I disagree completely, "blockers" is accurate.

The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive.

Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.

> "but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs."

No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way.

When I first started browsing the web I didn't have a graphical browser at home. My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not. It was not "blocking" anything, it was rendering the available content according to the capabilities of my system.

> "Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive."

It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display, when the web was specifically designed such that they should not.

> "Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content"

I modify many aspects of webpage display to help me assimilate content. When a website has chosen difficult to read colors, I change them so they're easier to see. I change fonts and font sizes. I modify page layouts, sometimes collapsing many separate pages into one long page, and sometimes I use screen readers and I don't even look at a visual rendering at all. I often remove annoying, obnoxious or intrusive content which also make it harder for me to read a page, many of which are ads.

The web is specifically designed from inception to give this agency to clients. Websites provide units of content and suggestions on how to best display it. That is all.

> No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way.

It was designed with this technical capability. But the social contract was always that you went to a site for it to tell you what to display. And we have many very nice, very non-standard sites because of it.

There is nothing wrong on blocking part of that content, but everybody's state of mind is that by default, any site content is expected to load.

>The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load

Source that this is just a side effect from other design decisions?

>My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not

Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard.

>It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display

They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS.

> "Source that this is just a side effect from other design decisions?"

The source would be Tim Berners-Lee's original 1989 proposal for a hypertext information system. He specifically wrote: "We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

These sentiments are also reflected in other technical documents such as RFC 1866. The intent is crystal clear.

> "Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard."

I think this is a common reaction from people who aren't old enough to remember a world before mega-complex browser platforms and non-portable websites came into being. My browser absolutely was standards compliant at the time, and it was expected that websites would be viewable without graphics.

Keep in mind: javascript had not yet been invented.

Again, HTML is specifically designed around portability, generality, and flexibility. This has been degraded by the rush of commercialization and related platform lock-in -- in large part due to things web 2.0. This is not a good thing.

> "They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS. "

I think you should read a bit deeper into the underpinnings of these standards you're referencing.

>We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

This would support the opinion that entire web sites should be protable as opposed to just a small subset.

This is just not true. The host serves data to a client which can do what it wants with it.

The client can interpret the data from the website however it wants regardless of the intention of the website.

A website, for example, can use tags that a client doesn’t comply with.

The client is and always has been opinionated. It does not and never has had to obey the websites intentions.

While that's true of software set up to specifically subtract content from a server response, the code could just as well be set up to add page elements (e.g. for easier navigation) or just rearrange things. So "content customizer" or "user preference enforcer" would both be apt and less arguably pejorative.

"Blocker" implies a specific set of assumptions about a publisher having some say in how content gets presented. "UserAgent" entails a different worldview, one that the companies making browsers seem increasingly unwilling to defend against competing interests.

The websites are _requesting_ the users’ browsers to execute certain extra code the users deem unnecessary to their experience in using the site. The users have no moral responsibility to execute that code. If website owners want to detect and block users making such choices, that is their prerogative, but as long as they don’t, the users may continue to exercise the control and autonomy given by them by the website owners without any moral concerns.

> If website owners want to detect and block users

Oops. I guess you meant to say user request selector/filter then if the term "block" is so loaded.

I meant what I said.

The "end game" from the user's point of view would if someone indeed came up with "content selectors". It would be quite an achievement to build one that was actually useful.

Maybe easy version could work exactly the same way as blockers do, except they'd invert the way the rules are evaluted, and of course the rules would need to be custom as well. And then if the rules would fail to find some actual content on the page, then I guess you might not even know about it :).

That closely describes uMatrix in default deny mode. For each individual site and subdomain, the user gets to choose if they want to allow cookies, images, CSS, JS, XHR, frames. Too bad it's unmaintained, with most of its practical and commonly intended use cases fitting the simpler uBlock Origin.

But the underlying principle is still filtering out the undesired content instead of selecting the desired content.

Surely the principle the parent suggested was to initially filter out all of the content, and then selecting the desired content to load.

But isn't "filtering out all of the content" just another way of saying, "not loading any content" - until explicitly requested?

Perhaps I misunderstood. But let's say I do run uMatrix in deny more, I get the site HTML as the Tim Berners-Lee intended. Yet that already may contain some kind of advertising material, so to view only the actual content I'd need to have e.g. an XPath do it. So I would have a database of sites and XPath (or other ways) describing how to find the content, instead of describing how to get rid of non-content.

Can I tell uMatrix to only show a certain XPath from the page? If so, I agree it is a content selector, albeit pretty impractical :).

uMatrix is the absolute best, I can't imagine browsing without it. So the unmaintaned part is very sad and troubling.

I do install uBlock Origin for all non-technical family members, but uMatrix is so much more capable.

The end game would be some AI running on a gpu in your monitor, so the browser nor the originating website need to know about any blocking.

Except you'd still have client-side execution in that case. Obviously not everyone cares, but there are some straightforward objective reasons to care if you're blocking it being rendered anyway, like why waste cycles on it.

True, but it's hard to block execution without the website not knowing about it.

That's basically what the "reader mode" in the various browsers do

Anyone remember Proxomitron?

The end game for the web to be scraped into entries in a database to be displayed by real software instead of a web browser.

Sounds miserable and authoritarian

Blocking useless content makes finding useful content much more easier.

No one has enough time in the world to block all the infinite amount of useless content. We already do that perpetually by what we personally value the most and what we choose to ignore.

The website usually includes the address of the content to display or script to run. My post meant that I don't think we should take it as a given that our browser must fetch and run all of those resources automatically or else violate some protocol.

And if a user wants to have a policy of selectively choosing what content they want, but that content is hard to define or whitelist, then using a blacklist mechanism doesn't mean that the policy is to block. It's just the most common, practical method of choosing the content you want.

With CSS, at least, users being able to override styles was explicitly the goal of its first edition:

"One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps."

Ideologically, I am inclined to agree. I have an epidermic reaction to advertising in general. However, these extensions exist in a context where they depend on the majority of users not using them. If every browser had them, the economy of the web would change completely. Very few users who take active steps against ads want to pull a Stallman and relinquish entire parts of the Internet altogether; they want to see the content they are seeing, content that is most of the time supported by ads, without ads. The word 'blocker' is thus appropriate because the explicit goal is an asymmetric relationship based on other people making ads profitable.

In reality, the more interesting question would be whether we shouldn't limit our media consumption to begin with, or form a culture that is less dependent on advertising. If browsing with ads becomes mandatory some day, I will probably make the choice to severely cut the amount of Internet I gorge on. It will take some willpower, but every time I switch off the blocker and see what websites really are like I want to gag, so I won't be that difficult.

How much would be gained if every piece of content actually had to actively earn your patronage versus passively pulling your eyes. I feel like that's the dynamic most AdBlock users see.

I personally don't care if click bait tabloids and exploitative re-hosters we're to crumble overnight.

This sounds very reasonable on paper. The elephant in the room, however, is that most people and even those who claim to want to move past ads don't want to pay that much for what they consume. The barrier between consuming something for free and paying even a tiny sum towards supporting the author is an enormous psychological chasm. The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too.

The case of HN is particularly enlightening because the community is very hostile to ads and for the most part has the technical ability to avoid them with a higher degree of sophistication than just installing Ublock. But there is also the majority of the focus and admiration placed on SWEs and companies that are directly and indirectly tied to the ad ecosystem. The energy given off is similar to McDonald's executives yelling at their children if they see them with a processed patty in hand.

I feel like it's only a psychological chasm because ad-supported content exists at all. If such sites did not exist, I feel like people might have to pay more, they would be more choosy, but then sites would also have to really put more effort into their content. That would eliminate the phenomenon of a thousand sites writing an SEO-farmed article on every possible topic imaginable, and bring it back to 1-2 sites that really put in effort because they care about the topic. Honestly I think the internet would suffer a bit for the first little bit but it would actually stabilize into something a lot more useful.

The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be. The educational and practical resources are there, and are not that hard to find assuming you have gained minimal technological literacy and a certain understanding of internet culture and critical thinking relating to the content available.

There is a ocean of addictive distractions to wade through, but at the same time we know the following things:

- We have to be constantly mindful of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

- News sources and journalism have always had significant quality problems when they venture beyond just reporting basic news, even in the case of business-oriented publications that as Chomsky has pointed out have a vested interest in delivering quality reporting

- Understand topics requires delving into the academic literature in many cases. In this scenario, the internet becomes the line towards that literature or those long-form articles but most of the users' time has to be spent reading and thinking instead of just browsing

- Identifying skinner boxes and addiction traps is easy. You usually know when you are in one. We have to just be honest about what our goals in life are and how much progress we are making towards them

What this does not solve is the problem of focusing on the wrong things in life or embarking in a career or interests that are ultimately deleterious to your life. But the internet at least makes it far easier to pivot and refocus as long as you let it do so and use it towards a conscious goal. This mindfulness is easier said than done but it's far from an impossibility.

Good point, I agree. I did not think of that. However, it's a bit hard to find certain things now. To take one example, sometimes I like to read reviews of camera equipment. I like to read reviews written by individuals who just use it rather than the SEO junk by most major websites. However, even if those small-time reviews are usually much more informative, they are VERY hard to find in search engines. The SEO junk just overwhelms page after page of search.

That's why I think the internet would be better off without a lot of the intense duplication that is out there today.

> The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be.

Sort of. Many of the useful (not ad-driven) sites of the 90s are still around. Mine are. So in that sense, yes.

But they are drowned by the flood of ad and SEO-driven junk. Finding the good parts, if you don't already know, is becoming harder. Search engines no longer return most of the useful sites on any given topic.

It depends on what you define as useful. 90's style personal websites/Usenet/BBS forums can be useful. People certainly gathered there to make significant things happen and to create useful resources. That said they're still pretty infotainmenty, the signal to noise ratio is still pretty low compared to a focus on an actual topic of interest that comes through deeply engaging with the literature and/or delving into making or building things with it. We have to keep to the logic that the internet is a conduit towards real life actions and the internet of the 90's already cut into that. In a sense, being bothered by the SEO means you are still in an infotainment mindset anyway or at least surfing the shallower waves.

Today's internet has astoundingly accessible resources on all sorts of things. A motivated person can still sidestep all of the crap with relative ease. Or to put it another way, if they get lost in the shrubs, they weren't gonna make it in any case. Motivated people now have many more tools and platforms at their disposal to gather alongside one another and make things happen. The pre-September internet was more private, yes, but that was actually a massive flaw in an absolute sense. Now you can have a bright middle class Mongolian kid become an electronics expert on his own and the greybeards aren't barred from finding their watering hole either.

> The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too.

The web in the late 90s was in most ways far more pleasant and useful place than today. Content was a labor of love, not driven by advertising.

I wouldn't hesitate for an instant go back to an internet which bans advertising. It would be far better than what we have today, not just the ads but all the toxic data collection and spyware that those fuel.

I’m fine with the funding engine of the internet dying.

The way those ads get put these is massive privacy violations happen to fuel an engine that’s smarter than you with data. Then this engine shows the perfect ad at the perfect time in the perfect moment of weakness to get you to do what the advertiser wants.

If these ads were merely roadside billboards I don’t think I would care as much. These are internet ads connected to an extensive surveillance infrastructure. Manifest v3 indirectly means an increase in surveillance activity and the biggest companies and governments on earth expanding their power. Let’s also not just say that content blockers merely block ads, I use them to block scripts all the time which are there to expressly mine your data to manipulate you in the future. I’m not smart enough to not get manipulated if I give these companies my data.

If I block ads to prevent all that and we have less 6 figure FAANG jobs and convenient services on the internet - oh no! P2P is a thing, community run websites are a thing, alternative funding models are a thing, open source is a thing, lower wages are fine, we’ll be fine.

I for one would be happier if every site that relied on ads simply vanished. The whole reason we have an "attention economy" is the monetary gain from showing people ads, which encourages quantity (ie spam) over quality.

There was a link posted to HN today: "Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto". I remember when a web search about any topic would find you a few similar pages, of people diving deeply into topics and DIYing experiments and publishing everything they'd learned simply because they wanted to share hard-won knowledge.

On my projects-to-do-someday list, I would like to try mashing up a search engine to filter out results that contain advertising (load the page, check if anything matches adblock list, if so, discard). Obviously in today's adcancer-filled web, that is going to discard the vast majority of results. But I'd hope that it would eventually surface some interesting results that have been drowned out by spam, assuming they're even still indexed. But it certainly couldn't be any worse than all the false positives that drown the results these days.

I pay for kagi search, it has some features that do this very well. Well not exactly the same but you can focus your search better where ads are less of an issue

I’m fine with “content blockers”. They block content the same way my eyelids and eye muscles do when I decide to not look at billboards.

If you don’t have moral qualms with using your eyelids to block ads then you shouldn’t have with software content blockers either. It just outsources the act of blocking from your eyes into the computer.

To be honest, no, I don't use my eyelids to block anything, and I don't think that's a reasonable thing for a person to do. I don't use any muscles to block billboards; I just look at whatever I was originally planning to look at (usually the road ahead of me), and don't expend much mental or muscular effort to pay attention to OR ignore billboards. The closest I might come is to turn away from ads playing at the gas pump. But that could easily be classified as choosing not to look vs. blocking.

If I could wear blinkers that only block the billboards while driving, I would definitely wear them.

Ad blockers on the PC are the same thing.

the "block" ads.

Not everything needs to be analyzed to death for some sort of symbolism.

I call them HTML firewalls.

Bouncers?