Our earth is careening towards an environmental cliff. We don't need people finding more ways emit CO2 into the atmosphere. If people really need the thing they'll find it and word will get around.
I agree to a great extent. We produce a lot of stuff that isn't necessary or is designed with excessive packaging, un-ecofriendly elements that may be replaceable, and is intentionally designed to reach obsolescence quickly. I despise our system, I'm just elucidating its internal logic.
Full disclosure, I run ad blocker, I love my ad blocker.
I get what you're trying to say, but here's a counter example. I have a hobby of astrophography. I live in a rural area without many other people nearby interested in the stars, much less a highly technical hobby like astrophography.
Asking on message boards like cloudynights, or reddit gets you a lot of well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level.
I'm currently building an observatory and I need input on which mount to use in my observatory. I don't have a good concept of what to buy for it as I've only dealt with really beginner mounts and I'm not a beginner anymore, and there's no astrophography retail stores within travel distance. Online advice is poor and hard to weed out those who are beginners meaning well and those who actually know what they're talking about.
However, to pull us back to what we're talking about here, I get a magazine for the industry called Sky and Telescope and it has ads. To me, ads are one of the best things about that magazine because it lets me know what options I have that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, or have any way to compare.
Though to be fair, ads in a magazine don't spy on you, don't infect your computer, don't move and steal attention and don't follow you around. But I think there is a place for targeted, well behaved ads.
I get what you are saying, and as a young hobbyist back in the day I loved perusing ads in specialist magazines. These days though I'm a much more informed and involved buyer, and have found that ads are usually not a great indicator of the best product or service for a particular need. I don't agree that online advice is worse than ads. It's a matter of doing the legwork to find the right place online for a particular interest, and also cross-referencing multiple sources to avoid getting caught by astroturfing. Ads are biased by their design and nature, and in most cases the placer of the ad has zero interest in making sure you choose the best product. They want you to buy their product even if it's not the best fit.
The funny part is I remember a time when even on HN the majority defended ads for a myriad of reasons..
There's quite a lot of HN readers who work for businesses that derive most of their revenue from ads (Google, Facebook, content companies, etc) so there's always going to be people here who are willing to stand up for ads. The famous Upton Sinclair quote is quite appropriate - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
There was a time when I purposely unblocked Facebook ads because they were actually showing me some interesting content and products in a fairly non-invasive way.
And occasionally I still get those but lately almost all ads I see are some interesting headline that then takes me to a page with an for nonsense products every paragraph and an extremely fluffy article to tell me that dinosaurs had feathers / the Romans had steam engines or something similar.
Yeah, I remember good ads there. Used to be the only reason I went on Facebook. I just checked to see what ads it would show these days. They were terrible and 4-5 of them had some hilarious typos in them.
Around 2011 or so this was me. I generally didn't ad block and thought that seeing a few ads was a reasonable price for the free content online. Ads became ridiculous though and lost any sense of balance, the web became borderline unusable without one.
I have sold on eBay for over a decade and at some point the desktop site became so slow as to be unusable with ad blocking. No idea who at eBay thinks getting in the way of sales to spam people with banner ads is a good idea.
> You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well
You can't research good appliances either online, because the SERPs are stuffed with SEO-ed blogs and sometimes industry magazines, monetized with Amazon affiliates or other networks, with titles like "5 best dishwashers in 2022". Unless you know someone in the industry or offline with knowledge you don't know what to buy.
This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.
There's no adblocker for this problem either. Google is complacent with their fat ad revenue and monopoly on search and doesn't care.
I feel like "scale" on the Internet has gone completely off the rails and has become just worthless "noise." Sure, anyone can post and sell whatever they want, but you lose all notions of reputation and trust. It all becomes a shouting match among those who can ad-spam and SEO their way to the top. Those shitty fly-by-night randomly-named Chinese brands on Amazon come to mind.
See also Youtube/Spotify/etc view/listen/impression farms. It really does make it so much noise, you can pretty much guarantee any large scale account is using these too and bot followers because it's an arms race for attention.
The only solution I found to that is to bypass google completely and directly go search on Reddit, where real humans have human opinions (sometimes HN, too).
And unfortunately, you're never really sure on Reddit, either. I found I was too willing to put those, what, 5-10 voices telling me to pick a certain brand up on a high pedestal, because they seemed like real people. They didn't sound like advertisers. But, honestly, how hard is it to fake 5-10 accounts to push your product, or buy high-karma accounts?
My go-tos are sites like Wirecutter, where it seems like the hit to their reputation would be too high to be blatantly bought-out, even if they'll generally only hawk products that can be bought on Amazon or other sites that give them affiliate money. They're not always perfect, but I trust that they're trying to do what they set out to do.
I'm a Consumer Reports + self-investigation guy (using all sources). I do use Wirecutter but I put low weight on their ultimate recommendations. I use them to find what else is out there.
The main issue with most review sites is that they're kids. Companies like NYT/Wirecutter don't want to pay old men that are experts in manufacturing. They hire kids with little life experience to review something like a washing machine. They haven't had 2 or even 1 washing machine in their entire lives. They wouldn't even be capable of doing a teardown. Let alone identifying which parts are quality vs not.
Unless of course your main qualification is not trying to find something that is built to last. Which is the hardest thing to get these days. Finding garbage like electronics and software is easy. Everyone wants to sell you software rather than high quality manufactured goods. And I want the least software possible as I'm very anti-technology for a software developer.
My research sources would be roughly in this order:
1. Consumer Reports (teardowns, can't beat this method. You pay them directly, if interested in least conflict of interest)
2. Wirecutter (good for a free source, but puts near-zero weight on reliability)
3. Amazon reviews (can find some old timers reviewing there but always keep in mind that most people aren't very intelligent. They maintain nothing and won't skim a manual)
4. Reddit (a lot of zero life experience kids on that, meaning generally anyone under 40)
To be fair(er) to WC, most of their review introductions typically mention interaction with people with longer histories in whatever the relevant business is, so it's clear that they recognize their outsider status. How much interaction they really have with these niche experts and what impact it has on their reviews, I don't know.
Let me share a resource with you, where an experienced community with skin in the game review products under the context of bargain hunting! www.ozbargain.com.au
Looking past the bargain and location aspects, this site is super useful for understanding products in greater detail
I find the best results on reddit when I look for the same company selling only that type of thing. They often moderate the sub on that topic and are very open about being a seller of it, and know their product. Note this is actually selling the product - not to be confused with amazon links. They need to have a real business, and while they moderate the sub they never have links to their store (instead it is search my profile to buy from me).
Consumer Reports does a great job at giving honest reviews. They go through multiple steps to ensure manufacturers don't know they're purchasing their products as well (to avoid getting beefed up 'review units').
And no, their service is not supported by ads - You have to pay for a subscription. Consumer Reports needs to be mentioned more IMO. Because even on reddit, there are companies that offer advanced stealth-like astroturfing campaigns for products/services.
The counterargument is that Consumer Reports could be intruded by corporate shills, but their reputation is solid and they've been around for a long time.
I use CR, but they do miss the target sometimes. They extrapolate a lot between models, sometimes farther than I think is justified by saying they are 'similar'. And occasionally they make really boneheaded recommendations that I just don't understand. On their recommendation I bought a Samsung washer and dryer pair, which both broke within the first 12 months. A bit of research on the appliance forum, and it turns out that all the repair guys say pretty much the same thing -- don't buy Samsung appliances, they're unreliable crap. As someone who owns three Samsung appliances (the third being a refrigerator), I wholeheartedly agree. Never again. Refrigerators are notoriously unreliable regardless of manufacturer, but Samsung really sets the bar pretty low.
So they're definitely not perfect - but it seems like they do far, far more research than the average online source, and are far more reliable, more consistently reliable, and have a much wider array of tested devices (as opposed to a blogger who might test a bunch of products in one specific category).
We can do better than CR - but right now, afaict they're the best we have.
4chan's /g/ for tech gear and /diy/ for bigger gear is great for that sort of thing. There's "generals" for common subjects like headphones, PC building etc, and "stupid questions thread" where you can ask about anything. Do note that 4chan can be very offensive and politically incorrect, you need a bit of a thick skin to get along there.
I type "reddit" after the query and Reddit usually has good recommendations.
Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working: sometimes Redditors recommend products which are way too expensive (still good quality, but the extra price really isn't worth it), but if someone recommends a genuinely crappy product, they get downvoted and replies saying "don't buy this"
I used to type “reddit” after my searches to look for genuine and real reviews, but even that is now being gamed.
Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.
Another think you'll see a lot of is bots looking for "listical" and blog info so some side hustle person can piece together an article on something they know next to nothing about.
By the way, while I have you here, have you considered extending your used car's warranty?
Most of the VPN discussion/coupon subs are literally run by the VPN companies themselves. r/VPNCoupons and r/VPN are run by Surfshark, for example. Nord and CyberGhost also run astroturf rings for themselves too.
The top post in the relevant enthusiast sub recommending stuff to buy had no actual information, but it was stuffed with Amazon affiliate links. It was basically a "Top 5 X 2022" post except it was on Reddit instead of its own spam blog
For me the problem with Reddit is not even the astroturfing. It's that, similarly to SEO and Google, people have figured out the kind of posts and replies that get upvotes. So, on niche subreddits, you get a lot of folklore and second-hand advice repeated by people addicted to internet points, or, like other poster put it better below, "well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level". The Geil-Mann Amnesia Effect is strong in that site.
This is one downside I will agree is a consequence of tracking technology on the web. There is no way for "genuine" discoverability to hide on the internet anymore. After a while, sites will start noticing that their purchase traffic is coming from Reddit so they'll start targeting it and before you know it, even the bad producers/products are being spammed there.
Meh if you put a little effort into it by checking the post & comment history of the person doing the review it should give you a clue. Sure some companies have bought accounts with lots of Karma and "good will" in the past but I think that's pretty rare.
One market where this has always been a problem is tools. So almost 20 years ago we were told in shop class that the industry magazines and reviews were basically all paid for by manufacturers. The solution we learned was to always buy the cheapest option first. If it breaks or fails to meet your needs understand how and why and then move on to a more costly tool that you can demonstrate is better in the specific way you need it to be. Of course thats not always practical or feasible but for the majority of items it really is.
This strategy is smarter than it sounds at first. If you don't have any obvious criteria for comparison available, failing fast and iterating on that is a way to come up with criteria by yourself.
It requires a strong character to throw away things when they don't work well.
I bought the cheapest drilling machine and it is so bad I end up borrowing one from a neighbor when I need to drill something.
But I can't make myself to throw away the useless one.
I’m also unable to throw things away, but I do give things away or sell at a fraction very often. It’s also a fun past time. I don’t have anything useless at home anymore.
Where I live, Craigslist works really well for this situation - someone will take it away for free for sure and you might even be able to get something for it.
This is what I do. I just put in "first email I get gets it" people will be at your house in an house or less to grab it. I'm always honest like "The bearings seem a little wobbly to me, but if you want it, it's yours if you can show up and pick it up today"
Sometimes the cost for a quality piece of gear is incremental though, so you buy a harbor freight thingamajig then it breaks so you buy the Milwaukee thingamajigfor twice the price, for a total of 300% of the cost of the original thing. You could have saved 30% in that case by just buying the good thing in the first place.
I'd argue then that the level of usage dictated a better one. Most people don't actually use tools to failure. I've owned edging tools, routers, sanders, even a small metal lathe from Harbor freight that have handled 10+ years of very occasional use just fine. If you're using things so much that they fail, yes, buy a more quality version. If it fails on the first use, Harbor freight happens to have a very generous return / exchange policy within the first 30 days.
Alternatively this thingamajig is so rarely used that you buy the harbor freight version and use it a few times a year. It becomes a life long tool and you save a fair bit of the price.
The second time you buy a type of tool you definitely need to go for quality, the first time though, are you certain you're actually going to be constantly using that tool?
The only exception to watch out for is when buying a crappy version of x will negatively color your new experiences with an activity. Tools meant for precision but the cheap versions are plastic rattle traps that get out of calibration/alignment from basic use can be extremely frustrating to someone just getting started in an activity. The user may throw their hands up and quit whereas a good quality tool would have made their new hobby more enjoyable/accessible (e.g. no, it’s not you, you’re just fighting a really crappy tool every step of the way). Again, tasks/activities that require repeatable precision come to mind here.
You have to expect that this will happen a certain amount of the time when you use the "buy the cheapest tool" strategy. Of course, really, it's not "buy the cheapest tool"; it's "buy the cheapest tool that could possibly work," sort of like "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" in agile.
If the tool breaks quickly, that's not usually a terrible outcome. Most companies have at least a 90 day limited warranty you could take advantage of in that case. In many cases, you can even just return the damn thing to the store where you bought it and get a refund or exchange for a better tool. This, of course, assumes that the reason you needed the thing in the first place isn't incredibly time-sensitive, but, usually, it works out fine.
Of course, if it lasts forever, then, great! But, in the intermediate scenario, where you encounter the limitation of the tool a little ways down the road, that's actually where this strategy shines, because you get a chance to upgrade to a better tool without wasting a ton of money on top of the line equipment right away. I know photographers who do this with lenses all the time: they'll rent a new lens for a week or something, go out and shoot it to see how it really works, and then determine whether they want to commit to it. $100 spent on a lens rental has saved some of my friends more than $1000 on glass they don't need. And, if they ultimately do end up buying the lens, that $100 is $100 well spent for peace of mind that they will actually get the use out of the thing that they actually bought it for. And, I think the Harbor Freight strategy makes a lot more sense if you view the initial purchase from HF as possibly a long term rental.
Now, there is that one caveat that you need to buy "the cheapest tool that could possibly work." If you're a professional machinist, for instance, don't go buying a $5 caliper and thinking that will be good. Go and spend the $150 or whatever on a Mitutoyo instrument to begin with, because you know damn well you will need it. This is just an example I pulled from personal experience, as I needed a caliper for hobby purposes a few years ago and ended up looking at things ranging from that $5 caliper on up to precision instruments. For my purposes, the low end is totally fine, because I don't need accuracy better than 0.1mm, and it's not my professional livelihood on the line. But, if you're a professional, never trust an instrument that doesn't come with a certificate of calibration.
I've also used this strategy with good success on photography equipment, myself. I wanted a DSLR camera I could use to take pictures for hobby purposes, mostly intended for web use. I did a little research and decided that a used Nikon D3400 was for me. So, I went to eBay, found one that only had about 1200 clicks on the shutter that came with the 18-55 kit lens and the original box for $325 (tax and shipping included), and I bought it. I augmented that with a used 90mm Tamron macro lens for under $150 and I was good to go.
It has one or two small limitations that either only come into play outside of the original use case I had in mind, or which aren't really annoying enough to mention, but, for the most part, it's been a spectacular camera that I spent under $500 on, as opposed to spending $1000 on a Z50 (or, you know, gone really crazy and gotten a D850 or a Z9), and then another $900 on a new Nikon 105mm macro lens, but, for my purposes, I can take photos that are 95% as good as what I could ultimately produce with the more expensive equipment, but, I can legitimately say this strategy has saved me over $1000.
I did exactly the same thing when I started learning to play the cello. A new, carved wooden cello suitable for a student probably runs around $2000-2500, and that doesn't necessarily include a decent bow. This is also an instrument one will certainly grow out of if one continues pla...
For a lot of people "cheapest tool first" is their goto (and not for the principled reason you shared).
So eventually the cheapest tool makers get enough money to buy up the differentiated quality makers for their logo with enough branding power to price discriminate, and slap it on products from the same cheap factory line.
A lot of times the price differential is such that I can buy two or three of item x for the price of a single premium version. If you seldom use the tool and it isn’t getting handled a lot (transportation, etc), this is the way. You can replace the item and still come out ahead.
There’s also that motto of “I’m too poor to buy it twice”, which comes into play when item y has a price like 75% of the premium version and/or you know the tool will have some rough travel and high demand, or time lost from outage isn’t acceptable. Then just spend the money on known-solid brands.
Reviews are an area where I really value specialized forums more than social media or blogs or industry publications.
In all cases with reviews even when no monetization involved, there can be a bandwagon mentality for brands and also people convincing themselves the high price they paid matters for something (even though it may not).
Harbor Freight's "low quality" tools will work for a great many average home owners doing some upgrading or light work. We absolutely fall into the trap of wanting the best thing ever, but how many people actually need the top of the line Milwaukee or Makita brand biscuit joiner for the 2 tables they ever make at 200$, vs the Harbor Freight one at 60 that you can probably find a coupon for to make it 45-50?
On that note though, an even worse practice is when a brand achieves notoriety for quality and starts making "light" versions of their tools. One example of this before they went belly up was Craftsman making nearly identical looking "Sears" brand that weren't covered by the craftsman warranty. Bosch also did this with pimping out their brand name to extend to rather crappy home appliances here in the EU. Black and Decker was synonymous with reliability in the early 80s, and I still have some jigsaws and circular saws from my dad that work great from that era, but anything from them now is arguably worse than the cheapest things you can buy at Harbor Freight.
I'm sure a bunch of executives made nice bonuses selling the brand value down the river, though.
It's an incentive problem. It's extremely difficult to get incentives aligned over a timeline longer than a few years that it might take for options or stock to vest or clawbacks to expire.
I managed to get a 48" flex bit stuck in my wall when I was running ethernet last summer. Since it was the last hole I needed and it only cost me $9 at Harbor Freight, I left it in the wall and called it good. The $90 bit from Home Depot probably would have meant removing a bunch of drywall and then having to patch it.
The batteries on my ~20 year old Craftsman cordless drill are finally getting to the point where they won't hold a charge. I'll probably have to bite the bullet and wade into the mess of "brand-name" tools the next time I have a significant project.
For a replacement like that, it's probably worth watching for Father's Day and other sales. With cordless tools, you're really buying into a battery accessory system, and it's good to know what tools are available for the battery you select.
100%. One of the areas I will spend more on is cordless tools. The modern Dewalt stuff has built me a deck and a campervan, and when it comes to lawn tools the E-go stuff has been fantastic. Both of those definitely locked me into a "system" as you say but both also covered just about any future use case I would have.
I have a 72 inch drill bit "stored" up in my attic amongst the rafters. There was one particular location where I really needed it at that time, so I just left it up there. I think it costs $15 off Amazon. If I never need it again, I figure I can deal with the hassle of getting it down from the attic.
For your 20 year old Craftsman, seriously look around for aftermarket replacement batteries. You might find them out there for pretty cheap. I did for my DeWalt.
Man, you said it about B&D. My family owned a small business, now bankrupt. One of the things my dad did to try to save it was start selling tools retail. He's very brand loyal, and of an older generation, so he was convinced selling B&D in the 90s was the way to go. The tools were such plastic crap. Meanwhile we had mid century era versions of the same tools in the workshop at home that were still going strong. Obviously my dad's idea didn't work. We got creamed by big box stores and the brands they hawk. And honestly rightfully so.
But anyhow, what happened with B&D has happened to so many previous quality brands. It's really frustrating to me.
Battery powered hand tool systems are a big cost now, especially that brushless motor have got so good. Its important to think about them as a system, like will replacement batteries still exist in 2 years, can more tools work with the same battery, etc. That makes it harder to try something and see how good it is. I agree with you re many tools though. For tools I'd recommend talking to someone who works with them daily to get a real opinion, and wouldn't trust anything I read
Batteries are a point of vendor lock-in and forced obsolescence. Not saying modern tech isn’t great, but young me who spent all that money tooling up with cordless has changed to older me who honestly prefers corded or hosed (or even ICE) tools when the application allows for it, not just for the longevity of the tool but the power (amps/psi), lighter weight, and availability of service (no issues with charging, temperature problems, etc) during a job.
Can anyone explain why such systems are so seemingly successful? I find it surprising. It seems great to create vendor lock-in, but they also change the form factor frequently enough that you have to replace your entire system in order to benefit from it being a system anyway; at which point you might change vendors. It feels like the first vendor that stops changing form factor wins; but they all still keep changing them.
My best guess is that by doing this they can raise margins on some items by making them lower quality or by charging more than they could otherwise get away with. If a brand has a great tool X, you might buy their lousy tool Y just to be able to use the same chargers and batteries.
For me, anyway, as a non-carpenter, I just end up with an annoying bespoke set of chargers and batteries.
The major brands do not change formats often. The store brands do change formats though. By Milwaukee or Dewalt and you will have tools and parts for many years, or even Ryobi if you want to save a penny. (There are others, just the 3 that come to mind).
The thing about their system is the whole only works so long as they keep you locked in. Once you make a choice you are locked into that choice and won't be looking at alternatives - but if they change batteries you suddenly are faced with the loss of your entire investment and so you are likely to look at the competition and might buy something else. That makes changing battery formats less attractive to the big brands trying to get people who buy a lot of tools.
The store brands have a different motivation: they know you won't be buying them again anyway, so they don't care. Changing formats means they can come up with some tiny reason the new one is better and try to sell the next customer on how their new battery is better.
If you are not a buying a lot of tools your plan isn't bad, just throw away the tools when the batteries die in 10 years. The tiny reasons some battery is better - over 10 years might add up to something slightly better than before anyway.
When my SO and I were renovating our home we followed some advice like the ones in this thread. First we had relatively cheap power tools. One the one hand early on we could not easily afford to invest more and also we wanted to learn what we really needed.
After the first ones broke we asked around and received only three recommended brands. DeWalt, Makita or the Blue Bosch line (in Germany). We went for DeWalt and never looked back. The power cells haven't changed in form or fitting in the years since and we could not be happier with performance and durability.
It is like deciding on a DSLR system. Once you are invested into Canon, Nikon, Sony or the likes with lenses and accessories you are locked in but also you learn to really know your tools and imho receive a productivity boost.
For example - whenever I am with other people and need to use their tools, I have to look at them and see how they work, what buttons/knobs are where and so on. With my DeWalt tools this is already muscle memory and the work as an extension of my arm - my brain uses them as if they were a part of me. This let's me focus more on the task I want to perform, not on the tool.
Milwaukee is still selling their nicad batteries, if you were in that platform before. The big brands (and this includes Ryobi, etc) do not change their batteries much at all.
The smaller brands like Craftsman and "store brands" seem to change relatively randomly.
In the days of Amazon (aka Aliexpress) that advice has to become more nuanced though. You still need a baseline of fitness-for-purpose rather than one-click buying a GENSYM Cordless Drill and thinking it might possibly suffice. And the traditional go-to of (brick and mortar curated) Harbor Fright has become somewhat expensive thanks to Trump's inflation, as well as increasing margins due to popularity (see also: Monoprice).
There's also just quality of life. As a DIYer I'm not particularly concerned about wearing out tools. But still I might want to pay more for better ergonomics, ecosystem compatibility, power, tolerances, or other non-longevity qualities, rather than being stuck with an adequate but suboptimal tool that gets the job done while bothering me.
I've noticed a problem when I try to buy tools (especially automotive tools): The only tools available locally are cheap and crappy. I know they are crappy because half the reviews state that it didn't even work once.
But I can't pay more to get a higher quality version of the tool, because the store doesn't even bother stocking a higher quality version.
If I plan ahead, I can shop online and find a quality tool. But what I really want is the option to buy a quality tool during a weekend project.
And I learn that Google is actually upset that its search results are suffering degradation by rampant, runaway SEO—they reap what they sow, and at everyone’s expense. Such brought to mind The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner as the web faces its own environmental collapse:
“You…treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”
I have yet to find a question Reddit has a good answer for, so I also add `-site:reddit.com` if my query has been SEO'd into a page full of their spam.
The net-net of all of this is that I buy a lot more stuff from brick and mortar stores now, where they've done the curation, and will only carry the stuff that sells best per square foot, and minimizes their returns.
> This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.
I think Google dropped the ball on their search objectives in this department. Why is it so bad at helping us search products? If I specify something with 2-3 conditionals why can't it match all the clauses, filter out fake reviews, out of stock, not shipped to my region and such?
They don't want to help us find what we want to buy, they want to sell us what the advertisers have to sell, and the two don't match. They want to sell us things we don't need, this is the reason we never buy anything from the ads and their whole industry is a scam.
consumerreports.org does exactly what you want, but you have to pay for it. if you don't want to pay for it, then you get what you pay for. google isn't complacent. google has a large number of paying customers that aren't you. you don't live in a socialist utopia. you live in a world where things cost money. you can pay for the information you want, or someone else can pay for you to have the information they want you to have.
This is something I had to teach my dad. But he believed it thoroughly until he had a few high purchase items fail outside of warranty. My advice to him has been look for customer reviews and he suspicious of the positive ones and aware of all the negative ones. My other advise is buy from a reputable distributor like Costco who makes returning something incredibly easy.
The answer to deceptive online reviews is Consumer Reports. While the web initially made CR not worthwhile, as time progressed it's once again very valuable. I would never buy any appliances without paying for a subscription first.
I'm doing this myself before I buy a treadmill. I want the most reliable one, not the most tech features, and while my hunch is Sole is the one for me based on their warranty, I'm going to confirm with CR before dropping $1,600 on one.
The problem is that people plug their ears and put blinders on to avoid spending $30 for teardown advice from an outfit like Consumer Reports. Too cheap for their own good.
This was my experience when trying to buy a new fridge. Due to the design of my kitchen, there is a very narrow choke point leading into it. There is no door. As a result I have to very careful when shopping for fridges. Mostly simply will not fit.
Almost everything about fridges nowadays wants to promote the virtues of the amazing new features associated with them.
After hours of searching, I narrowed it down to 3 models. All were the most basic fridge & freezer combo I could find. Exactly one of them was in stock, so I got that one.
I love the 'best of' sites that only have Amazon links. If its not on Amazon it must not exist and could not possibly be the best, right? But some brand from China you've never heard of will be on the list.
"This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins."
I agree with you but there's a simple shortcut you can employ: purchase commercial/industrial models that you see being used in industry.
Gym equipment is a good example: your local, serious weightlifting gym is probably using Hammer Strength plate-loaded machines and Rogue frames/racks.
Cooking: Look in the commercial kitchen of a high end restaurant - that's where I first saw my commercial microwave being used.[1]
TV: NEC P461 commercial display - I found the model number by climbing behind the arrivals/departures board at the airport.
It's the market for lemons problem. If it's your job, it's worth it to learn all you need to know to differentiate between junk and quality. If you're buying one of the 75 different appliances in your home, you'll probably just look at a review site, which can easily be gamed by companies selling junk.
The industry has large, potentially repeating customers, who use the equipment until it fails and who often have the resources to sue if a supplier screws then over too badly. This moves the risk/reward sweet spot for vendors towards the “provide good product for fair price” end and away from the “build shoddy malicious crap and spend your money on advertising.”
Agree with others, great advice. I suggested this once for my partner - she needed a laptop and loved her work laptop, so I suggested she look for a refurbished version of her work laptop for personal use, as business laptops often are fairly cheap after their warranty expires and the original owner returns it. She still uses it to this day.
The irony of this is that Rogue's popularity is due in no small part to their close partnership with Westside Barbell, a quirky club obsessed with both high-end equipment and steroid usage in equal measure. There's a lot of bad equipment out there, but the majority of people, training at home or in a gym, do not need Rogue equipment, and I'm willing to bet that Rogue has higher margins than some of the other good equipment manufacturers.
Speaking of which, anyone know what happened at The Verge? It may not ever have been a bastion of great journalism, but these days 30-50% of the content is (occasionally well-targeted) product advertising or "you can now buy the Xbox here for the best price ever" or "Walmart has this promo right now". It's such a noticeable and abrupt change to the content mix.
YouTube is pretty good here. The algorithm does a pretty good job at providing results that aren't the equivalent of blog spam and it is immediately obvious when you are watching a low quality video.
I have a theory most ads (especially invasive ones) don't actually target most people, not just tech-savvy users but anyone. They target "dumb", very-manipulable people who see these crazy ads and actually spend loads of money on them, out of impulse or whatever reason.
I feel cruel saying this but I really think it's true. Just like how most games have microtransactions because a minority of people who will spend an incredible amount of money on them. Most people are caught in the crossfire and ads just annoy them and steer them away from the product, but mass advertising is an effective way to target the minority who ultimately spend enough on the product to offset the cost.
Most ads I'm seeing lately have been on relatives' computers while using shady movie streaming sites. Most of the ads are deceptive things like, you click on the movie to play it and it opens a popup of a different movie, which then asks you to make a free account (and presumably uses those credentials to try and steal your other accounts).
On the other side of the spectrum: using the Instagram app was the first time in my life I felt positive about the ads I was being shown. I was shown ads for microdosing psilocybin (it's legal here) which blew my mind hahah. It's almost like I got through the uncanny valley and into the other side where ads are actually relevant!
Pretty weird since I almost never use Facebook. But I use Google, GMail and YouTube all the time ... and yet, the YouTube and Google Ads really suck! (They seem to be based on IP address rather than identity: I keep getting shown stuff that's obviously based on my housemate's browsing.)
To be clear there was still the gross undercurrent of "okay, why the hell do they know that?" but it was nice to see it actually working as intended for once.
Targeting potential marks absolutely makes sense and avoids scrutiny from savvy people who might call it out as a scam and potentially blow up the entire operation. This is also why web advertising is so much more dangerous than print advertising - at least with the latter, everyone can see what's being advertised and blow the whistle if necessary.
There are multiple reasons why it is hard to find good gear online.
In the case of electronics and photography gear it takes a huge amount of reading between the lines to interpret reviews even assuming the reviews are honest.
For instance at the Best Buy website there is a review for a photo printer where the user posted photographs of utterly ruined prints they made on this printer. Well, I've made prints like that too when I put the paper in upside down. That's what happens when you put the wrong side of the paper in.
A decade ago the story about Sigma lenses on Canon bodies was that 90% of them were OK but 10% were defective in subtle ways (like the autofocus doesn't quite lock on) Sigma on Sony today seems to be better. When you're reading reviews though you have to guess "did this person get a bad instance of the product or did this person have the wrong expectations for how this was supposed to perform."
You can't even pump gas without having an auto-play video start at the pump after you've started filling up your tank. I know I can choose not to watch the video, but I can't avoid hearing it play as I stand there waiting for my tank to fill up.
> Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that are actually good
Oh this heinous shit is not just limited to cheap tat. Samsung will happily sell you their highest end TVs for four figures with unremovable banner ads in the source menu.
I wonder if part of the problem is that the people who develop websites and put the ads on (developers) are largely also the people who use ad blockers so they don't realise how bad the experience is for regular users
Even if they did you think the average person is going to put their neck on the line over ads?
How many UX designers just give into client demands, how many devs work extra hours to make up for bad management practices? How many managers are under pressure over sales created deadlines? How many sales people are under pressure over the company's target numbers?
There will always be a few people who are willing to put their neck on the line but it'll require a culture shift before any momentum builds up and most feel comfortable protesting these practices at their workplace.
Developers realize how bad the visual experience is, how the tracking scripts, the megapixel images and the huge videos are ruining their perfect pagespeed insights score, slowing down everything, eating the visitor's mobile plan and are an awful waste of energy.
But developers don't control what marketing put in their sweet Google Tag Manager container(s).
When I was younger I felt bad, but I also had no money.
Now I get frustrated when I can't give a website I like and want to support a reasonable amount of money...
Of course, if they feel their website is worth $120/year and I feel it's worth $10/year, there's a problem, but thats their business decision to say ad-free costs that much regardless of your level of consumption or desire for the content
The problem I have with BAT is that it tries to give me power over the commercialization of something that I don't want commercialized. It's like someone launched a "Basic Sexual Favor Token" to empower me to take control over the sex work I'm expected to perform every day. I have a hard time being happy that they want to empower me, because I'm too busy being aghast at their assumption that this aspect of my life is for sale in the first place and that I would be ok with that.
Not GP, but when I think about the negative consequences of BAT, I'm thinking about the user and society overall, not necessarily the website owner in specific.
Monetizing attention is dangerous, and I think we should be a lot more careful about when we do so, as opposed to monetizing attention being the default way we fund everything online. BAT is in many ways less harmful than existing advertising networks, but it's still trying to find a way to ethically commoditize otherwise private attention/focus on what we read/see, and I think that the omnipresent commoditization of that attention/focus across society is harmful regardless of whether or not it's invasive or collects PII and regardless of whether or not users get paid for selling something that we shouldn't encourage them to sell. I think that this has an effect on how humans process the world, I think it has an effect on how much energy we're willing to devote to different tasks. I think it has an effect on attention spans, and on what types of content get made, and the way that we spread memes/culture, and how we interact with each other. I think it has an effect on market efficiency and on what products succeed. I'm not going to oversell modern advertising as some kind of giant monster that's responsible for all problems, but I think its effects are likely more negative than positive at this point and that we can build better systems that don't optimize for keeping people hooked on consuming content endlessly just so we can redirect some of that attention to a product.
As a website owner, the social stuff still applies to me, I may not want my stuff commoditized at all. But I also recognize that users have the right to modify code running on their computer, including for the purposes of inserting their own ads, so if it's happening with the user's permission I can't really get mad at the user. In many ways I'm the least impacted person in this situation. However, that doesn't mean that I think Brave's system is good for the user or for society, and I'm not going to encourage people to use it.
My feeling is that Brave is trying to reform a system that I would like to see destroyed.
Why don't you go prove it by checking our code and runtime network behavior? We pay bug bounties through hackerone.com/brave.
Talk is cheap, especially stories that don't pass any kind of smell test: we would not take our life into our hands by collecting any user data, when it's easy to discover that for real hackers.
But you're not selling ads. The user has opted-in to seeing spamware that gives them OS-level notifications, right? Is this new? I guess I don't see the specific impact on web content producers.
We don't and never have put ads in publisher pages. It's not ethical without site consent and our users don't want ads in baseline Brave.
If Brave users opt into Brave Rewards for private user ads in push notifications (which, contra Butterick, do not belong to any page they might be near or above; they belong to the user's inventory, same as new tabs and unrelated windows of all kinds), we still wouldn't put ads in pages without both publisher and extra user consent (too many users still wouldn't want in-page ads, even if opted into user push notification ads).
HN is full of made up nonsense about Brave, in spite of all the hackers here who can verify our open source, network behavior, etc. etc. This site has seen better days.
Oh hello!
I recently tried brave and was relatively impressed.
BAT is also an interesting idea, and I want to see it succeed!
However, I also had negative opinions of it like many people here before I really dug into it. I think your marketing really needs some work. I don't exactly know what it is - it might not even be your fault. The negative view of crypto many have has been associated with it. I would remove all mentions of crypto from your website. If people really want to know how the tokens work, they can go into the documentation. Having the word crypto on your landing page does you no good.
Ad blocking these days is actually just a security measure. When sites like nytimes.com serve malware through third party ad networks they’ve put on their page, it’s silly to not use an ad blocker.
On sites that handles all their own ad sales and display directly, I still see their ads.
Isn’t it fun how our years of combined nerd opposition toward surveillance of Internet infrastructure was a total waste of time when all it took was flashing some cash to make advertisers implement even more intrusive client-side surveillance in a distributed infinitely-scalable way instead?
Even our response to the Snowden releases was to get Google Analytics running over TLS and to make it even harder for a normal solo person to host a website that isn’t through one of the major silos.
No guilt either. It's on them for making the ads so damn annoying with popups, modals, megabytes of JavaScript, interspersed with more subscription and GDPR popups, and shitting cookies all over my browser, and tracking my searches across sites, and sometimes covering up over HALF my screen on mobile.
No thanks. If they had stuck with a simple, in-line, hyperlinked image I would have probably not cared, but this is too much.
The way the ad is delivered is what is annoying and not the ad itself.
There should be no guilt and I'm surprised at even the notion as a possibility. If someone pays for a billboard that does not in any way entitle them to my choosing to look away. That's all an ad blocker does: enforce your choice to ignore advertising by not looking.
> There was some period of discussion on the subject back in like 2003 but the ad companies went to war against human civilization and there's been no going back.
I believe this is true about society in general and has gone on since long before 2003. Almost every ill in modern society can be drawn back to some people doing their best to convince other people to buy shit from them. At this point, I think we should make a serious political effort to outright ban advertising and marketing entirely. Whatever the results of that are, I seriously doubt they'd be worse than what we have.
Well said. Periodically, I try to turn ad-blocking off because of my sympathies for various web sites. I always turn it back on. The web is now unusable without ad-blocking, at least for me.
> . It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash
Indeed. Even with an ad blocker, you have this issue where your momentary attention on the internet (say by visiting a site) is presumed to have value. So anything to get you to click on some shitty link.
Ad companies gave up any right to not be blocked decades ago when they were serving actively malicious stuff that would backdoor browsers and own earlier versions of Windows. Since then it has been irresponsible to use the internet without a robust ad-blocker.
I don't know why anybody would feel any guilt. When cable was the only thing available, I would switch to my Gameboy when ads would come on and mute the TV, effectively blocking the ads. I'm always curious if people who shame others about ad-blocking similarly think that action was immoral and I should instead be forced to keep my eyes open with superglue when the ads came on.
> People give Brave grief over BAT
Many people are against crypto-currency with no reason other to be contrarian (or they just really, really, really love JP Morgan/Chase). BAT is not even required to be used to use Brave...
I have mixed opinions on where the ad-blocking layer should live (I generally think at the router level), but there are some undeniable benefits to having at least some form at the browser-level as well, and I think Brave making this a default was a fantastic idea.
Quick note on router level approach: without MitM and full JS/HTML/CSS runtime, can't block tracking and ads effectively.
PiHole etc. are good but not sufficient to stop the latest, and with Google pushing for more AMP borg-ification of sites' content, getting into the 1st party content that unfolds only at TLS termination and JS execution is essential to blocking threats.
> There was some period of discussion on the subject back in like 1963 but the <tv> companies went to war against human civilization and there's been no going back. It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash and an entire generation has now reached adulthood knowing nothing but that hustle touching every bit of media they ever interact with. Who even knows what they'll do with that.
Fixed that for you ;)
Like, I remember growing up absolutely surrounded by advertising. It was on the TV, it was on the radio, it was in newspapers and magazines. Literally every second page in a magazine was ads! It was crazy. I grew up with it (as did many of you).
What were the major level societal consequences of this shift? And when did it begin? Was radio just as bad in the 30's?
Are newspapers where it went wrong? Man, at that point we may as well go the whole way and blame the industrial revolution ;)
More generally, advertising is a consequence of the economic system we've (somewhat) collectively as a species decided we want to achieve our goals. I doubt the first urban dwellers expected the vast new cities to be hives of disease, either, but them's the breaks.
> “It is inconceivable,” said Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce, at the first national radio conference in 1922, “that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.” Hoover’s remarks reflected the accepted wisdom of the times: that advertising on radio was unacceptable … According to a report of the first conference, all agreed that “direct advertising in radio broadcasting service [should] be absolutely prohibited.”
I never used an ad blocker. I think ads are a symptom of our time, and although I understand that not everyone would (or should) follow this idea, I will neither ignore or treat a symptom but rather watch it closely as one should with enemies. Most people on this planet is not using ad blockers so there's an inequality issue, and hiding the effects (ads) of a problem will further stop us from taking systematic action.
Reminds you to keep your anger hot. Better than what I'm going to do, which is block ads with extreme prejudice until the one day when google/apple/mozilla flips the switch and adblockers don't work anymore.
Same, I pay for my internet connection and I get to decide which content I see and don't see. They're my resources. If you're going out of business because ad revenue, find a different business model. Nobody likes ads plastered all over the screen, the worst part is many ads are deceptive or as mentioned could lead to other nefarious acts. No thanks...
"It corrupts everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash and an entire generation has now civilzation and there's been no going back."
Nasty side effects: journalism suffers as "tech" prospers, less well-informed, more polarised society, freedom of the press is threatened (now by "tech" intermediaries, in addition to governments), justice system competes with "cancellation", etc. via "tech" intermediary "platforms"
Consider downstream effects of all this on governance
Journalism has declined in quality. But "tech" does not provide a solution or even a viable alternative, it is the cause.
With journalism, advertising once supported far more unbiased reporting. This was too long ago for many younger folks to remember. People born into a world of "tech" companies happily accept today's lower quality "news"; many even try to profit from it. With "tech", advertising tends to support increased digital surveillance. Not a net gain for humanity.
YES. Every dark pattern in technology today is caused directly or indirectly by advertising. Privacy violations? Advertising. Bloated and unusable websites? Advertising. Addictive social media? Advertising.
Blocking these ads is a moral imperative at this point. I don't feel guilty, I feel proud and I encourage every single person to do it.
No? I'm not sure that's the gotcha you think it is - I also don't read random web pages that I'm not interested in, and I don't sit and 'read' adverts on pages I am reading.
Because the implicit agreement of a site with adverts is that the content's available to you with the adverts on it. If you don't like that you don't have to read it, but if you remove them automatically then I think it's hard to argue you aren't breaking an implied agreement.
* This implicit agreement is too open to exploitation. Many people don't understand the depth of the tracking/ad ecosystem. If the full cost were explained to them, they might not agree to that exchange. I think I do understand it (well, probably it is worse than I expect, but whatever), but if the ad companies get to interpret this implicit relationship in the way that benefits them, then why can't I? I think the agreement should be explicit, and some sites do make it explicit -- they block people like me. Fair game! I'm sure they won't miss me, I can be quite annoying.
* I'm not sure I believe in this implicit agreement anyway. From the beginning, the design of the internet has been that information is sent to the browser, and then rendered in line with the client's needs. If I use elinks, lynx, or some graphical browser without javascript is that morally dubious? What if I'd like to minimize the amount of javascript I run, but selectively enable it as necessary, like umatrix?
* The underlying goal of the people placing the ads is not just to get something rendered on a screen somewhere, right? Their goal is to capture some attention. As you say, you don't read the ads. I could browse a while and train myself to ignore them too. At which point... the person who placed the ad still doesn't get what they wanted. At least if I block the ad, there's at least some chance that they'll detect that, and maybe the poor fool who paid for the placement can get a refund.
Not sure where you've gotten that idea from? I don't think anyone is arguing that. They say they're burning it if it's sent to them, at which point it's their property.
This is a big part of why the implicit deal argument doesn't really make sense. If a website sends me information then the information is on my device just like a letter, so I should be able to do what I like with it. The framing of this as an agreement between the user/publisher that we accept or reject skips over the question of whether it is even possible or moral in the first place for a website operator to try and offer an unsigned contract that removes user autonomy/rights, and whether it is moral in general for us to normalize that kind of contract.
The way that online advertising gets phrased sometimes is that you have something free that's being given to you, and consumers with ad-block are going out of their way to take more or to change the content of the webpage. But that's not really what's happening -- what's happening is that something is being given to me for free, and then the person serving that content is asking to come into my house (computer) and they're saying that they should be able to tell me what to do with the content after it's entered my house. Adblocking is the same as throwing out the spam mail from your mailbox without opening it, and anti-adblocking normalizes the idea that it's acceptable for a business to guilt or pressure people into reading junk mail.
If an industry did ever start trying to guilt people for not opening every single physical letter that was sent to them, it would be good to push back against that industry even if the industry was only trying to make a moral argument and not trying to pass laws. Some implicit contracts are so inherently invasive that they should be rejected at a conceptual level -- not merely rejected by turning down the contract, but by vocalizing, "I refuse to normalize or acknowledge the concept that a remote operator in another state has any moral claim whatsoever in any situation over what a user-agent does with information that is in my home." So we reject the concept of a website delivering content in exchange for delivering ads not because we deserve anything for free, but because we don't believe website operators have any authority (legal or moral) to set up this kind of contract, and we think it is borderline immoral/invasive for them to assert that they do. Even allowing their expectation to alter browsing behavior or treating it like a contract we have to reject gives it more legitimacy than it deserves.
It's the exact same reason why we all reject the implicit social contract where advertisers expect people to leave their volume turned all the way up for commercials, or for screen readers not to skip ads during navigation around the page to different sections. Remember that advertisers are actually the people paying for this content, and their implicit contract with users is based around actual attention -- not for allowing code to run, not for rendering the ad on the page. Advertisers have an implicit contract with us where we alter our purchasing behaviors and pay attention to their products in exchange for free content. But by and large, all of us (including anti-adblock advocates) reject that agreement and say that advertisers have no moral authority to demand that. We all kind of recognize that accepting this contract with advertisers and shaming people for walking out of the room during a TV commercial would be infringing on something vaguely sacred -- people's rights to consume content how they wish within their own homes and to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to.
But then anti-adblock advocates try to draw a line saying that it's OK for a user to ignore advertising unless a user-agent helps them. That just doesn't really make any sense, it doesn't make sense to say that pressing a button to mute a TV is morally better than having the TV press the button itself; both outcomes are exactly the same. The only place to draw that line that stands up to scru...
Do I think it's fine to walk away during an advert break on a US TV station or to mute? Yeah that's fine.
Can you cut up your magazine and reconstruct it with the advertising pages removed? Yeah fine.
Both are different from advert blocking because of the automation and the specific targeting of the workaround. I think that's where it crosses into not as morally reasonable.
I think it's also just a huge faff to run custom software in your browser just to avoid seeing some adverts.
I think that's a really arbitrary line. Screenreaders skip ads. Scrapers/apis skip ads. There isn't a clear division between an automated tool and a tool with manual intervention.
In some ways this feels like the same legalism that popped up in spam phone calls where to get around auto-dial rules businesses would have someone on their end sit in a room and press a button over and over to complete the call. In the exact same way, we could imagine a version of Ublock Origin where every time the page loads it comes up as a blank screen, and then I hit a button on my keyboard, and then the screen renders without ads. I don't think that advertisers would see a difference between those systems.
Remember that from the perspective of the advertiser -- the person actually paying for the content -- you walking out of your room during a TV commercial and a piece of software skipping the TV commercial are the same thing. The advertiser does not see a distinction between those actions because the advertiser is not paying for content in exchange for the privilege of streaming data to your computer, the advertiser is paying for content in exchange for your attention.
It is weird to me that people are able to latch on to the idea that ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts, but don't view circumventing advertising through other means as stealing money from advertisers. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that when we say that it's fine for people to block content manually but not using user agents, what we are effectively saying is that it's fine for them to ignore ads as long as they're not particularly good at ignoring them. But even that isn't a great argument.
Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages? What if I make a machine with image recognition that does the same thing? It just doesn't make sense to say that ad blocking is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient, and then it becomes immoral.
You won't find a mathematical equation to define the moral line.
> ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts
Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing, I just think it's morally dubious. I didn't say anything like I thought it was criminal.
> Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages?
I think so yes.
> It just doesn't make sense to say that something is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient
Well yeah, again it's morality, it's human and fuzzy.
Automation is often a line for morality. Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.
> Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.
Not for arbitrary reasons though, there are tangible effects from automation that we worry about in those systems. We draw distinctions because there are parts of the manual process that we can point to as valuable.
We worry about automated weapons because they take a safety check out of the system. We kind of are saying what I mentioned above, that we want killing to be kind of difficult and emotionally hard to do. But that doesn't map to ads, unless you're saying that one of our goals is that we want blocking ads to be emotionally draining/difficult. But I don't think that's what anyone believes about ads.
Similarly, people don't oppose automated speed cameras because they think automation is a moral line, they oppose taking humans out of the decision making process for whether or not someone should get a ticket. But this doesn't really map to ads unless we think it's important that humans have to consciously decide to skip content, which... why would we think that? Some people also don't trust the automated cameras to be reliable. This also doesn't really map to adblockers, because adblockers aren't being used by other people to make decisions about you.
----
> Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing
I should phrase this differently, that's totally my bad.
I can't think of any way of defining an implicit social contract between website operators and consumers that wouldn't also define an implicit social contract between consumers and advertisers themselves. It is weird to me that people think it's morally dubious to do things that deprive website operators of profit, but that it's not morally dubious to do things that deprive advertisers of profit.
If we say that advertisers don't have a right to ask us to look at content, I'm not sure why website operators should be different.
I run Firefox with uBlock Origin, and spend most of my time on pages like HN and other old-school forums that are mostly just text. My wife runs Chrome with all defaults and spends a lot more time in the mainstream web. Whenever she wants to show me something on her laptop, I think to myself, "how can she subject herself to this all day?!" For me, the experience in her browser is like being assaulted.
She doesn't want an ad-blocker because they do break things at times and she actually likes seeing some ads and especially getting coupon or discount offers, using things like Rakuten. I know that you can fine-tune the settings of uBlock Origin, but she doesn't want to be bothered with that.
I have a Pi Hole as well and it's been pretty quiet in my house. I've had to whitelist a few sites (e.g., our kids' school gave out meeting links using tracking links in email that was blocked) but it's been pretty good. Definitely more upside than downside.
Been there done that. Advertising is a problem most non technical users aren't aware of (as a problem) and often they're used to it, but if you install an adblocker, they indeed see that as a change, therefore "you and your damn adblocker" will get the blame for each and every problem.
In my opinion the only options are to either leave their browser as is or just installing Ublock Origin without telling.
I tried to enforce ad blocking at the router level (pihole) but eventually had to change it to opt-in (DNS) because my wife wouldn’t stop telling me to turn it off when she wanted to click on Google ads.
It depends on what you do on the internet. I rarely use an AdBlock on my phone, browse a lot from it and I don't find my experience hindered all that much. If AdBlock didn't exist on desktop my biggest gripe would be YouTube and then I'd just pay for it and call it a day.
There was a report last year that more than 37% of UK traffic in people under 30 had an ad blocker enabled. I think the analytics market is going to have to shift to server-side tracking in the next 5 years if this trend continues globally. I welcome it, though.
Not implying at all that it isn't developed -- back in the early 00s this was the only way we could do tracking largely. But Google Analytics is completely blind when you block it, and that's a huge percentage of the market. For example, simply loading a 1px image (the old way of doing a lot of server-side tracking, and still the state-of-the-art way of doing email tracking) is insufficient when the client is hard blocking the ad server. In that scenario the only way to do it is server-side at the actual web server serving the web page (not some third party ad server), and most large analytics services don't offer anything like that anymore.
I had this happen to me when the poker planning widget we were using was offline (can't complain about free services). I googled around then found something, gave it a go on my system, and then gave it to my team. When someone started sharing their screen, I was embarrassed by the amount of highly personal ads that I saw (fat loss, vacation things). I saw none of that. I felt terrible for suggesting it. No one else seemed to notice or care, but - it's amazing.
A few years ago I had to use my mom's laptop to order dinner or something, and I couldn't figure out why the page I was on looked so weird. I double checked another site I visit regularly, and that site looked weird, too: huge background images, videos everywhere, weird fonts, etc., etc. At first I thought her machine had a virus, then it dawned on me it was all ads! I installed an ad blocker, and the difference was night and day! The unfiltered pages were basically unreadable.
Without ads, we'd have different free content obeying different incentives, but it's hard to say whether that would be better or worse. I've been reading a lot of free online fiction lately, where authors make money by selling early access to chapters on Patreon, and both quality and pay are often competitive with traditional book sales.
Uhm.... the perfect example is ublock origin with reddit.com vs. old.reddit.com
Reddit.com is eye fucking cancer.
Old.reddit.com is consumable....
Interestingly, after a 15-year-long account I was "permanently banned" for TOS violations which cannot be determined... Reddit is dead to me. (Ill be deleting (scrambling) millions of comments... I was top mod of a sub /r/ with 1.5 million users, which is now one of the most active /r/s...
If anyone would like to buy my 15+ year old account, make me an offer.
Honestly this is how I feel about television vs streaming/Plex/ahoy matey. Going to another home and watching live television is a terrible experience because of ads but people seem fine with it because it’s what they’re used to, they don’t know better and it’s harder to do if they know better… probably all the same reasons people don’t use ad blockers and are fine with them.
One of my biggest concerns about the future of the "web" - like when it's built into our glasses - is that it will no longer be an open/hackable platform, and it will not be possible to create ad-blockers.
The site appears to be hugged to death...but the thrust of the idea seems pretty obvious on the surface...I'd add that it also probably follows financial, if not technically savvy groups.
The person with a $50 Walmart Burner phone's experience will be a WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT from the person with the $1100 smartphone with ad blocking turned on.
I wish it had full addon support though, rather than just Mozilla's curated selection of 20 or so. I have to install an app to do twitter -> nitter redirection when it could just be a browser extension.
It is possible to use your own list of addons, but it's needlessly difficult [1]. I hope they will support a slightly less insane workaround eventually.
I occasionally check to see if Firefox has unbroken extensions on Android and won't be back to using it as my primary browser on my phone until it does or Kiwi ceases to be an option.
I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.
I bet! I run an adblocker and it's a cat and mouse game with YouTube ads slipping through. Last breakage, before I reinstalled it, I was getting ad interruptions for the same two stupid adds literally every 45 seconds.
Yeah, google can circumvent the ad blocker's attempts to block the ad playback from beginning, but if the first thing the ad does is have double verify check if you're a bot, and double verify's domain is in your adblocker's list, then the ad is going to fail and Google will try load some other ad once it errors out.
That's win-win for the server. Servers start doing this because automated traffic is cutting into their ability to provide service to humans. If you're freeing up their traffic to serve other humans you're doing them a favor.
To be clear, advertising bot detection is different to website bot detection. The website bot detection is because they're worried about spambots filling comments or DDOS attacks. This is where you get the captchas. The advertiser bot detection is more for the case where the website owner is in on it and trying to boost their metrics to get more revenue from advertisers, and is more likely to be expressed via blank ad slots and demands for refunds from the website owner.
YouTube Premium does nothing to stop Google using your youtube history to profile you and letting advertisers target ads at you on other sites using Google's data which is partially built on the youtube profiling.
By not loading the ads at all, it may stymie non-Google ad networks attempts to profile you.
I suspect that since you're a paying user, a more valuable customer, they'd want to mine your data more thoroughly to derive more profits in other ways.
I would suspect the opposite, once you start paying you go from being a product to being a customer.
If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.
In a normal world that would make sense but we're dealing with businesses and MBAs who need to incessantly increase their revenue. As a paying customer they could squeeze more, you're willing to pay. Non-paying customers are used as a product themselves but it's extremely hard to extract more.
That's just normal business though, and my statement is intrinsically correcting for that.
Netflix has the same MBAs and bean counters, but their product has no ads and orders of magnitude less clickbait. Its clear they make content geared for their users, not for their advertisers. Youtube is very heavy with advertiser friendly content, and both creators and users pay heavily for that (but its *quote* Free! *unquote*)
Netflix productions do content placement. It's pretty sneaky and they do use social media accounts for shenanigans like fake posts on subreddits asking "What was that jacket in TVShow S03E04?" and another account responding with a link. Big brands with recognizable logos also do product placement on those. For fantasy shows they aim to own the merchandise distribution, but for stuff that happens on the real world there's always product placement and webpage placement and stuff like that going on.
I hardly see product placement as being even remotely close to what YouTube is doing. Its probably one of the most innocuous forms of advertising. Imagine a YouTube where the worst you can come up with is a guy drinking a coke during his video.
YouTube ads are based on your watch history, not some tracking pixel, so even a regular ad blocker on YouTube.com only blocks ads and doesn't help with privacy.
I just upgraded after refusing. Mostly for mobile. On desktop my ad block works but on mobile it wouldnt. You can also shut off your screen on mobile and it continues to run with Premium. It kind of sucks that Youtube requires you to pay for this but I use Youtube enough to be okay with it.
I'm blocking youtube ads on my mobile quite okay and the experience is fine (IOS - AdGuard). There are some twitches here and there but it is very usable.
I ran ad blocking on Youtube for years, and I've been a Premium member since it came out (as Red back then). I can't stand ads and avoid them like the plague.
Some ads still sneak into my world though. My current peeve is when going to a restaurant and they have "the game" on full blast. I'm perfectly fine with people watching/listening to the game - and half the time the restaurant is considered a "sports bar", so I get it. But what ends up happening is that those major games are mostly ads. And the ads are twice as loud as the game. So here I am, paying to eat at a place and I'm listening to ads. I've been tempted to ask the server if we'll be receiving a discount for listening to each ad like a mobile game!
Regarding this, sports bars in particular pay a pretty hefty fee to have public-view television service, especially regarding access to all pro-league games. I'm sure they'd be paying more in general if they opted to mute or turn off the screen during ads (since the network expects x% of the restaurant's viewers to see and hear the ad, so they get the advertiser to pay more for access to those viewers, subsidizing the restaurant's actual monthly bill).
Depends on where you live. Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are plenty of TV-free restaurant choices. Back when I lived in the South, it was a lot harder to find.
Another alternative is ask them to turn it down and turn on CC.
I wish more of these places would have CC on. Especially if multiple programs are on, you can't have the audio. There's a solution right there, built right in, just waiting.... page in the conversation about how accessibility can be useful to more than just the immediately disabled.
Maybe your sensorium is different than mine, but the motion, flashing, and colors of advertisements are just as irritating as the audio to me. This is especially true in an environment where there are lots of other conversations and sounds to compete with the TV noise.
Unless the volume is turned up annoyingly loud, I find the visuals to be the annoyingly loud part: The subdued hues of the painted walls, tile floors, and wood trim reflecting back to my eyes from the ambient lighting are invisible compared to the 500 nits of flourescent colors jump cutting back and forth.
Turning on CC but leaving the visual assault in place doesn't help my eyes much. I would feel less abused if they'd turn the screen off but leave the game audio over the radio.
It depends on what I'm there for, certainly. Recently I went to a piano bar with friends, and also happened to catch a particular football game. In this environment, you surrendered peace and quiet the moment you selected the restaurant. Fortunately for a football game, the audio is optional anyhow.
If I'm just there to eat, one TV is no big deal to me, but the TV Wall is definitely a distraction.
But at least don't try to have the audio on. As technically nifty as some of the restaurants are that try to have per-table speakers or a streaming option are, CC is still less obtrusive to me.
I've bought the standalone keychain and the DIY TV-B-Gone. They're great but clunky. I bought a USB C IR blaster keychain hoping there'd be a TV-B-Gone app that could utilize it. No such luck.
The gym that I go to (and pay for) have ads on most of the displays (some are running TV programs). Ads for local businesses and “upgrade your membership TODAY”. It irks me. I don’t want to be distracted by these flashing screens.
But I guess there is no law that says that patrons should be shielded from ads. And I don’t think they would listen if I gave them a complaint (why would they give up a source of revenue?). So I don’t know what can be done about it short of a concerted effort by many members. And they (and myself) would probably not be motivated enough to go to that level of effort just to get rid of some irksome ads.
If there is another gym in the area with fewer ads, cancel your current membership, let them know the reason why, and go to the other gym. Let the new gym also know why you are switching to them.
I already said that it is too inconvenient for me to do some kind of protest move which won’t make a difference. All that will accomplish is that I will have to travel longer to and fro.
This strikes me as wishful thinking, adblockers are such a small minority. They are just following the incentives they would always follow, adblockers or no.
There are plenty of websites that detect that I'm using an adblocker. It's mildly annoying, but then I get to decide if what I was about to read was worth it.
Most of the time it's journaldemontreal.com (and other Quebecor-related websites) that prevents me from reading their articles with my adblocker. Which is a blessing in a way, because it's basically a glorified tabloid with a lot of articles of dubious quality.
I'm on Firefox with both AdBlockPlus and uBlock Origin.
Adblockers are at 27% just in the US looking at statista and other random sources, and the number is much higher if you look at the more relevant younger demographic.
This is exactly the case. Every time someone starts ad-blocking, someone else has to assume that ad watch for them.
Of course this isn't 1:1 parity in reality, but the ultimate manifestation of ad blocking is that.
Google had a good system a few years ago that I was probably the only sucker who paid them for it (and probably why they stopped it). You could pay a chosen amount monthly, and they would not show you ads as a result. It wasn't perfected, but the concept was good for those who understand the problem and want to work towards a solution.
I want to say they stopped it in 2018? I don't remember the name of the program, and searching "google paying for no ads" brings up a ton of unrelated adwords stuff.
I payed $5/mo and they would roll over unused funds. It worked pretty well, except that it would still show where the banners were, just blank whitespace instead of an ad.
Aren't the people who use adblockers by definition those who are irritated by advertising enough that they wouldn't buy the products and services being advertised? If anything ad people should love things like uBlock Origin, it means they're not wasting their ad spend on people who aren't going to buy their products anyway.
I think that's wishful thinking. I might even think this about myself, that I don't care about ads. But they still have some effect I think. Sure, I rarely buy stuff online or anywhere, I just don't shop much, but I still get affected by ads.
Some things about our brain we just can't change: we like things we've seen before. Both brands and people. Recognition makes a big difference, for example in arbitrary choices when shopping.
And global warming was much milder when we had more pirates in the world [1]. Correlation is not causation. In the same period, YouTube's management style and public-facing attitude have changed dramatically, Google's general attempt at being the "good guys" has pretty much vanished, and beancounting has taken over as the guiding principle in many respects. I have zero reason to believe that had Adblocking not been a thing, there would have been any significant difference in the frequency or intrusiveness of the ads YouTube shows.
I wouldn't call them "milder". They weren't static ads. They were video ads. Often loud and un-skippable for a certain small amount of time. This is definitely equivalent to a "punch the monkey" ad.
There was a time back in the IE6 era where firefox didn't really have any market share and adblockers weren't really a thing.
The advertising industry was really aggressive even then. Some publishers put as many popups and banner ads as they could. I'm not saying all publishers would do this, but I have to admit the worst actors are the ones I strongly remember.
Only difference now is that there's a lot more tracking and ads are more insidious where they blend in with content now.
Yep, the first punch was thrown by the ad industry. Popups, pop-unders and even full window advertisements were rampant before popup blockers became commonplace, to the point of being added directly to browsers.
To be fair, if people stopped blocking ads I don't see them backing off on Ads any more; the increase in revenue and ad watch time would be kept as profit, since the current YouTube paradigm where they show 2 ads at the start and sometimes multiple mid-roll ads is so that they annoy you enough to sign up for Premium.
I doubt that. Even if adblockers weren't a thing they'd push more ads since it generates more revenue. It's probably also effective at annoying users into buying a subscription to avoid (most) ads.
What's this mythical world where industry execs leave profit on the table because they aren't being squeezed by ad blockers? Have you tried watching cable TV? You know, the service that was originally billed as a way to watch tv without ads?
instead of paying for premium and all of that money going to a megacorp. I spent some money on a simple browser plugin that forces YT to use the HTML5 video player.
Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.
Premium views help a lot more than ad-supported views for creators, on the scale of 10-20x the payout per-view[0,1] (and it pays out regardless of the advertiser friendliness rating).
This has been a hot topic lately[2,3], but at what point is you watching YouTube for years without ads, without paying for Premium, ethically stealing or "piracy"? YouTube was buying petabytes of Hard Drive storage a day in 2012 to keep up with the demand[4], i'm sure it's nearly an Exabyte a day or more right now, so it doesn't cost $0 for YouTube to run the service, they just happen to have enough people on Mobile watching and clicking ads to make a profit[5] and subsidize the rest of us.
It's insane to me that people are arguing in favor of the advertisement companies simply because they pay the content creators a sliver of what they accept from the companies that use their ad platform.
Here's my take. It's not "piracy" or "ethical piracy" (what the fuck?). The content creators put it out on YT with the expectation that it will get viewed. The little money they receive now is simply a bonus. It's only piracy if the content creator put it out on a platform for some dollar amount (ie, direct to consumer model) and then it is later re-uploaded for free by another channel or via other means..
In other words, you can't claim piracy when the "price" is $0 up front.
As for YT, I don't really care. They are subsidized by the data that is fed to them (ie, viewing history) and resold to advertisers. They get their nut.
If anything, this should really push the forefront on innovation for a decentralized video streaming platform. One organization or group should not have this much power over who gets the "top views" via a proprietary algorithm.
The price of things don't have to be represented in dollar amounts. If I want to give you a free iPad for watching my 2 hour lecture, I don't expect you to put on some sunglasses and take a nap for 1 hour 55 minutes. If you do that, I don't have to give you that iPad even if you sued me for it.
Piracy in general is just 'unauthorized use'[0]. YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy. The only reason there's no consequences for adblock are because (A) it'd be bad optics and bad PR to sue regular viewers, and (B) YouTube sees the value of subsidizing those who block ads as a plus, since it means they can keep their tight grip on where 'everyone' goes to watch videos and thus where creators are required to upload if they want people to see their stuff. If they blocked ~37% [1] of viewers with adblock, different services more lenient to ad blockers (at first) would be able to actually attract viewers and perhaps get the content creators to start dual-uploading their content.
> YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy.
Piracy is another word for copyright infringement. Blocking ads on YouTube is not piracy because you are not violating copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of) by viewing only a portion of the content that is delivered to you. DVRs do the same thing as ad blockers for TVs, but in the U.S., the courts have ruled that DVR services do not infringe the copyrights of media companies.[1]
YouTube and other Google services don't forbid ad blocking in their terms of service.[2] If they did, there would be an uproar because Google itself includes an ad blocker in Chrome, which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads.[3]
> which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads
I've seen it block Google ads a few times on this one website which cycles through them every minute. It says the ad 'used too many resources and Chrome has killed it'.
You're missing so much in this analysis - the big advertising companies do much more than show ads - they stalk you in excruciating detail, they resell your private life information to untold abusers who try to gain advantage from you.
Taking advantage of you, by manipulating your mind is one of the basic premises of ads.
In some ideal 'fair' world ads would just present information for you to make rational choices - but nope, the reality is the ads industry is based on emotional/psychological manipulation. If you seek to understand you can research about the evolution of the industry since the time of Freud where they co-opted psychological techniques to sell things by exacerbating people's psychoses.
Put another way, your arguments would only make sense if the advertisers played fair but they are abusive and try to trick you. You can't make a fair deal with conniving.
The reality of this is so bad that it is destroying our society - at what point is allowing massive scale psychological manipulation/abuse for profit destroying society?
My post here is a bit ranty but I get upset at the lack of fair context in the presuppositions of your argument.
I have an ethical dilemma about YouTube. I hate ads, I hate Google, and I want to support the creators.
For those reasons adblock is a must, and paying for YouTube Premium is not an option (I’m not going to voluntarily give a single penny of my money to Google)
Sure, I’ve got CuriosityStream and Nebula subs, but not all content creators use those platforms.
A lot of big creators take sponsorship deals and have in-video ads. I know most of the ones I watch do, and I actually don't even mind them. They're personalized to the content creator's content, and are usually as entertaining as the video's contents because of it.
Nebula seems to split profit 50/50[0] while YouTube splits it 55/45 to the channel[1], and Youtube Premium views are regarded as being sometimes 10-20x the payout of an ad-supported view[2].
To support the creators whose videos I'm watching on YT, I use a whitelist add-on that disable the adblocker on those channels. Though the add-on still allows me to skip the ad, which I'm doing when it's an ad I've already seen.
As to the reason it's worth it, here are a couple of reasons:
When legacy media companies sell ad space, often they do not do so through an auction mechanism but through a direct purchase model. That means someone paid anywhere from a few hundred to thousands to be on that page. That gives them more of a client relationship and so they can feel more burdened to make sure advertising clients get 'visibility' and bang for their buck.
Also, they can sell ads in their videos with estimated view/impression counts. If they autoplay, the view count goes up even if you're not watching the video so an unsophisticated ad consumer thinks the ad spend is justified.
I don't run ad campaigns anymore, but I did for eight years and I always preferred no autoplay because intentional viewing is much more valuable for what I was selling.
I have this moment when I have to use Youtube on my phone for some reason (such as a tutorial for how to fix something), and get blasted with 3 ads for a 1 minute video. I would never use it for long periods without an ad blocker.
Well, they have a pretty active subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/Vanced/ so you can see a few folks besides me championing it.
But ultimately, you can either examine the binary yourself or else trust them.
One point of note is that it does not automatically update. Whether you install it directly or use the manager app, there is always some manual process involved in updates. (The manager just notifies you when there is an update available.)
With Chrome's crippling of adblockers via their Manifest V3 mandate, I wonder if Chrome users are in for a rude awakening of how hostile and repugnant the ad laden web has become.
Doubt it - with manifest V3, most of the adverts will still be blocked. I expect more are getting through with Chrome already because of CName cloaking and uBO not being able to uncloak on Chrome.
I have friends who still don't use some sort of adblocking, no fucking idea how they browse websites without it in 2022. Anytime I've had to use a computer without uBlock Origin, they are horrible to use.
Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin. Works great, highly recommended.
iPhone solutions seem less advanced, unfortunately, but they exist. Personally I use one called "Adblock Pro," but that's not an endorsement, just the one I tried that has stuck.
What I find interesting is that in my experience people with lots of add blocking are more likely to pass on HORRIBLE links. They don't know and thus pass on garbage sites (full of ads and such) where the folks I know without ad blockers are more careful of what they subject their friends to.
It's not just ads that contribute to link sharing nightmares. If you leave certain query parameters in a Twitter link you get a hard login wall after about 10 seconds if you aren't logged in. Other sites such as Quora do something similar: redirect you to a login wall if you click to expand an answer (only if some url query param is present). On Twitter that behavior is much worse, of course. To view a reply thread you must click the share button and manually copy and paste it into a new tab or you'll get a login wall. It's truly amazing how hostile big players are to UX when they aren't getting their way.
I'm still looking for a block list that simply removes all video content from various franchise and local news sites. It is rarely actually relevant to the article, and is often vastly less information dense.
Yeah, it's more that I will run into an article on some local news site I've never visited before far more frequently than I'll end up on one I looked at previously.
They all seem to implement an ever-so-slightly different player, which means manually blocking the unique element (s) each time.
Definitely a use case for a standard community sourced list.
I am shocked every time I use my wife's computer and the ad blocker isnt there. I don't even understand how you could use the web on a regular basis where you have to duck, dodge, and weave better than Ali to avoid some type of disturbance.
A friend (who does not use an ad blocker) showed me something on a website a few weeks ago and I was shocked by the invasiveness and aggressive nature of the ads. I asked him how he was able to use the web like this and he said it was annoying and that he was interrupted a lot, but he had sort of gotten use to it.
There's no way I would use a browser without an ad blocker. Doing so is counter-productive and also a major security risk.
I also have NoScript installed - it significantly decreases the amount of crap your web browser fetches and renders and thus makes browsing faster and consume less energy.
And as mentioned by blakesterz in Private mode I have both uBlock Origin and NoScript disabled because multiple websites refuse to work otherwise.
I still use NoScript because you can quickly enable bare minimum scripts to get a site working. After a while you develop a good intuition for what is making things not work. At first it is pretty daunting and I generally don't recommend it for the less savvy.
If you just blanket turn off Js the internet basically is not useable.
By default I visit with NoScript enabled. It usually works fine. Sometimes it doesn't, so I selectively enable scripts. As often as not, it doesn't help.
If it's at all hard to make the site work for me, I give up - it's not as if there's a shortage of websites to visit. I know when I'm not welcome.
How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. They'd pay for that. Instead we have the majority of content creators engaged in an arms race to hijack your attention and produce the most outrageous, rather than best, content possible because more outrage = more eyeballs = more ads.
My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really.
If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
When the content provider offers the content for free, the viewer obtains the right to consume any portions of the content they want for free. If a website wants to require the viewer to consume all of the content when they view it, they can do that in their terms of service, though it might not be legally enforceable. Most sites don't.
No, they wouldn't pay for that. This is a dumb myth that people use to brush off their guilt. If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole.
You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
I support several content creators on Patreon because I greatly value their content and want them to continue making it. I realise not everyone is in a position to do so and that is fine.
> If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist.
Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
Many sites on the internet provide little more than infrastructure and moderation for the content provided by users of that site. I think every one of those users has a relevant opinion about the internet itself whether or not they are forking over money or being subjected to advertising.
The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
As long as it is possible to make money with ads, the web will be full of SEO-optimized trash, clickbait, and other worthless "content" full of ads, and it will drown out anything of quality. If you're giving them ad views, you're partly responsible for and contributing towards the sorry state of the internet. Start blocking ads, and ask everyone you know to do the same.
A lot of people are saying this but I disagree that you are either on one side or the other. If you pay a monthly subscription to the Washington Post, their website is still absolutely covered with advertisements - moving, video, intrusive advertisements that IMHO make the site unusable. So I'm not owed free content. I'm paying for it. And since I'm paying for it, don't shove a bunch of crap down my throat when I want to see the stuff I paid for.
I don't recall how long ago this was, but I bought a digital subscription to The Economist only to discover the site refused to make good on my subscription while I had an adblocker active. I canceled the subscription explaining why.
I've since resubscribed as their site no longer does this. It seems so crazy to me that I tried to search for when The Economist changed their policy and found nothing relevant, other than a spate of 2015 stories about how they contracted with an ad-tech firm to determine how many subscribers were using adblockers, but the service subjected their readers to malware.
Newspapers have always made their money by selling their audience to advertisers. However, it wasn't too hard to ignore the ads in print and there is a limit to how malicious a print ad can be.
The fact that you're talking about "content" shows the commercial mindset. The web used to be mostly where people shared information and media about things they loved with no expectation of making money. It still is underneath all the commercial crap piled high within the walled gardens. Take off the profit blinders and see the web can be motivated by other things.
I'm not owed free content; but nor do I owe anyone my eyeballs. If you put up a site on the public internet, then it's reasonable to assume the site's public. If it turns out my assumption is wrong, I just go away - I'm not going to argue with a webmaster who is determined to make me see stuff I don't want to see.
The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd.
Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all.
> The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd.
You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense.
If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it.
You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing the content does not make you virtuous, no matter how you might attempt to distort reality. It makes you a thief.
"I don't how you do things, so I am going to steal your product!"
Who's stealing it? I asked for an article through the customary channels and they served it to me. Inside that article, they offered a whole set of embedded resources for me to choose to load, and I opted out of a lot of them.
You have obviously convinced yourself it is OK to steal because you think it is OK to steal, because you think it is OK to steal. Good for you.
What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences.
If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.
Correct. You have no idea what it means to respect someone's property and livelihood. Hence a creative interpretation that allows you to take while explicitly blocking their ability to generate revenue.
If a site owner publishes content and makes it available free of charge, it is available for visitors to consume free of charge. Your argument shows a lack of respect for the autonomy of internet users, who are not obligated to consume ads just because they are presented alongside other site content, just as TV viewers are not obligated to watch the ads during commercial breaks. Site owners have alternative means of generating revenue (affiliate links, sponsored content, merchandise, donations, etc.) and the option of charging for site content. No site owner is entitled to revenue from advertising.
I don't like ads. Yet I respect the fact that the product supplier needs them to pay the bills.
You don't like ads. You have zero respect for the product supplier. You consume their work product and delete the ads, using an artificially-constructed moral high ground to justify it.
The web would not exist if your world view had been dominant from the early days. Few people are interested in paying for anything directly. Gmail has 1.5 billion users. Care to guess how many pay for the service? Nobody is going to pay for search, and yet it is one of the most valuable tools on the internet, arguably the one thing that makes it work. A service like YouTube is incredibly valuable, not just from an entertainment perspective but also for learning and more. Once again, nobody wants to pay for it.
I could go on. There are millions of excellent sites beyond what Google has to offer. What's more important is that none of these services would have been built to where they are today were it not for the use of advertising as a revenue generation channel.
At a higher philosophical level, the question might be:
What future valuable service or product would we not allow to germinate if nobody wants to pay for anything and everyone uses ad blockers. Like it or not, this is one of the easiest ways for entrepreneurs to finance their dreams and ideas on the web. Given the vast majority of people will not pay for anything, the options become very few. This is certainly true at inception. Later on, as a business matures, other potential revenue streams surface.
Go try and start something like Facebook (about 3 billion users) and ask people to pay you just $1 per year. Aside from the fact that it would be impossible to support the infrastructure and people needed to run such a beast, well, nobody is going to hand you even $1 per year for the service. I don't care what features and privacy enhancements you might offer, nobody is going to pay. What's left? Well, initially, advertising. That's the only way. Sad, but true.
We don't have to like reality, but we should understand it.
I respect the ability of site owners to make their own decisions about how to run their own businesses. I respect the courage it takes for a site owner to accept responsibility for their own decisions. When a site owner chooses to supply content without charging for it and without stipulating that it must be consumed in its entirety without an ad blocker, I respect that. And if some of that content interests me, I will accept the site owner's offer of free content and consume the parts that I want to consume, while ignoring or blocking the parts that I don't.
How I spend my time and attention on the site is my personal decision, not the site owner's decision, not your decision, and not anyone else's decision. I don't care if an unsound and generally unaccepted ethical theory like the one you're advocating for disregards my individual right to spend my time and attention as I please. I don't care if you would rather prioritize someone else's profit over my autonomy. My time and my attention belong to me.
I don't use Gmail, and I would prefer Gmail's user base to be distributed among many smaller companies that compete with each other to provide better products. I don't use Facebook, and I would prefer it to be completely supplanted by fediverse services that don't violate the privacy of users and non-users, and don't create poor working conditions for its contractors.* YouTube is not irreplaceable either, and I would rather see a variety of platforms like PeerTube instances and Vimeo break YouTube's near-monopoly of online video content in the U.S. and many other countries. I fully understand the reality of online advertising, which only amplifies my support for ad blocking.
Calling ad blocking "theft" is an absurd take. It is not theft to only consume part of the content that is provided to you. There is no law that requires the viewer to consume all of the content provided in a format, in any country that I'm aware of. It would also be immoral to compel the viewer to spend their time and attention on dross.
When there's a law that makes adblocking illegal. I will gladly leave the web behind forever. But to equate adblocking to stealing is hyperbolic nonsense. And to out right call me a thief is insulting. Looks like I struck a nerve; or maybe this whole thread did. Maybe you're in ad tech? I hope you are. I hope you read through this entire thread and soak in just how rotten your industry is; so reviled even here on HN.
It is not the responsibility of Internet users to ensure the jobs of people in the advertising industry. Compelling users to view ads (when they view other content) to protect those jobs would be an infringement on individual rights for a very poor reason. That's why ad blockers and DVRs are legal in every country that I'm aware of.
So, you think that the only people who's jobs are affected by this theft are those in the advertising industry?
I have news for you. Those jobs are not affected at all. Advertising isn't going away, ever. The channels change, but advertising survives. There's plenty pre-internet history on that.
The jobs that are affected are those from the sites that rely on ad income to pay for salaries and their costs. If 100% of internet users used ad-blocking millions of jobs would evaporate almost overnight.
I'll give you a simple example of this. A good friend of mine runs a nice little site where he and his wife provide valuable and well-researched nutritional information for pet owners. They work very hard to create their content. This site is their sole income. This is what they do to house and feed their kids, to have a life. Nearly 100% of their income is form advertising on their site. If they did not generate this income they would go bankrupt and likely lose everything.
Why do people like you think it is OK to steal their work product? I don't get it. How can anyone rationalize that. Once you get down to ground reality, it's theft.
No business is entitled to survive eternally on its existing business model. Businesses must adapt to changing market conditions if they want to succeed in the long term. And every business owner goes in with the understanding that success is not guaranteed.
Hopefully, your friend is keeping track of the increasing popularity of ad blocking and developing alternative sources of revenue to supplement their display ads. Affiliate links, sponsored articles, subscriptions for premium content, merchandise, and donations are common monetization pathways for websites.
Reading a website without loading or viewing the ads is not "stealing" or "theft", since the site owner voluntarily provided the content free of charge. If the site owner doesn't want people to read their content for free, they should charge for it. No viewer is obligated to load or consume all of the content provided in any medium, and a site owner has no inherent right to compel a visitor to spend time or attention on any part of the site.
> No business is entitled to survive eternally on its existing business model. Businesses must adapt to changing market conditions if they want to succeed in the long term.
Typical totalitarian view coming from an artificially constructed moral high ground. Now you want to tell people how to create, finance and run a business. Most people who think this way have never run a non-trivial business in their lives and have no idea what it takes.
Nope, defending the right to block ads is a libertarian position because it affirms the autonomy of individual internet users. No individual is obligated to go out of their way to enrich another person's business or support the viability of someone else's business model. Please don't make assumptions about my personal life, you have no idea who I am.
When companies SEO-shove it in my face and almost literally beg me to take it.. oh I don't feel entitled but it's hard to avoid. Stop shoving it in my face and I won't take it.
> And then reality hits: There was never any free pizza. And the pizza is gone. Along with the jobs and everything else it created.
So clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash that scream "free pizza" and hand you a bag full of ads will be gone from the internet? This is like cure for cancer, I look forward to it!
You are exaggerating, the vast majority of the ad-supported internet does not fit your "clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash" narrative. Once again, it is convenient to construct such a narrative to justify taking from truly useful sites.
I must ask: Do you mean to say that you only visit "clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash" sites with your ad blockers?
Likely not. What is a far more likely scenario is that you frequent sites that deliver you enough value that you choose to visit them. This is that context I am referring to when I speak of theft. Not the useless content-farm junk you seem to want to use as a means of justification for blocking ads on the sites you visit.
If you don't like their use of advertising, don't visit the sites.
Note that what we are discussing here isn't a requirement for you to CLICK on ads and make money for them. Not at all. All this boils down to is not interfering with these sites displaying their ads and engaging in marketing to you that might result in revenue. That's what you are objecting to.
You want the people who create and manage the valuable content you provide to work for you for free. That is a remarkably shitty position to take, and I am being kind. Give me your valuable content or service --which I enjoy and want to consume, repeatedly-- and do it for nothing, while actively interfere with your ability to earn any money and promote others to do the same.
If a site owner doesn't want to provide content for free of charge, then they shouldn't do that. Nobody is forcing a site owner to provide free content. Site owners can charge for the content if they want to.
But if a site owner does choose to provide their content for free, it is not the responsibility of the site visitor to ensure that such a business model is successful. Internet users do not have any legal or moral obligation to avoid consuming content that is provided free of charge. Internet users also do not have any legal or moral obligation to consume all of the content that is presented in one place.
I won't shed a tear if every ad supported site vanishes from the internet. Yes, I think the vast majority of them are useless, and the only reason I visit them is because someone else links them or, because of SEO, they end up in the way when you search for something. Usually these sites are worse than what you'd get if search engines skipped straight to the good, valuable sites with no ads; their value is generally negative, not positive. Good sites get buried because of everyone who's spamming the internet for quick buck. I refuse to support ad-supported sites, because ad-money and the incentive it creates for spam is ruining the internet. Spammers' ability to earn money by creating more spam should be revoked. Anyone who supports that "business" model is partly responsible for spam and trash.
> It is nothing less than delusional to convince yourself that you are entitled to the entire web without paying for any of it.
I never said I'm entitled to the entire web for free. Don't try to make it seem like I'm brazenly pirating my way across the internet. There are plenty of services behind paywalls and subscriptions that I choose to support with my actual dollars.
> Do you know what happens at this end of the scale when your 100% ad-blocked utopia becomes reality? Do you have any clue?
Yes. Actually I do. I'm old enough to know what life was like before the internet. We all got along just fine back then. One could argue we were better off than we are now.
For a brief shining period the internet was a blank canvas, full of actual wonder and discovery. Seriously, it felt amazing to connect and just explore. But look at what it has become; a wasteland where 2 advertising giants waged a war of psychological manipulation.
> Along with the jobs and everything else it created.
Eyeballs for dollars. Its a grotesque machine. If it all burned down tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost. Not even the jobs you claim. (Except, of course, the ad networks, the PII data miners, the blog spammers, and the rest of the seedy by products that sprout from these networks...so, like I said, nothing of value lost.)
> I never said I'm entitled to the entire web for free. Don't try to make it seem like I'm brazenly pirating my way across the internet. There are plenty of services behind paywalls and subscriptions that I choose to support with my actual dollars.
Great. Then, if you are a principled person and do not agree with the way advertising is being used on the 'net, don't use anything other than what you pay for. That's the morally and ethically correct stance to take.
What ad-blocker users are saying is: I don't like advertising. I am still going to use your work product and I am not going to pay you a dime for any of it.
Well, that's wrong.
> If it all burned down tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost.
I don't think you have a good sense of the scale and breath of what online marketing supports.
They have ads. Blocking them would mean the service would suffer and maybe even shutdown.
There are millions of sites like that, where valuable content or services are offered. I belong to several manufacturing related forums that would not exist were it not for their ability to monetize the hard work required to keep them going. I personally know a couple of people running these sites. They work 16 hour days, seven days a week, to keep their communities going. It's very hard work and it is very, very far from "nothing of value".
Since WebMD is providing its content free of charge and not requiring visitors to refrain from blocking ads, visitors are free to consume the content on WebMD without paying and while blocking ads. The business model seems to be working well for WebMD, since its parent company (Internet Brands) is still in the private equity portfolio of its owner, the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which had a net income of about $4.9 billion in 2020. Their 2020 Form 10-K also says:*
> The most significant increases in value of our privately held investments related to increases in AppLovin Corporation (technology sector), Kokusai Electric Corporation (manufacturing sector), and Internet Brands, Inc. (technology sector).
If WebMD, your friends' sites, or any other sites end up not performing well under a business model driven by display advertising, then they should transition their business model to one that is more profitable. A person who works hard is not entitled to a successful business, and internet users are definitely not legally, morally, or ethically obligated to contribute to the success of other people's businesses.
I have 600 records, pay directly for a YouTube show, pay for 5 substack blogs, I have hundreds of dvds, 500books, endless video games for multiple consoles, Netflix, hbomax, Hulu, boomerang, Shudder, Amazon, I've had sling, CBS watch, wb archive, criterion, and others.
I go through periods of Pandora or Spotify.
The reality is every company wants to charge but they all want to be on the open web at the same time.
Can't have it both ways.
I control what downloads on the internet I pay for, on the device I own.
If you didn't erect a paywalls? Your fault. Not mine.
I wouldn't bed a stranger without a condom
I don't browse without an ad blocker. Or privacy badger.
People who understand ad blockers but don't use them are corporate sychophants.
Does anyone actually feel like they are owed anything for free (site seems down, apologies if the author said as much)?
I will browse news and articles sometimes -because- they are free. If they were not, I simply no longer visit said page. I don't feel I'm owed their content in any way, and I'm OK just walking away if they decide to paywall it.
I don't think anyone feels they are "owed" anything. I do, however, feel I have the right to download whatever someone puts online, and not download and view the adjacent ads.
Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.
I think that the idea that "people would largely stop making content for the web if that weren't ads" is a myth. Sure, the money seeking people wouldn't do it anymore and a lot less people would be able to make a living off of it. But think of all the web content makers that currently don't make a lot of money, which I believe is a lot of people since not everyone who has blog earns a living from it. I'm not saying we wouldn't lose anything but this idea the "90% of the web would disappear or be paywalled" is kinda insane and quite unlikely
Based on how many trash sites show up in search (even after search engines' algorithms try hard to downrank garbage), I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of the web is there only to make a quick buck with ads. According to Wikipedia, 90% of all email traffic in 2014 was spam, despite hosting providers and ISPs blocking ports and taking a hard stance on spam. I have no reason to believe the web is much better, especially given that spinning up a trash site is not going to start alerts and get IP blocks banned the same way that sending email spam does.
I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web.
But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.
To answer the question posed by the site. How can they afford 261MB page load instead of 5MB? Because the largest expense of delivering video, the bandwidth, is still very cheap. We're talking less than one cent per gigabyte. Even if ad rates are really low, they're bringing in more than 1 cent per ad play.
This is yet another example of US/BayArea Privilege blindness.
It is NOT cheap in most places to the User. Including in the unprivileged-USA.
The user pays a lot for that bandwidth. Specially now that everyone will unknowingly move to predatory 5G home services but let me try to stay on topic.
People out of the Empire Center will pay both bandwidth and processing power. Where do you think all those old phones you trade in for the latest apple/Samsung ends up? Everyone is running phones that barely gets any security update anymore and is already slowed to the maximum by the OS itself. Trying to load and then display video ads is just evil.
And that is not web only, Apps are worse. If you install Apps, all of them are following the standard set by amazon, newegg, etc... you will get video ads along your usual usage. Ads in between search listings, ads in your cart! and you have to be much more technical to block those.
The very article ends with the following: "But even so, again: video is expensive! And I simply can’t see how it’s worth their while to autoplay video on their site. Can anyone explain this to me?!"
I'm sure this was an answer to the article this thread references. Bandwidth is cheap and it only gets cheaper.
I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now).
The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.
The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
> But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?
Not really, no. It's the publisher's fault if they targeted the browser in the first place. If they didn't, and it didn't render properly, then it's nobody's fault, just something that happens.
No, you don't WANT to see the web rendered "properly" (with all the ads). The browser+adblocker do the best they can to render the usably rather than "properly". The issue is that it may become impossible to render usably.
This is not enough if we don't stop DRM (which Firefox also supports).
DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
We had a couple effective strategies to deal with ads on network TV when I was a kid. I've found they they still work today.
1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.
2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).
> If I was watching alone I would have a book with me
That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity
> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show
It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.
For network TV the show producers know ahead of time where the ad breaks will be and structure the story so that they come between acts.
I have noticed when things originally on network television end up on ad-supported streaming services the ad breaks sometimes no longer happen during natural breaks. When those same things end up in syndication on non-streaming cable or OTA channels the ad breaks usually do align with the natural story breaks. I wonder why OTA and cable channels can time things better than streaming services? Are the shows distributed in different formats to the two, and only one includes metadata on when the act breaks occur?
I have no idea why a successor to TiVo never came out. The idea of "fast forwarding" TV ads was way ahead of its time. I've got cable TV and would pay good money for a service like that. The same applies to Podcast ads: I would pay for a podcast player (like Podcast Republic) that could automatically skip ads, and say let people mark ad segments in a podcast so that others could skip them.
Comcast has some support for skipping ads. It doesn't work for everything, just top shows from NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CW, Bravo, HGTV, Discovery, MTV and TLC recorded after January 1, 2019 in HD. It's enabled by default on their X1 DVR boxes.
The way it works is that if you start fast forwarding, it automatically stops and switches to play when you reach the end of a commercial break. You watch normally and when a commercial starts just hit FF a few times (the first hit starts forwarding, subsequent hits switch to faster FF speed).
I dropped cable in the middle of 2020. My recollection was that it also only worked if it had been at least 24 hours since the program originally broadcast, but their documentation [1] does not mention any such limit so perhaps they dropped that limit.
I seem to remember maybe 5 30sec ads so must be 2.5 minutes.
I even vaguely remember this was lampshaded in Fresh Prince (?)
Uncle Phil is having a heart to heart chat with young Nicky and in the middle says something like "ok nice talk see you in around 2 1/2 minutes" which I thought was hilarious
I did so too when I realized its actually worse, its about 19 min play for 30 min 'show' & about 43 for 60mins for most popular shows (you can verify with imdb or 'otherwise'). thats on top of what we pay them monthly.
the other hard rule I have is 'no news from narrated sources' so really no need to cable tv & have cut the cord for more than a decade now.
YouTube is still no where near as bad as commercial TV in the UK. It's when we visit relatives who still watch TV, that I get reminded how bad it is. YouTube has a couple of ads before a video and then a 10 second one every 10 minutes or so - but the ones on the TV go on and on. Probably 5 minutes of them every 20 minutes of TV.
I got so used to having uBlock that I couldn't relate to the memes about YouTube adding multiple unskippable ads recently. I'm like "they did?". It is like I browse a different web and it's awesome.
I use ublock and have setup a dns blocker through openwrt and have even added my own items to the blacklist. I am astoundished how much traffic leaves my machine "just sitting there".
At this point my blocklist has something like 77.614 domains blocked and I do not believe that its going to get less.
what is intersting is that I grew up with the uncensored internet and the things i found are not on the list of things that I definitly will block for my children.
Its kind of the opposite approach of a censored web for children because to be honest im not so much worried about their activities, but far more concious of the bad actors out there.
I don't use any "ad blocker" plugins, but I do use EFF's Privacy Badger, which blocks all cookies it determines are tracking cookies. Many websites deduce it'ss blocking their ads, because they're addicted to tracking us, but I feel no guilt. I wouldn't risk browsing without it.
I hate auto-playing videos. Several news websites in Germany embed an auto-playing video in a news article. Often these videos have nothing to do with the article. And then there are some that even turn into a pop-up player when you scroll down.
What's the best way to block these videos (in Chromium)? I wouldn't mind a solution where videos are completely blocked with a whitelist, since I rarely consume videos except on dedicated video sites (e.g Youtube).
It's almost unbelievable how big the gap is. Sometimes I try to turn it off and check links before I share them to find out if they're actually good reading experiences. I've got a couple of sites that I used to reflexively share on social media that I've since learned not to because without an adblocker they auto-play videos at the top of the page - but I never ran into that behavior when I was using them, so I thought they were fine.
I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so.
Maybe it's an ADHD thing and I'm overstating this, but I personally see really tangible effects on my ability to concentrate based on how many ads I'm surrounded with. Even stuff like Sponsorblock, which is honestly mostly removing intros/outros has helped a lot with how I interact with Youtube. Sure there's data savings, page load time, etc... but I also vaguely suspect that constant web advertising just flat-out affects people's mood and ability to focus more than is commonly talked about.
Seriously, ask your family members about whether they adblock, and install Ublock Origin for them if they don't. If they're on Android, consider (with their permission) swapping out their browser for Firefox (or some equivalent) and installing Ublock Origin again. If they don't mind some very minor UI differences (and in my experience many people don't), then it's an immediate speedup and data savings at the cost of maybe 3 minutes of work and explanation.
The article suggests that roughly 73% of users don't use an adblocker. Some of those users are making a conscious choice, and that's fine, but a lot of them just don't know how to install one or don't know how they work. You don't need to be actually evangelizing ad blockers to still occasionally ask someone who's complaining about ads whether or not they realize that there's a really easy way to get rid of them.
> I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so.
I have done this in the past. However, I have discovered that most of the people I introduce to ad blocking will turn it off later. This is because some sites are able to detect when you are using an ad blocker and even provide steps to turn it off. While there are ways to get around this, most of the people just preferred to turn it off.
I don't know if it makes that much difference, but I like that Ublock Origin by default only disables itself for the specific site you click it on when you click the big power button. I always try to reinforce to people how to turn Ublock Origin off if they need to (and I like that Ublock's UI makes this really easy to do), because I'd rather they disable adblocking for one site than remove it completely from their browser.
SponsorBlock is one of the coolest extensions of recent times. It's also a great example of crowdsourcing actually working for the benefit of the commons.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] thread(Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)
If there was no way to block ads Id probably be happy to downsize my internet usage.
Their definition of "acceptable" seems straightforward and paying for certification seems like a pretty standard business model.
If they were to bend their definition for money, that woukd be shady. Do they?
I was browsing the web with AdBlock Plus and found myself assaulted by an image of someone's fungus-infected toenail or something similarly nauseating. I went to report it as a mistake on their forums only to find there was already a thread about Taboola, and they were firm that Taboola was "acceptable". The only way I can imagine ads like that made it onto their list was by paying really good money.
I went to uBlock that day and haven't looked back. Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.
So it is just your imagination. Their definition of "acceptable" is here:
https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria
> Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.
You did not even read it, but just immediately jumped to "shady"/bribery....
> I wanted no part of it.
Me neither, but you spreading misinformation is not okay.
The policy on images is the one that is relevant to my complaint, so let's look at that one:
> Static image ads may qualify as acceptable, according to an evaluation of their unobtrusiveness based on their integration on the webpage.
The policy was stricter back in 2015 (http://web.archive.org/web/20150613035152/https://adblockplu...):
> Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
It changed to the one with more wiggle room in February 2016, in the middle of a backlash against AdBlock Plus's continued tolerance for Taboola's antics. Here's that thread for context: https://forum.adblockplus.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991
Under either definition, it's hard to argue that Taboola's images were "acceptable". They were explicitly designed to grab attention, bore no relation to the text content of the ad, and frequently were disgusting specifically because gross images draw the eye. Adblock Plus kept insisting that Taboola was cooperating, but users (including myself) kept reporting over and over again that their garbage was getting through. After years of violations that get dismissed as "mistakes" (documented in part on the thread linked above), it's reasonable to assume that the only reason they weren't dropped like a hot potato was because they were paying to not be dropped.
As a power user I also set JS off by default and whitelist specific sites, and also use garbage websites in private mode so their garbage tracking is hopefully purged.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges?utm_conte...
What this review means? Do you have a link? Is it reviewed by a security developer hired by Mozilla or some community person?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
It's exactly what you're asking for, a badge showing that Mozilla "staff security experts" have carefully reviewed the extension to ensure that it is free of malicious or unsafe code. The extension must also be effective at what it does, offer a good user experience, and be regularly updated.
I could be totally wrong, but ublock-origin just keeps certain things that match a pattern from appearing in the html. It can't remove the annoying "in-video" ads, right?
Or are you saying you might as well not pay for premium if you'll still have to deal with the product placement anyway?
In 2005 or so there was a bunch of trojans going around for IIRC Blizzard games to steal account creds on various sites and my first response to that was "huh, that site has ads?"
People give Brave grief over BAT, and maybe with good reason, but it's one the few efforts to try and bring some sort of involvement to the public side of it as to where the money is flowing that seems to have a chance of going anywhere.
Upvotes the moment I read this. Yes. This is what they did and they deserve to be blocked in every way possible for it.
You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
[0]: http://www.hashcash.org/
That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment.
> Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.
I'd pay a monthly fee for unmolested search results. I pay for Youtube Premium. I only watch ad-free content that I pay for.
I don't want the content for free - the free stuff is usually worse in quality anyway. I just want to be left alone by advertisers. I don't need what they are selling and the reduce my ability to think. The sheer amount of noise they add to the world makes them a problem.
Anyone using an adblocker is expecting free content.
Advertisements directly lower the quality of any content I'm consuming and I am expecting high quality content.
If someone wants to turn a profit on their site, that's fine. Do I need to accept whatever they want to serve me when I visit their page? No. Do I need to buy a product from their store if it's not something I'm interested in, even though the payment may go to helping their hosting costs? No.
I would say no, and I think websites are not different from media I listed above. If they make or don't make enough money it's not my business. I am free to consume their freely distributed products as I like.
I feel like there are some IRC channels that owe me some dividends.
Also, a lot of that content still exists but it is hidden behind the SEO garbage.
If I were to ever buy an Android phone (I wouldn’t because Google). It would be a Google device.
I also pay more for an AppleTV than a Roku because half of the Roku screen and the hard coded buttons on the remote are ads.
It's not always possible to buy out of advertising. One of my fave sites anandtech.com has (I guess relatively reasonable) ads, and I can't subscribe or whatever to get rid of them.
I'm also generally OK with Adwords v1.0 ads, which had virtually no chance of autoplaying a super loud video, running malware on my machine, breaking the layout of a page as I'm trying to click on something, or masquerading as genuine content.
Ad blockers respond to the fact that users have very little ability to control their ad experiences, even in ways we probably think are appropriate like buying out of them. What you're implying here (ads vs. free content) is a false dichotomy.
ads vs. free content is indeed a very false dichotomy.
The privacy invasion that accompanies web ads leads me to treat them as malware and prevent their execution on my devices. I don't care about non-personalized ads (e.g. the 1P-hosted display ads on Ravelry).
Going without is better than ad funded. The goal of me running ad blockers is not just to make my life nicer but to make ad funded shit (i.e. most of the current internet) unviable.
Paywall away! If it’s good enough for the money, I’ll always pay for it.
Oh the irony! Likewise, the agreement between the content company and the ad company has nothing to do with my consumption of the content. The content company agrees to show ads for the ad company. The ad company agrees to make ads for the content company to show and pay them to show the ads. I make no agreement with either. I download the content and choose not to download the ad. It’s my bandwidth.
I will take the content as long as they don't bother blocking me, and will try to get more people to do the same. Their business model does not work if they start blocking everybody, it also doesn't work if too many people take the content without the ads. That means I'm helping them fail, what is absolutely good. The sooner they all go away, the better.
The big thing we need is some kind of action against Google: they currently are the best positioned to penalize operators of sites slowed by ads but the search team isn't going to cut into their ad business and Chrome is going to continue slow-walking attempts to make browsers restrict ad networks. It'd also be nice if there was liability for malware delivered by ads — something like they have to pay a fine up front and try to recover it from their advertiser, forcing them to actually vet people first.
What I'd like would be publishers self-hosting ads — forcing them to take more responsibility for the security risks — and more effort into alternative payment mechanisms. I liked the idea of Google Contributor but one big challenge for that is that even a less half-hearted version probably wouldn't generate enough money to be viable because most people consider ads a reasonable cost for free content.
People will pay for good content, they did for a long time before there was an internet or a surveillance industry. There were books, films, subscription TV services, paid for audio. There were also steady streams of novel manuscripts, demo tapes and screenplays that went straight into the bin because they were rubbish. Now the rubbish hangs around on a webpage surrounded by trackers, luring people in with clickbait titles and lies, and multiplying beyond the ability of even google to sort out.
Yes, people paid for content prior to the internet but there were also problems — many good things went unnoticed because not enough discovered them while plenty of garbage got tons of attention because the creator had some personal connection to publishers, reviewers, DJs, etc. One of the things I loved about the rise of the web was that it provided so many opportunities to find things which weren't going to run in my local newspaper, be stocked by the local book or music shops (if you weren't lucky enough to have good indie options), or the pile of mud a lot of the big radio stations were often playing (this got a lot worse in the 90s when Clear Channel started buying all of the radio stations so questions about what got mainstream coverage in many markets came down to what one guy in Texas wanted).
I don't want to lose that — whether it's counterpressure to the huge race-to-the-bottom advertising market for more selective sponsorship, something like Apple/Stripe Pay to make it super easy for people to get paid for their work, etc.
Paying people for good content doesn't fix the problem. The internet is still cluttered with awful content drowning out the useful stuff. Not because people are trying hard and learning or just plain love their awful guitar playing even if nobody is watching, but because they're getting paid by surveillance. What we need is the absence of that incentive.
This is one of those cases where the free market would actually fix the problem if there was some sensible regulation applied. Sadly it'll never be quick enough to catch up with the technology.
Also, ads can be served in ways that makes blocking much more difficult. It's just harder to do, and harder to track users across sites. (and therefore, probably less lucrative to the site owners).
What happened to serving ads based on site content? How is using poor algorithms that require a lot of tracking and then make bad guesses about your interests any better?
When a website wants to make viewing their ads mandatory for viewing their content, that is their prerogative. Most don't, and I'm not obligated to volunteer my CPU for their ads.
I don't feel I'm owed anything. I just refuse to consume ads. Sometimes that means I pay a subscription fee. Sometimes I read it with my blocker on and the creator goes without revenue to get their message out. And sometimes the creator won't serve up their content unless I disable my blocker, so I shrug and turn my attention elsewhere.
The problem for creators is that there's a glut of content online. It's just way more than anyone needs. The best creators can afford monetize directly, the good ones can do custom ads integrated into their content, and the rest have to churn out clickbait, top 11 lists, and ludicrously "optimized" content laden with ad-network garbage. It sucks to be mediocre, but I don't feel I owe anyone that revenue stream.
1. People wanted content without paying for it.
2. Creators wanted/needed financial support to make and host their work.
Advertising filled the void between those two things. You can think of it as sort of a natural, emergent property. No one wanted advertising, but the way the individual actors behaved—web users preferring sites that didn't charge them, creators that didn't advertise going out of business—led to the rise of advertising.
I think that is part of why some people don't think of advertising as morally bad. No one deliberately nefariously foisted it onto the world, it just arose from the behavior of individuals. That behavior created an environment, and the environment evolved the dominance of ads.
You can use that exact same argument justify the use of ad-blockers now.
People using ad blockers are not actively trying to harm creators. They are just using the web and tools available in the way that makes the most sense for them. This is exactly the same as when they chose to prefer non-paid ad-supported content before. The system gave them options, and they chose the ones that they prefer.
Creators will in turn make the choices that make the most sense for them. If ad blockers mean that they no longer make money from ads, they'll find other ways to be sustainably creative. Markets aren't magic solutions to all problems, but in this case I think the market is working pretty damn efficiently.
People are using ad blockers because ads are bad for them. If consumers improving the quality of their own life is a problem for the system, the system should change. And in order to change, it needs systemic incentives to do so. Ad blockers create that incentive.
An argument against ad blockers is essentially an argument for forcing users to consume something toxic. Imagine if McDonald's stopped selling burgers in isolation, required you to buy combos, and then forced you to drink your entire soda. When people who wanted to cut back on unhealthy sugar complained, they were told that they're the problem because McDonald's makes most of its profit from drinks. If they don't drink the soda then McDonald's won't be as profitable and then they won't be in business. That's basically the argument against ad blockers.
But... a burger joint that forced you to chug soda should be out of business, or should at least have to change its pricing in a way that lets people eat in a healthier manner. Ad blockers enable consumers to "stop drinking the soda" in the attention combo offered by sites.
There's a world of a difference between a Linus Tech Tips style sponsored segment and some jarring ad that constantly interrupts your YouTube video to scream at you about KFC.
Same for text content where they'll insert outright scams that use disgusting or offensive images to farm clicks throughout the article.
If advertising wasn't so obnoxious, people wouldn't go to such lengths to block it.
"Information wants to be free" used to be part of the hacker ethos.
This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that are actually good.
The concept of "value" for consumers has been completely twisted and I am not looking forward to seeing where this race to the bottom will end up.
For a lot of consumer tech companies, it's less about providing value to consumers and more about extracting value from them. Between vendor lock-in, privacy violations, and arbitrary one-sided changes in service, it's straight out of an abusive partner's playbook.
This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.
Unfortunately, web ads suck. Because there isn't enough Gatekeeping(tm), I can't buy things from web ads, because the probability of it being a scam is too high.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_mLxyIXpSY
I get what you're trying to say, but here's a counter example. I have a hobby of astrophography. I live in a rural area without many other people nearby interested in the stars, much less a highly technical hobby like astrophography.
Asking on message boards like cloudynights, or reddit gets you a lot of well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level.
I'm currently building an observatory and I need input on which mount to use in my observatory. I don't have a good concept of what to buy for it as I've only dealt with really beginner mounts and I'm not a beginner anymore, and there's no astrophography retail stores within travel distance. Online advice is poor and hard to weed out those who are beginners meaning well and those who actually know what they're talking about.
However, to pull us back to what we're talking about here, I get a magazine for the industry called Sky and Telescope and it has ads. To me, ads are one of the best things about that magazine because it lets me know what options I have that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, or have any way to compare.
Though to be fair, ads in a magazine don't spy on you, don't infect your computer, don't move and steal attention and don't follow you around. But I think there is a place for targeted, well behaved ads.
There's quite a lot of HN readers who work for businesses that derive most of their revenue from ads (Google, Facebook, content companies, etc) so there's always going to be people here who are willing to stand up for ads. The famous Upton Sinclair quote is quite appropriate - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
And occasionally I still get those but lately almost all ads I see are some interesting headline that then takes me to a page with an for nonsense products every paragraph and an extremely fluffy article to tell me that dinosaurs had feathers / the Romans had steam engines or something similar.
I have sold on eBay for over a decade and at some point the desktop site became so slow as to be unusable with ad blocking. No idea who at eBay thinks getting in the way of sales to spam people with banner ads is a good idea.
You can't research good appliances either online, because the SERPs are stuffed with SEO-ed blogs and sometimes industry magazines, monetized with Amazon affiliates or other networks, with titles like "5 best dishwashers in 2022". Unless you know someone in the industry or offline with knowledge you don't know what to buy.
This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.
There's no adblocker for this problem either. Google is complacent with their fat ad revenue and monopoly on search and doesn't care.
My go-tos are sites like Wirecutter, where it seems like the hit to their reputation would be too high to be blatantly bought-out, even if they'll generally only hawk products that can be bought on Amazon or other sites that give them affiliate money. They're not always perfect, but I trust that they're trying to do what they set out to do.
The main issue with most review sites is that they're kids. Companies like NYT/Wirecutter don't want to pay old men that are experts in manufacturing. They hire kids with little life experience to review something like a washing machine. They haven't had 2 or even 1 washing machine in their entire lives. They wouldn't even be capable of doing a teardown. Let alone identifying which parts are quality vs not.
Unless of course your main qualification is not trying to find something that is built to last. Which is the hardest thing to get these days. Finding garbage like electronics and software is easy. Everyone wants to sell you software rather than high quality manufactured goods. And I want the least software possible as I'm very anti-technology for a software developer.
My research sources would be roughly in this order:
1. Consumer Reports (teardowns, can't beat this method. You pay them directly, if interested in least conflict of interest)
2. Wirecutter (good for a free source, but puts near-zero weight on reliability)
3. Amazon reviews (can find some old timers reviewing there but always keep in mind that most people aren't very intelligent. They maintain nothing and won't skim a manual)
4. Reddit (a lot of zero life experience kids on that, meaning generally anyone under 40)
5. Then whatever else you can find on the web
Looking past the bargain and location aspects, this site is super useful for understanding products in greater detail
And no, their service is not supported by ads - You have to pay for a subscription. Consumer Reports needs to be mentioned more IMO. Because even on reddit, there are companies that offer advanced stealth-like astroturfing campaigns for products/services.
The counterargument is that Consumer Reports could be intruded by corporate shills, but their reputation is solid and they've been around for a long time.
Link: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/index.htm
We can do better than CR - but right now, afaict they're the best we have.
Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working: sometimes Redditors recommend products which are way too expensive (still good quality, but the extra price really isn't worth it), but if someone recommends a genuinely crappy product, they get downvoted and replies saying "don't buy this"
Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.
So many of the Reddit threads were blatantly astroturfed.
By the way, while I have you here, have you considered extending your used car's warranty?
The top post in the relevant enthusiast sub recommending stuff to buy had no actual information, but it was stuffed with Amazon affiliate links. It was basically a "Top 5 X 2022" post except it was on Reddit instead of its own spam blog
Would you know if it did?
The second time you buy a type of tool you definitely need to go for quality, the first time though, are you certain you're actually going to be constantly using that tool?
If the tool breaks quickly, that's not usually a terrible outcome. Most companies have at least a 90 day limited warranty you could take advantage of in that case. In many cases, you can even just return the damn thing to the store where you bought it and get a refund or exchange for a better tool. This, of course, assumes that the reason you needed the thing in the first place isn't incredibly time-sensitive, but, usually, it works out fine.
Of course, if it lasts forever, then, great! But, in the intermediate scenario, where you encounter the limitation of the tool a little ways down the road, that's actually where this strategy shines, because you get a chance to upgrade to a better tool without wasting a ton of money on top of the line equipment right away. I know photographers who do this with lenses all the time: they'll rent a new lens for a week or something, go out and shoot it to see how it really works, and then determine whether they want to commit to it. $100 spent on a lens rental has saved some of my friends more than $1000 on glass they don't need. And, if they ultimately do end up buying the lens, that $100 is $100 well spent for peace of mind that they will actually get the use out of the thing that they actually bought it for. And, I think the Harbor Freight strategy makes a lot more sense if you view the initial purchase from HF as possibly a long term rental.
Now, there is that one caveat that you need to buy "the cheapest tool that could possibly work." If you're a professional machinist, for instance, don't go buying a $5 caliper and thinking that will be good. Go and spend the $150 or whatever on a Mitutoyo instrument to begin with, because you know damn well you will need it. This is just an example I pulled from personal experience, as I needed a caliper for hobby purposes a few years ago and ended up looking at things ranging from that $5 caliper on up to precision instruments. For my purposes, the low end is totally fine, because I don't need accuracy better than 0.1mm, and it's not my professional livelihood on the line. But, if you're a professional, never trust an instrument that doesn't come with a certificate of calibration.
I've also used this strategy with good success on photography equipment, myself. I wanted a DSLR camera I could use to take pictures for hobby purposes, mostly intended for web use. I did a little research and decided that a used Nikon D3400 was for me. So, I went to eBay, found one that only had about 1200 clicks on the shutter that came with the 18-55 kit lens and the original box for $325 (tax and shipping included), and I bought it. I augmented that with a used 90mm Tamron macro lens for under $150 and I was good to go.
It has one or two small limitations that either only come into play outside of the original use case I had in mind, or which aren't really annoying enough to mention, but, for the most part, it's been a spectacular camera that I spent under $500 on, as opposed to spending $1000 on a Z50 (or, you know, gone really crazy and gotten a D850 or a Z9), and then another $900 on a new Nikon 105mm macro lens, but, for my purposes, I can take photos that are 95% as good as what I could ultimately produce with the more expensive equipment, but, I can legitimately say this strategy has saved me over $1000.
I did exactly the same thing when I started learning to play the cello. A new, carved wooden cello suitable for a student probably runs around $2000-2500, and that doesn't necessarily include a decent bow. This is also an instrument one will certainly grow out of if one continues pla...
So eventually the cheapest tool makers get enough money to buy up the differentiated quality makers for their logo with enough branding power to price discriminate, and slap it on products from the same cheap factory line.
Then, ugh.
There’s also that motto of “I’m too poor to buy it twice”, which comes into play when item y has a price like 75% of the premium version and/or you know the tool will have some rough travel and high demand, or time lost from outage isn’t acceptable. Then just spend the money on known-solid brands.
Reviews are an area where I really value specialized forums more than social media or blogs or industry publications.
In all cases with reviews even when no monetization involved, there can be a bandwagon mentality for brands and also people convincing themselves the high price they paid matters for something (even though it may not).
On that note though, an even worse practice is when a brand achieves notoriety for quality and starts making "light" versions of their tools. One example of this before they went belly up was Craftsman making nearly identical looking "Sears" brand that weren't covered by the craftsman warranty. Bosch also did this with pimping out their brand name to extend to rather crappy home appliances here in the EU. Black and Decker was synonymous with reliability in the early 80s, and I still have some jigsaws and circular saws from my dad that work great from that era, but anything from them now is arguably worse than the cheapest things you can buy at Harbor Freight.
It's an incentive problem. It's extremely difficult to get incentives aligned over a timeline longer than a few years that it might take for options or stock to vest or clawbacks to expire.
The batteries on my ~20 year old Craftsman cordless drill are finally getting to the point where they won't hold a charge. I'll probably have to bite the bullet and wade into the mess of "brand-name" tools the next time I have a significant project.
But anyhow, what happened with B&D has happened to so many previous quality brands. It's really frustrating to me.
Battery powered hand tool systems are a big cost now, especially that brushless motor have got so good. Its important to think about them as a system, like will replacement batteries still exist in 2 years, can more tools work with the same battery, etc. That makes it harder to try something and see how good it is. I agree with you re many tools though. For tools I'd recommend talking to someone who works with them daily to get a real opinion, and wouldn't trust anything I read
My best guess is that by doing this they can raise margins on some items by making them lower quality or by charging more than they could otherwise get away with. If a brand has a great tool X, you might buy their lousy tool Y just to be able to use the same chargers and batteries.
For me, anyway, as a non-carpenter, I just end up with an annoying bespoke set of chargers and batteries.
The thing about their system is the whole only works so long as they keep you locked in. Once you make a choice you are locked into that choice and won't be looking at alternatives - but if they change batteries you suddenly are faced with the loss of your entire investment and so you are likely to look at the competition and might buy something else. That makes changing battery formats less attractive to the big brands trying to get people who buy a lot of tools.
The store brands have a different motivation: they know you won't be buying them again anyway, so they don't care. Changing formats means they can come up with some tiny reason the new one is better and try to sell the next customer on how their new battery is better.
If you are not a buying a lot of tools your plan isn't bad, just throw away the tools when the batteries die in 10 years. The tiny reasons some battery is better - over 10 years might add up to something slightly better than before anyway.
After the first ones broke we asked around and received only three recommended brands. DeWalt, Makita or the Blue Bosch line (in Germany). We went for DeWalt and never looked back. The power cells haven't changed in form or fitting in the years since and we could not be happier with performance and durability.
It is like deciding on a DSLR system. Once you are invested into Canon, Nikon, Sony or the likes with lenses and accessories you are locked in but also you learn to really know your tools and imho receive a productivity boost.
For example - whenever I am with other people and need to use their tools, I have to look at them and see how they work, what buttons/knobs are where and so on. With my DeWalt tools this is already muscle memory and the work as an extension of my arm - my brain uses them as if they were a part of me. This let's me focus more on the task I want to perform, not on the tool.
The smaller brands like Craftsman and "store brands" seem to change relatively randomly.
There's also just quality of life. As a DIYer I'm not particularly concerned about wearing out tools. But still I might want to pay more for better ergonomics, ecosystem compatibility, power, tolerances, or other non-longevity qualities, rather than being stuck with an adequate but suboptimal tool that gets the job done while bothering me.
But I can't pay more to get a higher quality version of the tool, because the store doesn't even bother stocking a higher quality version.
If I plan ahead, I can shop online and find a quality tool. But what I really want is the option to buy a quality tool during a weekend project.
“You…treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”
Adblocking isn’t simply convenience it’s life-preserving.
You’ll most likely end up on Reddit but sometimes make some good discoveries.
The net-net of all of this is that I buy a lot more stuff from brick and mortar stores now, where they've done the curation, and will only carry the stuff that sells best per square foot, and minimizes their returns.
I think Google dropped the ball on their search objectives in this department. Why is it so bad at helping us search products? If I specify something with 2-3 conditionals why can't it match all the clauses, filter out fake reviews, out of stock, not shipped to my region and such?
They don't want to help us find what we want to buy, they want to sell us what the advertisers have to sell, and the two don't match. They want to sell us things we don't need, this is the reason we never buy anything from the ads and their whole industry is a scam.
I'm doing this myself before I buy a treadmill. I want the most reliable one, not the most tech features, and while my hunch is Sole is the one for me based on their warranty, I'm going to confirm with CR before dropping $1,600 on one.
The problem is that people plug their ears and put blinders on to avoid spending $30 for teardown advice from an outfit like Consumer Reports. Too cheap for their own good.
Almost everything about fridges nowadays wants to promote the virtues of the amazing new features associated with them.
After hours of searching, I narrowed it down to 3 models. All were the most basic fridge & freezer combo I could find. Exactly one of them was in stock, so I got that one.
I agree with you but there's a simple shortcut you can employ: purchase commercial/industrial models that you see being used in industry.
Gym equipment is a good example: your local, serious weightlifting gym is probably using Hammer Strength plate-loaded machines and Rogue frames/racks.
Cooking: Look in the commercial kitchen of a high end restaurant - that's where I first saw my commercial microwave being used.[1]
TV: NEC P461 commercial display - I found the model number by climbing behind the arrivals/departures board at the airport.
[1] https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/microwaves-and-m...
Huh. Trying to imagine someone doing that and not getting detained. "I just wanted to read the model number, officer, I swear!"
Other than that, good advice. :)
I feel cruel saying this but I really think it's true. Just like how most games have microtransactions because a minority of people who will spend an incredible amount of money on them. Most people are caught in the crossfire and ads just annoy them and steer them away from the product, but mass advertising is an effective way to target the minority who ultimately spend enough on the product to offset the cost.
On the other side of the spectrum: using the Instagram app was the first time in my life I felt positive about the ads I was being shown. I was shown ads for microdosing psilocybin (it's legal here) which blew my mind hahah. It's almost like I got through the uncanny valley and into the other side where ads are actually relevant!
Pretty weird since I almost never use Facebook. But I use Google, GMail and YouTube all the time ... and yet, the YouTube and Google Ads really suck! (They seem to be based on IP address rather than identity: I keep getting shown stuff that's obviously based on my housemate's browsing.)
To be clear there was still the gross undercurrent of "okay, why the hell do they know that?" but it was nice to see it actually working as intended for once.
In the case of electronics and photography gear it takes a huge amount of reading between the lines to interpret reviews even assuming the reviews are honest.
For instance at the Best Buy website there is a review for a photo printer where the user posted photographs of utterly ruined prints they made on this printer. Well, I've made prints like that too when I put the paper in upside down. That's what happens when you put the wrong side of the paper in.
A decade ago the story about Sigma lenses on Canon bodies was that 90% of them were OK but 10% were defective in subtle ways (like the autofocus doesn't quite lock on) Sigma on Sony today seems to be better. When you're reading reviews though you have to guess "did this person get a bad instance of the product or did this person have the wrong expectations for how this was supposed to perform."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvbusjDOspQ
Oh this heinous shit is not just limited to cheap tat. Samsung will happily sell you their highest end TVs for four figures with unremovable banner ads in the source menu.
How many UX designers just give into client demands, how many devs work extra hours to make up for bad management practices? How many managers are under pressure over sales created deadlines? How many sales people are under pressure over the company's target numbers?
There will always be a few people who are willing to put their neck on the line but it'll require a culture shift before any momentum builds up and most feel comfortable protesting these practices at their workplace.
But developers don't control what marketing put in their sweet Google Tag Manager container(s).
When I was younger I felt bad, but I also had no money.
Now I get frustrated when I can't give a website I like and want to support a reasonable amount of money...
Of course, if they feel their website is worth $120/year and I feel it's worth $10/year, there's a problem, but thats their business decision to say ad-free costs that much regardless of your level of consumption or desire for the content
The amount of guilt I feel about ad blocking is equal to the amount of guilt advertisers feel about bothering me with their ads.
Not GP, but when I think about the negative consequences of BAT, I'm thinking about the user and society overall, not necessarily the website owner in specific.
Monetizing attention is dangerous, and I think we should be a lot more careful about when we do so, as opposed to monetizing attention being the default way we fund everything online. BAT is in many ways less harmful than existing advertising networks, but it's still trying to find a way to ethically commoditize otherwise private attention/focus on what we read/see, and I think that the omnipresent commoditization of that attention/focus across society is harmful regardless of whether or not it's invasive or collects PII and regardless of whether or not users get paid for selling something that we shouldn't encourage them to sell. I think that this has an effect on how humans process the world, I think it has an effect on how much energy we're willing to devote to different tasks. I think it has an effect on attention spans, and on what types of content get made, and the way that we spread memes/culture, and how we interact with each other. I think it has an effect on market efficiency and on what products succeed. I'm not going to oversell modern advertising as some kind of giant monster that's responsible for all problems, but I think its effects are likely more negative than positive at this point and that we can build better systems that don't optimize for keeping people hooked on consuming content endlessly just so we can redirect some of that attention to a product.
As a website owner, the social stuff still applies to me, I may not want my stuff commoditized at all. But I also recognize that users have the right to modify code running on their computer, including for the purposes of inserting their own ads, so if it's happening with the user's permission I can't really get mad at the user. In many ways I'm the least impacted person in this situation. However, that doesn't mean that I think Brave's system is good for the user or for society, and I'm not going to encourage people to use it.
My feeling is that Brave is trying to reform a system that I would like to see destroyed.
Talk is cheap, especially stories that don't pass any kind of smell test: we would not take our life into our hands by collecting any user data, when it's easy to discover that for real hackers.
https://brave.com/data covers our data policies for baseline and optional stuff.
If Brave users opt into Brave Rewards for private user ads in push notifications (which, contra Butterick, do not belong to any page they might be near or above; they belong to the user's inventory, same as new tabs and unrelated windows of all kinds), we still wouldn't put ads in pages without both publisher and extra user consent (too many users still wouldn't want in-page ads, even if opted into user push notification ads).
HN is full of made up nonsense about Brave, in spite of all the hackers here who can verify our open source, network behavior, etc. etc. This site has seen better days.
However, I also had negative opinions of it like many people here before I really dug into it. I think your marketing really needs some work. I don't exactly know what it is - it might not even be your fault. The negative view of crypto many have has been associated with it. I would remove all mentions of crypto from your website. If people really want to know how the tokens work, they can go into the documentation. Having the word crypto on your landing page does you no good.
On sites that handles all their own ad sales and display directly, I still see their ads.
Even our response to the Snowden releases was to get Google Analytics running over TLS and to make it even harder for a normal solo person to host a website that isn’t through one of the major silos.
The art of not feeling guilt
No thanks. If they had stuck with a simple, in-line, hyperlinked image I would have probably not cared, but this is too much.
The way the ad is delivered is what is annoying and not the ad itself.
I believe this is true about society in general and has gone on since long before 2003. Almost every ill in modern society can be drawn back to some people doing their best to convince other people to buy shit from them. At this point, I think we should make a serious political effort to outright ban advertising and marketing entirely. Whatever the results of that are, I seriously doubt they'd be worse than what we have.
Indeed. Even with an ad blocker, you have this issue where your momentary attention on the internet (say by visiting a site) is presumed to have value. So anything to get you to click on some shitty link.
I don't know why anybody would feel any guilt. When cable was the only thing available, I would switch to my Gameboy when ads would come on and mute the TV, effectively blocking the ads. I'm always curious if people who shame others about ad-blocking similarly think that action was immoral and I should instead be forced to keep my eyes open with superglue when the ads came on.
> People give Brave grief over BAT
Many people are against crypto-currency with no reason other to be contrarian (or they just really, really, really love JP Morgan/Chase). BAT is not even required to be used to use Brave...
I have mixed opinions on where the ad-blocking layer should live (I generally think at the router level), but there are some undeniable benefits to having at least some form at the browser-level as well, and I think Brave making this a default was a fantastic idea.
Quick note on router level approach: without MitM and full JS/HTML/CSS runtime, can't block tracking and ads effectively.
PiHole etc. are good but not sufficient to stop the latest, and with Google pushing for more AMP borg-ification of sites' content, getting into the 1st party content that unfolds only at TLS termination and JS execution is essential to blocking threats.
Fixed that for you ;)
Like, I remember growing up absolutely surrounded by advertising. It was on the TV, it was on the radio, it was in newspapers and magazines. Literally every second page in a magazine was ads! It was crazy. I grew up with it (as did many of you).
What were the major level societal consequences of this shift? And when did it begin? Was radio just as bad in the 30's?
Are newspapers where it went wrong? Man, at that point we may as well go the whole way and blame the industrial revolution ;)
More generally, advertising is a consequence of the economic system we've (somewhat) collectively as a species decided we want to achieve our goals. I doubt the first urban dwellers expected the vast new cities to be hives of disease, either, but them's the breaks.
Tim Wu, The Master Switch (2011), chapter 5
If a site is responsible I will add them to my white list. How do I know if a site is responsible If I'm blocking you might ask? Well you just know.
Nasty side effects: journalism suffers as "tech" prospers, less well-informed, more polarised society, freedom of the press is threatened (now by "tech" intermediaries, in addition to governments), justice system competes with "cancellation", etc. via "tech" intermediary "platforms"
Consider downstream effects of all this on governance
Journalism has declined in quality. But "tech" does not provide a solution or even a viable alternative, it is the cause.
With journalism, advertising once supported far more unbiased reporting. This was too long ago for many younger folks to remember. People born into a world of "tech" companies happily accept today's lower quality "news"; many even try to profit from it. With "tech", advertising tends to support increased digital surveillance. Not a net gain for humanity.
Blocking these ads is a moral imperative at this point. I don't feel guilty, I feel proud and I encourage every single person to do it.
I don't use an advert blocker but I know what they look like.
Why? The adverts don't really bother me and I also think they're dubiously moral.
* This implicit agreement is too open to exploitation. Many people don't understand the depth of the tracking/ad ecosystem. If the full cost were explained to them, they might not agree to that exchange. I think I do understand it (well, probably it is worse than I expect, but whatever), but if the ad companies get to interpret this implicit relationship in the way that benefits them, then why can't I? I think the agreement should be explicit, and some sites do make it explicit -- they block people like me. Fair game! I'm sure they won't miss me, I can be quite annoying.
* I'm not sure I believe in this implicit agreement anyway. From the beginning, the design of the internet has been that information is sent to the browser, and then rendered in line with the client's needs. If I use elinks, lynx, or some graphical browser without javascript is that morally dubious? What if I'd like to minimize the amount of javascript I run, but selectively enable it as necessary, like umatrix?
* The underlying goal of the people placing the ads is not just to get something rendered on a screen somewhere, right? Their goal is to capture some attention. As you say, you don't read the ads. I could browse a while and train myself to ignore them too. At which point... the person who placed the ad still doesn't get what they wanted. At least if I block the ad, there's at least some chance that they'll detect that, and maybe the poor fool who paid for the placement can get a refund.
This is a big part of why the implicit deal argument doesn't really make sense. If a website sends me information then the information is on my device just like a letter, so I should be able to do what I like with it. The framing of this as an agreement between the user/publisher that we accept or reject skips over the question of whether it is even possible or moral in the first place for a website operator to try and offer an unsigned contract that removes user autonomy/rights, and whether it is moral in general for us to normalize that kind of contract.
The way that online advertising gets phrased sometimes is that you have something free that's being given to you, and consumers with ad-block are going out of their way to take more or to change the content of the webpage. But that's not really what's happening -- what's happening is that something is being given to me for free, and then the person serving that content is asking to come into my house (computer) and they're saying that they should be able to tell me what to do with the content after it's entered my house. Adblocking is the same as throwing out the spam mail from your mailbox without opening it, and anti-adblocking normalizes the idea that it's acceptable for a business to guilt or pressure people into reading junk mail.
If an industry did ever start trying to guilt people for not opening every single physical letter that was sent to them, it would be good to push back against that industry even if the industry was only trying to make a moral argument and not trying to pass laws. Some implicit contracts are so inherently invasive that they should be rejected at a conceptual level -- not merely rejected by turning down the contract, but by vocalizing, "I refuse to normalize or acknowledge the concept that a remote operator in another state has any moral claim whatsoever in any situation over what a user-agent does with information that is in my home." So we reject the concept of a website delivering content in exchange for delivering ads not because we deserve anything for free, but because we don't believe website operators have any authority (legal or moral) to set up this kind of contract, and we think it is borderline immoral/invasive for them to assert that they do. Even allowing their expectation to alter browsing behavior or treating it like a contract we have to reject gives it more legitimacy than it deserves.
It's the exact same reason why we all reject the implicit social contract where advertisers expect people to leave their volume turned all the way up for commercials, or for screen readers not to skip ads during navigation around the page to different sections. Remember that advertisers are actually the people paying for this content, and their implicit contract with users is based around actual attention -- not for allowing code to run, not for rendering the ad on the page. Advertisers have an implicit contract with us where we alter our purchasing behaviors and pay attention to their products in exchange for free content. But by and large, all of us (including anti-adblock advocates) reject that agreement and say that advertisers have no moral authority to demand that. We all kind of recognize that accepting this contract with advertisers and shaming people for walking out of the room during a TV commercial would be infringing on something vaguely sacred -- people's rights to consume content how they wish within their own homes and to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to.
But then anti-adblock advocates try to draw a line saying that it's OK for a user to ignore advertising unless a user-agent helps them. That just doesn't really make any sense, it doesn't make sense to say that pressing a button to mute a TV is morally better than having the TV press the button itself; both outcomes are exactly the same. The only place to draw that line that stands up to scru...
Do I think it's fine to walk away during an advert break on a US TV station or to mute? Yeah that's fine.
Can you cut up your magazine and reconstruct it with the advertising pages removed? Yeah fine.
Both are different from advert blocking because of the automation and the specific targeting of the workaround. I think that's where it crosses into not as morally reasonable.
I think it's also just a huge faff to run custom software in your browser just to avoid seeing some adverts.
I think that's a really arbitrary line. Screenreaders skip ads. Scrapers/apis skip ads. There isn't a clear division between an automated tool and a tool with manual intervention.
In some ways this feels like the same legalism that popped up in spam phone calls where to get around auto-dial rules businesses would have someone on their end sit in a room and press a button over and over to complete the call. In the exact same way, we could imagine a version of Ublock Origin where every time the page loads it comes up as a blank screen, and then I hit a button on my keyboard, and then the screen renders without ads. I don't think that advertisers would see a difference between those systems.
Remember that from the perspective of the advertiser -- the person actually paying for the content -- you walking out of your room during a TV commercial and a piece of software skipping the TV commercial are the same thing. The advertiser does not see a distinction between those actions because the advertiser is not paying for content in exchange for the privilege of streaming data to your computer, the advertiser is paying for content in exchange for your attention.
It is weird to me that people are able to latch on to the idea that ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts, but don't view circumventing advertising through other means as stealing money from advertisers. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that when we say that it's fine for people to block content manually but not using user agents, what we are effectively saying is that it's fine for them to ignore ads as long as they're not particularly good at ignoring them. But even that isn't a great argument.
Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages? What if I make a machine with image recognition that does the same thing? It just doesn't make sense to say that ad blocking is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient, and then it becomes immoral.
Yeah - we're talking morals!
You won't find a mathematical equation to define the moral line.
> ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts
Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing, I just think it's morally dubious. I didn't say anything like I thought it was criminal.
> Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages?
I think so yes.
> It just doesn't make sense to say that something is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient
Well yeah, again it's morality, it's human and fuzzy.
Automation is often a line for morality. Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.
This isn't some kind of new idea.
Not for arbitrary reasons though, there are tangible effects from automation that we worry about in those systems. We draw distinctions because there are parts of the manual process that we can point to as valuable.
We worry about automated weapons because they take a safety check out of the system. We kind of are saying what I mentioned above, that we want killing to be kind of difficult and emotionally hard to do. But that doesn't map to ads, unless you're saying that one of our goals is that we want blocking ads to be emotionally draining/difficult. But I don't think that's what anyone believes about ads.
Similarly, people don't oppose automated speed cameras because they think automation is a moral line, they oppose taking humans out of the decision making process for whether or not someone should get a ticket. But this doesn't really map to ads unless we think it's important that humans have to consciously decide to skip content, which... why would we think that? Some people also don't trust the automated cameras to be reliable. This also doesn't really map to adblockers, because adblockers aren't being used by other people to make decisions about you.
----
> Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing
I should phrase this differently, that's totally my bad.
I can't think of any way of defining an implicit social contract between website operators and consumers that wouldn't also define an implicit social contract between consumers and advertisers themselves. It is weird to me that people think it's morally dubious to do things that deprive website operators of profit, but that it's not morally dubious to do things that deprive advertisers of profit.
If we say that advertisers don't have a right to ask us to look at content, I'm not sure why website operators should be different.
She doesn't want an ad-blocker because they do break things at times and she actually likes seeing some ads and especially getting coupon or discount offers, using things like Rakuten. I know that you can fine-tune the settings of uBlock Origin, but she doesn't want to be bothered with that.
I'm the weird one.
You pay, just not with money! (insert evil laugh)
Consumers of GA may be blind, I'm guessing (confidently) Google and other big players are far from blind today.
Reddit.com is eye fucking cancer.
Old.reddit.com is consumable....
Interestingly, after a 15-year-long account I was "permanently banned" for TOS violations which cannot be determined... Reddit is dead to me. (Ill be deleting (scrambling) millions of comments... I was top mod of a sub /r/ with 1.5 million users, which is now one of the most active /r/s...
If anyone would like to buy my 15+ year old account, make me an offer.
outline.com: https://outline.com/5HuFGj
https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthan...
The person with a $50 Walmart Burner phone's experience will be a WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT from the person with the $1100 smartphone with ad blocking turned on.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
I occasionally check to see if Firefox has unbroken extensions on Android and won't be back to using it as my primary browser on my phone until it does or Kiwi ceases to be an option.
So you'll get whatever's in the B-list of ads and that may be just two.
I hate when they do this. I just leave and go somewhere else. I'm not submitting to Voight-Kampff just to see a LinkedIn profile.
My fear is I would pay the fee for no ads, but Google would still collect data on what I view and monetize that by selling me ads somewhere else.
By not loading the ads at all, it may stymie non-Google ad networks attempts to profile you.
If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.
Netflix has the same MBAs and bean counters, but their product has no ads and orders of magnitude less clickbait. Its clear they make content geared for their users, not for their advertisers. Youtube is very heavy with advertiser friendly content, and both creators and users pay heavily for that (but its *quote* Free! *unquote*)
Just install that and uBlock Origin and you're set: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin...
Some ads still sneak into my world though. My current peeve is when going to a restaurant and they have "the game" on full blast. I'm perfectly fine with people watching/listening to the game - and half the time the restaurant is considered a "sports bar", so I get it. But what ends up happening is that those major games are mostly ads. And the ads are twice as loud as the game. So here I am, paying to eat at a place and I'm listening to ads. I've been tempted to ask the server if we'll be receiving a discount for listening to each ad like a mobile game!
I wish more of these places would have CC on. Especially if multiple programs are on, you can't have the audio. There's a solution right there, built right in, just waiting.... page in the conversation about how accessibility can be useful to more than just the immediately disabled.
Unless the volume is turned up annoyingly loud, I find the visuals to be the annoyingly loud part: The subdued hues of the painted walls, tile floors, and wood trim reflecting back to my eyes from the ambient lighting are invisible compared to the 500 nits of flourescent colors jump cutting back and forth.
Turning on CC but leaving the visual assault in place doesn't help my eyes much. I would feel less abused if they'd turn the screen off but leave the game audio over the radio.
If I'm just there to eat, one TV is no big deal to me, but the TV Wall is definitely a distraction.
But at least don't try to have the audio on. As technically nifty as some of the restaurants are that try to have per-table speakers or a streaming option are, CC is still less obtrusive to me.
But of course everyone's mileage will vary.
Get a TV-B-Gone.
But I guess there is no law that says that patrons should be shielded from ads. And I don’t think they would listen if I gave them a complaint (why would they give up a source of revenue?). So I don’t know what can be done about it short of a concerted effort by many members. And they (and myself) would probably not be motivated enough to go to that level of effort just to get rid of some irksome ads.
Note: I tried a few google search to find accurate data, but it goes all over the place; is there an accurate estimation somewhere?
(anti ad blocker leads to anti anti ad blocker)
Most of the time it's journaldemontreal.com (and other Quebecor-related websites) that prevents me from reading their articles with my adblocker. Which is a blessing in a way, because it's basically a glorified tabloid with a lot of articles of dubious quality.
I'm on Firefox with both AdBlockPlus and uBlock Origin.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...
Of course this isn't 1:1 parity in reality, but the ultimate manifestation of ad blocking is that.
Google had a good system a few years ago that I was probably the only sucker who paid them for it (and probably why they stopped it). You could pay a chosen amount monthly, and they would not show you ads as a result. It wasn't perfected, but the concept was good for those who understand the problem and want to work towards a solution.
I payed $5/mo and they would roll over unused funds. It worked pretty well, except that it would still show where the banners were, just blank whitespace instead of an ad.
Some things about our brain we just can't change: we like things we've seen before. Both brands and people. Recognition makes a big difference, for example in arbitrary choices when shopping.
This is a completely unsubstantiated claim, and also false if you think about it.
[1] https://swizec.com/blog/pirates-downfall-causes-global-warmi...
>Ad-blockers took off once they started throwing animated banners at us
which is still not true. When they took off the ads were still minimal.
The advertising industry was really aggressive even then. Some publishers put as many popups and banner ads as they could. I'm not saying all publishers would do this, but I have to admit the worst actors are the ones I strongly remember.
Only difference now is that there's a lot more tracking and ads are more insidious where they blend in with content now.
Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.
This has been a hot topic lately[2,3], but at what point is you watching YouTube for years without ads, without paying for Premium, ethically stealing or "piracy"? YouTube was buying petabytes of Hard Drive storage a day in 2012 to keep up with the demand[4], i'm sure it's nearly an Exabyte a day or more right now, so it doesn't cost $0 for YouTube to run the service, they just happen to have enough people on Mobile watching and clicking ads to make a profit[5] and subsidize the rest of us.
0: https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...
2: https://youtu.be/-znPFc-0VS8?t=149
3: https://youtu.be/6jUxOnoWsFU
4: https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube-yearly-cost...
5: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
Here's my take. It's not "piracy" or "ethical piracy" (what the fuck?). The content creators put it out on YT with the expectation that it will get viewed. The little money they receive now is simply a bonus. It's only piracy if the content creator put it out on a platform for some dollar amount (ie, direct to consumer model) and then it is later re-uploaded for free by another channel or via other means..
In other words, you can't claim piracy when the "price" is $0 up front.
As for YT, I don't really care. They are subsidized by the data that is fed to them (ie, viewing history) and resold to advertisers. They get their nut.
If anything, this should really push the forefront on innovation for a decentralized video streaming platform. One organization or group should not have this much power over who gets the "top views" via a proprietary algorithm.
Piracy in general is just 'unauthorized use'[0]. YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy. The only reason there's no consequences for adblock are because (A) it'd be bad optics and bad PR to sue regular viewers, and (B) YouTube sees the value of subsidizing those who block ads as a plus, since it means they can keep their tight grip on where 'everyone' goes to watch videos and thus where creators are required to upload if they want people to see their stuff. If they blocked ~37% [1] of viewers with adblock, different services more lenient to ad blockers (at first) would be able to actually attract viewers and perhaps get the content creators to start dual-uploading their content.
0: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/piracy
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30151590
Piracy is another word for copyright infringement. Blocking ads on YouTube is not piracy because you are not violating copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of) by viewing only a portion of the content that is delivered to you. DVRs do the same thing as ad blockers for TVs, but in the U.S., the courts have ruled that DVR services do not infringe the copyrights of media companies.[1]
YouTube and other Google services don't forbid ad blocking in their terms of service.[2] If they did, there would be an uproar because Google itself includes an ad blocker in Chrome, which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads.[3]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business-us-cablevision-cour...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms
[3] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/7632919
I've seen it block Google ads a few times on this one website which cycles through them every minute. It says the ad 'used too many resources and Chrome has killed it'.
Taking advantage of you, by manipulating your mind is one of the basic premises of ads.
In some ideal 'fair' world ads would just present information for you to make rational choices - but nope, the reality is the ads industry is based on emotional/psychological manipulation. If you seek to understand you can research about the evolution of the industry since the time of Freud where they co-opted psychological techniques to sell things by exacerbating people's psychoses.
Put another way, your arguments would only make sense if the advertisers played fair but they are abusive and try to trick you. You can't make a fair deal with conniving.
The reality of this is so bad that it is destroying our society - at what point is allowing massive scale psychological manipulation/abuse for profit destroying society?
My post here is a bit ranty but I get upset at the lack of fair context in the presuppositions of your argument.
Also, when I accidentally open a video in a private browsing window where I'm not logged in. DAMN IT WHY IS ALL THESE ADS.
Although, I have to say that the ads on YouTube were some of the most targeted of any site, and I would often sit through them.
For those reasons adblock is a must, and paying for YouTube Premium is not an option (I’m not going to voluntarily give a single penny of my money to Google)
Sure, I’ve got CuriosityStream and Nebula subs, but not all content creators use those platforms.
It is what it is.
0: https://nebula.app/faq#:~:text=How%20do%20the%20creators%20g...
1: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/youtube-partner-progra....
2: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2... and https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
When legacy media companies sell ad space, often they do not do so through an auction mechanism but through a direct purchase model. That means someone paid anywhere from a few hundred to thousands to be on that page. That gives them more of a client relationship and so they can feel more burdened to make sure advertising clients get 'visibility' and bang for their buck.
Also, they can sell ads in their videos with estimated view/impression counts. If they autoplay, the view count goes up even if you're not watching the video so an unsophisticated ad consumer thinks the ad spend is justified.
I don't run ad campaigns anymore, but I did for eight years and I always preferred no autoplay because intentional viewing is much more valuable for what I was selling.
Use adblock.
Also, there's an option to enable SponsorBlock, which can automatically skip over ads, introductions, etc. that are part of the original video.
Vanced and Firefox's addons are two of the main things keeping me off of iOS.
But ultimately, you can either examine the binary yourself or else trust them.
One point of note is that it does not automatically update. Whether you install it directly or use the manager app, there is always some manual process involved in updates. (The manager just notifies you when there is an update available.)
Now I just recommend everyone Ublock Origin :)
Many times I have to hunt for the second half of the article past five or six full image ads and sponsored content.
This feels like a death spiral - the more Adblock the more ads they’ll put up to get seen by a smaller segment of users.
iPhone solutions seem less advanced, unfortunately, but they exist. Personally I use one called "Adblock Pro," but that's not an endorsement, just the one I tried that has stuck.
I've tried others, and they don't seem to do much. Adguard works as well as uBO 90% of the time.
I only see a difference when visiting actual malicious sites, like pirated sports streams, where Adguard might occasionally lets a pop-under through.
It's a weird situation.
I'm still looking for a block list that simply removes all video content from various franchise and local news sites. It is rarely actually relevant to the article, and is often vastly less information dense.
They all seem to implement an ever-so-slightly different player, which means manually blocking the unique element (s) each time.
Definitely a use case for a standard community sourced list.
There's no way I would use a browser without an ad blocker. Doing so is counter-productive and also a major security risk.
And as mentioned by blakesterz in Private mode I have both uBlock Origin and NoScript disabled because multiple websites refuse to work otherwise.
It has an option for disabling JS (</> in its main drop-down menu).
If you just blanket turn off Js the internet basically is not useable.
If it's at all hard to make the site work for me, I give up - it's not as if there's a shortage of websites to visit. I know when I'm not welcome.
Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.
My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really.
If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole.
You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
> If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist.
Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
I've since resubscribed as their site no longer does this. It seems so crazy to me that I tried to search for when The Economist changed their policy and found nothing relevant, other than a spate of 2015 stories about how they contracted with an ad-tech firm to determine how many subscribers were using adblockers, but the service subjected their readers to malware.
Newspapers have always made their money by selling their audience to advertisers. However, it wasn't too hard to ignore the ads in print and there is a limit to how malicious a print ad can be.
Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all.
https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads
https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metave...
You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense.
If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it.
You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing the content does not make you virtuous, no matter how you might attempt to distort reality. It makes you a thief.
"I don't how you do things, so I am going to steal your product!"
Yeah, that's a formula for a better society.
None of that remotely resembles theft.
What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences.
If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.
You don't like ads. You have zero respect for the product supplier. You consume their work product and delete the ads, using an artificially-constructed moral high ground to justify it.
The web would not exist if your world view had been dominant from the early days. Few people are interested in paying for anything directly. Gmail has 1.5 billion users. Care to guess how many pay for the service? Nobody is going to pay for search, and yet it is one of the most valuable tools on the internet, arguably the one thing that makes it work. A service like YouTube is incredibly valuable, not just from an entertainment perspective but also for learning and more. Once again, nobody wants to pay for it.
I could go on. There are millions of excellent sites beyond what Google has to offer. What's more important is that none of these services would have been built to where they are today were it not for the use of advertising as a revenue generation channel.
At a higher philosophical level, the question might be:
What future valuable service or product would we not allow to germinate if nobody wants to pay for anything and everyone uses ad blockers. Like it or not, this is one of the easiest ways for entrepreneurs to finance their dreams and ideas on the web. Given the vast majority of people will not pay for anything, the options become very few. This is certainly true at inception. Later on, as a business matures, other potential revenue streams surface.
Go try and start something like Facebook (about 3 billion users) and ask people to pay you just $1 per year. Aside from the fact that it would be impossible to support the infrastructure and people needed to run such a beast, well, nobody is going to hand you even $1 per year for the service. I don't care what features and privacy enhancements you might offer, nobody is going to pay. What's left? Well, initially, advertising. That's the only way. Sad, but true.
We don't have to like reality, but we should understand it.
How I spend my time and attention on the site is my personal decision, not the site owner's decision, not your decision, and not anyone else's decision. I don't care if an unsound and generally unaccepted ethical theory like the one you're advocating for disregards my individual right to spend my time and attention as I please. I don't care if you would rather prioritize someone else's profit over my autonomy. My time and my attention belong to me.
I don't use Gmail, and I would prefer Gmail's user base to be distributed among many smaller companies that compete with each other to provide better products. I don't use Facebook, and I would prefer it to be completely supplanted by fediverse services that don't violate the privacy of users and non-users, and don't create poor working conditions for its contractors.* YouTube is not irreplaceable either, and I would rather see a variety of platforms like PeerTube instances and Vimeo break YouTube's near-monopoly of online video content in the U.S. and many other countries. I fully understand the reality of online advertising, which only amplifies my support for ad blocking.
* https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
I have news for you. Those jobs are not affected at all. Advertising isn't going away, ever. The channels change, but advertising survives. There's plenty pre-internet history on that.
The jobs that are affected are those from the sites that rely on ad income to pay for salaries and their costs. If 100% of internet users used ad-blocking millions of jobs would evaporate almost overnight.
I'll give you a simple example of this. A good friend of mine runs a nice little site where he and his wife provide valuable and well-researched nutritional information for pet owners. They work very hard to create their content. This site is their sole income. This is what they do to house and feed their kids, to have a life. Nearly 100% of their income is form advertising on their site. If they did not generate this income they would go bankrupt and likely lose everything.
Why do people like you think it is OK to steal their work product? I don't get it. How can anyone rationalize that. Once you get down to ground reality, it's theft.
Hopefully, your friend is keeping track of the increasing popularity of ad blocking and developing alternative sources of revenue to supplement their display ads. Affiliate links, sponsored articles, subscriptions for premium content, merchandise, and donations are common monetization pathways for websites.
Reading a website without loading or viewing the ads is not "stealing" or "theft", since the site owner voluntarily provided the content free of charge. If the site owner doesn't want people to read their content for free, they should charge for it. No viewer is obligated to load or consume all of the content provided in any medium, and a site owner has no inherent right to compel a visitor to spend time or attention on any part of the site.
Typical totalitarian view coming from an artificially constructed moral high ground. Now you want to tell people how to create, finance and run a business. Most people who think this way have never run a non-trivial business in their lives and have no idea what it takes.
When companies SEO-shove it in my face and almost literally beg me to take it.. oh I don't feel entitled but it's hard to avoid. Stop shoving it in my face and I won't take it.
> And then reality hits: There was never any free pizza. And the pizza is gone. Along with the jobs and everything else it created.
So clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash that scream "free pizza" and hand you a bag full of ads will be gone from the internet? This is like cure for cancer, I look forward to it!
I must ask: Do you mean to say that you only visit "clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash" sites with your ad blockers?
Likely not. What is a far more likely scenario is that you frequent sites that deliver you enough value that you choose to visit them. This is that context I am referring to when I speak of theft. Not the useless content-farm junk you seem to want to use as a means of justification for blocking ads on the sites you visit.
If you don't like their use of advertising, don't visit the sites.
Note that what we are discussing here isn't a requirement for you to CLICK on ads and make money for them. Not at all. All this boils down to is not interfering with these sites displaying their ads and engaging in marketing to you that might result in revenue. That's what you are objecting to.
You want the people who create and manage the valuable content you provide to work for you for free. That is a remarkably shitty position to take, and I am being kind. Give me your valuable content or service --which I enjoy and want to consume, repeatedly-- and do it for nothing, while actively interfere with your ability to earn any money and promote others to do the same.
But if a site owner does choose to provide their content for free, it is not the responsibility of the site visitor to ensure that such a business model is successful. Internet users do not have any legal or moral obligation to avoid consuming content that is provided free of charge. Internet users also do not have any legal or moral obligation to consume all of the content that is presented in one place.
Money well spent, I'm sure. https://gizmodo.com/facebook-announces-its-fake-ad-numbers-a...
> It is nothing less than delusional to convince yourself that you are entitled to the entire web without paying for any of it.
I never said I'm entitled to the entire web for free. Don't try to make it seem like I'm brazenly pirating my way across the internet. There are plenty of services behind paywalls and subscriptions that I choose to support with my actual dollars.
> Do you know what happens at this end of the scale when your 100% ad-blocked utopia becomes reality? Do you have any clue?
Yes. Actually I do. I'm old enough to know what life was like before the internet. We all got along just fine back then. One could argue we were better off than we are now.
For a brief shining period the internet was a blank canvas, full of actual wonder and discovery. Seriously, it felt amazing to connect and just explore. But look at what it has become; a wasteland where 2 advertising giants waged a war of psychological manipulation.
> Along with the jobs and everything else it created.
Eyeballs for dollars. Its a grotesque machine. If it all burned down tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost. Not even the jobs you claim. (Except, of course, the ad networks, the PII data miners, the blog spammers, and the rest of the seedy by products that sprout from these networks...so, like I said, nothing of value lost.)
Great. Then, if you are a principled person and do not agree with the way advertising is being used on the 'net, don't use anything other than what you pay for. That's the morally and ethically correct stance to take.
What ad-blocker users are saying is: I don't like advertising. I am still going to use your work product and I am not going to pay you a dime for any of it.
Well, that's wrong.
> If it all burned down tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost.
I don't think you have a good sense of the scale and breath of what online marketing supports.
Simple example: https://www.webmd.com/
They have ads. Blocking them would mean the service would suffer and maybe even shutdown.
There are millions of sites like that, where valuable content or services are offered. I belong to several manufacturing related forums that would not exist were it not for their ability to monetize the hard work required to keep them going. I personally know a couple of people running these sites. They work 16 hour days, seven days a week, to keep their communities going. It's very hard work and it is very, very far from "nothing of value".
Since WebMD is providing its content free of charge and not requiring visitors to refrain from blocking ads, visitors are free to consume the content on WebMD without paying and while blocking ads. The business model seems to be working well for WebMD, since its parent company (Internet Brands) is still in the private equity portfolio of its owner, the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which had a net income of about $4.9 billion in 2020. Their 2020 Form 10-K also says:*
> The most significant increases in value of our privately held investments related to increases in AppLovin Corporation (technology sector), Kokusai Electric Corporation (manufacturing sector), and Internet Brands, Inc. (technology sector).
If WebMD, your friends' sites, or any other sites end up not performing well under a business model driven by display advertising, then they should transition their business model to one that is more profitable. A person who works hard is not entitled to a successful business, and internet users are definitely not legally, morally, or ethically obligated to contribute to the success of other people's businesses.
* https://ir.kkr.com/sec-filings-annual-letters/sec-filings/?a...
I have 600 records, pay directly for a YouTube show, pay for 5 substack blogs, I have hundreds of dvds, 500books, endless video games for multiple consoles, Netflix, hbomax, Hulu, boomerang, Shudder, Amazon, I've had sling, CBS watch, wb archive, criterion, and others.
I go through periods of Pandora or Spotify.
The reality is every company wants to charge but they all want to be on the open web at the same time.
Can't have it both ways.
I control what downloads on the internet I pay for, on the device I own.
If you didn't erect a paywalls? Your fault. Not mine.
I wouldn't bed a stranger without a condom
I don't browse without an ad blocker. Or privacy badger.
People who understand ad blockers but don't use them are corporate sychophants.
I will browse news and articles sometimes -because- they are free. If they were not, I simply no longer visit said page. I don't feel I'm owed their content in any way, and I'm OK just walking away if they decide to paywall it.
Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.
I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web.
But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.
This is yet another example of US/BayArea Privilege blindness.
It is NOT cheap in most places to the User. Including in the unprivileged-USA.
The user pays a lot for that bandwidth. Specially now that everyone will unknowingly move to predatory 5G home services but let me try to stay on topic.
People out of the Empire Center will pay both bandwidth and processing power. Where do you think all those old phones you trade in for the latest apple/Samsung ends up? Everyone is running phones that barely gets any security update anymore and is already slowed to the maximum by the OS itself. Trying to load and then display video ads is just evil.
And that is not web only, Apps are worse. If you install Apps, all of them are following the standard set by amazon, newegg, etc... you will get video ads along your usual usage. Ads in between search listings, ads in your cart! and you have to be much more technical to block those.
There's no escape paying the BayArea-cost.
I'm sure this was an answer to the article this thread references. Bandwidth is cheap and it only gets cheaper.
The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.
The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?
DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.
2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).
That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity
> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show
It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.
I have noticed when things originally on network television end up on ad-supported streaming services the ad breaks sometimes no longer happen during natural breaks. When those same things end up in syndication on non-streaming cable or OTA channels the ad breaks usually do align with the natural story breaks. I wonder why OTA and cable channels can time things better than streaming services? Are the shows distributed in different formats to the two, and only one includes metadata on when the act breaks occur?
The way it works is that if you start fast forwarding, it automatically stops and switches to play when you reach the end of a commercial break. You watch normally and when a commercial starts just hit FF a few times (the first hit starts forwarding, subsequent hits switch to faster FF speed).
I dropped cable in the middle of 2020. My recollection was that it also only worked if it had been at least 24 hours since the program originally broadcast, but their documentation [1] does not mention any such limit so perhaps they dropped that limit.
[1] https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/dvr-smart-resume
You're welcome.
I even vaguely remember this was lampshaded in Fresh Prince (?)
Uncle Phil is having a heart to heart chat with young Nicky and in the middle says something like "ok nice talk see you in around 2 1/2 minutes" which I thought was hilarious
the other hard rule I have is 'no news from narrated sources' so really no need to cable tv & have cut the cord for more than a decade now.
Why in the hell would I pay £60 a month and have to watch adverts when I can just get it for free?
Why do I have to subscribe to channels I have no interest in to get the handful I do want?
It's like a baker who pads his bread with sawdust throwing a tantrum when customers start going elsewhere.
At this point my blocklist has something like 77.614 domains blocked and I do not believe that its going to get less.
what is intersting is that I grew up with the uncensored internet and the things i found are not on the list of things that I definitly will block for my children.
Its kind of the opposite approach of a censored web for children because to be honest im not so much worried about their activities, but far more concious of the bad actors out there.
My wife is blown away when she sees my feed. It's like we've been using completely different apps for years.
What's the best way to block these videos (in Chromium)? I wouldn't mind a solution where videos are completely blocked with a whitelist, since I rarely consume videos except on dedicated video sites (e.g Youtube).
I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so.
Maybe it's an ADHD thing and I'm overstating this, but I personally see really tangible effects on my ability to concentrate based on how many ads I'm surrounded with. Even stuff like Sponsorblock, which is honestly mostly removing intros/outros has helped a lot with how I interact with Youtube. Sure there's data savings, page load time, etc... but I also vaguely suspect that constant web advertising just flat-out affects people's mood and ability to focus more than is commonly talked about.
Seriously, ask your family members about whether they adblock, and install Ublock Origin for them if they don't. If they're on Android, consider (with their permission) swapping out their browser for Firefox (or some equivalent) and installing Ublock Origin again. If they don't mind some very minor UI differences (and in my experience many people don't), then it's an immediate speedup and data savings at the cost of maybe 3 minutes of work and explanation.
The article suggests that roughly 73% of users don't use an adblocker. Some of those users are making a conscious choice, and that's fine, but a lot of them just don't know how to install one or don't know how they work. You don't need to be actually evangelizing ad blockers to still occasionally ask someone who's complaining about ads whether or not they realize that there's a really easy way to get rid of them.
I have done this in the past. However, I have discovered that most of the people I introduce to ad blocking will turn it off later. This is because some sites are able to detect when you are using an ad blocker and even provide steps to turn it off. While there are ways to get around this, most of the people just preferred to turn it off.
It's quite sad, really.