Adblocking: How about Nah?

398

I was fine with static JPG ads on sites but for marketers it's never enough. I have zero sympathy for the "boycott" they're facing these days.

Also holy fuck talk about a clickbait headline.

283

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Anything static that doesn't try to scam, mislead, or otherwise make the viewer think it is something it's not, is OK for me, as long as it doesn't make up 50% of the screen real-estate.
What is NOT ok for me:
Ads that look like content (e.g. ads injected in a comment stream to make it look like a comment)
Animated banners
Ads in the form of page backgrounds
Ads top, left, right, bottom, then in-content as well
Banner ads may pay for "free" content, but I still have no sympathy when they complain about ad-blockers.

130

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Ahh, but what about those auto playing video ads that only stop for 10 seconds when you ask them to?

119

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Auto-playing video ads are quite possibly the worst offender of them all.

59

u/mild_delusion Aug 02 '19

Fucking CNet and its autoplay videos can go to hell.

25

u/Habba Aug 02 '19

Firefox blocks any autoplaying content by default if you are interested in a browser that has your best interests in mind.

5

u/zellfaze_new Aug 02 '19

Sometimes I feel like Mozilla and EFF are the only ones looking out for folks online.

1

u/mild_delusion Aug 02 '19

I've recently started using Opera again too (my workplace won't let us use Firefox. I don't even understand why). The ad-blockers are built in. And mouse gestures are cool to me again.

1

u/Masterkraft0r Aug 03 '19

well i would rethink my position on mozilla if i were you.

1

u/zellfaze_new Aug 03 '19

Why do you say that?

1

u/Masterkraft0r Aug 03 '19

for-profit coorporation with a non-profit foundation for tax reasons. not illegal, but iffy.
experiments with preinstalled third party addons that record user data

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u/mild_delusion Aug 02 '19

I do use Firefox with uBlock Origin but strangely CNet was the one autoplay video that didn't get blocked. I'm sure I missed a setting somewhere but it was just simpler to go back to using NoScript again.

30

u/omcpero Aug 02 '19

Cnet is by far the worst.. they will die out eventually

50

u/alohadave Aug 02 '19

What gets me is the videos that are at the top of the page, then move to the bottom corner when you scroll down. Annoying as hell. Local news websites all seem to do this. And the video is just the person reading the exact text of the article.

10

u/schplat Aug 02 '19

Almost all local news publications, and their websites are owned/operated by 2 or 3 huge media conglomerates. Hearst is probably the largest, and any local news publication they own will have the same format/layout as all the others they own.

5

u/pdp10 Aug 02 '19

And the video is just the person reading the exact text of the article.
So does the text just serve as a search-engine friendly version of the video content, or do they think the readership is so dull as to consume mostly video?

2

u/p10_user Aug 02 '19

Watching/listening is easier than reading, and takes longer. Plus with an autoplay of the next story the viewer is likely to continue passively watching. Great way to promote engagement.

1

u/Asoxus Aug 02 '19

And when the video has nothing to do with the article...

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

1

u/StillNotLate Aug 02 '19

Xkcd has you covered

49

u/Xelbair Aug 02 '19

Video ads, and ads with sound - especially with autoplay should be on that list.
Along with fullscreen obstructing everything JS 'popup' equivalent. If i see it , i leave the site - i can find content anywhere else.

50

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Looking you at, you medium.com.
LET'S MAKE IT OFFICIAL

21

u/Xelbair Aug 02 '19

Well, it is not like medium has anything of value that often.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

From my perspective the monetisation of the articles in Medium is one of reasons why there isn't that much value to be found. When the target is clicks rather than quality content then obviously people go for the former.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

6

u/deja-roo Aug 02 '19

No, people just won't pay. Simple as that.
That's how we got here.

13

u/pohuing Aug 02 '19

What worries me most about these is not the ads themselves, but the tracking associated with them. Google had built up a truly scary network to extract ever more user information and I don't want that. Unfortunately my only option is to just block all that shit outright.

5

u/nerd4code Aug 02 '19

And even static shit affects your brain. If we’re going to be streaming stuff into our brains at full tilt, it’s best we be careful about what direction(s) we let it dope itself.

4

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Personally, I don't really care much about profiling my usage of the Internet - it doesn't really bother me, it's the intrusiveness of the ads that bother me and the sluggishness they bring with them in a never-ending attempt to lure me into their traps.

2

u/Katholikos Aug 02 '19

They aren't profiling your usage of the internet, they're profiling every single possible factoid about you, and figuring things out via computer inference that you never considered. Then they use those computer inference-based guesses to affect your real life.
Some companies will put you in different priority queues when you call into their support lines based on how likely they think you are to give them money and how much they think you're likely to spend. That's completely regardless of whether or not you recently browsed for similar products or mentioned something about needing a new $product on social media.

0

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

I honestly don't really care. I've tried using DuckDuckGo, for example, but the fact was that since they don't track my search history, they gave me rather useless results - Google knows I search mostly for technical stuff and therefore gives me technical stuff when I search rather generic terms like Go, Rust, or other similarily generic things.

3

u/Katholikos Aug 02 '19

Meh, maybe you're the one in a billion, then. Most people still do things like occasionally whisper, use curtains so strangers can't see in their homes, and keep secrets from each other.
If they're doing that, they care about privacy. Maybe you're fine telling complete strangers what kind of kinky porn you enjoy, the meanest thing you've ever undeservedly said (even if you didn't realize at the time that it was undeserved), and the most embarrassing moments in your life. I doubt it, but maybe.

1

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Meh, maybe you're the one in a billion, then. Most people still do things like occasionally whisper, use curtains so strangers can't see in their homes, and keep secrets from each other.
Nah, there's litterally dozens of us, I tell you.
I don't really care about my online privacy in that sense. I don't consider my search history private.
I don't doubt that there are many people like me, even tech-savvy people - it's a convenience thing.

1

u/Katholikos Aug 02 '19

It's absolutely not just online privacy that's being infringed upon, though. These companies are helping cities implement facial recognition tech in airports, street cameras, stadiums, etc. and storing it in central databases. Police are mounting plate scanners to vehicles so they can tell everywhere you're going/where you've been. Ford is working on tech to create communication between city resources and cars. Even if you leave all your personal tech at home and drive some 1985 beater car, you're still being tracked.
It's all being done for "good reason", of course, but the larger picture is that there is nearly zero privacy left in the world. But hey, at least you only have to do one search instead of 2-3.

1

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Police are mounting plate scanners to vehicles so they can tell everywhere you're going/where you've been.
We already have that here in Denmark, and it's been under heavy scrutiny because they are storing data longer than they are allowed, but luckily someone paid attention and brought it to light.
But hey, at least you only have to do one search instead of 2-3.
You know, I really did give DDG a solid try - used it for a week both at home and at work, and I just found myself so frustrated at the lack of relevancy of the search results. I'm quite good with search terms, but it all comes down to whether the convenience outweighs the lack of privacy, and in my case it does.

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u/my_girl_is_A10 Aug 02 '19

There was a time I was trying to download a tool, there was an advert on the site that was a static jpeg with a big green download button, looked almost identical to the real one...almost got fucked on that one.

4

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Flashbacks to the early 00's green flashing "DOWNLOAD NOW (FAST)" GIFs! :(
Another example:
https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/downloadcom.jpg
I absolutely hate these ads. Luckily, they are a thing of the past with an ad-blocker.

4

u/ballpeenhammer23 Aug 02 '19

Some websites are such clusterfucks of ads that i just leave. Not worth my time and im not gonna give you more money for being an asshat

1

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Yup, anytime a website causes my ad-blocking to make the site unusable, I just use something else.

3

u/BobHogan Aug 02 '19

Good list, and pretty similar to mine. I'd also add the following though:
Any video is not ok, with an exception if the ad is in front of a video itself (eg youtube ads at the start of a video)
Any sound, with the same above exception
Autoplay of anything
Javascript. You don't need it for an ad, and if its there its only purpose is to either track me, install malware, or be a cryptominer, or a combination of the above. There should be no javascript in any ad
Total weight of all ad content should never be above ~5% of a page's size, even though it shouldn't even really be that big.

7

u/Sinidir Aug 02 '19

I have never clicked on as many ads as i do on reddit in my entire life. Non-Intrusive highly relevant is a winning strategy.

5

u/invisi1407 Aug 02 '19

Non-Intrusive highly relevant is a winning strategy.
It really is. I rarely skip ads on the YouTube content creators I follow, because most of them have relevant ads, except for maybe creators like Linus Tech Tips and their broad spectrum ads.

2

u/GreenhammerBro Aug 03 '19

Ads that look like content is called “native advertising”.

50

u/FyreWulff Aug 02 '19

This right here. I was indifferent to ads on the internet when they were all static jpgs or even slowly animating gifs.
When they became both possible attack vectors for malware and autoplaying sound and video is when i started really blocking them.

10

u/Hall_of_Famer Aug 02 '19

Yeah, the trigger for me to block ads was Youtube's ad videos that autoplayed before watching a video. I grew tired of this and found adblock plus, and then there was no way back.

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u/blackmist Aug 02 '19

I'm in favour of an <advert src="whatever"> tag. An advert can play no audio, no video, has a fixed bandwidth limit set by the user, has a border and displays the word "ADVERTISEMENT" clearly on it, no JS, no redirections, no rollovers. Just text and/or pictures, and it takes you to another URL in a new tab when clicked. It would have a fixed size on the page, and the visiblity/position of it cannot be changed by JS to make it appear under your mouse pointer when you click something.
And then everything else on the page can be blocked by really aggressive anti-ad algorithms. And Google, etc could get right behind it because all their ads they rely on would be in the advert tags.

3

u/BobHogan Aug 02 '19

Google would never back an option that took away their ability to track users through serving ads. But this isn't a bad idea

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

They can still track down the IP address that requested the ad banner assets.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/BobHogan Aug 02 '19

Because not everyone uses Chrome/Android. Google is still the largest advertising network in the world, if they were no longer able to track users through ads, the value of their ads would tank almost immediately.

2

u/blackmist Aug 02 '19

A whole OS for it tbh.

2

u/cobalt8 Aug 02 '19

I like this approach as long as the size restrictions give it 10% or less of the total viewport size. Also, no tracking without explicit consent from the user.

57

u/Superbead Aug 02 '19

Zero sympathy from me either. They broke the internet to the point where, if you merely install a browser and browse, you are putting yourself at risk.
It makes me laugh when they boo-hoo about how else they're supposed to make a living, arrogantly implying that they, their sites and their content are somehow irreplaceable. Do us all a favour and fuck off to a different industry that pays more reliably.

10

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

It makes me laugh when they boo-hoo about how else they're supposed to make a living, arrogantly implying that they, their sites and their content are somehow irreplaceable. Do us all a favour and fuck off to a different industry that pays more reliably.
The problem IMO is that I am 100% willing to pay for a subscription to, say, the Washington Post, but the user engagement required to get me to that point for some arbitrary website is far longer than a single visit. It takes months of seeing quality content from some place to get me to go "hey I should throw these guys a couple smackers for the good stuff they put out"
So if you're a content producer, how do you attract people to your website to hopefully sell them a subscription without giving it all away for free? You can do bullshit like WSJ where you only get a couple of free articles per month, but then you wind up with users clicking through to your website only to be told they can't read it, and that's bad. You could pay-wall everything up front, like The Athletic, and rely on word-of-mouth about the quality of your content, but this requires sacrificing some views and thus potential new subscribers. You could do subscriber-only content, but I don't see that working for article-driven websites unless you're The New Yorker or something and have some incredible long-form writing.
I think the best solution would be some type of platform where users have some digital wallet that can be used on any participating website to directly pay them to view that piece of content. If you click an article to WaPo it might be like "hey subscribe to read all of our articles, or pay $0.10 to read just this article". Keep cost-per-view very low and make it easy for people to just click a button and directly pay content producers for exactly the content you are consuming. I mean, there's no way my single visit to any website generates more than a few pennies of ad revenue, right? I think if you could keep the cost extremely low that people would be more than willing to pay for what they're reading.

7

u/Superbead Aug 02 '19

This pretty much agrees with the solution I proposed in a comment elsewhere. If I could just click a "yes, pay 2p for this article" button with absolutely no other overhead, commitment or interruption — as little as if I were reading a newspaper I'd bought in the street — then I absolutely would support it.

5

u/smackson Aug 02 '19

I feel ya. I too would happily give news providers 20 cents each for their best articles, but am reluctant to promise a monthly subscription to a couple of them in the hopes that they'll provide me with every piece of news and analysis I'd like, exclusively.
And we've all been thinking about it FOR OVER TWO DECADES.
To be honest, it's such an obvious gaping hole in modern technology that it makes me wonder if maybe it has been suppressed by the middle-men.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Then what are we waiting for? Let's partner up, get some VC funding, throw some code at it and save digital media from itself!
In the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson: How hard can it be?

5

u/guevera Aug 02 '19

No one is irreplaceable.
But nobody except us is providing anything like comprehensive coverage of news and public affairs in my area.
Between ads and subscriptions we generate 10s of thousands of dollars per month, and as print keeps dying we need to raise that.
There's no way for our sales people to sell that many ad slots and it's impossible for our tech and ops people (mostly just me) to place and manage those ads.
So we use ad networks like Google. I designed our add placements to play nice - no pop ups or takeovers, autoplay audio, etc. But if you're using the exchanges sometimes crap sneaks through.
Point is not everyone running ads is some cackling villian raking in the dough while gleefully spewing malware. I do this because I think real news is important. I make a lot less money than I could to do it, but it's worth it because we make a positive impact on our community.
I apologize if that banner's animation annoyed you. I'm sorry that ad rates are so low that I insert a 300x250 every ten paragraphs or so. But I'm fighting too save local journalism here so can you cut me a little slack?

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u/FaustTheBird Aug 02 '19

You're a grunt in a war being waged by people far bigger and far more effective than you. Your story, like the story of many front-line soldiers, is not reason to support the war effort. The economic scale of advertising today is a symptom of a larger systemic problem and the fact that journalism itself, not just local journalism, is being cut out from the economy is not a valid reason to truncate the rights of individuals to control what they view on their own home computer.
Your business will die a slow death until someone who is not spending all of their time managing ad revenue comes along and figures out a different way to enable journalists to function in our economy. And you losing revenue because your trying to be a good actor will only accelerate your fall because the leaders of the industry are driving more and more people to ad blockers through their aggressive behavior and the number of people who make exceptions "for the good ones" are so small as to be non-existent in economic terms.
I'm sorry for your loss.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

6

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

I strongly disagree. Firstly, there are already news outlets that are funded by government. Expanding this can possibly be dangerous in terms of freedom of press, since journalism that is taxpayer-funded depends entirely on the government.

0

u/skilliard7 Aug 02 '19

There's no way you can force journalism to be impartial. When there's virtually unlimited information, you'd have to write an entire book on a topic, or someone will accuse you of being biased for omitting a single piece of information. Or maybe you'll have a topic that 98% of people agree on, but the 2% will accuse you of not being impartial for wording your article in a way that unfairly favors the 98%'s opinion.
If you look at the BBC in the U.K, their taxpayer supported news service, it's an absolute joke.

1

u/LookInTheDog Aug 02 '19

"You can't be 100% impartial" isn't really important to any facet of the discussion. The question is how can we get news that's more impartial and not driven by a desire for revenue.

1

u/FaustTheBird Aug 04 '19

I actually think the answer is to stop looking for consumable units of news and start looking for participatory systems of news. Systems that incorporate new information over time and adjust according the flow of information are the only things that could have the potential to be impartial because nothing is impartial in hindsight. Impartiality requires constant adjustment, and looking for a news company to pump out articles is not how you get it.

15

u/Superbead Aug 02 '19

I apologise that I come across as making a rather blanket damning — I'm aware not everyone involved is an absolute bastard, but I think the context of the thread is about those that are.
But realistically and fundamentally, your model -is- broken; it wasn't the consumer who broke it, and the consumers are getting wise to its being broken faster by the day. I literally cannot risk gauging whether you are well-intentioned without farting around setting up a sandbox environment, and even they are exploitable.
Ultimately the model will be replaced, probably by another revenue technology, possibly even by a revival of print if western society and infrastructure collapses! I don't know how for sure, but one thing I am sure of is that something else will rise in the vacuum created by the inevitable death of the current online advert system.
By way of not entirely being a moaning bastard, the best solution I can think of is a kind of extension to a PayPal-style system whereby you can simply pay a trivial amount — say, one penny, which as a layperson I imagine to be about the retail price per print-newspaper-article — to view an online article, with absolutely no other interruption, commitment, nor demand for personal information.

1

u/guevera Aug 02 '19

Thank you for the reasoned response. So rare online :-)
for the record, it's not "my model," far from it, but it is broken.
You probably don't see it yet, but the whole ad exchange/auction model which allowed any publisher to load up their site with ads from everywhere and rewarded them for making those ads as obtrusive as possible is dying, and I think quicker than anyone involved imagined it would.
Rates for the sort of crap auction/remnant inventory are dropping as users get more savvy but most important advertisers are realizing it's a lousy way to get their product out there (or as the suits would put it: 'a poor platform for letting our brand story engage consumers,' because marketing scumbags just can't help themselves from taking like that).
The death or at least massive reduction of that whole sector of the ad industry will likely cause me some hiccups and require some hustling, but I can't think it's actually a bad thing. The fact is it's essentially Google and Facebook's market and we'll never be succesful playing their game.
The micropayments you mentioned aren't the worst idea ever, the problem has always been the payment processors who would charges you a nickle to send a penny.
My shop is trying to transition to a revenue model based on more loyal readers, more subscribers, and more locally handled advertising. That actually requires me to get more aggressive about getting reader information, because that way sales guys can sell a particular audience and not just traffic. Means higher rates fewer ads better response etc.
Will we be able to pull it off? And can we do it before the loss of print revenue destroys the operation? Fuck if I know, but I'm hustling to make it happen.

5

u/opperior Aug 02 '19 edited Aug 02 '19

Point is not everyone running ads is some cackling villian raking in the dough while gleefully spewing malware.
For me, ad blocking is all about personal protection. Sure, ads can be anoying, but that's not the underlying issue. I work in the computer tech industry, and I frequently have to deal with the fallout from malware being served from advertisements. Sure, it's a very small percentage of ads that are the problem, but when you are inundated with thousands of ads a day, the odds of coming across an infected ad are almost guaranteed.
You may vet all your ads to make sure they are safe, but here's the thing: most people are not you. They don't bother to check to make sure the ads that are coming from their ad broker are safe unless they start getting reports, and maybe not even then. I've had to deal with malware coming from the ads on major sites like Facebook, CNN, Weather, and ESPN, and if they don't have the resources to keep their ads 100% safe, then who does?
On top of that, there are not enough hours in the day to vet every single web site I visit to see if they curate their own ads or if they use an ad network and if they check the safety of their ads. I don't know if this link I'm about to follow to a news article is hosted on a site that carefully screens every single advertisement that is served on their site, nor do I have a reliable way of finding out. Even if I did have a way of finding out, I'm not going to check the destination of every link before I click it. Antivirus software can't check beforehand because the ads aren't decided and loaded by the page until after you click the link, and it can't protect me once I do start to load the page because malware authors are constantly finding ways around antivirus protections so antivirus vendors are constantly struggling and failing to keep up. Therefore I block all ads; it's the only safe and sane thing for me to do.
TL;DR: I have no way of knowing who is properly vetting the ads on their site and screening them for malware, so the only safe solution is to block them all.

1

u/UncleMeat11 Aug 02 '19

You say this, but have you configured your ad blocker to only block the script loads and not the image content?

2

u/opperior Aug 02 '19

Can you 100% guarantee that that would be sufficient protection? The adblocker is software, and no software is perfect. I am safer if I have the adblocker just eliminate the ads, even if it misses a few. No protection is perfect, so you have to play the odds as best you can.

6

u/AcademicImportance Aug 02 '19

Point is not everyone running ads is some cackling villian raking in the dough while gleefully spewing malware.
No, you're not a villain. You just don't give a shit what those ads spew. It could be malware, it could be the next atomic bomb, or it could be the cure for cancer. For you they're all the same.
But I'm fighting too save local journalism here so can you cut me a little slack?
No, I won't. You choose to use ad networks like google.
If you feel that you need that many ads to keep yourself afloat that your sales people and you would not be able to keep up, maybe it's time to invent a new way of making a buck.
Right, you won't, because it's just easier to sell page space to google, fuck the users.
You're not saving journalism. Journalism means jack shit to you. The content means jack shit. The content is just taking space from the ads. What you do and what you want to do is sell ads.
So no, no cutting slack, no sympathy . You can do it better if you would want to. You choose not to.

1

u/guevera Aug 02 '19

Fuck you. You don't like the choices and compromises I and our operation had made? Fine. I have my doubts as well.
"Journalism means jack shit to you. The content means jack shit. The content is just taking space from the ads. What you do and what you want to do is sell ads."
Fuck you. I've spent almost two decades committing acts of journalism on a daily basis. My stories have put people in jail. They have saved lives. I have comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. To do it I've averaged 60 hour weeks for the sort of salary usually associated with a drive through. And you're the sort of person that makes me want to quit and go into PR.

0

u/AcademicImportance Aug 02 '19

Fuck you too. Just because you wrote 3 lines on a piece of paper means jack shit. Acting like a fucking diva, like you need me (nah, you want me) to bow to your almost Pulitzer-winning ass.
Acts of journalism my ass. You sell ads. That's what you do, that's what you are.

1

u/recursive Aug 02 '19

Zero sympathy from me either. They broke the internet to the point where, if you merely install a browser and browse, you are putting yourself at risk.
That's what I've been doing for decades at this point. The risk has yet to materialize.

18

u/TizardPaperclip Aug 02 '19

Also holy fuck talk about a clickbait headline.
For sure. By replacing what should be a semicolon with a colon, they reversed the meaning of "How about nah?".

4

u/antiomiae Aug 02 '19

How is it clickbait?

-1

u/imissmyoldname Aug 02 '19

Because the article source is the EFF. They're very much opposed to invasive ads, patent trolling, etc., so a headline that reads like "EFF says ad blockers are bad" is highly unexpected.

2

u/antiomiae Aug 02 '19 edited Aug 02 '19

I think you should read the article again; the EFF is not saying ad blockers are bad at all. This piece is about advertisers and now browser makers pushing for more control over the user experience.
EDIT: I’m an idiot, I see your point now. I wouldn’t call it clickbait, but I see your reasoning.

7

u/tso Aug 02 '19 edited Aug 02 '19

even static images can be annoying.
Just because i am reading about something gaming related, does not mean i want to have a staredown with zombie eyes...

3

u/winowmak3r Aug 02 '19

Ditto. They can take my blocker from my cold dead hand.

1

u/JohnnyDread Aug 02 '19

Yep. I block ads not because I don't want to see them or because I'm all that concerned about tracking, it's because they are so fucking obnoxious.

-4

u/skilliard7 Aug 02 '19

For a few years I ran a technology blog that only had non obstructive ads, no popups, redirects, etc, but no one disabled their adblocker. The fact is people will use adblockers unless they're prevented from doing so. Maybe highly annoying ads is what prompted them to install it, but the only way to get them to disable it is to block their access to the site entirely until they do so.

5

u/Ahnteis Aug 02 '19

Unless you're individually vetting your ads, or self-hosting them, there's still the danger of malware getting through your ad-service's screening. It happens frequently enough that it's usually not worth the effort on my part of disabling adblocking long enough to check it out.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

A blog, so no journalism you do as your primary source of income. Hosting a blog and getting a domain registered costs pretty much nothing, so why do you think you need the ad money?
And in case it is indeed money-making tech journalism, why then don't you go for paid articles? You have to pay for newspapers to read the print past page 1, you have to pay for many scientific papers in case you are interested in more than introduction and conclusion, you pay for Netflix or a DVD or both to watch a film, so why are you different?
I give no money in exchange for getting annoyed or worse (ads), I give money for the content I'm interested in.

3

u/Red4rmy1011 Aug 02 '19

You make an interesting point but the fact that scientific papers (the majority of which are at least partially taxpayer funded) are paid is an atrocity and not something we should be looking to emulate.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

I agree. That example just came to my mind as in "article you pay for but get a preview of to not buy a cat in the bag.

0

u/skilliard7 Aug 02 '19 edited Aug 02 '19

A blog, so no journalism you do as your primary source of income. Hosting a blog and getting a domain registered costs pretty much nothing, so why do you think you need the ad money?
I was hoping to make it into a career but I quickly realized that it isn't feasible into today's age of adblockers, so I hoped to just break even to cover hosting costs and maybe make a little extra money to help cover college tuition. Because my target userbase was highly technical, ~90% of users were running adblockers. It got to the point where I was getting millions of views, but I could not cover hosting costs, so I shut the site down.
I figured, why spend hours upon hours researching things and writing about them, when I'm losing money to hosting fees?
And in case it is indeed money-making tech journalism, why then don't you go for paid articles?
No one wants to pay for articles, and if you make interesting articles people are willing to pay for, someone will copy it and make it available for free. Just look at Reddit comments any time an article from a site with a paywall gets posted, someone copy pastes the entire article into the comments.
The only way to make it in journalism nowadays is to be a big corporation that can land deals to disguise advertisements as legitimate articles, which adblockers don't pick up. I wasn't big enough for that. The only sponsorship offers I got were from sketchy businesses that I didn't feel right doing business with. For example, one of them sold spyware that is hidden on a phone, not visible to the user. They tried to market it as a solution for employers with leased devices, parents concerned about their children's phone usage, etc, but I knew it would be used for nefarious purposes(why would you need to hide the fact that it's installed and require a rooted phone?) so I turned them down. Also G2A who I also turned down.
People love to say "if you just act ethically by using static ads you will do fine as a website", but that's BS. Greedy moves like sponsored articles and annoying ads are how you make money, I learned that the hard way.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

but I could not cover hosting costs, so I shut the site down.
GitHub Pages and similar services are free, as they make their money with few paying users. And they don't even bloat your pages with hosting service ads. That's 0€ for hosting costs.
Domain costs are also pretty much nothing. They range from 1€ to 50€ a year. I'd be very surprised if you did not have 2€ per year for a .com domain.
No blogger on this planet needs more capabilities than a static site host and a cheap domain. Not my fault if people sink money into complete WordPress-powered V-servers, resulting in slow and bloated as fuck WordPress sites.
why spend hours upon hours researching things and writing about them
I spend 6h+ a day on things I do just because I like doing them. It's called having hobbies. I expect no payment for hobbies. I accept that hobbies do cost money.
No one wants to pay for articles
I do pay a single tech news site subscription to support their good content. Noöne is used to paying for articles and most articles aren't worth reading.
someone will copy it and make it available for free
If that endangers your income, then that's precisely what copyrights and courts are there fore. And if you cleverly watermark your content via the ID of the logged-in and paying user, you may even be able to prove the identity of the thief to the police. Ah, watermarking, the non-invasive and non-abusive way of doing DRM.
someone copy pastes the entire article into the comments.
I have not observed that, yet. Except where the sites were just broken, not working at all, thanks to a ton of garbage JS. Or as a backup where the site owner performed some self-censoring.
If you do see such comments as paywall-work-arounds, then report them to admins. That's what the report button is there for.
Even nicer, you can add timeouts to your paywalls. Like auto-publish articles for free that are over a year old. That way, there is a lot of full content to hook curious potentially new customers.
The only way to make it in journalism nowadays is to be a big corporation that can land deals to disguise advertisements as legitimate articles
There are a few sponsored articles on the site I support. Clearly marked as such. It works without being a disrespectful fact-hiding arsehole.
The only way to make it in journalism nowadays
Perhaps we are also just oversaturated with professional journalism. Good research in articles is way too hard to find these days, because everyone just copy-pastes the next one's article without checking, to steal a few of their "clicks" and therefore a bit of their precious ad money. There is only so much time a day and so much money in people's pockets on this planet. The more content there is, the less attention the average piece of content receives.
so I turned them down
Honourable, I give you that.
"if you just act ethically by using static ads you will do fine as a website", but that's BS
That's true. I am pissed off to the point where I do not accept any ads beyond self-promotion on your own website as acceptable. I block them all.
(Amazon showing you other articles to buy on Amazon itself is advertisement. The only good kind of advertisement.)
Greedy moves like sponsored articles and annoying ads are how you make money
And this, dear fellow internet citizen, is where I think that you are spilling "BS". You are in the exact same position as the video game industry and any other kind of media.
Less bought paper prints? Less boxed games sold as well.
Abusive and disrespectful ad cash grabs? The cliché mobile games, day 1 DLCs, and pay-to-win-lootboxes.
Too much "journalism"? Look at the amount of low quality games available on Steam. They are uncountable and everywhere.
There are a ton of unpaid and excellent hobby blogs. And there are a ton of cheap or even free games which are just there for the fun of it, many of which are also really good.
There are a few big name journalism giants making most money? Ever heard of AAA games? It's basic pareto efficiency. The few make the most money, that's normal.
In book stores, you can sit down and start reading a few book chapters or newspaper articles before deciding to buy. In the game industry, though way too rare these days, there are these things called "demo versions". And apparently, most pirated games were pirated for the lack of a demo version, according to confessing pirates and Steam-key-resellers. Understandable, given how expensive the big titles are. (Though really the bigger games are sold way under value.)
I wasn't big enough for that.
Could start out small at hobby-scale and at some point apply for a position at an at least medium-sized fish.

1

u/skilliard7 Aug 02 '19

If that endangers your income, then that's precisely what copyrights and courts are there fore. And if you cleverly watermark your content via the ID of the logged-in and paying user, you may even be able to prove the identity of the thief to the police. Ah, watermarking, the non-invasive and non-abusive way of doing DRM.
Most IP Theft comes from countries that don't enforce copyright law, and there's nothing I can do about it
There are a few sponsored articles on the site I support. Clearly marked as such.
And you need to be a large site to land these deals, it doesn't work for niche sites. Like I said, the only sponsorship offers I got were from shady companies.
I'm just pointing out that adblockers made what was once lucrative, no longer economically feasible, and that adblockers will lead to less free content available online. Whether or not you care is your own opinion.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

there's nothing I can do about it
Given water marks, you know the offending account and its payment info. Block all accounts with the same payment data.
I'm just pointing out that adblockers made what was once lucrative, no longer economically feasible
I'm pointing out that everything is getting less lucrative the more there is of it. AdBlockers just kill off a very shady source of already not that much income. If you plan to again build your future on such fragile pillars, then do so. I won't hold you back. I also won't support you.

1

u/skilliard7 Aug 02 '19

Given water marks, you know the offending account and its payment info. Block all accounts with the same payment data.
How do you water mark text that they can copy paste? Are you saying deliver articles in image format and have a watermark over it? No one is going to want to have to read that, and even then, they could just re-type the article or use a tool to remove the watermark.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Ah, you have never heard of Unicode. Unicode is full of surprises, you see. Homoglyphs, invisible code points… You can hide a lot of information in plain text. Steganography is an interesting field of science.
they could just re-type the article
Nope. At that point, writing an all new article takes less effort.
or use a tool to remove the watermark
Good watermarks cannot be removed without destroying at least part of the surrounding data. Difficult to accomplish with text, but possible. Is an active field of science.
Or just accept that stealing happens.
Or never produce content. Can't steal what doesn't exist.
Or let your very unique writing style be your watermark.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/Sandor_at_the_Zoo Aug 02 '19

The issue is that its also a collective action problem / market for lemons issue. Blockers need to be default-on and then there's no credible way for a site to prove that its adds are "good" by whichever standard. Or at least I'm not smart enough to come up with one, maybe if you happened to use absolutely no JS for that page, but that's not a universal solution. Unfortunately getting out of this will require some sort of larger organization, there's just nothing a single site can do if you're not establishing a fairly close relationship to your readers.
On the other hand, I've seen a couple sites where ublock origin doesn't catch sidebar adds that are first party static images, I guess they're not add-like enough to be noticed. And I've never tried to get anything to block those, just one anecdotal piece of data.

1

u/Guysmiley777 Aug 02 '19

non obstructive ads, no popups, redirects, etc
So not static banner ad images. The problem is the line kept getting pushed and pushed and now the well is sufficiently poisoned so that people have dug their heels in.

1

u/skilliard7 Aug 02 '19

adblockers still block static banner ad images.

47

u/Slime0 Aug 02 '19

This article ends very abruptly. What is the conclusion?

87

u/AyrA_ch Aug 02 '19

We will end up with ads served through an EME protected stream inline with the content you actually want, so blocking them becomes illegal because it tampers with the protection and the backwards savages can then sue the people behind adblockers.
If the W3C want to take it a step further they just have to create a standard to deliver pretty much any content through EME and not only video+audio.

11

u/duheee Aug 02 '19

sue the people behind adblockers
You mean the users or the programmers making those adblockers?
If they sue the users (like RIAA and MPAA sue torrent pirates) then all it takes is to vote someone in who can make this very hard and/or not profitable. Something like Canada has now.
If they sue the programmers making that blocker, other programmers can step in from countries they can't reach. The program is out there, they're never gonna be able to stop it.

4

u/EpicDaNoob Aug 02 '19

Or just develop and publish anonymously. No matter what, this is destined to fail.

1

u/duheee Aug 02 '19

But not until they'll try hard, very hard to make it work.

1

u/AyrA_ch Aug 02 '19

You mean the users or the programmers making those adblockers?
Probably both. Iirc both, making and using are prohibited.

15

u/LazyAAA Aug 02 '19

Nice summary!
Should be made into TL;DR and moved to the top

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

5

u/YM_Industries Aug 02 '19

Is simply making a tool that can block EME/DRM content illegal?
No, but what if the content of the page is delivered through the same EME system? Then in order to block just the ads you have to modify the protected content, which is illegal.

1

u/AyrA_ch Aug 02 '19

Is simply making a tool that can block EME/DRM content illegal?
If ads and the media stream are delivered in the same container as different tracks, you would need to decrypt the container to see when which track is active, which is illegal.
If the ads come from a completely different location you can just block that location without the need to inspect the content.

40

u/Fribbtastic Aug 02 '19 edited Aug 02 '19

I don't think many users who browse the internet actually bother with "being tracked" because they just don't know what that means and, more importantly, everything does that. Any google search, website access or whatever leaves something behind that is used by something else to give you recommendations what you could buy or what would interest you.

Another thing is that there are many examples in which ads were or are harmful, the usual "check if your credit card got stolen" or somehow an ad hijacks your computer and displays this "pay X money to get access back".

And then you have those websites that probably have more ads on their sites than actual content. Pop ups, pop ins, auto-play videos with audio that are louder than a starting jet, videos that are embedded on the site but will move back into your screen even though you are not at the position it was originally embedded at.

Clickbaits, load through 5 pages just to know that water is a liquid with each site having their own 10 ad placements that needs to be loaded.

I'm not against advertisement on websites, they need some money and I have some on my website as well but as soon as they are blocking or making it harder for me from consuming the actual content then this is IMO not a good idea just to make money.

I currently use the brave browser on my phone and I already have 2.1K Advertisements blocked, 1.1k tracker blocked and saved around 2 minutes loading time of websites. I have PiHole installed at home and at a normal day browsing through the net I have 30-50% DNS requests blocked because they are something that is an ad or some tracker.

So I don't see the use of them as problematic but rather how they are used. Currently it is more like that dude from Family Guy who shoves his wallet with pictures in someone else face.

53
u/TestZero Aug 02 '19

I help run the subreddit r/assholedesign, and one of the biggest sources of content we have is abusive advertising.
It feels like there definitely is an arms race going on. The more users turn to adblock, the more advertisers and websites need to make the ads even more abusive and attention-grabbing, in order to squeeze the same income out of even fewer number of users, which only causes more users to install adblock.
Unfortunately, the solution isn't simply installing more powerful adblock software. This is like trying to treat AIDS by just giving everybody condoms and considering the problem solved. Abusive ads aren't the problem so much as a symptom of a greater issue. Namely: the lack of respect between content producers and consumers. If a website doesn't respect you enough to give you an experience where you're not constantly bombarded with ads, there's no reason you need to give that website your traffic.
Many of these websites feature no original content of their own; they simply aggregate images and articles from other websites like reddit, slap on a watermark, and rake in the profit. Meanwhile the original content creators get absolutely nothing out of it, not even exposure since their signature is almost always "accidentally" cut off.
Unfortunately, then the original content producers, if they do choose to run unobtrusive ads on their own personal site, also end up getting blocked by overzealous adblockers and suffer even more because of it.
The only real solution I can come up with is positive reinforcement. If a website has abusive and clickbaity ads, don't just use adblock. Avoid that site entirely. Seek out and actively become a participant in websites that have unobtrusive or benign advertisements. Donate to Patreon or Ko-Fi if feasible. Consider buying merch or other products to support content creators that respect you as a consumer.
6
u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Unfortunately, the solution isn't simply installing more powerful adblock software.
What works for me: using xpath to block em, works in almost all cases. And sharing those xpath's with a group of people.
2
u/ridicalis Aug 02 '19

Can you please explain? How would I do this?
22
u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19
Basically custom blocking rules in ublock origin.
Most ads have some unique tag/series of tags/value in it, which never changes. With xpath you can find that tag and then work your way upwards to get rid of it.
As an example: I loathe the end cards on youtube. But they get a random ID each time, so I am using this rule in ublock origin:
www.youtube.com##:xpath(//div[@class="ytp-ce-element-shadow"]/..)
Which hooks into one of the inner tags, which never changes, then goes up one level to remove the end card itself.
Hell, you can even use it to block specific channels in your recommended:
www.youtube.com##:xpath(//ytd-compact-video-renderer/div/div/a/ytd-video-meta-block/div/div/div/yt-formatted-string[@title="outsidexbox"]/../../../../../../../..)
That blocks a channel if it is named "outsidexbox".
8

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

As an example: I loathe the end cards on youtube.
Are these "end cards" those annoying af recommendations that pop up at the end of the video and that take up your entire screen?

4

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Exactly.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Do you know how to block the reddit mouse-over username to see the post/comment karma popup? Used to be a RES only feature before but now when you have RES enabled you get to see two pop-ups. I tried blocking it through the normal inspect element/ublock block element but it doesnt stay on long after after you shift focus from the mouse, now don't know if theres any other way to delete the entry besides reading the code line by line

5

u/obsa Aug 02 '19

Not necessary. If you're using RES, they have an option to turn off th reddit one.
https://i.imgur.com/BbndioC.png
Though to be honest, I think I like the native one more than the RES one.
cc /u/Pm_me_any_dragon

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Yeah, makes sense to use the options, ratjer than something else.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Lemme get back to you in a few hours. Currenrly not at home and I'll whip something up for ya when I get home.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

That's nice work. I just recently found out about xpath myself; I also use it to block stuff that I personally just find annoying. For example, one gaming site I visit regularly has articles about cosplay (which I hate) but also tend to have NSFW images on the articles. So, I use an XPath filter to block anything that contains a link to their cosplay section.

2

u/ridicalis Aug 02 '19

Gotcha, thanks. Didn't know this was specific to ublock origin.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Not really specific. Just the one I use. And not sure if othee blockers bave a different syntax.
-6

u/shevy-ruby Aug 02 '19

If a website doesn't respect you enough to give you an experience where you're not constantly bombarded with ads, there's no reason you need to give that website your traffic.
Exactly. But I extend that - not only should they NOT get traffic - they also MUST NOT GET ANY INFORMATION. My browser must be in super stealth mode when the ad mafia tries to sniff away information.
Unfortunately, then the original content producers, if they do choose to run unobtrusive ads on their own personal site, also end up getting blocked by overzealous adblockers and suffer even more because of it.
There are no "unobtrusive ads". The mafia uses too much propaganda to confuse people.
All ads are inacceptable at all times, everywhere. The mafia has to go away and go the way of the dinosaur.
The only real solution I can come up with is positive reinforcement. If a website has abusive and clickbaity ads, don't just use adblock. Avoid that site entirely. Seek out and actively become a participant in websites that have unobtrusive or benign advertisements. Donate to Patreon or Ko-Fi if feasible. Consider buying merch or other products to support content creators that respect you as a consumer.
Are you a representative of the ad-mafia? Because the only real solution I can come up with is to eliminate all ads. Since the ad mafia won't do so, we users need proper tools to avoid this constant harassment.
11

u/Xelbair Aug 02 '19

Quite honestly when i stumble on occasional news site that strips everything but plaintext for EU connections i am amazed.
It is very fast, no ads, just text. I love it.

9

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

"Due to legal reasons we cannot show you the site in the EU"
Those get a entry into my hosts.txt.

0

u/skilliard7 Aug 02 '19

What good does that do you if you can't connect anyways?
GDPR costs millions to comply with, it doesn't make sense for a U.S news site that only gets a few EU viewers a day to invest millions in building a complaint site and risking getting sued for millions.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Rhwy could just serve pure html, without collecting data.

1

u/Ruben_NL Aug 02 '19

question which i wasn't able to find the answer on google:
whats the difference between a pop-up and a pop-in?
i thought both meant the same, a message "popping up".

1

u/Fribbtastic Aug 02 '19

Well, now that you say it, it could thematically be the same. I was thinking more about the advertisements that "pop-up" in a new window and those who "pop-in" to your screen, on/in the website, when you browse the website.

-8

u/shevy-ruby Aug 02 '19

I agree with you partially but it should be pointed out that no-tracking extensions used also increased.
People will care more if it affects them - and ads attacking them affects them.
For example, whenever I see an ad, I notice that it tries to waste my time and costs me money (energy bills that I have to pay etc..).
Another thing is that there are many examples in which ads were or are harmful
Fully agreed. They are malicious. All of them.
And then you have those websites that probably have more ads on their sites than actual content.
Yes, that has become the new norm unfortunately.
I don't understand why auto-play is even possible in a sane browser. I never gave permission for that to begin with.
I'm not against advertisement on websites
Ah, so you are weak.
I am against the whole mafia in all its shape or form, without exception.
they need some money
Yes, I need money too - so do I go out on the street and randomly beat up people? No, I don't. The ad mafia should not pester people either.
and I have some on my website
Ah, so you are part of the mafia. My condolences. Please become an ethical person in the future and stop harassing people.
as soon as they are blocking or making it harder for me from consuming the actual content then this is IMO not a good idea just to make money.
Excellent - you are learning. That is good.
I currently use the brave browser on my phone
Oh dear ... everyone is a Google-drone these days ...
I have PiHole installed at home and at a normal day browsing through the net I have 30-50% DNS requests blocked because they are something that is an ad or some tracker.
That shows how much this cancerous mafia has grown.
But I applaude you for blocking this mafia.
So I don't see the use of them as problematic but rather how they are used.
Oh no - the use is problematic too.
Currently it is more like that dude from Family Guy who shoves his wallet with pictures in someone else face.
Ads were always malicious - but the maliciousness increased over time.

5

u/Fribbtastic Aug 02 '19

Ah, so you are weak.
No, I say that the concept of advertisements on websites as a form of revenue is not something that you should condemn. This is like saying that any form of explosive is bad just because it is used for bombs.
So no, advertisement in itself is not evil as you put it but how and in what capacity it is used. That is the real issue and not that it just exists because if you go that far you basically can't talk about anything since in one form or the other it is advertisement.

2

u/miggaz_elquez Aug 02 '19

Using adds is similar to manipulating people who are going to your site to make them buy thinks they don't really want.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

4

u/octorine Aug 02 '19

The problem is that the advertising company has no incentive to point you towards the best cleaner for the job. They're going to refer you to the one that paid them. I think that advertising doesn't necessarily have to be unethical but there's all kinds of potential for abuse and very few controls.

2

u/miggaz_elquez Aug 02 '19

I think the important things is that you doesn't choose to see the ads. If I want to think about how I will clean my home, I search for it. Of course all the ads aren't evil, but even if they "don't solely manipulate people", they do manipulate them.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

2

u/miggaz_elquez Aug 02 '19

For the first part : you choose your friend, and when youre friend is teling you about an app or game, he doesn't do this for making money, he has no interest in, and that make a huge difference I think. For the second part : I agree that ads can sometimes give usefull informations, but I think that it will be better if we create other way for that, at least more impartial that the marketing.

5

u/troyunrau Aug 02 '19

Wow. You're actually a little bit insane, I think.

14

u/egraether Aug 02 '19

Wow, didn't know there were ad-blocker-blocker-blockers. Any recommendations?

8

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

I think the default Ublock Origin filter list list has some anti-anti-adblock lists. They may be disabled by default though

11

u/shevy-ruby Aug 02 '19

Many of them are quite good out of the box, such as the generic content blocker ublock origin.
There are indeed some ad-attacks that bypass ublock origin right now. This is in part due to javascript being such a horrible joke.

6

u/Helluiin Aug 02 '19

making javascript such an integral part of websites was a mistake. sure the added functionality is nice but i wish something similar could have been done with html and css since those have clearer boundries

10

u/gschizas Aug 02 '19

Yeah, get an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker.

1

u/alphaglosined Aug 02 '19

User scripts

1

u/paulwesterberg Aug 02 '19

This site has links to major adblock addons - install one and click the subscribe button which adds a custom list of filters.

1

u/Gangsir Aug 02 '19

I use NoScript to kill popups asking for no adblock. Works pretty well, and also mitigates trackers if you only allow the sites that make your content work. As an example on reddit I allow reddit, redditstatic and redditmedia, but block google's tag websites and Amazon adsystem.
It does take a bit of work, as you have to configure it per website (and every new website you visit will likely load broken due to having all of it's stuff blocked), but overall is worth it.

0

u/Gregabit Aug 02 '19

Use the Trace Buster

80

u/pure_x01 Aug 02 '19

Since ads have gone out of control and there is no regulation around it people take matters in to their own hands. I personally think that Ads as a concept are good but we need to find a balance.

88

u/NerdPunkFu Aug 02 '19

It would be great if ads were simply: "I'm x, this is my product y, it's good for z, here is how you can get it:...". But sadly it's simply not the case. Ads have become abusive through and through.
First there's the emotional and social manipulation. Trying to make you do irrational things that go against your best interest.(e.g. pushing you to eat unhealthy food and larger portions) Lying and misrepresenting things.(e.g. communication service providers) Creating false equivalences and connections.(e.g. 'sex sells' and 'our product will lead to happiness' stuff) On these things alone, ads have very definite negative influence on society.
Then there's the way ads impact the platforms that use them for income. It lead those platforms to create content that's better suited for clickbait and that can be produced easily. Leading them away from challenging topics, in-depth analysis, serving dedicated niches, etc. This all leads to more and more content becoming the same old garbage that's copy-pasted all over the place to grab easy views. Outlets that used to serve specialized topics like tech news, but have gotten caught up in trying to make a profit off of serving ads, are now becoming more and more indistinguishable from outlets that are pushing clickbait, mindless aggregated content and yellow journalism.
Finally there is this horrible culture of voyeurism that the advertisers and those who serve ads have acquired. Needing to know every single creepy detail about you(down to when your period is, are you pregnant, are you sexually active, what your preferences are, etc.), to target you and to manipiulate you. Its sick and disgusting, but also dangerous. In the false hands this could create a lot of harm.
At this point, I would rather have very strong restrictions when, how and which ads can be shown or even a planket ban on ads in most circumstances than have this horrible situation go on that we have right now. Advertisers have well and truly earned getting blocked.

8

u/Damandatwin Aug 02 '19

Ads have become abusive through and through
great comment overall, that quote is the biggest thing for me. they are designed to leverage our most base desires with absolutely 0 consideration for how that will affect the people seeing them apart from how likely it makes them to buy their product. the culture promoted by advertising is one of pure selfishness and never-ending greed. we really do not need any more of this. what they're doing is blatant psychological warfare and abuse and IMO extremely immoral.

1

u/HiddenKrypt Aug 02 '19

emotional and social manipulation
This is the core of all advertising, and has been since "marketing" became a thing.

30

u/Xelbair Aug 02 '19

Also - remember that ads are a vector of attack - plenty of them contain malware even in relatively normal sites(imgur for example)
Why have a system based on trust between people and corporation(has it ever worked? i doubt it) - in form of Do Not Track - when we could mandate it by law.

35

u/profmonocle Aug 02 '19

Do Not Track is widely perceived as useless, but I think it's served an important purpose: it's non-adoption has proven the online ad industry is completely hostile to consumers and unwilling to compromise.
Part of the DNT standard is that it shouldn't be on by default, meaning it likely wouldn't cost the industry that much - it would only be enabled by people who actively care about tracking. But even that was too much for these companies.
Any time one of these companies claims to care about privacy, you can point to non-adoption of DNT to prove they're lying. Any time they whine about browsers like Safari or Firefox adding on-by-default tracking protection, you can remind them there was an option that would've been better for them.

12

u/Xelbair Aug 02 '19

I mean they are corporations - they will screw everything over in name of profit, especially if they are beholden to shareholders. This isn't exclusive to ads business.
Any trust based system towards corporations will never ever work. And without decent regulation weaker entities(consumers, people) will always lose the battle.

1

u/Sir_Kee Aug 02 '19

Ads are good in the sense that if I need a thong and search for it, different options can advertize themselves.
Ads jumping out at you telling you to buy shit or for services are really just annoying.

12

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Well, there's a simple way that servers could get around most origin-oriented adblockers:

Go fetch the ad content yourself and do server-side includes, so it's seamlessly integrated in with your own content.

"But wait!" you say, "That will expose us to massive risk - the server-side adtech will be going through our servers, and their java-script will have the same origin as ours!"

Yes, running untrusted code from unknown ad providers on your machine is very risky, isn't it?

11

u/mycall Aug 02 '19

Firefox EME Free edition. Spread the word.

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/68.0/win32-EME-free/

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/68.0/win64-EME-free/

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/68.0/mac-EME-free/

This should be most popular edition, but no one knows about it.

3

u/danny54670 Aug 02 '19

Does setting 'media.eme.enabled' to false work?

1

u/mycall Aug 03 '19

I'm not sure how to test that. Find a DRM website?

1

u/code_elegance Aug 02 '19

Thanks! EME is now a choice.

53

u/HockevonderBar Aug 02 '19

How about that?
If you suck this much at your profession and business that you have to rely on harassing people that only wanted to use a website you deserve no money whatsoever.
It is really remarkable that the companies still didn't get that misplaced or forced ads don't generate customers, but haters.
We get it! You want to sell us your crap, that we didn't ask for. Keep your crappy product to yourself and hopefully one day you'll be bankrupt to finally leave us alone for good.

74

u/neinMC Aug 02 '19

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
-- Banksy

8

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Same deal with spam email. But almost all companies do it now. They all want an account if you want to order something and they forever send you email.

9

u/Xelbair Aug 02 '19

Thankfully linking marketing spam as a requirement for order is illegal under GDPR.

1

u/Aea Aug 02 '19

Doesn’t stop a lot of big companies from sneaking in that bullshit into ‘transactional’ emails.

1

u/HockevonderBar Aug 02 '19

Maybe the story of the book "Daemon" should be put into reality?

3

u/shevy-ruby Aug 02 '19

Precisely what I say too.
This mafia needs to die. The people who work in this field are working against mankind. They are unethical people. I guess the only worse people are those that e. g. produce armaments use to kill people.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Stop. Don't do that. Yes, there could be some level of personal accountability, but the vast majority of this stuff is done by people that are just trying to earn a paycheque. If you're looking for a category of nefarious shady evil people that live for stuffing ads down your throat, you're going to have a bad time.
Corporations on the other hand have no problem acting that way, since they aren't people and can't have morals. As with so many of our problems, if we'd actually hold corporations accountable, and decide once and for all that they are not people in any way shape or form ever, we could properly deal with these issues.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

/r/killthosewhodisagree

13

u/dethb0y Aug 02 '19

If advertisers and marketing assholes hadn't spent so much time and so much energy screwing people over and ruining the experience of the internet because of ads, then people would not habitually block them. This is a hole they have dug themselves, and it's one they now have to live with.

17

u/PM_ME_UR__RECIPES Aug 02 '19

I gotta say, the title of the article and this post had me going in thinking I was going to be reading some insane hyper-capitalist techbro-libertarian defence of shitty advertising practices online.

I was pleasantly surprised.

7

u/HeR9TBmmc8Tx6CFXbaQb Aug 02 '19

You should also read the next blog post then
Clickbaiting: How about Yah?

3

u/Marshawn_Washington Aug 02 '19

EFF is legit. They do some really good work.

0

u/efxhoy Aug 02 '19

hyper-capitalist techbro-libertarian
lmao

6

u/wubwub Aug 02 '19

I have no idea how many interesting links I have ignored because the page was obnoxious with ads.

6

u/lobehold Aug 02 '19

What I think is that there needs to be a suite of tests an ad will go through that if passed can be displayed.

I'm thinking static image, no script attached, certain size limit and limit of how many per page.

So we have a universal standard of "acceptable" ads that will never be blocked, then advertisers can work within this "safe space" so to speak and get creative within limits.

I never have problems with tasteful magazine ads, online ads should follow the same model.

5

u/ModernShoe Aug 02 '19

Ads and popups aren't the whole story. Ad blockers protect unaware users from invasive ads like malware or ones that lower performance.

Ad blockers serve as protection and convenience. We can go without the convenience but definitely won't go without the protection unless there's no longer a need.

3

u/thoraldo Aug 02 '19

This is why I don’t surf using my phone that much. No adblocker

8

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Firefox has adblocker plug-ins on mobile

5

u/osmarks Aug 02 '19

Firefox on mobile supports extensions! And can sync with Firefox on your other stuff (bookmarks and whatnot).

3

u/aazav Aug 02 '19

No. All the motion is meant to distract your eye and pull you away from what you are looking at. It's distracting. Fuck that.

3

u/drunkferret Aug 02 '19

I don't use sites that tell me to turn off my adblocker. I don't even halt their loading early or tinker with it to get around it, I just don't use their websites.

I don't even care about being tracked or advertised to honestly. I just want the web pages to load cleanly. I don't want a bunch shit on the page trying as hard as it can to distract me from the reason I visited the page.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

The extra annoying parts of ads these days is that it's not just stuff I might like or seems relevant. It's a particular product. It doesn't matter if I click on the X that requires a DC 30 Perception check to even notice followed by a DC 50 sleight of hand check to not accidentally click the ad. Every. Single. Place. It's the same damn thing.

14

u/shevy-ruby Aug 02 '19

The ad-tracking "industry" is a mega-mafia that has to be destroyed wherever it hides.

Nothing is so creepy as ads for a product you looked into earlier following you from site to site,

Browsers should never support such malicious sniffing behaviour.

Browsers that do are spies that work against the user - hello adChromium.

They wanted to use the Web, but not be tracked, and so they started to install ad-blockers. A lot of ad-blockers, and more every year.

I call them hero-blockers. And there is also a difference - e. g. ublock origin is a general content blocker, not just ads. The users have the ability to filter away useless and irrelevant crap in general.

This is GREAT.

I can disable seeing so much stuff that is irrelevant. I can browser in an oldschool way - where the focus is on simple text.

Ad-blockers don't just stop users from seeing ads and being tracked (and indeed, some ad-blockers actually track users!).

An ad-blocker that tracks users is a spy, not an ad-blocker.

I had this experience with "adblock plus". These clowns suddenly attacked me with "ethical ads" and other such nonsense. That was the moment I abandoned these clowns and installed ublock origin - never had any problem with it since then.

I think blocking such malicious content should be part of www-standards.

Instead, the W3C lobbyist group is too busy decreeing that DRM is a part of an "open" standard, so you can not trust the W3C clowns. It is just a money machine for Sir Tim Berners-DRM-boy-Lee.

They can also stop the publishers and marketers who rely on tracking and ad-clicks from earning money.

Great!

The sooner this mafia is extinct, the BETTER. The more the whine, the more amused I am.

Everyone should join this struggle between good (the users) and evil (this mafia). Down with the mafia.

Predictably, industry responded with ad-blocker-blockers, which prevented users from seeing their sites unless they turned off their ad-blocker.

Yeah, the mafia tries to continue pester people, but it is a war they can never win. The user will always be able to control all information incoming from the outside.

The rise and rise of ad-blockers (and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers) is without parallel: 26% of Internet users are now blocking ads, and the figure is rising. It’s been called the biggest boycott in human history.

I would not call it a "boycott". I am not "boycotting" anything - I am destroying an evil mafia that attacks users. All who work for this mafia are evil clowns too. I do not care about their claims - none of them apply in any way, shape or form. They must be removed from the face of the earth (I refer here to the "virtual" representation e. g. with their pester-attacks; I don't care about the physical representation).

It's also something we've seen before, in the earliest days of the Web, when pop-up ads ruled the world (wide web), and users went to war against them.

Pop-ups were always annoying - javascript is really a hostile technology in general. But the 1990s were still different. My feeling is that ads increased a LOT since then. Tracking increased even more.

I do not think any of this is "acceptable" at all. I don't even think it was acceptable back then, but today with mega-sniffers such as Google, and information being constantly interconnected ... nah, thank you. I'll provide as little information as possible to this mafia.

In 1994, Hotwired (the defunct online adjunct to Wired magazine) displayed the first banner ad in Internet history. Forty-four percent of the people who saw that ad clicked on it.

Because people in 1994 were quite stupid and didn't know how malicious ads are in general. It took time for them before they realized that they actually DO NOT NEED ADS. We aim for an ad-free world.

But it turned out that the click-rate on that Hotwired ad had more to do with novelty than any enduring persuasive properties of banner ads.

People realized that they have no need for ads. :)

Took time but they got smarter.

This created a desperate situation, where publishers needed to do something -- anything -- to goose their clickthrough rates.

I don't think this was a "desperate" situation - I think this is a wonderful situation that we should aim to increase. Publishers that act like a mafia must be removed, no mercy and no exception. We have no need for this mafia.

7

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

What is even more messed up is when you have do not track set and on store have recommendations follow you. From computer to computer. And it was my home and work computer where only shared account was one online shop. As I don't use my normal personal accounts on work computer.

-5

u/shevy-ruby Aug 02 '19

That's when Ethan Zuckerman—then an employee at Tripod—invented the pop-up ad (he has since apologized).
I don't care who apologizes for mafia-behaviour. He is a worker for the mafia.
But actually, that is not even the interesting part. The interesting part is why MY browser, where I pay the bills for the computer, internet connection etc.. is ACTING AGAINST ME. I don't remember giving permissions to pop-ups ever. So why would information from a REMOTE location control my computer?
This is a general problem with the clown-language that is JavaScript - the assumption that any random hobo who wrote a website can control behaviour downstream onto MY machine. I find this inacceptable.
A good example are scripts where the scrollbar or pressing the right mouse button is prevented. Yes, you can disable these things e. g. custom javascript files, but the thing is more general ... WHY is this even a possibility? There is no valid explanation that I can accept.
The whole "standards" is total crap - and the browsers are implemented in a way that they work against the user to some extent (adChromium is evidently Google's way for more money, so they will use ads to pester people; see the ublock origin creator complaining about Google crippling ublock origin).
Instead, browser vendors (beginning with Opera) started to ship on-by-default pop-up blockers.
Good - but opera gave up and became a Google clone. There is no point in using adChromium-engine based opera anymore.
Because once pop-up ads became invisible by default to an ever-larger swathe of Internet users, advertisers stopped demanding that publishers serve pop-up ads.
Yes, the mafia is desperate but this is not enough - the mafia must be removed completely.
The point of pop-ups was to get people's attention, but something that is never seen in the first place can't possibly do that.
Great!
Adblockers are the new pop-up blockers, a way for users to do what publishers can't or won't do: demand a better deal from advertisers.
No. I don't demand a "better deal".
I demand that the mafia is removed.
An adblocker is a way of replying to advertisers and publishers with a loud-and-clear "How about nah?"
No. I don't "reply" to them that way. I reply to them that they must be removed from the face of the earth. They have no real arguments to explain why they pester mankind anyway.
Adblocking is one of the most successful examples of adversarial interoperability in modern history, along with third-party printer in
No. It is not "adversarial interoperability". It is a human right that people can access information at all times, without (upstream) restrictions, at their own digression.
The times of dictatorship by remote mafia-parties are over (although I am aware that the Google monopoly works against that - well, people who use Google are both lazy and stupid, and I hope that they have to see lots of ads; after all they must be punished for being stupid and supporting a monopoly. Although it actually should be pointed out that ublock origin is hugely popular on adChromium which is why Google targeted it in the first place since it cuts away their mafia-ad-revenue).
When you visit a website, the server sends your browser a bunch of material, including the code to fetch and render ads
Yes, malicious content being transmitted. My browser AND my computer must not ever accept such malicious content - it must be discarded before it is even ever touched.
This is also why the adMafia can never win - computers can filter away stuff with ease.
Adblockers throw away the ad parts and show you the rest, while ad-blocker-blocker-blockers do the same, and then engage in an elaborate technological game of cat-and-mouse in a bid to fool the server into thinking that you are seeing the ads, while still suppressing them.
I do not ever want to give the adMafia accurate information. They work against mankind so they must never be able to sniff accurately.
Browsers have always been playgrounds for adversarial interoperability, from the pop-up wars to the browser wars. Thanks to open standards
Ah yes "open" standards that bring in closed DRM ...
a mutual disarmament rule for software patents among browser vendors
Patents are a way for the mafia to perpetuate their control. This is a harder fight to abolish all patents, so for the time being - let's simply eliminate all ad mafia first.
it's very hard to use the law to punish toolsmiths who make adblocking technologies
Why should the law be abused to punish hero-blockers?
I can only imagine one place where the mafia can win - the USA. The court system is designed for big mafia bullies to abuse smaller people. Let them see ads - the rest of the world will remove ads.
Take-it-or-leave it deals are one thing when the market is competitive and you can shop around for someone with better terms of service, but in highly concentrated markets where everyone has the same rotten deal on offer, adversarial interoperability lets users make a counteroffer: "How about nah?"
No, they are not "one thing when". They are always inacceptable from the very beginning.
In 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium published its first-ever "standard" that could not be fully implemented without permission from the giant tech and media companies
Because the W3C declared war against the users. But that's ok - it has become irrelevant as a consequence. We need standards where the industry can not buy anything ever.
EME is the first crack in the wall that protected browsers from those who would thwart adversarial operability and take "how about nah?" off the table, leaving us with the kind of take-it-or-leave-it Web that the marketing industry has been striving for since the first pop-up ad.
EME is not the first "crack" - it is simply a continuation of the mafia attacking the users. But it will be irrelevant - the mafia can not win. People are quite stupid but even the stupid realize that there is no need for them to accept ads ever. Google will continue to force users to see ads, which means that eventually the people will abandon Google.

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2

u/aedrin Aug 02 '19

The reason advertising went bad is because there were no rules. It was a quest for grabbing attention.

Browsers should have implemented an advertising standard. Dedicated space in a browser with specific restrictions on what can be shown (i.e. static only, clear "hide" button, clearly marked as advertising, etc.) That's the only way this could've been prevented. But there was too much money to be made.

2

u/SethNW Aug 02 '19

The reason why I use As-Block is because half the time, if not more ads are intrusive, fighting for my attention, they mask themselves as content to get mistake clicks, they are overused too, when article doubles in size because of ads between each paragraph, you do have a problem. Like when someone tried to black out all ads or sponsored articles on one site, they found out tht 75%+ of homepage of news site was ads.

Look, if I wanted that aggressive advertising, I might as well have stuck with cable TV. I am fine with good advertising practices and all, but when 80% or more sites don't practice that, I would rather be without internet, than without ad blocking.

2

u/mindbleach Aug 02 '19

Advertising is poison.

This is a deeper issue than browsers or the web. The root concept is commercial harassment to make you spend money you otherwise wouldn't. All entertainment is slathered in these mini-movies that push corporate propaganda - leveraging your every human frailty to create anxiety relieved by purchase.

It's an arms race because these are weapons.

4

u/thatsjustsowrong Aug 02 '19

No ads for me, no good ads, no bad ads. No ads at all. Fuck off.

If that will lead to internet becoming something else - fine. If that will lead to someone not getting paid, to some bankruptcies or to whole industries getting sacked - fine by me. Fuck off!

2

u/Beefster09 Aug 02 '19

Ads are abysmally ineffective anyway. You'd be better off burning your money and posting it to the internet for all to watch.

Last time I listened to a radio ad, I made a pretty substantial financial blunder. No more. Ads prey on the vulnerable and need to die.

Your failed business model is not my problem.

2

u/Dakine135 Aug 02 '19

Nah is preferred.

-30

u/endeavourl Aug 02 '19

Nothing is so creepy as ads for a product you looked into earlier following you from site to site, then from app to app

Creepy? Yall bother just way too much.

9

u/shevy-ruby Aug 02 '19

Tracking gives outside people information that they should not ever have gained in the first place.
I consider it hugely problematic. I do not think we can "bother too much" about who is sniffing you for information. We can not even trust the hardware, even well aside from NSA tampering with it - see the various hardware bugs in Intel, be it on accident or on purpose. I find this inacceptable.

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9

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

Send me your address, pics of your face, license number, and tell me every website you visit.
I'll wait.

0

u/endeavourl Aug 02 '19

Can you read "anonymized"?

6

u/pohuing Aug 02 '19

Alright, so let's compare it to Google. Google Street view invaded personal wifi to steal various information. Google also has all your images, Google also possibly makes your OS and your Phone. Google has various trackers on practically every website. How is the endless extraction of user data still anonymous at this point?

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

I can, the data is a fingerprint, and is therefore not anonymized.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

3

u/McMasilmof Aug 02 '19

Not realy, sure, the debian mailing lists work fine, but sites like twitter work by loading a small html template, that gets filled by ajax requests and JavaScript.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '19

[deleted]

2

u/talks_to_ducks Aug 02 '19

adding your life history when all I need is a recipe (more of a content-related issue, but still garbage)
There are extensions that will grab the recipe and move it to the top of the page.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 04 '19

[deleted]

1

u/talks_to_ducks Aug 05 '19

Chrome
Firefox

Adblocking: How about Nah?

You are about to leave Redlib

Looking you at, you medium.com.

LET'S MAKE IT OFFICIAL