But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist.

I use Firefox's built Enhanced Tracking Prevention, that some sites call "ad blocking" but in reality it is super easy to have ads that don't get blocked by it, just make them non-creepy.

I think the primary argument line is something along:

1. Online ads today are so bad they must be blocked

2. But blocking ads blocks revenue for sites we like

3. So we should pay for them more directly

4. But I'm not about to set up 100 different monthly subscriptions. These corporations are not trustworthy and I cannot monitor this many bills.

5. We need a solution to simplify money -> content -> creator transfer

6. There's been many attempts at that, but there's too many players who want the power and control that comes with wedging themselves in between consumers and creators.

7. So we're stuck.

Serve content related ads and don't track. I'd be fine with that.

Same. But I think that once you've screwed the pooch this bad, you can't just take a single step backwards and expect everyone to be fine with that. The trust is gone. You've got to reboot and rebrand somehow.

Don’t track. Serve ads in a designated space across all pages (sidebar). I personally would happily uninstall adblocker if those two things came true.

The problem is that the advertising companies wanted the offline marketing spend so much that they started selling the dream of tracking with specificity, which caused marketeers the world over to finally have an answer to the age old 'I don't know which half I spend wrong' question.

Advent of Code does a great job at this. Its ads are text-based, relevant, and unintrusive. Of course, it has a pretty particular aesthetic, but plenty of sites could do a simple (non-animated) image or text to surface their sponsor without being annoying.

Shameless plug: this is what we are trying to do at https://contextcue.com. Ads that are targeted to the website you’re on, instead of the person viewing the ad. We’d love any feedback about what we are trying to accomplish!

That's great! I wish you well.

Bill Hicks had an answer. Nobody seemed to want to do that though.

Could you illuminate those of us who are not in the know?

Sorry - I was referring to his "Are you in marketing or advertising? Kill yourself." routine.

Presumably this refers to Hicks's advocacy for an "unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity"...

I prefer Sweet Meteor 'O Death 2020

Most of these sites offered a completely ad-free version for many years, then switched to an advertising model after they'd cornered the market.

There's no ethical reason for us to "pay" these scummy actors, including Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, after they destroyed all viable alternatives by giving away their products free and THEN add advertising.

As you intimate, there's also nothing intrinsically necessary to the advertising model for it to be served by different domains, with 3rd party cookies and third party javascript. Nor is it necessary to have auto-play videos, popups, etc. Even someone fairly benign like the Guardian is now infested with up-sells and adverts if you look at it without an adblocker.

So the sites brought it on themselves.

You want to support their ads, go ahead, but don't ask us to come up with the alternative model. You have no moral high ground to preach to us from, all these sites used a bait and switch to get on top. Right now if I look at facebook every 2 or 3 stories are adverts, where 5 years ago it was far less, and for google a huge chunk of the top of the results page, up to three results worth, are adverts.

None of these are clearly marked imo, nor are they necessary, they're making billions in profit. They can do it because they monopolized the market.

> But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either.

It's not a question they need to answer, that's the problem of the companies that caused this mess.

> Yet they still expect these websites to exist.

Not really, they just use what exists, not what they expect to exist.

> But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist.

This folk has an answer: display ads the ol' fashioned way, with a pair of <a> and <img> tags.

Ad blockers still remove them. They have tried not to and the users intentionally moved to ad blockers that still did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...

Yes, because Adblock Plus did it in the shadiest possible way imaginable. From the Wikipedia page:

> * In February 2013, an anonymous source accused Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant of offering to add his site's advertisements to the whitelist in return for one-third of the advertisement revenue.[68] In June 2013, blogger Sascha Pallenberg accused the developers of Adblock Plus of maintaining business connections to "strategic partners in the advertising industry", and called ABP a "mafia-like advertising network".[69] He alleged that Adblock Plus whitelisted all ads coming from "friendly" sites and subsidiaries, and promoted their product using fake reviews and pornography.[70] Faida responded to Pallenberg's accusations, stating that "a large part of the information concerning the collaboration with our partners is correct", but that the company did not see these industry connections as a conflict of interest.*

"We'll whitelist acceptable ads. Btw, acceptable means 'willing to pay us a kickback'".

The move on Adblock Plus did nothing to make me safer, so of course I ditched them for a more secure solution. Of course, it's Adblock Plus's goal and right to try to make a revenue, but I don't owe them the continued use of their product.

And I absolutely reject the premise that I owe every website that's willing to send a 200 OK response the right to run arbitrary javascript in my browser. If you don't want me 'mooching' your content, fine - put up a paywall.

Also, aside from the two HNers who claim they actually do, nobody is turning off their adblocker as they go to see if a given site has acceptable ads.

"Sir, I know the last seventeen hundred cups I've offered you were full of piss, but surely this time I'm being honest and genuine!"

Is there a blocklist that permits acceptable ads?

How big/relevant is the adblock user market segment?

Also, flattr and other micropayment sites could/would work. Just as patreon and other subscription methods.

After all paid-via-unskippable-ads is the inverse of consumed-without-payment. Both are the extremes of the spectrum and the majority of users probably would stop visiting/consuming if they were forced to look at the ads for a significant amount of time.

I mean TV channels probably spent hundreds of millions on trying to maximize ad time while keeping viewers. (And now YouTube too.)

But of course there will always be a segment that will be very bothered by ads. (Hence the success of Netflix.)

> Yet they still expect these websites to exist.

I for one certainly don't have that expectation. I understand sites have non-zero operating costs, and/or staffing and other expenses in order to create and serve interesting content.

If someone rolls out (without using the word blockchain or any derivative) a way of doing the web equivalent of .99 per track, no middlemen/Elsevier types, just 'pay the originating site for full permanent access to this page', I'll do that in a heartbeat.

I buy paper books and sit and enjoy them thoroughly... web content transparently priced with reasonable, honest rates get at least close to that style.

Richard Stallman: The Internet Sharing Licence (2012)

https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...

Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK): A Broadband Tax for the UK (2009)

https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-f...

Myself: Universal Payment Syndication (2014)

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

Joseph Stiglitz: "Knowledge as a Global Public Good"

http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343... (PDF) (pp 308-325)

Don’t monetize your users’ data, monetize their use. When you log in with a paid account the ads should be gone.

If users don’t need an account to get the content and they still get ads with the paid account, what exactly are you offering in exchange for the payment?

The answers for that have been around for more than a decade. But rare are the people making the decisions that are willing to dump the current system...

The solution is to deliver safe ads from your own servers.

The solution we'll get stuck with is an embedded webassembly browser rendering to canvas.

On the contrary, people pay for Netflix. People also pay for the ad-free upgrade to Hulu. Speaking to text websites, people are also using Brave, though I don't know how that experiment will work out in the end.

When it is reasonably priced, people will pay for legal alternatives. If there was a Netflix for paid websites, which would provide subscriptions in a convenient way to all websites in bulk, people would pay for that. Current options are:

> Manage subscriptions of 10 plus websites manually

> Pay by your privacy

It is clear that both options suck, so people opt in to ad blockers instead. Legal options are just overpriced for the demand.

Ad blocking is not illegal.

I think we need a solution for websites that aren't as unanimously popular as Netflix and Hulu. It's no surprise to me that the biggest entertainment services online can attract a subscription. But it would be a damn shame if those are the only services that can make much money. Just more and more centralization of content.

People often respond to this with "well, hobbyists make plenty of content for free," but the thing is that we benefit when our favorite hobbyists can make money from the craft and produce more work for us to enjoy instead of waiting around for their charity.

Though the growth of Patreon is a good step in the right direction, culturally. It shows a growing willingness to indeed pay content producers directly with small recurring transactions.

I think Brave is on the right track, but I am skeptical the kind of users that are aggressively anti-ad are going to like seeing ads straight in their notifications.

I'd prefer to just pay Brave e.g. $10/month and have it give out that money to sites I visit.

Isn’t that what the brave browser is trying to solve?

Why? The Great Cannon is served from a proxy. It can inject whatever it wants. It doesn’t have to swap out ad tracker JS.

Or "Why should I care about security, I have nothing of value" folks.

You do have something of value: Bandwidth.

It always bothers me when I hear people say this, it's everyone's responsibility that their devices don't become part of a botnet or worse used to take part in an attack against infrastructure that we're increasingly dependent upon that either makes for an unpleasant time for people or threatens lives.

99.9% of devices are owned by someone who has absolutely zero technical ability to fulfill this responsibility. So I'd say the responsibility needs to be satisfied another way. Maybe it escalates to the ISP.

I mean, unless we start issuing Internet Licenses the way we do Driver's Licenses.

In the early 2000s my cable provider would outright shut off our Internet if my dumb brother or my dumb self got us all virused up.

I agree, most don't have the technical ability to administrate their devices although I'm not sure if that excuses basic competence. I like the idea that an ISP would disable the connection of a subscriber however that would depend on how they define malicious activity.

If ISPs were basic utilities it would probably be a fairly safe responsibility to give them. But no, they're media corporations, so they have an inherent drive to abuse that power.

What you’re describing as “basic competence”, which is removing viruses from a PC in this case, would exclude 99% of users.

A responsibility is meaningless if most people have no practical means to exercise that responsibility.

One step in the right direction is to drop the marketing bullshit of "unlimited internet" (which doesn't exist) and always meter it, but make it completely transparent.

If your smart toaster is saturating your bandwidth, it should show up as an expensive line-item on your bill. You should see that "SmartToast9000" used $80 of bandwidth, "baidu.com" used $17 because it used your bandwidth to ddos. And, of course, the tooling to catch these things before they escalate would likely become part of our computing devices.

Right now, everything is completely opaque to the end-user and we all suffer except for bad actors. It's a problem when we can't even estimate how much bandwidth we used in a month off the top of our head. Instead it should be informing our decisions from the IoTrash we buy to which websites we use.

Example: the internet was regularly awful at my girlfriend's house. We couldn't figure it out despite calling the ISP. On a suspicion, I helped my gf install a bandwidth monitor on her laptop. We found that a recipes website she often had open would get stuck in some sort of ad-loading retry loop due to her adblocker and would saturate her download bandwidth as long as she had it open.

It's completely ridiculous to me that there's no feedback built in to the browser when I think it should be a first-class UI component. I think transparent + metered bandwidth (at a fair price of course) would start the ball rolling on this kind of tooling. Until then, it's like everything acts like bandwidth is unlimited.

This is a tiring example of why the web and all its technologies thoroughly suck. It's a boiling toilet fueled by greed.

And yet here you are. I'm interested how you would perceive something that might supercede the internet by being better (than a boiling toilet fueled by greed), ignoring network effects?

Everyone has to be somewhere. I would not be surprised to find someone, who feels like the modern internet as it exists is terrible, on hacker news. I believe the sentiment is more common here than say, the comments section on CNN.

I like the approach taken by the folks at the dat project and beaker browser. Let's make the web a DHT already. If we can force consumers to share what they consume then a DDOS becomes impractical for censoring speech (the speech spreads all over the network, making it counterproductive).

Something similar to the web in the late 90s / early 2000s?

Exactly what I'm thinking. Not everything is awful but the insistence of turning the browser into a vm and loading random javascript is pure insane. I'm not advocating for stoneage html and frames but let's take a step back and realize that not every website has to be an interactive webpage some designer dreamed up. I want information, not entertainment or an experience. The experience is what I take away from the information, not the clown paint smeared all over it for show.

The Internet of the early 2000s was consumed by greed. What changes would you make to its replacement to prevent the exact same pattern from repeating?

This just seems like "web bad" naivety.

Popular native apps could execute the same exact attack, except this time you wouldn't be able to simply open a browser's developer console to debug it.

They'd have to arbitrarily download and execute code from the internet w/ out any proper checks in place; not sure Vim does that by default...

This is not a good counterexample: the attacker is only able to do this because the analytics scripts are being served over HTTP. If you include the analytics on your site over HTTPS this sort of attack is not relevant.

The Chinese government has the root certificates for every Chinese certificate authority. It can MITM traffic for any citizen, even over HTTPS.

What makes this attack powerful is not that sites within China can be shut down (the government can already do that) but that sites outside of China can be tricked into DDOSing other sites outside of China. Which is why this attack only works over HTTP.

Right, but the traffic is coming from users in China is past the point that HTTPS would help. The requests are already in flight from people in China who've been served malicious JavaScript.

What I mean is that China can just force a CA to give the CPC its root certificate and then just intercept and edit any HTTPS responses to Chinese citizens and resign them as secure.

It would work just as well over HTTPS, they would just have to make a different phone call (to the site hosting the script rather than to the GFW).

I imagine China has quite a bit of infrastructure to push their own CA's onto devices in china, enough to do any MITM'ing they want.

For _this_ particular example, yes. But ad networks aren't magically immune from other types of attacks.