> We choose Adblock as it is one of the most popular. It is also possible to use Adblock Plus or uBlock, as the way they operate is exactly the same — HTTP filters and HTML element hiding.
AdBlock in the Chrome store uses Adblock Plus filtering engine[1], so to say the way these two "operate is exactly the same" makes sense.
However uBlock Origin uses its own code base, and is far better equipped than AdBlock/Adblock Plus to deal with anti-blockers, so to say that the way uBO operates is "exactly the same" is a stretch.
What would you recommend for mobile? Browsing on Android with Chrome is a nightmare, and the last time I tried FF it was a bit sluggish (although it did allowed me to install extensions!)
I use an ad blocker, because otherwise the web is unusable.
Maybe if (1) fewer ads pumped up CPU and memory usage for a page, and (2) companies didn't give their non-technical asshole free reign over placing scripts on the page, then maybe many of these sites wouldn't be so bad to visit without an ad blocker.
Some adtech startup should just quit playing games and go full creeper mode:
* simple text-only ads
* give the advertisers the tools to generate text content that is minimally distracting, maximally invasive, maximally creepy, and maximally personally-identifying
"$35,000 in debt, unemployed, recently dumped and insecure about your male sexual identity? You deserve this special price on Axe Body Spray..."
The buzz alone would get people to turn off their ad-blockers just to see what content gets generated for them.
They would still find themselves in the filter lists. It's hard to trust any ad company, that is unfortunate truth. I did text only Amazon links sort of advertising but it triggers some unlock filters because of the affiliate link.
I've been using uBlock since it came out and I just immediately leave those sites that don't function unless I disable it. Whatever content they have, someone else likely has a "good enough" alternative.
I also happen to run a blog (no where near a major website) but my thought process is, you should write because you want to spread what you've learned with others, not create a platform for the sole purpose of making money.
To me, having a visitor on your site is a privilege. Why would you go out of your way to interrupt and attempt to manipulate them, yet that's what so many large sites do. There's other ways to make money rather than tormenting your users.
But you are not writing for a living, so it is easy to say, just doing it for the joy and not for money. But there are people which profession is writing - and they need to get money.
The normal way, unfortunately is with ads, even though nobody likes them.
My preferred solution of voluntarily pay what you want ... probably takes a bit more time, to become established.
I apply the same logic but to website that has annoying ads. You annoy me, I go somewhere else.
I have the privilege to have content creators to visit, not the other way around. There is 8 billions potential visitors, there's can only be less than that potential content creator. Visiting takes no time, creating takes so much more time (if it wouldn't, well I wouldn't even read your stuff, I would do it myself).
> There's other ways to make money rather than tormenting your users.
Sure, but what does it have to do with me visiting your website? I'm there for a single reason, read what you got. Except if you directly sell me what you write using a paywall, if you have a sideline, than what you do is ADVERTISING, which let me remind you, you don't like (I don't either). At least using advertising on the side of what you read, the text is no longer an advertisement, just what's beside it (which is clearly labeled and clearly ads).
Since the explosion of adblocker and the effect was increased after the Youtube Adpocalypse, there is so much more sponsored content produced, it's disgusting. I can live with some of it but currently, it just becomes worse and worse.
I've started noticing this from Google, among others. Tracking scripts are no longer explicitly named as such, or they're prefixed with some slug or GUID alongside the legitimate "functional" scripts.
It's getting to a point where you need to actively monitor every network request the site makes. It's despicable and I have nothing but ill will for the data scientists, software engineers, and product managers who participate in this.
Tie the advertisement to the type of content that the user is already there to read about. Then you can serve ads from the content web server and make it indistinguishable from content, completely unobtrusive, completely noninvasive, and maybe even welcome.
I was reading the news with Safari on iOS 11.2 with a new iPhone X recently. As I was browsing different sites I noticed I was getting redirected to those scammy "You've won a cruise" style websites. I had no idea ads were so out of control. I've been using ad blocking technology for 10+ years and never see it first hand. It's pretty crazy that website operators have to create such a terrible user experience to survive these days.
Advertisers need to fuck off. Ads are never going to work on the web - the ad bubble needs to pop already! Advertising on the web is a horrifying web of fraud, psuedoscience, and invasive tracking and sensitive data hoarding. Frankly, it should have been outlawed by now.
While everything that is going on with ads is horrible, it does work. This is very wrong side to hope for things get better. There is fraud but companies pay premium for ads because of it and in the end customers.
I agree, but it will be ugly. These "ad" companies are really surveillance companies who can currently print money by selling ads. When the bubble pops, they'll still have all of their surveillance data, but will be forced to sell it in different and sleazier ways. Think credit reporting that is technically not "credit reporting," job applicant screening based on web histories, reporting on political dissidents, etc. FB/GOOG will get seriously evil as they collapse.
Disabling javascript is the best anti-anti-adblock solution. I wish chrome added an option for tampermonkey scripts to be run with disabled js, that would make this solution perfect.
Brave (at least on mobile) has a handy toggle by default right in the tool bar for blocking javascript and trackers. I don't use anything else on mobile anymore. Been using it about 50% of the time on desktop as well. Thinking about doing the micro-payments thing they offer.
Ads are inherently psychologically abusive, targeting your insecurities and exploiting sex and basic instinct to move product.
There needs to be a fundamental shift from the old tv and radio model of advertisers targeting everyone through inescapable ham fisted and manipulative ads, to a system that is all but dormant until I query it for a service.
Show me nothing, nothing at all, until I make the effort to ask the question "what products are available for $need?"
If I'm on a website and begin searching, give the site the ad revenue.
> Ads are inherently psychologically abusive, targeting your insecurities and exploiting sex and basic instinct to move product.
This is a pretty wild claim. Most ads I see are relatively tame (like the “Build on AWS” and iPhone X ads I see around San Francisco), and I don’t see them “exploiting sex or basic instinct.”
When I worked as an intrusion analyst, I worked on a lot of content to detect domain generation algorithms (DGA) that are sometimes used by botnets and other malware for more robust command and control. Over the last couple of years this has become increasingly frustrated by a lot of websites using algorithmically generated domain names in order to evade adblocker blocklists. Domains like "djbvueiabjqkna.com" are increasingly just some major news website delivering their banner ads.
I'd be happy to install an extension that blocks all sites/content that consider viewing ads a prerequisite for accessing their content.
I run an ad/analytic blocker, and I will never turn it off. I also understand that content creation and hosting costs money. If you're not a company that I already give money to (bank, insurance, other meat space service) then I accept the ad-for-content relationship and choose not to view the content.
The biggest problems are that I can't scale randomly adding domains to a host file, and it's difficult to know the intent of content creators/owners regarding ads.
It would be nice to have a signal, maybe a html tag in the header or something to state the intent regarding ads. I would set my browser/an extension to honor it and block access to content instead of accepting ads.
Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker.
Hey big web sites, here is the solution, and I won’t even charge you for it: stop making terrible user experiences. I am not trying to block your ad; I am blocking your carelessly-written malware-laden code, your obnoxious pop-ups, your auto-playing videos, your shove-in-my-face-at-the-worst-time messages, your unreasonable consumption of my mobile data, and everything that is making a simple article difficult to load.
I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors. Make the first paragraph of every article a nice little blurb telling me more about a company that pays you to advertise for them. Put some cute ads in muted colors inline with the content. Create a couple simple links to things that cost money that could support you (apps, T-shirts or whatever). In short, don’t be a complete jerk to the people you apparently “need” to help maintain the costs of your site.
I had to disable my ad blocker today to try out another plugin. The sites were 2-3x slower to load. There is no way anyone can convince me to disable my ad blocker again.
Although I agree with your first point, I think this is a symptom of a much larger problem that we are ignoring:
We have a serious economic problem in which we can't fund things that we want and need. Instead of making advertising "less bad", we should be looking into alternative ways to fund sites and services. Advertising in it's current form simply needs to go.
Do many sites have that much direct editorial control over the ads they run?
I've only ever done a little ad banner work so I don't know how it is for "large" sites, but I assume the people writing and maintaining the code are not the ones actually selling or creating the ads. I assume those decisions are made between sales and the client.
> Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker.
That's not how online advertising works. If a user doesn't like ads, they block all ads indiscriminately. Changing ads doesn't do anything, because users will always block ads regardless of their quality, at least until the vast majority of ads are "acceptable" -- and even then, many demographics will continue blocking anyway. What is "acceptable", anyway? Make the ad small enough and/or dumb enough that it is no longer worth anything to the advertiser?
> stop making terrible user experiences.
There are plenty of websites with acceptable UX (or UX that isn't practically made worse by ads) that use ads. How many of them are on your whitelist? Do you even know which sites are showing ads if you use an adblocker?
> I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors.
While this is a reasonable request, it doesn't change the fact that many/most people now have an adblocker on their browser.
There's no doubt this problem has been exasperated by malicious ad creatives. But the onus of correcting the problem lies in the hands of BOTH adblocker developers AND the online ads industry (including publishers, exchanges, and advertisers.)
> “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?”
If a single website -- say, your local or regional news site -- overhauled its ad experience to become more user-friendly, how would you even notice, if their ad server was added to your ad blocker's blacklist?
As I've said many times I don't mind ads, but I block trackers. What these websites need to understand is that this is the market in action. We can bemoan trackers. We can legislate against them (at least in principle). But if WEBSITES were to LOSE MONEY if as a result of using trackers and therefore NOT USE THEM then the companies hoarding our data would have to find another business model or go out of business.
Using ad/tracking blockers is the morally correct choice if you want the market to handle this.
In the beginning, I tried to avoid ad-blockers in the beginning out of consideration for the sustainability of the content providers.
It took one site for me to start using ad-blockers.
Facebook: they persistently were showing me ads for online MBA programs when I already had completed a better brick-and-mortar one.
I recall that I tried complaining and got no response. For some psychological reason, that did it. I installed an ad-blocker on my and my wife's laptops and never looked back.
If the big sites had been more conscientious about their ad strategy (and specifically allowing people more control over what shows up on their screens) we might not be in an escalating technological war over ads.
The linked article is highly readable and loads very quickly simply by disabling all JavaScript on the site. Which I do by default. Thank you NoScript.
Y'know, you could not force multiple tracker scripts and obtrusive ads on me.
Stupid bastards.
The sad part is that anti-adblocking may work in their favor because the average person isn't going to go as far as to stop using certain websites or turn off JavaScript. It may get to that point with me, though. I already refuse to use most websites that try to block my ad blocker, autoplay videos, open modals too early, etc.
It's not about ads, but the types of ads that are presented. There would be backlash if the types of ads we see on the internet were equally as plastered everywhere in real life, but for some reason we've just got to deal with it on the web.
I generally don't disdain people for doing things for a living, but I'd openly thumb my nose at developers and anyone else involved in thwarting adblockers and tracking blockers. Talk about a sisyphean job that helps nobody except one of the slimiest industries to exist.
A lot of people would be willing to pay for web content; Patreon and the wealth of content on YouTube are a testament to this. But websites that let you pay to remove ads have a problem, and it's that they don't use a unified system to manage subscriptions. The user is somehow supposed to manage what sites they're subscribed to. It'd make more sense if news sites, for example, could integrate with a service where you could manage your subscriptions to these sites as well as more content.
Without adblocking, the web is unusable for most sites. Full page ads, video ads that follow you while you scrolling, popup, malwares, bitcoin mining, tracking, etc...
TBH, the only solution is browser makers put out an ad acceptable standard. However, with Google's revenue base on ads, I doubt there will be any change to it until someone come along and disrupted the browsers.
- We miss the old internet of independent creators.
- We love ad blockers.
The rise of the second has in no small part injured the first. Money is a big incentive for independent creators, and removing it from the equation has a chilling effect.
[+] [-] gorhill|8 years ago|reply
> We choose Adblock as it is one of the most popular. It is also possible to use Adblock Plus or uBlock, as the way they operate is exactly the same — HTTP filters and HTML element hiding.
AdBlock in the Chrome store uses Adblock Plus filtering engine[1], so to say the way these two "operate is exactly the same" makes sense.
However uBlock Origin uses its own code base, and is far better equipped than AdBlock/Adblock Plus to deal with anti-blockers, so to say that the way uBO operates is "exactly the same" is a stretch.
* * *
[1] Since version 3.0: https://help.getadblock.com/support/discussions/topics/60000... -- it's not explicitly stated in the announcement but this code repo mirror shows it: https://github.com/kzar/watchadblock/blob/c5f5b7f535182d6774...
[+] [-] bradknowles|8 years ago|reply
Cool!
And thank you for your service to the Internet!
[+] [-] zzleeper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RandomInteger4|8 years ago|reply
Maybe if (1) fewer ads pumped up CPU and memory usage for a page, and (2) companies didn't give their non-technical asshole free reign over placing scripts on the page, then maybe many of these sites wouldn't be so bad to visit without an ad blocker.
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
* simple text-only ads
* give the advertisers the tools to generate text content that is minimally distracting, maximally invasive, maximally creepy, and maximally personally-identifying
"$35,000 in debt, unemployed, recently dumped and insecure about your male sexual identity? You deserve this special price on Axe Body Spray..."
The buzz alone would get people to turn off their ad-blockers just to see what content gets generated for them.
[+] [-] reificator|8 years ago|reply
http://www.danasoft.com/vipersig.jpg
[+] [-] kilroy123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PrimHelios|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raguuu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickjj|8 years ago|reply
I also happen to run a blog (no where near a major website) but my thought process is, you should write because you want to spread what you've learned with others, not create a platform for the sole purpose of making money.
To me, having a visitor on your site is a privilege. Why would you go out of your way to interrupt and attempt to manipulate them, yet that's what so many large sites do. There's other ways to make money rather than tormenting your users.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|8 years ago|reply
The normal way, unfortunately is with ads, even though nobody likes them.
My preferred solution of voluntarily pay what you want ... probably takes a bit more time, to become established.
[+] [-] dbmikus|8 years ago|reply
A site can disable access to those using adblock, and it's reasonable to choose to avoid those websites.
[+] [-] dwild|8 years ago|reply
I have the privilege to have content creators to visit, not the other way around. There is 8 billions potential visitors, there's can only be less than that potential content creator. Visiting takes no time, creating takes so much more time (if it wouldn't, well I wouldn't even read your stuff, I would do it myself).
> There's other ways to make money rather than tormenting your users.
Sure, but what does it have to do with me visiting your website? I'm there for a single reason, read what you got. Except if you directly sell me what you write using a paywall, if you have a sideline, than what you do is ADVERTISING, which let me remind you, you don't like (I don't either). At least using advertising on the side of what you read, the text is no longer an advertisement, just what's beside it (which is clearly labeled and clearly ads).
Since the explosion of adblocker and the effect was increased after the Youtube Adpocalypse, there is so much more sponsored content produced, it's disgusting. I can live with some of it but currently, it just becomes worse and worse.
[+] [-] AlexMax|8 years ago|reply
"Your terms are acceptable."
I think that is precisely what those sites want. They would probably prefer not to waste bandwidth on a user they can't monetize.
[+] [-] nerdponx|8 years ago|reply
It's getting to a point where you need to actively monitor every network request the site makes. It's despicable and I have nothing but ill will for the data scientists, software engineers, and product managers who participate in this.
[+] [-] orbitingpluto|8 years ago|reply
Tie the advertisement to the type of content that the user is already there to read about. Then you can serve ads from the content web server and make it indistinguishable from content, completely unobtrusive, completely noninvasive, and maybe even welcome.
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raguuu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] username223|8 years ago|reply
I agree, but it will be ugly. These "ad" companies are really surveillance companies who can currently print money by selling ads. When the bubble pops, they'll still have all of their surveillance data, but will be forced to sell it in different and sleazier ways. Think credit reporting that is technically not "credit reporting," job applicant screening based on web histories, reporting on political dissidents, etc. FB/GOOG will get seriously evil as they collapse.
[+] [-] snarfy|8 years ago|reply
I may learn of a new product by seeing an ad, and in that sense it worked, but never by clicking on it.
The point being there is absolutely no reason for any ad to have javascript associated with it.
[+] [-] lousken|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freedomben|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] severine|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/mems/bookmarklets-context-menu
[+] [-] nimbius|8 years ago|reply
Show me nothing, nothing at all, until I make the effort to ask the question "what products are available for $need?"
If I'm on a website and begin searching, give the site the ad revenue.
[+] [-] tylerhou|8 years ago|reply
This is a pretty wild claim. Most ads I see are relatively tame (like the “Build on AWS” and iPhone X ads I see around San Francisco), and I don’t see them “exploiting sex or basic instinct.”
[+] [-] mythrwy|8 years ago|reply
Only the really good ones though. Most are just annoying and boring.
[+] [-] nostrademons|8 years ago|reply
Isn't that basically Google (at least before they bought DoubleClick)?
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doesnt_know|8 years ago|reply
I run an ad/analytic blocker, and I will never turn it off. I also understand that content creation and hosting costs money. If you're not a company that I already give money to (bank, insurance, other meat space service) then I accept the ad-for-content relationship and choose not to view the content.
The biggest problems are that I can't scale randomly adding domains to a host file, and it's difficult to know the intent of content creators/owners regarding ads.
It would be nice to have a signal, maybe a html tag in the header or something to state the intent regarding ads. I would set my browser/an extension to honor it and block access to content instead of accepting ads.
[+] [-] Matheus28|8 years ago|reply
(numbers completely made up on the spot)
[+] [-] makecheck|8 years ago|reply
Hey big web sites, here is the solution, and I won’t even charge you for it: stop making terrible user experiences. I am not trying to block your ad; I am blocking your carelessly-written malware-laden code, your obnoxious pop-ups, your auto-playing videos, your shove-in-my-face-at-the-worst-time messages, your unreasonable consumption of my mobile data, and everything that is making a simple article difficult to load.
I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors. Make the first paragraph of every article a nice little blurb telling me more about a company that pays you to advertise for them. Put some cute ads in muted colors inline with the content. Create a couple simple links to things that cost money that could support you (apps, T-shirts or whatever). In short, don’t be a complete jerk to the people you apparently “need” to help maintain the costs of your site.
[+] [-] noncoml|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CaptSpify|8 years ago|reply
We have a serious economic problem in which we can't fund things that we want and need. Instead of making advertising "less bad", we should be looking into alternative ways to fund sites and services. Advertising in it's current form simply needs to go.
[+] [-] lscotte|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|8 years ago|reply
I've only ever done a little ad banner work so I don't know how it is for "large" sites, but I assume the people writing and maintaining the code are not the ones actually selling or creating the ads. I assume those decisions are made between sales and the client.
[+] [-] lwansbrough|8 years ago|reply
That's not how online advertising works. If a user doesn't like ads, they block all ads indiscriminately. Changing ads doesn't do anything, because users will always block ads regardless of their quality, at least until the vast majority of ads are "acceptable" -- and even then, many demographics will continue blocking anyway. What is "acceptable", anyway? Make the ad small enough and/or dumb enough that it is no longer worth anything to the advertiser?
> stop making terrible user experiences.
There are plenty of websites with acceptable UX (or UX that isn't practically made worse by ads) that use ads. How many of them are on your whitelist? Do you even know which sites are showing ads if you use an adblocker?
> I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors.
While this is a reasonable request, it doesn't change the fact that many/most people now have an adblocker on their browser.
There's no doubt this problem has been exasperated by malicious ad creatives. But the onus of correcting the problem lies in the hands of BOTH adblocker developers AND the online ads industry (including publishers, exchanges, and advertisers.)
[+] [-] danso|8 years ago|reply
If a single website -- say, your local or regional news site -- overhauled its ad experience to become more user-friendly, how would you even notice, if their ad server was added to your ad blocker's blacklist?
[+] [-] getaclue99|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dhimes|8 years ago|reply
Using ad/tracking blockers is the morally correct choice if you want the market to handle this.
[+] [-] aaronchall|8 years ago|reply
It took one site for me to start using ad-blockers.
Facebook: they persistently were showing me ads for online MBA programs when I already had completed a better brick-and-mortar one.
I recall that I tried complaining and got no response. For some psychological reason, that did it. I installed an ad-blocker on my and my wife's laptops and never looked back.
If the big sites had been more conscientious about their ad strategy (and specifically allowing people more control over what shows up on their screens) we might not be in an escalating technological war over ads.
[+] [-] leeoniya|8 years ago|reply
incognito: 4.4mb, 7000ms scripting, 365 requests, onload: 7600ms
with uMatrix (no third party shit): 612kb, 190ms of scripting, 56 requests, onload: 500ms
this is on a 300MBit connection
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktta|8 years ago|reply
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/27/thousands-of-major-sites-a...
[+] [-] true_religion|8 years ago|reply
Also, I'm not sure where the irony is here. They're talking about anti-adblocking, so it's hardly ironic that they use advertisements themselves.
[+] [-] ravenstine|8 years ago|reply
Stupid bastards.
The sad part is that anti-adblocking may work in their favor because the average person isn't going to go as far as to stop using certain websites or turn off JavaScript. It may get to that point with me, though. I already refuse to use most websites that try to block my ad blocker, autoplay videos, open modals too early, etc.
It's not about ads, but the types of ads that are presented. There would be backlash if the types of ads we see on the internet were equally as plastered everywhere in real life, but for some reason we've just got to deal with it on the web.
I generally don't disdain people for doing things for a living, but I'd openly thumb my nose at developers and anyone else involved in thwarting adblockers and tracking blockers. Talk about a sisyphean job that helps nobody except one of the slimiest industries to exist.
A lot of people would be willing to pay for web content; Patreon and the wealth of content on YouTube are a testament to this. But websites that let you pay to remove ads have a problem, and it's that they don't use a unified system to manage subscriptions. The user is somehow supposed to manage what sites they're subscribed to. It'd make more sense if news sites, for example, could integrate with a service where you could manage your subscriptions to these sites as well as more content.
[+] [-] wdn|8 years ago|reply
TBH, the only solution is browser makers put out an ad acceptable standard. However, with Google's revenue base on ads, I doubt there will be any change to it until someone come along and disrupted the browsers.
[+] [-] donatj|8 years ago|reply
- We miss the old internet of independent creators.
- We love ad blockers.
The rise of the second has in no small part injured the first. Money is a big incentive for independent creators, and removing it from the equation has a chilling effect.
[+] [-] borplk|8 years ago|reply
And had an overlay with a countdown.