In 2005 or so there was a bunch of trojans going around for IIRC Blizzard games to steal account creds on various sites and my first response to that was "huh, that site has ads?"
People give Brave grief over BAT, and maybe with good reason, but it's one the few efforts to try and bring some sort of involvement to the public side of it as to where the money is flowing that seems to have a chance of going anywhere.
This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that are actually good.
The concept of "value" for consumers has been completely twisted and I am not looking forward to seeing where this race to the bottom will end up.
You can't research good appliances either online, because the SERPs are stuffed with SEO-ed blogs and sometimes industry magazines, monetized with Amazon affiliates or other networks, with titles like "5 best dishwashers in 2022". Unless you know someone in the industry or offline with knowledge you don't know what to buy.
This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.
There's no adblocker for this problem either. Google is complacent with their fat ad revenue and monopoly on search and doesn't care.
Battery powered hand tool systems are a big cost now, especially that brushless motor have got so good. Its important to think about them as a system, like will replacement batteries still exist in 2 years, can more tools work with the same battery, etc. That makes it harder to try something and see how good it is. I agree with you re many tools though. For tools I'd recommend talking to someone who works with them daily to get a real opinion, and wouldn't trust anything I read
My best guess is that by doing this they can raise margins on some items by making them lower quality or by charging more than they could otherwise get away with. If a brand has a great tool X, you might buy their lousy tool Y just to be able to use the same chargers and batteries.
For me, anyway, as a non-carpenter, I just end up with an annoying bespoke set of chargers and batteries.
The thing about their system is the whole only works so long as they keep you locked in. Once you make a choice you are locked into that choice and won't be looking at alternatives - but if they change batteries you suddenly are faced with the loss of your entire investment and so you are likely to look at the competition and might buy something else. That makes changing battery formats less attractive to the big brands trying to get people who buy a lot of tools.
The store brands have a different motivation: they know you won't be buying them again anyway, so they don't care. Changing formats means they can come up with some tiny reason the new one is better and try to sell the next customer on how their new battery is better.
If you are not a buying a lot of tools your plan isn't bad, just throw away the tools when the batteries die in 10 years. The tiny reasons some battery is better - over 10 years might add up to something slightly better than before anyway.
After the first ones broke we asked around and received only three recommended brands. DeWalt, Makita or the Blue Bosch line (in Germany). We went for DeWalt and never looked back. The power cells haven't changed in form or fitting in the years since and we could not be happier with performance and durability.
It is like deciding on a DSLR system. Once you are invested into Canon, Nikon, Sony or the likes with lenses and accessories you are locked in but also you learn to really know your tools and imho receive a productivity boost.
For example - whenever I am with other people and need to use their tools, I have to look at them and see how they work, what buttons/knobs are where and so on. With my DeWalt tools this is already muscle memory and the work as an extension of my arm - my brain uses them as if they were a part of me. This let's me focus more on the task I want to perform, not on the tool.
The smaller brands like Craftsman and "store brands" seem to change relatively randomly.
So eventually the cheapest tool makers get enough money to buy up the differentiated quality makers for their logo with enough branding power to price discriminate, and slap it on products from the same cheap factory line.
Then, ugh.
There’s also that motto of “I’m too poor to buy it twice”, which comes into play when item y has a price like 75% of the premium version and/or you know the tool will have some rough travel and high demand, or time lost from outage isn’t acceptable. Then just spend the money on known-solid brands.
Reviews are an area where I really value specialized forums more than social media or blogs or industry publications.
In all cases with reviews even when no monetization involved, there can be a bandwagon mentality for brands and also people convincing themselves the high price they paid matters for something (even though it may not).
The second time you buy a type of tool you definitely need to go for quality, the first time though, are you certain you're actually going to be constantly using that tool?
If the tool breaks quickly, that's not usually a terrible outcome. Most companies have at least a 90 day limited warranty you could take advantage of in that case. In many cases, you can even just return the damn thing to the store where you bought it and get a refund or exchange for a better tool. This, of course, assumes that the reason you needed the thing in the first place isn't incredibly time-sensitive, but, usually, it works out fine.
Of course, if it lasts forever, then, great! But, in the intermediate scenario, where you encounter the limitation of the tool a little ways down the road, that's actually where this strategy shines, because you get a chance to upgrade to a better tool without wasting a ton of money on top of the line equipment right away. I know photographers who do this with lenses all the time: they'll rent a new lens for a week or something, go out and shoot it to see how it really works, and then determine whether they want to commit to it. $100 spent on a lens rental has saved some of my friends more than $1000 on glass they don't need. And, if they ultimately do end up buying the lens, that $100 is $100 well spent for peace of mind that they will actually get the use out of the thing that they actually bought it for. And, I think the Harbor Freight strategy makes a lot more sense if you view the initial purchase from HF as possibly a long term rental.
Now, there is that one caveat that you need to buy "the cheapest tool that could possibly work." If you're a professional machinist, for instance, don't go buying a $5 caliper and thinking that will be good. Go and spend the $150 or whatever on a Mitutoyo instrument to begin with, because you know damn well you will need it. This is just an example I pulled from personal experience, as I needed a caliper for hobby purposes a few years ago and ended up looking at things ranging from that $5 caliper on up to precision instruments. For my purposes, the low end is totally fine, because I don't need accuracy better than 0.1mm, and it's not my professional livelihood on the line. But, if you're a professional, never trust an instrument that doesn't come with a certificate of calibration.
I've also used this strategy with good success on photography equipment, myself. I wanted a DSLR camera I could use to take pictures for hobby purposes, mostly intended for web use. I did a little research and decided that a used Nikon D3400 was for me. So, I went to eBay, found one that only had about 1200 clicks on the shutter that came with the 18-55 kit lens and the original box for $325 (tax and shipping included), and I bought it. I augmented that with a used 90mm Tamron macro lens for under $150 and I was good to go.
It has one or two small limitations that either only come into play outside of the original use case I had in mind, or which aren't really annoying enough to mention, but, for the most part, it's been a spectacular camera that I spent under $500 on, as opposed to spending $1000 on a Z50 (or, you know, gone really crazy and gotten a D850 or a Z9), and then another $900 on a new Nikon 105mm macro lens, but, for my purposes, I can take photos that are 95% as good as what I could ultimately produce with the more expensive equipment, but, I can legitimately say this strategy has saved me over $1000.
I did exactly the same thing when I started learning to play the cello. A new, carved wooden cello suitable for a student probably runs around $2000-2500, and that doesn't necessarily include a decent bow. This is also an instrument one will certainly grow out of if one continues playing. I did my research and went out and bought a Yamaha electric for $3000 and went to a cello shop to try out bows, ending up with a nice $1200 bow. I ended up with an instrument I'll never outplay and a bow that will last me years. The alternative would have probably been a much less playable bow and instrument, or a lot more money expended.
But I can't pay more to get a higher quality version of the tool, because the store doesn't even bother stocking a higher quality version.
If I plan ahead, I can shop online and find a quality tool. But what I really want is the option to buy a quality tool during a weekend project.
There's also just quality of life. As a DIYer I'm not particularly concerned about wearing out tools. But still I might want to pay more for better ergonomics, ecosystem compatibility, power, tolerances, or other non-longevity qualities, rather than being stuck with an adequate but suboptimal tool that gets the job done while bothering me.
On that note though, an even worse practice is when a brand achieves notoriety for quality and starts making "light" versions of their tools. One example of this before they went belly up was Craftsman making nearly identical looking "Sears" brand that weren't covered by the craftsman warranty. Bosch also did this with pimping out their brand name to extend to rather crappy home appliances here in the EU. Black and Decker was synonymous with reliability in the early 80s, and I still have some jigsaws and circular saws from my dad that work great from that era, but anything from them now is arguably worse than the cheapest things you can buy at Harbor Freight.
It's an incentive problem. It's extremely difficult to get incentives aligned over a timeline longer than a few years that it might take for options or stock to vest or clawbacks to expire.
The batteries on my ~20 year old Craftsman cordless drill are finally getting to the point where they won't hold a charge. I'll probably have to bite the bullet and wade into the mess of "brand-name" tools the next time I have a significant project.
But anyhow, what happened with B&D has happened to so many previous quality brands. It's really frustrating to me.
I agree with you but there's a simple shortcut you can employ: purchase commercial/industrial models that you see being used in industry.
Gym equipment is a good example: your local, serious weightlifting gym is probably using Hammer Strength plate-loaded machines and Rogue frames/racks.
Cooking: Look in the commercial kitchen of a high end restaurant - that's where I first saw my commercial microwave being used.[1]
TV: NEC P461 commercial display - I found the model number by climbing behind the arrivals/departures board at the airport.
[1] https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/microwaves-and-m...
Huh. Trying to imagine someone doing that and not getting detained. "I just wanted to read the model number, officer, I swear!"
Other than that, good advice. :)
“You…treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”
Adblocking isn’t simply convenience it’s life-preserving.
Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working: sometimes Redditors recommend products which are way too expensive (still good quality, but the extra price really isn't worth it), but if someone recommends a genuinely crappy product, they get downvoted and replies saying "don't buy this"
Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.
The top post in the relevant enthusiast sub recommending stuff to buy had no actual information, but it was stuffed with Amazon affiliate links. It was basically a "Top 5 X 2022" post except it was on Reddit instead of its own spam blog
So many of the Reddit threads were blatantly astroturfed.
By the way, while I have you here, have you considered extending your used car's warranty?
Would you know if it did?
I think Google dropped the ball on their search objectives in this department. Why is it so bad at helping us search products? If I specify something with 2-3 conditionals why can't it match all the clauses, filter out fake reviews, out of stock, not shipped to my region and such?
They don't want to help us find what we want to buy, they want to sell us what the advertisers have to sell, and the two don't match. They want to sell us things we don't need, this is the reason we never buy anything from the ads and their whole industry is a scam.
And no, their service is not supported by ads - You have to pay for a subscription. Consumer Reports needs to be mentioned more IMO. Because even on reddit, there are companies that offer advanced stealth-like astroturfing campaigns for products/services.
The counterargument is that Consumer Reports could be intruded by corporate shills, but their reputation is solid and they've been around for a long time.
We can do better than CR - but right now, afaict they're the best we have.
My go-tos are sites like Wirecutter, where it seems like the hit to their reputation would be too high to be blatantly bought-out, even if they'll generally only hawk products that can be bought on Amazon or other sites that give them affiliate money. They're not always perfect, but I trust that they're trying to do what they set out to do.
The main issue with most review sites is that they're kids. Companies like NYT/Wirecutter don't want to pay old men that are experts in manufacturing. They hire kids with little life experience to review something like a washing machine. They haven't had 2 or even 1 washing machine in their entire lives. They wouldn't even be capable of doing a teardown. Let alone identifying which parts are quality vs not.
Unless of course your main qualification is not trying to find something that is built to last. Which is the hardest thing to get these days. Finding garbage like electronics and software is easy. Everyone wants to sell you software rather than high quality manufactured goods. And I want the least software possible as I'm very anti-technology for a software developer.
My research sources would be roughly in this order:
1. Consumer Reports (teardowns, can't beat this method. You pay them directly, if interested in least conflict of interest)
2. Wirecutter (good for a free source, but puts near-zero weight on reliability)
3. Amazon reviews (can find some old timers reviewing there but always keep in mind that most people aren't very intelligent. They maintain nothing and won't skim a manual)
4. Reddit (a lot of zero life experience kids on that, meaning generally anyone under 40)
5. Then whatever else you can find on the web
Looking past the bargain and location aspects, this site is super useful for understanding products in greater detail
Best dishwashers 2022 -amazon
You’ll most likely end up on Reddit but sometimes make some good discoveries.
The net-net of all of this is that I buy a lot more stuff from brick and mortar stores now, where they've done the curation, and will only carry the stuff that sells best per square foot, and minimizes their returns.
Almost everything about fridges nowadays wants to promote the virtues of the amazing new features associated with them.
After hours of searching, I narrowed it down to 3 models. All were the most basic fridge & freezer combo I could find. Exactly one of them was in stock, so I got that one.
I'm doing this myself before I buy a treadmill. I want the most reliable one, not the most tech features, and while my hunch is Sole is the one for me based on their warranty, I'm going to confirm with CR before dropping $1,600 on one.
The problem is that people plug their ears and put blinders on to avoid spending $30 for teardown advice from an outfit like Consumer Reports. Too cheap for their own good.
This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.
There's quite a lot of HN readers who work for businesses that derive most of their revenue from ads (Google, Facebook, content companies, etc) so there's always going to be people here who are willing to stand up for ads. The famous Upton Sinclair quote is quite appropriate - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Unfortunately, web ads suck. Because there isn't enough Gatekeeping(tm), I can't buy things from web ads, because the probability of it being a scam is too high.
I get what you're trying to say, but here's a counter example. I have a hobby of astrophography. I live in a rural area without many other people nearby interested in the stars, much less a highly technical hobby like astrophography.
Asking on message boards like cloudynights, or reddit gets you a lot of well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level.
I'm currently building an observatory and I need input on which mount to use in my observatory. I don't have a good concept of what to buy for it as I've only dealt with really beginner mounts and I'm not a beginner anymore, and there's no astrophography retail stores within travel distance. Online advice is poor and hard to weed out those who are beginners meaning well and those who actually know what they're talking about.
However, to pull us back to what we're talking about here, I get a magazine for the industry called Sky and Telescope and it has ads. To me, ads are one of the best things about that magazine because it lets me know what options I have that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, or have any way to compare.
Though to be fair, ads in a magazine don't spy on you, don't infect your computer, don't move and steal attention and don't follow you around. But I think there is a place for targeted, well behaved ads.
I have sold on eBay for over a decade and at some point the desktop site became so slow as to be unusable with ad blocking. No idea who at eBay thinks getting in the way of sales to spam people with banner ads is a good idea.
And occasionally I still get those but lately almost all ads I see are some interesting headline that then takes me to a page with an for nonsense products every paragraph and an extremely fluffy article to tell me that dinosaurs had feathers / the Romans had steam engines or something similar.
I feel cruel saying this but I really think it's true. Just like how most games have microtransactions because a minority of people who will spend an incredible amount of money on them. Most people are caught in the crossfire and ads just annoy them and steer them away from the product, but mass advertising is an effective way to target the minority who ultimately spend enough on the product to offset the cost.
On the other side of the spectrum: using the Instagram app was the first time in my life I felt positive about the ads I was being shown. I was shown ads for microdosing psilocybin (it's legal here) which blew my mind hahah. It's almost like I got through the uncanny valley and into the other side where ads are actually relevant!
Pretty weird since I almost never use Facebook. But I use Google, GMail and YouTube all the time ... and yet, the YouTube and Google Ads really suck! (They seem to be based on IP address rather than identity: I keep getting shown stuff that's obviously based on my housemate's browsing.)
To be clear there was still the gross undercurrent of "okay, why the hell do they know that?" but it was nice to see it actually working as intended for once.
For a lot of consumer tech companies, it's less about providing value to consumers and more about extracting value from them. Between vendor lock-in, privacy violations, and arbitrary one-sided changes in service, it's straight out of an abusive partner's playbook.
In the case of electronics and photography gear it takes a huge amount of reading between the lines to interpret reviews even assuming the reviews are honest.
For instance at the Best Buy website there is a review for a photo printer where the user posted photographs of utterly ruined prints they made on this printer. Well, I've made prints like that too when I put the paper in upside down. That's what happens when you put the wrong side of the paper in.
A decade ago the story about Sigma lenses on Canon bodies was that 90% of them were OK but 10% were defective in subtle ways (like the autofocus doesn't quite lock on) Sigma on Sony today seems to be better. When you're reading reviews though you have to guess "did this person get a bad instance of the product or did this person have the wrong expectations for how this was supposed to perform."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
Oh this heinous shit is not just limited to cheap tat. Samsung will happily sell you their highest end TVs for four figures with unremovable banner ads in the source menu.
The amount of guilt I feel about ad blocking is equal to the amount of guilt advertisers feel about bothering me with their ads.
Not GP, but when I think about the negative consequences of BAT, I'm thinking about the user and society overall, not necessarily the website owner in specific.
Monetizing attention is dangerous, and I think we should be a lot more careful about when we do so, as opposed to monetizing attention being the default way we fund everything online. BAT is in many ways less harmful than existing advertising networks, but it's still trying to find a way to ethically commoditize otherwise private attention/focus on what we read/see, and I think that the omnipresent commoditization of that attention/focus across society is harmful regardless of whether or not it's invasive or collects PII and regardless of whether or not users get paid for selling something that we shouldn't encourage them to sell. I think that this has an effect on how humans process the world, I think it has an effect on how much energy we're willing to devote to different tasks. I think it has an effect on attention spans, and on what types of content get made, and the way that we spread memes/culture, and how we interact with each other. I think it has an effect on market efficiency and on what products succeed. I'm not going to oversell modern advertising as some kind of giant monster that's responsible for all problems, but I think its effects are likely more negative than positive at this point and that we can build better systems that don't optimize for keeping people hooked on consuming content endlessly just so we can redirect some of that attention to a product.
As a website owner, the social stuff still applies to me, I may not want my stuff commoditized at all. But I also recognize that users have the right to modify code running on their computer, including for the purposes of inserting their own ads, so if it's happening with the user's permission I can't really get mad at the user. In many ways I'm the least impacted person in this situation. However, that doesn't mean that I think Brave's system is good for the user or for society, and I'm not going to encourage people to use it.
My feeling is that Brave is trying to reform a system that I would like to see destroyed.
If Brave users opt into Brave Rewards for private user ads in push notifications (which, contra Butterick, do not belong to any page they might be near or above; they belong to the user's inventory, same as new tabs and unrelated windows of all kinds), we still wouldn't put ads in pages without both publisher and extra user consent (too many users still wouldn't want in-page ads, even if opted into user push notification ads).
HN is full of made up nonsense about Brave, in spite of all the hackers here who can verify our open source, network behavior, etc. etc. This site has seen better days.
However, I also had negative opinions of it like many people here before I really dug into it. I think your marketing really needs some work. I don't exactly know what it is - it might not even be your fault. The negative view of crypto many have has been associated with it. I would remove all mentions of crypto from your website. If people really want to know how the tokens work, they can go into the documentation. Having the word crypto on your landing page does you no good.
Talk is cheap, especially stories that don't pass any kind of smell test: we would not take our life into our hands by collecting any user data, when it's easy to discover that for real hackers.
https://brave.com/data covers our data policies for baseline and optional stuff.
Upvotes the moment I read this. Yes. This is what they did and they deserve to be blocked in every way possible for it.
On sites that handles all their own ad sales and display directly, I still see their ads.
I don't know why anybody would feel any guilt. When cable was the only thing available, I would switch to my Gameboy when ads would come on and mute the TV, effectively blocking the ads. I'm always curious if people who shame others about ad-blocking similarly think that action was immoral and I should instead be forced to keep my eyes open with superglue when the ads came on.
> People give Brave grief over BAT
Many people are against crypto-currency with no reason other to be contrarian (or they just really, really, really love JP Morgan/Chase). BAT is not even required to be used to use Brave...
I have mixed opinions on where the ad-blocking layer should live (I generally think at the router level), but there are some undeniable benefits to having at least some form at the browser-level as well, and I think Brave making this a default was a fantastic idea.
Quick note on router level approach: without MitM and full JS/HTML/CSS runtime, can't block tracking and ads effectively.
PiHole etc. are good but not sufficient to stop the latest, and with Google pushing for more AMP borg-ification of sites' content, getting into the 1st party content that unfolds only at TLS termination and JS execution is essential to blocking threats.
I believe this is true about society in general and has gone on since long before 2003. Almost every ill in modern society can be drawn back to some people doing their best to convince other people to buy shit from them. At this point, I think we should make a serious political effort to outright ban advertising and marketing entirely. Whatever the results of that are, I seriously doubt they'd be worse than what we have.
When I was younger I felt bad, but I also had no money.
Now I get frustrated when I can't give a website I like and want to support a reasonable amount of money...
Of course, if they feel their website is worth $120/year and I feel it's worth $10/year, there's a problem, but thats their business decision to say ad-free costs that much regardless of your level of consumption or desire for the content
But developers don't control what marketing put in their sweet Google Tag Manager container(s).
How many UX designers just give into client demands, how many devs work extra hours to make up for bad management practices? How many managers are under pressure over sales created deadlines? How many sales people are under pressure over the company's target numbers?
There will always be a few people who are willing to put their neck on the line but it'll require a culture shift before any momentum builds up and most feel comfortable protesting these practices at their workplace.
Nasty side effects: journalism suffers as "tech" prospers, less well-informed, more polarised society, freedom of the press is threatened (now by "tech" intermediaries, in addition to governments), justice system competes with "cancellation", etc. via "tech" intermediary "platforms"
Consider downstream effects of all this on governance
Journalism has declined in quality. But "tech" does not provide a solution or even a viable alternative, it is the cause.
With journalism, advertising once supported far more unbiased reporting. This was too long ago for many younger folks to remember. People born into a world of "tech" companies happily accept today's lower quality "news"; many even try to profit from it. With "tech", advertising tends to support increased digital surveillance. Not a net gain for humanity.
Even our response to the Snowden releases was to get Google Analytics running over TLS and to make it even harder for a normal solo person to host a website that isn’t through one of the major silos.
Fixed that for you ;)
Like, I remember growing up absolutely surrounded by advertising. It was on the TV, it was on the radio, it was in newspapers and magazines. Literally every second page in a magazine was ads! It was crazy. I grew up with it (as did many of you).
What were the major level societal consequences of this shift? And when did it begin? Was radio just as bad in the 30's?
Are newspapers where it went wrong? Man, at that point we may as well go the whole way and blame the industrial revolution ;)
More generally, advertising is a consequence of the economic system we've (somewhat) collectively as a species decided we want to achieve our goals. I doubt the first urban dwellers expected the vast new cities to be hives of disease, either, but them's the breaks.
Tim Wu, The Master Switch (2011), chapter 5
Blocking these ads is a moral imperative at this point. I don't feel guilty, I feel proud and I encourage every single person to do it.
If a site is responsible I will add them to my white list. How do I know if a site is responsible If I'm blocking you might ask? Well you just know.
No thanks. If they had stuck with a simple, in-line, hyperlinked image I would have probably not cared, but this is too much.
The way the ad is delivered is what is annoying and not the ad itself.
Indeed. Even with an ad blocker, you have this issue where your momentary attention on the internet (say by visiting a site) is presumed to have value. So anything to get you to click on some shitty link.
The art of not feeling guilt
You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment.
> Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.
I'd pay a monthly fee for unmolested search results. I pay for Youtube Premium. I only watch ad-free content that I pay for.
I don't want the content for free - the free stuff is usually worse in quality anyway. I just want to be left alone by advertisers. I don't need what they are selling and the reduce my ability to think. The sheer amount of noise they add to the world makes them a problem.
Anyone using an adblocker is expecting free content.
I would say no, and I think websites are not different from media I listed above. If they make or don't make enough money it's not my business. I am free to consume their freely distributed products as I like.
Advertisements directly lower the quality of any content I'm consuming and I am expecting high quality content.
If someone wants to turn a profit on their site, that's fine. Do I need to accept whatever they want to serve me when I visit their page? No. Do I need to buy a product from their store if it's not something I'm interested in, even though the payment may go to helping their hosting costs? No.
I feel like there are some IRC channels that owe me some dividends.
Also, a lot of that content still exists but it is hidden behind the SEO garbage.
If I were to ever buy an Android phone (I wouldn’t because Google). It would be a Google device.
I also pay more for an AppleTV than a Roku because half of the Roku screen and the hard coded buttons on the remote are ads.
It's not always possible to buy out of advertising. One of my fave sites anandtech.com has (I guess relatively reasonable) ads, and I can't subscribe or whatever to get rid of them.
I'm also generally OK with Adwords v1.0 ads, which had virtually no chance of autoplaying a super loud video, running malware on my machine, breaking the layout of a page as I'm trying to click on something, or masquerading as genuine content.
Ad blockers respond to the fact that users have very little ability to control their ad experiences, even in ways we probably think are appropriate like buying out of them. What you're implying here (ads vs. free content) is a false dichotomy.
ads vs. free content is indeed a very false dichotomy.
Oh the irony! Likewise, the agreement between the content company and the ad company has nothing to do with my consumption of the content. The content company agrees to show ads for the ad company. The ad company agrees to make ads for the content company to show and pay them to show the ads. I make no agreement with either. I download the content and choose not to download the ad. It’s my bandwidth.
The privacy invasion that accompanies web ads leads me to treat them as malware and prevent their execution on my devices. I don't care about non-personalized ads (e.g. the 1P-hosted display ads on Ravelry).
Going without is better than ad funded. The goal of me running ad blockers is not just to make my life nicer but to make ad funded shit (i.e. most of the current internet) unviable.
Paywall away! If it’s good enough for the money, I’ll always pay for it.
The big thing we need is some kind of action against Google: they currently are the best positioned to penalize operators of sites slowed by ads but the search team isn't going to cut into their ad business and Chrome is going to continue slow-walking attempts to make browsers restrict ad networks. It'd also be nice if there was liability for malware delivered by ads — something like they have to pay a fine up front and try to recover it from their advertiser, forcing them to actually vet people first.
What I'd like would be publishers self-hosting ads — forcing them to take more responsibility for the security risks — and more effort into alternative payment mechanisms. I liked the idea of Google Contributor but one big challenge for that is that even a less half-hearted version probably wouldn't generate enough money to be viable because most people consider ads a reasonable cost for free content.
People will pay for good content, they did for a long time before there was an internet or a surveillance industry. There were books, films, subscription TV services, paid for audio. There were also steady streams of novel manuscripts, demo tapes and screenplays that went straight into the bin because they were rubbish. Now the rubbish hangs around on a webpage surrounded by trackers, luring people in with clickbait titles and lies, and multiplying beyond the ability of even google to sort out.
Yes, people paid for content prior to the internet but there were also problems — many good things went unnoticed because not enough discovered them while plenty of garbage got tons of attention because the creator had some personal connection to publishers, reviewers, DJs, etc. One of the things I loved about the rise of the web was that it provided so many opportunities to find things which weren't going to run in my local newspaper, be stocked by the local book or music shops (if you weren't lucky enough to have good indie options), or the pile of mud a lot of the big radio stations were often playing (this got a lot worse in the 90s when Clear Channel started buying all of the radio stations so questions about what got mainstream coverage in many markets came down to what one guy in Texas wanted).
I don't want to lose that — whether it's counterpressure to the huge race-to-the-bottom advertising market for more selective sponsorship, something like Apple/Stripe Pay to make it super easy for people to get paid for their work, etc.
Paying people for good content doesn't fix the problem. The internet is still cluttered with awful content drowning out the useful stuff. Not because people are trying hard and learning or just plain love their awful guitar playing even if nobody is watching, but because they're getting paid by surveillance. What we need is the absence of that incentive.
This is one of those cases where the free market would actually fix the problem if there was some sensible regulation applied. Sadly it'll never be quick enough to catch up with the technology.
I don't feel I'm owed anything. I just refuse to consume ads. Sometimes that means I pay a subscription fee. Sometimes I read it with my blocker on and the creator goes without revenue to get their message out. And sometimes the creator won't serve up their content unless I disable my blocker, so I shrug and turn my attention elsewhere.
The problem for creators is that there's a glut of content online. It's just way more than anyone needs. The best creators can afford monetize directly, the good ones can do custom ads integrated into their content, and the rest have to churn out clickbait, top 11 lists, and ludicrously "optimized" content laden with ad-network garbage. It sucks to be mediocre, but I don't feel I owe anyone that revenue stream.
When a website wants to make viewing their ads mandatory for viewing their content, that is their prerogative. Most don't, and I'm not obligated to volunteer my CPU for their ads.
I will take the content as long as they don't bother blocking me, and will try to get more people to do the same. Their business model does not work if they start blocking everybody, it also doesn't work if too many people take the content without the ads. That means I'm helping them fail, what is absolutely good. The sooner they all go away, the better.
There's a world of a difference between a Linus Tech Tips style sponsored segment and some jarring ad that constantly interrupts your YouTube video to scream at you about KFC.
Same for text content where they'll insert outright scams that use disgusting or offensive images to farm clicks throughout the article.
If advertising wasn't so obnoxious, people wouldn't go to such lengths to block it.
1. People wanted content without paying for it.
2. Creators wanted/needed financial support to make and host their work.
Advertising filled the void between those two things. You can think of it as sort of a natural, emergent property. No one wanted advertising, but the way the individual actors behaved—web users preferring sites that didn't charge them, creators that didn't advertise going out of business—led to the rise of advertising.
I think that is part of why some people don't think of advertising as morally bad. No one deliberately nefariously foisted it onto the world, it just arose from the behavior of individuals. That behavior created an environment, and the environment evolved the dominance of ads.
You can use that exact same argument justify the use of ad-blockers now.
People using ad blockers are not actively trying to harm creators. They are just using the web and tools available in the way that makes the most sense for them. This is exactly the same as when they chose to prefer non-paid ad-supported content before. The system gave them options, and they chose the ones that they prefer.
Creators will in turn make the choices that make the most sense for them. If ad blockers mean that they no longer make money from ads, they'll find other ways to be sustainably creative. Markets aren't magic solutions to all problems, but in this case I think the market is working pretty damn efficiently.
People are using ad blockers because ads are bad for them. If consumers improving the quality of their own life is a problem for the system, the system should change. And in order to change, it needs systemic incentives to do so. Ad blockers create that incentive.
An argument against ad blockers is essentially an argument for forcing users to consume something toxic. Imagine if McDonald's stopped selling burgers in isolation, required you to buy combos, and then forced you to drink your entire soda. When people who wanted to cut back on unhealthy sugar complained, they were told that they're the problem because McDonald's makes most of its profit from drinks. If they don't drink the soda then McDonald's won't be as profitable and then they won't be in business. That's basically the argument against ad blockers.
But... a burger joint that forced you to chug soda should be out of business, or should at least have to change its pricing in a way that lets people eat in a healthier manner. Ad blockers enable consumers to "stop drinking the soda" in the attention combo offered by sites.
"Information wants to be free" used to be part of the hacker ethos.
Also, ads can be served in ways that makes blocking much more difficult. It's just harder to do, and harder to track users across sites. (and therefore, probably less lucrative to the site owners).
What happened to serving ads based on site content? How is using poor algorithms that require a lot of tracking and then make bad guesses about your interests any better?
She doesn't want an ad-blocker because they do break things at times and she actually likes seeing some ads and especially getting coupon or discount offers, using things like Rakuten. I know that you can fine-tune the settings of uBlock Origin, but she doesn't want to be bothered with that.
I'm the weird one.
Consumers of GA may be blind, I'm guessing (confidently) Google and other big players are far from blind today.
Reddit.com is eye fucking cancer.
Old.reddit.com is consumable....
Interestingly, after a 15-year-long account I was "permanently banned" for TOS violations which cannot be determined... Reddit is dead to me. (Ill be deleting (scrambling) millions of comments... I was top mod of a sub /r/ with 1.5 million users, which is now one of the most active /r/s...
If anyone would like to buy my 15+ year old account, make me an offer.
Their definition of "acceptable" seems straightforward and paying for certification seems like a pretty standard business model.
If they were to bend their definition for money, that woukd be shady. Do they?
I was browsing the web with AdBlock Plus and found myself assaulted by an image of someone's fungus-infected toenail or something similarly nauseating. I went to report it as a mistake on their forums only to find there was already a thread about Taboola, and they were firm that Taboola was "acceptable". The only way I can imagine ads like that made it onto their list was by paying really good money.
I went to uBlock that day and haven't looked back. Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.
So it is just your imagination. Their definition of "acceptable" is here:
https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria
> Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.
You did not even read it, but just immediately jumped to "shady"/bribery....
> I wanted no part of it.
Me neither, but you spreading misinformation is not okay.
The policy on images is the one that is relevant to my complaint, so let's look at that one:
> Static image ads may qualify as acceptable, according to an evaluation of their unobtrusiveness based on their integration on the webpage.
The policy was stricter back in 2015 (http://web.archive.org/web/20150613035152/https://adblockplu...):
> Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
It changed to the one with more wiggle room in February 2016, in the middle of a backlash against AdBlock Plus's continued tolerance for Taboola's antics. Here's that thread for context: https://forum.adblockplus.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991
Under either definition, it's hard to argue that Taboola's images were "acceptable". They were explicitly designed to grab attention, bore no relation to the text content of the ad, and frequently were disgusting specifically because gross images draw the eye. Adblock Plus kept insisting that Taboola was cooperating, but users (including myself) kept reporting over and over again that their garbage was getting through. After years of violations that get dismissed as "mistakes" (documented in part on the thread linked above), it's reasonable to assume that the only reason they weren't dropped like a hot potato was because they were paying to not be dropped.
If there was no way to block ads Id probably be happy to downsize my internet usage.
Or are you saying you might as well not pay for premium if you'll still have to deal with the product placement anyway?
I could be totally wrong, but ublock-origin just keeps certain things that match a pattern from appearing in the html. It can't remove the annoying "in-video" ads, right?
As a power user I also set JS off by default and whitelist specific sites, and also use garbage websites in private mode so their garbage tracking is hopefully purged.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges?utm_conte...
What this review means? Do you have a link? Is it reviewed by a security developer hired by Mozilla or some community person?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
It's exactly what you're asking for, a badge showing that Mozilla "staff security experts" have carefully reviewed the extension to ensure that it is free of malicious or unsafe code. The extension must also be effective at what it does, offer a good user experience, and be regularly updated.
You pay, just not with money! (insert evil laugh)
I don't use an advert blocker but I know what they look like.
Why? The adverts don't really bother me and I also think they're dubiously moral.
* This implicit agreement is too open to exploitation. Many people don't understand the depth of the tracking/ad ecosystem. If the full cost were explained to them, they might not agree to that exchange. I think I do understand it (well, probably it is worse than I expect, but whatever), but if the ad companies get to interpret this implicit relationship in the way that benefits them, then why can't I? I think the agreement should be explicit, and some sites do make it explicit -- they block people like me. Fair game! I'm sure they won't miss me, I can be quite annoying.
* I'm not sure I believe in this implicit agreement anyway. From the beginning, the design of the internet has been that information is sent to the browser, and then rendered in line with the client's needs. If I use elinks, lynx, or some graphical browser without javascript is that morally dubious? What if I'd like to minimize the amount of javascript I run, but selectively enable it as necessary, like umatrix?
* The underlying goal of the people placing the ads is not just to get something rendered on a screen somewhere, right? Their goal is to capture some attention. As you say, you don't read the ads. I could browse a while and train myself to ignore them too. At which point... the person who placed the ad still doesn't get what they wanted. At least if I block the ad, there's at least some chance that they'll detect that, and maybe the poor fool who paid for the placement can get a refund.
This is a big part of why the implicit deal argument doesn't really make sense. If a website sends me information then the information is on my device just like a letter, so I should be able to do what I like with it. The framing of this as an agreement between the user/publisher that we accept or reject skips over the question of whether it is even possible or moral in the first place for a website operator to try and offer an unsigned contract that removes user autonomy/rights, and whether it is moral in general for us to normalize that kind of contract.
The way that online advertising gets phrased sometimes is that you have something free that's being given to you, and consumers with ad-block are going out of their way to take more or to change the content of the webpage. But that's not really what's happening -- what's happening is that something is being given to me for free, and then the person serving that content is asking to come into my house (computer) and they're saying that they should be able to tell me what to do with the content after it's entered my house. Adblocking is the same as throwing out the spam mail from your mailbox without opening it, and anti-adblocking normalizes the idea that it's acceptable for a business to guilt or pressure people into reading junk mail.
If an industry did ever start trying to guilt people for not opening every single physical letter that was sent to them, it would be good to push back against that industry even if the industry was only trying to make a moral argument and not trying to pass laws. Some implicit contracts are so inherently invasive that they should be rejected at a conceptual level -- not merely rejected by turning down the contract, but by vocalizing, "I refuse to normalize or acknowledge the concept that a remote operator in another state has any moral claim whatsoever in any situation over what a user-agent does with information that is in my home." So we reject the concept of a website delivering content in exchange for delivering ads not because we deserve anything for free, but because we don't believe website operators have any authority (legal or moral) to set up this kind of contract, and we think it is borderline immoral/invasive for them to assert that they do. Even allowing their expectation to alter browsing behavior or treating it like a contract we have to reject gives it more legitimacy than it deserves.
It's the exact same reason why we all reject the implicit social contract where advertisers expect people to leave their volume turned all the way up for commercials, or for screen readers not to skip ads during navigation around the page to different sections. Remember that advertisers are actually the people paying for this content, and their implicit contract with users is based around actual attention -- not for allowing code to run, not for rendering the ad on the page. Advertisers have an implicit contract with us where we alter our purchasing behaviors and pay attention to their products in exchange for free content. But by and large, all of us (including anti-adblock advocates) reject that agreement and say that advertisers have no moral authority to demand that. We all kind of recognize that accepting this contract with advertisers and shaming people for walking out of the room during a TV commercial would be infringing on something vaguely sacred -- people's rights to consume content how they wish within their own homes and to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to.
But then anti-adblock advocates try to draw a line saying that it's OK for a user to ignore advertising unless a user-agent helps them. That just doesn't really make any sense, it doesn't make sense to say that pressing a button to mute a TV is morally better than having the TV press the button itself; both outcomes are exactly the same. The only place to draw that line that stands up to scrutiny is around the users "home" -- to say that once content enters their network, be it physical junk mail, or TV commercials, or online ads, users are then free to do what they wish with it even if it's to burn it and never open the envelope -- and no one has the moral authority to dictate what users do with that information or to force them to read it regardless of how much other stuff is being given away for free.
Do I think it's fine to walk away during an advert break on a US TV station or to mute? Yeah that's fine.
Can you cut up your magazine and reconstruct it with the advertising pages removed? Yeah fine.
Both are different from advert blocking because of the automation and the specific targeting of the workaround. I think that's where it crosses into not as morally reasonable.
I think it's also just a huge faff to run custom software in your browser just to avoid seeing some adverts.
I think that's a really arbitrary line. Screenreaders skip ads. Scrapers/apis skip ads. There isn't a clear division between an automated tool and a tool with manual intervention.
In some ways this feels like the same legalism that popped up in spam phone calls where to get around auto-dial rules businesses would have someone on their end sit in a room and press a button over and over to complete the call. In the exact same way, we could imagine a version of Ublock Origin where every time the page loads it comes up as a blank screen, and then I hit a button on my keyboard, and then the screen renders without ads. I don't think that advertisers would see a difference between those systems.
Remember that from the perspective of the advertiser -- the person actually paying for the content -- you walking out of your room during a TV commercial and a piece of software skipping the TV commercial are the same thing. The advertiser does not see a distinction between those actions because the advertiser is not paying for content in exchange for the privilege of streaming data to your computer, the advertiser is paying for content in exchange for your attention.
It is weird to me that people are able to latch on to the idea that ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts, but don't view circumventing advertising through other means as stealing money from advertisers. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that when we say that it's fine for people to block content manually but not using user agents, what we are effectively saying is that it's fine for them to ignore ads as long as they're not particularly good at ignoring them. But even that isn't a great argument.
Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages? What if I make a machine with image recognition that does the same thing? It just doesn't make sense to say that ad blocking is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient, and then it becomes immoral.
Yeah - we're talking morals!
You won't find a mathematical equation to define the moral line.
> ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts
Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing, I just think it's morally dubious. I didn't say anything like I thought it was criminal.
> Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages?
I think so yes.
> It just doesn't make sense to say that something is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient
Well yeah, again it's morality, it's human and fuzzy.
Automation is often a line for morality. Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.
This isn't some kind of new idea.
Not for arbitrary reasons though, there are tangible effects from automation that we worry about in those systems. We draw distinctions because there are parts of the manual process that we can point to as valuable.
We worry about automated weapons because they take a safety check out of the system. We kind of are saying what I mentioned above, that we want killing to be kind of difficult and emotionally hard to do. But that doesn't map to ads, unless you're saying that one of our goals is that we want blocking ads to be emotionally draining/difficult. But I don't think that's what anyone believes about ads.
Similarly, people don't oppose automated speed cameras because they think automation is a moral line, they oppose taking humans out of the decision making process for whether or not someone should get a ticket. But this doesn't really map to ads unless we think it's important that humans have to consciously decide to skip content, which... why would we think that? Some people also don't trust the automated cameras to be reliable. This also doesn't really map to adblockers, because adblockers aren't being used by other people to make decisions about you.
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> Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing
I should phrase this differently, that's totally my bad.
I can't think of any way of defining an implicit social contract between website operators and consumers that wouldn't also define an implicit social contract between consumers and advertisers themselves. It is weird to me that people think it's morally dubious to do things that deprive website operators of profit, but that it's not morally dubious to do things that deprive advertisers of profit.
If we say that advertisers don't have a right to ask us to look at content, I'm not sure why website operators should be different.
(Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)