Ads come with tracking now... that needs to die immediately!
And I'm not talking about sites like HN: I know who owns it but they're not actively forcing me to watch some claim that "This thing will stop you being an ugly bastard and make women throw themselves at you"...
In fact, UBlock Origin shows nothing on this site.
That’s the very best kind of advertising. The kind that has fooled you into thinking it’s not there.
Every site has logs. They can all see where I've been, what I've looked at, how long I looked at it and so on. I get that part. I'm a developer. I build that stuff myself.
However, I need to draw the line somewhere and using UBlock Origin and never ever seeing an on-page advertisement AND minimising all tracking is the threat-model I'm targetting. And, I'd reckon that most people who care about privacy would stop about there too.
With HN, there are no distractions on the screen. Nothing flashing or moving or asking me to sign up or anything... that's what I am trying to prevent.
In any case, lets say I could stop everything and still let the text on a web page through on my browser... just the text, nothing else: we've seen in the past how even that is a signal that can be tracked.
We can't stop it completely but I feel that I'm doing my bit to make it less effective and hopefully, eventually, pointless.
Why can’t you believe some ads have a clickthrough of 35%? You never see ads so you don’t know how good they can be, right?
Also, you see ads all the time on HN. This whole site is a marketing/advertising campaign for a VC company.
Personally. I love to buy stuff and I love to click on ads for things I might want to buy.