I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.)

So I hope your manager did their cost-benefit well. I don't know too many publishers in a position to be selective about their readers. But I suspect I know who you're talking about, and won't personally won't miss any of their properties.

GitHub is free, but definitely not open source (and has never pretended to be).

Yep, there are lots of major news websites I dont visit at all. I know they are going to have an annoying autoplay video.

I'll skip to the comment section.

If the site is supported by ad revenue and you actively refuse to permitany ad revenue is it really a loss to the publisher if you leave?

https://www.reddit.com/r/choosingbeggars would enjoy discussing that proposition.

Yes, they probably should. It works in the retail world. Shop owners are usually happy to have non-paying customers in their store, and restaurant owners usually happy to have low-paying customers (i.e. they don't buy very much), to make sure their establishment "looks busy". Having a store or eatery with few or no customers is bad: it "looks dead" and can either scare away customers, or just not bring as many in. People are social creatures; when they see a lot of people in a place, they think that it must be popular for a reason, so having some customers brings in more customers, and some fraction of those customers will pay (or pay a lot more than the average), making the establishment profitable overall.

Internet publishers need to figure out a better business model if they one they have isn't profitable enough for them. Other businesses have long recognized that not all customers are equally profitable, and some aren't profitable at all, but they figured out how to make things work.

Until internet publishers reach that conclusion themselves, is it OK to force a different business model on them? To be clear, that "business model" is "I don't like the form of payment this business is asking for, so I'll take the merchandise for free instead."

When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.

If the store doesn't want to give merchandise away for free, then they should stop doing that. When I make an HTTP request, it's just that: a request. Their server can either respond with the page, or not (or a different page). It's my business what I do with the code that the server sends me.

>When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.

Poor analogy. These websites aren't actually selling you stuff, they're giving away stuff for free, and hoping you'll look at the ads.

If I go into a store that's handing out free samples along with a stack of paper advertisements to look at, and I take some samples and decline to take the ads (or I promptly drop the ads into the trash can), that's the store's problem, not mine. I have no obligation to look at their ads. It's the business's responsibility to come up with a workable business model.

Do you mind if i hide all this shit while bying stuff on Amazon?

I use about 5 non-commercial services which may show ads (don't know whether they do or not and not gonna disable adblocker to check). I would happily pay 10€-15€ per month for this services, if there would be good save annonymes payment service. I don't want to send my utility bill to paypal or give away my credit card number. Maybe crypto would be a possibility.

If, for a random example since it's the one coming to mind, Marco Arment runs with an ad blocker (which he almost certainly does because he developed an early one for iOS) do you want him linking your piece? Unless you are one of the biggest news sites, you probably do. You might even be happy even if he linked it entirely to savage it.

On the other hand, do you want me? Probably not, I don't have that much reach.

Problem is figuring out who you've got, and even whether they're likely to offer that.

You can still see cases where publishers choose to not show stuff to anyone, but that's an artifact of imperfect ability of the publisher to discern between customers that would pay and the customer's that wouldn't -- they don't want to make a mistake to disincentivize someone able to pay from paying. You can see when they try and allow access from FB shares for example.

This makes it completely different from asking actual people for free work: person's price of time is expensive and it's rarely useful to give it away.

However, it does appear impossible to criticize technical and/or business decisions without being accused of enslaving web developers.

Even now with an ad blocker many videos autoplay. I bounce immediately once I see a video being loaded.

I have serious doubts that it works out that way, but hey, they are free to use whatever signal they want for whatever purpose they choose. And we don't know their identity - who knows, perhaps running a low-pass filter on their audience's technical sophistication actually makes sense for them.

User Experience Tip: When I go to a site to read your article, I want to read your article. Not the pop up to subscribe to your newsletter. Not the side bar of related click bait articles. Not the ads you've sprinkled in every other paragraph. If you do this, your UI is already poor & not optimized. That's why people are using other tools to fix your UI.

And no, I don’t want to install your frakking app. I will NEVER install it, so please stop asking me on every visit.

User-hostile design pervades online media, and they wonder why people use ad blockers. Hell, ad blocking isn’t even enough. Most of the time, I end up manually hiding all the useless clutter on news sites to make them actually usable.

This is so annoying. Especially on sites where I already subscribe.

I put up with this for years because I do believe that websites need a way to support themselves. But then a Forbes ad tried to download a virus.. and then I got another ad like it on WashingtonPost. These are big, dull websites.. the last place I would expect that.

I've been on the internet since the 90s. The ads have never been so aggressive (autoplay videos, in particular) or dangerous. I disabled adblock 6 months ago temporarily, and some sites are so loaded down with ads, my browser was unresponsive at points.

I now recommend everyone install ad block. I consider it similar to antivirus software in Windows. What else can I do? I really feel forced to do it. But they refuse to police themselves. It's gotten completely out of hand.

... and then popup blockers were invented.

Which is a good point -- advertisers abused a privilege (ability to open a window), and internet users adapted, their business model adapted, and they survived it just fine.

The same thing needs to happen again. I really feel it's the advertisers/websites that have once again abused a privilege. If they can't make money, they should look at themselves. No one signs up for internet service to check out the latest ad blockers. Users install them because they have to (just like why they installed popup blockers).

Long story short, it uses HTML5 and flash exploits to put a hundred popups of various porn shock images alongside blaring over the speakers "HEY EVERYBODY IM LOOKING AT GAY PORN"

Unless you: ban flash, ban popups, and ban Java; you are going to have a bad time, and necessitate in rebooting to get it to stop.

I consider it a good tool to check for client browser hardening. Just beware, if you do search for it, it's absolutely NSFW. (Will not provide links)

I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malware. I even miss advertising because I'm not exposed to things I might otherwise be interested in, but I won't accept it in the current form.

Google had the idea to monetize search based on the hypothesis that if people are searching then they're looking to buy something. That didn't really work out: conversion rates are super low, even for free stuff- apparently less than direct mail. So things got more and more intrusive. And spammy. It's time to stop. It's really really time to stop.

In which country?!?

I hardly see any regular TV because in 30m show, 20m are advertisements, and the remaining 10m have lots of product placements.

Instead, a computer ad costs you money for bandwidth, can be intrinsically annoying (e.g. playing sounds or manipulating the browser), and poses a direct risk of serious harm (malware, subscriptions, snooping/tracking, etc.).

There was a medium post here a few days ago about the eponymous extension "Adblock". Adblock offered advertisers a paid program ("Acceptable Ads") where their ads would be vetted and whitelisted. The blog post focused on the ethical and legal quandry of double dipping income (users and advertisers) but what you're talking about isn't unheard of.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997272

Maybe that model won't work for some reason, I'd like to see some publishers talking about it though! It's either full on the google/fb tracking train or expensive monthly paywall.

I for one, wouldn’t pay $20 for a month of Bloomberg, never mind $40. I won’t really miss them either. If Buzzfeed puts up a paywall... ok that’s fine, good even! Of course this assumes that people don’t just rapidly figure out ways to pirate content, and they will. Try to track me, I’ll use uMatrix. Try to paywall me, and I’ll remember how little you’re worth. The NYT and FT can paywall, and a few others are worth the money... most aren’t. How many sites would you be willing to pay for rather than just forget exist in a week?

There’s always piracy lurking in the background, waiting for companies to be venal or stupid enough to make the hassle of pirating less onerous than the legal option.

Unfortunately, that may also prove to be a tragedy of the commons. If everyone blocks ads aggressively, ad-funded resources will need to find new business models or they won't be available any more.

I mean noone, absolutely -noone-, foresaw this coming nor warned about the slippery slopes of letting stuff like this into the standard in the first place.

Nope. Absolutely noone. This was a genuine surprise to all of us.

Unlike EME, there's a far stronger argument of "the web has survived without this for 25 years" (and yes, for better or for worse, I consider a plugin with over 99% market penetration as part of the web), and I think that still holds weight.

For mobile, the only remaining options are silos.

And the problem of all this wasn't just that the end product was ruined. It also played a significant role in the exodus of multiple skilled developers that were sick of toiling away at stuff that would end up ad- and tracker-riddled monstrosities. Just that struck me as reason enough to stop blindly doing all that.

That's why we need to educate users, just like we're doing now about Facebook. They need to understand that this is the worst scenario possible for the so-called "world-wide web".

So you are on board with Google's acceptable ads initiative then?

What I find frustrating is that people (in aggregate, not individually) keep moving goalposts. First, it's about annoying ads and how they will accept good ads. When presented with good ads, it becomes about tracking and how they will pay for the subscription. When subscription is available, how it is too heavy handed and they want something more flexible like micropayments. When you get micropayments, it is about how they introduce so much friction and mental overload.

I have came to realize that people (again, in aggregate and not individually) just want stuff as cheap as possible; other reasons just seem like excuses.

There are quite a lot of different people on the Earth with access to the internet and different perceptions of what ads are acceptable.

This is where I fear EME is going.

Getting it in at all was the first step -- the sharp end of the lever.

My concerns regarding "locking up" the Web:

- Security. Ad networks continue to shovel exploits as well as a panopticon of data mining that gets sold off to dark patterns, commercial and governmental.

- History. We already have disappearing news and other content that is leaving increasing holes in the historical record. Who would have thought with this ever-increasing capacity to record and store "everything", we are becoming more blinded to recent events and public conversation.

(This goes for commercial media, as well. Seminal TV shows no longer available in their original format (music "rights"). Movies no longer so available (just leave it the fuck alone, Lucas). What happens when all you consume comes from central, centrally-controlled servers that can be "revised" at the behest of central authorities?)

- Usability. The other problem I have with ads et al., is that they do their utmost to grab all the attention. I find them too distracting to actually or effectively consume the content.

I remember back the the "early days" of the Web, most ads were static in appearance, and I actually clicked on a fair amount of them. Yes, given the nature of the Web, then, they were more technical. They also described things I was actually interested in. I'd read the article, notice an interesting ad along the way, and click it when I was done -- or maybe immediately, if it was of higher interest than what I was reading.

Now, ads do everything they can to make me look a them. I can't even pay adequate attention to the page, until I scroll them out of the viewport or otherwise obscure them.

That makes for a miserable user experience.

(And all too often, they play a game to "intrigue" me, instead of just telling me what they're about and why I'd be interested in that.)

There is no ad-block on _mobile_ chrome. Maybe they talk about mobile clients here?

Firefox Focus makes a great "default browser" for opening random links from apps, as it's always in incognito mode, very lightweight, and supports content blocking. Only real downside for me is that you are still contributing to webkit dominance, as it's chromium-based. Full fat Firefox on android is great too, though.

As a fully featured browser which supports extensions and has a good UI, Samsung's browser is astonishingly good and I believe open for anyone to use now, though again chromium-derived. I fear at this point the battle may be lost for alternate rendering engines on mobile, though.

Anyone told them yet that Chromium is open-source, so distributions can just flip that bit in the code?

I don't know what you read, but blinking GIFs and misleading links are only on sketchy or adult-themed sites.

As for the auto-play videos, that was a direct response to the declining value of print ads. If they can get people to play the videos, they can sell video advertising.