I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.
That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.
For many many years I resisted installing an ad-blocker. As someone who worked at a website that made the bulk of it's revenue from ads, it felt hypocritical, and also, I wanted to make sure that the experience of our website was bearable without ad blocking, by forcing myself to experience it every day.
I gave up about two years ago. The web just go so bad I had to install ad-block. My computer would spin like a jet plane at least once an hour due to insane advertising on a website consuming all the CPU.
I literally installed ad-block to save my computer hardware.
The ads don't even bother me that much. I used to always say, "my brain is my ad-block". It was the slow loading, CPU heavy ads that got me to turn.
If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. But how about not melting my computer in the process?
> If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money.
I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.
Yeah, for many years I figured "Let the website owners make money, I get to use their service for free anyway, and I can always mentally tune the ads out."
And then sometime around 2015 or 2016, I started noticing ads that would lock up my CPU, or get my laptop's fan running, or prevent the page from loading entirely, or increase page loading time by 10x. And then I decided enough was enough, and installed an adblocker.
It's not the general concept of advertising that I object to. It's when the advertising makes the content that I initially came to see unusable. Fix your goddamn Javascript and maybe I won't block you, although at this point I'm kinda enjoying the ad-free experience.
Same boat. I actually don't mind most ads. Then the slow page loading, CPU melting became annoying. And on mobile, even reputable sites were having ads hijack the browser. I'm done, I only use Opera or Brave now. I feel like I was a target demographic to advertise to, and they abused me instead.
I used to not use ad blockers as I'm not bothered by ads. But it's getting increasingly difficult not to because the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs. It has got to the point that ads and analytics are being added so mindlessly (I saw it first hand as random CPU hogging battery killing trackers were pushed onto my single-page web app by product managers) that browsing without an ad blocker isn't viable anymore performance-wise.
> the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs
Where are you going for that to happen? Not only does a tab crashing is extremely rare for me, even on my low 8 GB of RAM which I got 8 years ago. It seems a bit crazy that it happens quite often for you.
Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.
(Of course, if you measure the success of an economy by the GDP, then it might seem that ads have a positive influence, but that seems a bit like a broken-window fallacy to me).
IMO the first place to start implementing ad bans is in public spaces, which I hear is common in Europe. I don't have to watch TV so I don't see TV ads. I don't listen to the radio much so I don't listen to radio ads. I can use an ad blocker on the web, yet for some reason the public spaces I inhabit (and help pay for) are full of ads.
Even disregarding the many questionable aspects of consumerism, think about how many developers you know that have dedicated their entire ability to creating better advertising. The amount of brain power that has been spent on marketing (largely) unnecessary products to consumers is staggering. I hesitate to suppose where we could be if those abilities had been directed elsewhere, but I expect the world might be a much better place.
>'Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.'
Interesting idea. I just read that over £20bn is spent a year on advertising in the UK. The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
Netflix is an interesting example of a new model of entertainment that generates revenues through subscriptions instead of advertisements. Lots of newspapers have also shifted to a subscription-based model, though only The Guardian has done so without placing their website behind a paywall. Another alternative is public service broadcasting, like the BBC.
There was a paper on the psychological effects, i.e. net negative effects on happiness not too long ago [1], I think it was posted on HN a while back. Haven't read it though so I can't comment on the specific findings and the quality.
If anyone has any literature on the other effects mentioned by the parent, I'd be highly interested as well.
There are countries that ban ads, but they also ban a lot of other things.
My presumption is that if advertising was banned, and you were still dealing with a relatively free society, that many more resources would go in to PR and marketing. At least an ad you know is an ad.
A good exercise is to go back and look through magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, especially Playboy. The advertising seems much more transparent in its shallow promises and we actually know what the long term outcomes were from following them -- e.g. alcohol, tobacco, and cars no one gives a shit about anymore. The editorial bridges between advertising and content glaringly stick out. These things aren't necessarily no longer true, but the obviousness of time shines a bright light on it.
To me the biggest story in ads isn't ad blockers or Google, it is Facebook getting consumers to spend gargantuan amounts of money creating content for free and then making tens of billions of dollars from it. Youtube/Google at least has revenue sharing.
I worked briefly in a marketing department as programmer. Learned the following there.
The benefit of advertising is to inform the consumer of products they may not be aware of.
"Messa thinks Messa might have Mesothelioma!"
Most of the time advertising is a waste of time, and there certainly are better ways of learning about products. However, the function of informing consumers of products they may not be aware of is of mild benefit.
A better question than what benefit is advertising might be, "How can advertising be made more beneficial to the viewers"
I'm currently reading the book the book, "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman. I consider myself fairly intelligent, but of course knowledgeable in just a few domains, but he brought up something that I'm ashamed to not have realized for myself.
Simon Kuznets, a Russian emigre to the US, developed the concept of the GDP in 1934, and according to Bregman, tracking the GDP was a significant factor in the US's ability to harness its manufacturing capability during the war effort; most countries had a significantly inferior understanding of their own production dynamics.
As useful was it was for the war effort, Kuznets warned that the GDP should be redefined after the war, as the country's needs had changed. Instead, military spending is part of the GDP. No party wants to significantly cut back on military spending because it would affect the GDP. So not only does the GDP encourage increased military spending, it doesn't reward so many things that would be beneficial to society, and thus little effort is spent optimizing for those things.
TL;DR: if the GDP doesn't measure it, there is no political will to address it, and if the GDP does measure it, it is a political necessity to boost spending in that area. Thus, needless military spending, rent seeking money shuffling on wall street, and advertising are richly rewarded as they are included in the GDP.
> It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need;
My SO opened an escape room a year ago. I though similarly as you before that (not that it make people consume more, but that they'll buy the inferior product), but then after a few weekend without any reservation... it made me realize how things aren't just found.
You need to be reminded that something exist to even consider it. It's not even a question of whether that's the best thing for you.
She always ask people what they think once they done and recently she got as a comment "but you aren't visible enough". We pay for ads, a few thousands, we are probably not too far from having spend 5 digits in ads. I couldn't imagine how people could be aware of our existence without ads at all.
> and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
We are paying for it, sure, but at least we are paying, aren't we? I like that I can get any ads on a channel. I love DIY channels, I seriously hate how almost all of them hide that all their tools were given. They say it from time to time, but on most videos, they'll just keep using the one from the past videos without mentionning getting them for free. That's an ads by the way, they may even directly get paid for using theses tools. With adsense though, the ads I get aren't necessarily related to the video, I'm AWARE they are ads, they are made FOR ME (thus more profitable for the channel, because I may need tool, but I may be more likely to buy a new computer for example).
Are ads really that effective? I'd love for my internet ads to show me stuff I could buy at nice prices. What I get is I bought a mechanical keyboard once and now for two months all ads will be bombarding me with mechanical keyboard offers. Why would I want one if I already got one?
Advertising exists to increase consumption, because capitalism requires constant growth. On order for it to sustain itself, we need to buy more and more, consume more and more.
When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.
And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.
"Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt?"
I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way.
Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are loathe to do investigative journalism or negative reporting on the companies that provide their bread and butter and because they also want to run stories that don't offend or antagonize their advertisers -- stories from that point of view that capitalism is bad or advertising is bad, for instance, are off limits to many outlets partially because of this.
Advertisers also routinely lie about the products they're selling, so people are being deceived about the products they're buying, sometimes with very serious negative consequences (such as advertising of cigarettes or medical products that are actually harmful).
This line of thought is complete nonsense. When you get a product in a transaction, you get something from the other party and you give them something in exchange. When you buy an iPhone, what you're giving is $700. In the case of non-paywalled online content, what you're giving is an ad impression. It would be ludicrous to say after an iPhone purchase "I didn't get anything out of the part of the transaction where I paid $700? The government should ban it".
I'm not dismissing the possibility of conversations about whether advertising for services is a type of transaction that's difficult to reason about, and that users need to be protected from themselves by regulation. But looking at only the outflow half of a transaction and asking "I don't benefit from this part, we should ban it" is utter gibberish.
"Did anyone ever investigate what benefits payment systems have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, since payment systems cost money to operate and in the end all they do is reduce the amount of money a user has. While payment systems may allow you to 'buy' services, we are still paying for these systems directly and indirectly
Why then, doesn't the government bring currency and bank accounts and credit cards to a halt?"
Remember that the formal name for a web browser is a User Agent.
This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.
This - so far I have a title, 'The death of User Agent' of an article about how browsers turned from user (my) agents, who represent my best interests on the internet, into corporate agents (which act in best interests of their makers - on my own computer!)
Regrettably, nobody bothers to mention that JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this. If unnecessary use of JavaScript earned the same sort of derision that "best viewed in IE 6" banners did, we wouldn't be where we are today.
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.
> JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this
Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations.
Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more complicated than you're making it seem. I don't need Javascript to put a tracking pixel in your email.
JavaScript enables functionality in the same way that cars enable transportation. They aren't the only solution. And there would be far less injury, death, and pollution if we all just didn't use automobiles. The world would be a safer, cleaner place. And a small fraction of people would be happy with it.
JavaScript is the same. We'd have a cleaner, safer web without it. And only a small fraction of people would be happy with that.
Agree.
I no longer use an ad-blocker, and haven't for some time. Especially so since CSS took over.
Originally I used NoScript (and Firefox 'View>Page Style>No Style'), now I just tend to use uMatrix, with appropriate media types disabled.
It makes for a faster, and easier to read web, where I still see the occasional ad, but once configured, usually not.
I'd guess that use with Javascript disabled seems to be accepted in part due to Safari on iOS supporing it - possibly it was the default (I can't remember).
I've been blocking ads ever since I learned that I could stop seeing DoubleClick ads by blocking their domain in /etc/hosts.
I won't ever apologize for doing so. As far as I'm concerned, any advertisement that depends on JavaScript is malware, and I think that my right to protect myself online outweighs the need of publishers to turn a profit.
IMO, profits are like respect. They must be earned, and if the only way you can turn a profit is by spying on people then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place. If the only way you can get me to use your product is by giving it away and selling my data, then maybe your product shouldn't exist?
As far as I'm concerned, the data I generate by using a search engine should be treated with the same care as my medical records. It should not be mined or traded. It should not be kept longer than 30 days.
And if that breaks the internet, so be it. You brought this on yourselves.
The great thing about getting older for me is realising that nothing is indispensable. Everything eventually ends, we move on with our lives and do something else.
So sure: maybe someday un-adblockable content will be a thing. Do I care about that content? Turns out maybe I'll just walk away entirely. The internet has a lot of utterly ad-ridden services with far too high an opinion of how important they really are.
I often use firefox reader mode just because websites use custom fonts, and to remove all the clutter, even when there is no ads.
Also, it won't be long until reddit is sued and must remove comments where people copy-paste the entire article because of pay walls and ad blockers. Same for outline. I guess website will start findings ways to prevent copy pasting, and maybe someone will create some app that just let their users browse a PNG rendering of websites.
It's almost as if normal newspapers might be considered a good alternative.
I'm amazed that all the interested parties haven't got together to flesh out a microtransaction standard. The whole ad-blocking debate would be moot if we could pay a few cents to read an article free of distracting ads. If you choose not to pay, you get the ads and don't get to complain about ad-blocker-blockers because you were offered an alternative.
I know it has been attempted in the past with little success, but all those attempts were just companies going it alone and hoping for the best. If the W3C, browser makers, banks and publishers all got together a standard could be developed. Something that would be core to web standards. It wouldn't be easy, but it would solve a lot of problems.
A huge part of advertising is getting users to feel that they can trust in a product or service enough to spend their money on it. Spend a bit of time watching TV commercials and see how many methods of establishing trust you can spot.
This is why the way web ads are served is utterly farcical. How can you build a person's trust by invading their privacy in a hundred different ways just so you can be sure the ads they're seeing are a little bit more targeted than what's on TV?
People often say that they would be happy to have reasonable ads that don't interfere with website function and which respect their privacy, but it's been so bad for so long that it would likely be very difficult for an ethical, privacy respecting ad service to get off the ground. Many people have been burned too many times to believe and unblock such an ad service. EME shows that there is no interest in even trying this approach. They're just going to continue escalating the arms war.
They're going to lose.
Companies advertising on the internet need to wake up to the fact you can't support a war against the privacy of your potential customer base and expect them to trust you. Yes, you've dug quite the hole for yourselves over the last couple of decades. Why keep digging?
Something is different in the arms race this time.
Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.
I've been browsing with EME disabled for years, most stuff still works, I just leave sites that don't. If I accidentally hit a site with EME too much, I add the domain to my link block list so I never see links to them ever again. If most people would get on board with that for just a year, it could sway the industry to stop using it.
At the end he mentions EME (encrypted media extensions) which may be the real front in the war. Actually the browser and video market consolidation with EME could really slant the odds in the advertisers favor because and Google and Netflix can make it really hard for people.
Eventually we may make a hard break from the old internet into a new one. I'm looking for practical and scalable cryptocurrency and smart contract solutions to become popular. After that you may see a new type of browser protocol that does not have a full operating system in it and can be implemented by mere mortals. It might depend on one or more decentralized protocols such as IPFS or dat or even one of the many less popular academic content-oriented-networking systems. There is a strong possibility it will not have any JavaScript.
In the end, it's an arms race, and I don't think either side is giving up on it anytime soon. The only thing that concerns me is that one side has way too much money, while the other side has way too much time.
IMO this war will lead to greater consolidation on publisher side. If only FB/Google are left with ability to make money of the web, we'll be left with hobbyist who do it for free or super platforms.
Right now Verge created a wordpress website put google ads on it and can afford a team to right some content. If all third party ads are blocked option left would be `paid content` or go to Google/FB platform to publish wherein you'll have lesser control but more revenue as all ads are first party.
I can't use most of the sites at work because of ads and I can't install an adblocker because it would have access to corp data. When I search for something related to work, I know that most of the sites would display inappropriate junk on half screen with my colleagues probably watching behind. The solution I use us to search on stackoverflow only, but it too displays some garbage, and I have to scroll the page so the ads won't be in view. It's a hilarious situation.
Google and other ad businesses need to create "AMP for ads". Ads should allow only basic HTML elements without javascript. Figure out a way to track only what's really necessary, maybe even get allowed tracking level set by user in browser settings (an improved version of Do Not Track). That might be even used to check if user agrees to have cookies set. It should solve the annoying cookie banners issue too.
Finally, let's add option for user to select "text only" mode for ads to keep additional downloaded data to minimum and maybe even make ads accessible.
Update: And, of course, after a quick search I find that AMP for Ads is an actual product from Google https://amp.dev/about/ads/
Sorry for not researching before commenting.
I never click on ads. Never ever. I get that every ad doesn't need to be clicked e.g. videos that mindlessly show you a product. But atleast there is no direct feedback going back on those in terms of ad placement effectiveness/click-rate etc. They can keep burning their money showing ads - I just won't provide them any feedback on whether/where their money was wasted vs well spent. Also the best way to kill them is for lesser and lesser people to click on them.
[+] [-] wybiral|6 years ago|reply
But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.
That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
I gave up about two years ago. The web just go so bad I had to install ad-block. My computer would spin like a jet plane at least once an hour due to insane advertising on a website consuming all the CPU.
I literally installed ad-block to save my computer hardware.
The ads don't even bother me that much. I used to always say, "my brain is my ad-block". It was the slow loading, CPU heavy ads that got me to turn.
If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. But how about not melting my computer in the process?
[+] [-] slang800|6 years ago|reply
I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.
[+] [-] nostrademons|6 years ago|reply
And then sometime around 2015 or 2016, I started noticing ads that would lock up my CPU, or get my laptop's fan running, or prevent the page from loading entirely, or increase page loading time by 10x. And then I decided enough was enough, and installed an adblocker.
It's not the general concept of advertising that I object to. It's when the advertising makes the content that I initially came to see unusable. Fix your goddamn Javascript and maybe I won't block you, although at this point I'm kinda enjoying the ad-free experience.
[+] [-] realharo|6 years ago|reply
For web apps that need it, it could be an explicit permission, like webcam or location access.
[+] [-] axaxs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nate_meurer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwkoss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techslave|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwild|6 years ago|reply
Where are you going for that to happen? Not only does a tab crashing is extremely rare for me, even on my low 8 GB of RAM which I got 8 years ago. It seems a bit crazy that it happens quite often for you.
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.
(Of course, if you measure the success of an economy by the GDP, then it might seem that ads have a positive influence, but that seems a bit like a broken-window fallacy to me).
[+] [-] elindbe2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikeboy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zcid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Emma_Goldman|6 years ago|reply
Interesting idea. I just read that over £20bn is spent a year on advertising in the UK. The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
Netflix is an interesting example of a new model of entertainment that generates revenues through subscriptions instead of advertisements. Lots of newspapers have also shifted to a subscription-based model, though only The Guardian has done so without placing their website behind a paywall. Another alternative is public service broadcasting, like the BBC.
[+] [-] bschne|6 years ago|reply
If anyone has any literature on the other effects mentioned by the parent, I'd be highly interested as well.
1. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cag...
[+] [-] AJ007|6 years ago|reply
My presumption is that if advertising was banned, and you were still dealing with a relatively free society, that many more resources would go in to PR and marketing. At least an ad you know is an ad.
A good exercise is to go back and look through magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, especially Playboy. The advertising seems much more transparent in its shallow promises and we actually know what the long term outcomes were from following them -- e.g. alcohol, tobacco, and cars no one gives a shit about anymore. The editorial bridges between advertising and content glaringly stick out. These things aren't necessarily no longer true, but the obviousness of time shines a bright light on it.
To me the biggest story in ads isn't ad blockers or Google, it is Facebook getting consumers to spend gargantuan amounts of money creating content for free and then making tens of billions of dollars from it. Youtube/Google at least has revenue sharing.
[+] [-] SapporoChris|6 years ago|reply
A better question than what benefit is advertising might be, "How can advertising be made more beneficial to the viewers"
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|6 years ago|reply
Simon Kuznets, a Russian emigre to the US, developed the concept of the GDP in 1934, and according to Bregman, tracking the GDP was a significant factor in the US's ability to harness its manufacturing capability during the war effort; most countries had a significantly inferior understanding of their own production dynamics.
As useful was it was for the war effort, Kuznets warned that the GDP should be redefined after the war, as the country's needs had changed. Instead, military spending is part of the GDP. No party wants to significantly cut back on military spending because it would affect the GDP. So not only does the GDP encourage increased military spending, it doesn't reward so many things that would be beneficial to society, and thus little effort is spent optimizing for those things.
TL;DR: if the GDP doesn't measure it, there is no political will to address it, and if the GDP does measure it, it is a political necessity to boost spending in that area. Thus, needless military spending, rent seeking money shuffling on wall street, and advertising are richly rewarded as they are included in the GDP.
[+] [-] dwild|6 years ago|reply
My SO opened an escape room a year ago. I though similarly as you before that (not that it make people consume more, but that they'll buy the inferior product), but then after a few weekend without any reservation... it made me realize how things aren't just found.
You need to be reminded that something exist to even consider it. It's not even a question of whether that's the best thing for you.
She always ask people what they think once they done and recently she got as a comment "but you aren't visible enough". We pay for ads, a few thousands, we are probably not too far from having spend 5 digits in ads. I couldn't imagine how people could be aware of our existence without ads at all.
> and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
We are paying for it, sure, but at least we are paying, aren't we? I like that I can get any ads on a channel. I love DIY channels, I seriously hate how almost all of them hide that all their tools were given. They say it from time to time, but on most videos, they'll just keep using the one from the past videos without mentionning getting them for free. That's an ads by the way, they may even directly get paid for using theses tools. With adsense though, the ads I get aren't necessarily related to the video, I'm AWARE they are ads, they are made FOR ME (thus more profitable for the channel, because I may need tool, but I may be more likely to buy a new computer for example).
[+] [-] briandear|6 years ago|reply
Not necessarily. An ad for a restaurant doesn’t necessarily make you eat more. An ad for a hotel doesn’t make you go on more trips.
[+] [-] skocznymroczny|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KozmoNau7|6 years ago|reply
When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.
And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|6 years ago|reply
I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way.
Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are loathe to do investigative journalism or negative reporting on the companies that provide their bread and butter and because they also want to run stories that don't offend or antagonize their advertisers -- stories from that point of view that capitalism is bad or advertising is bad, for instance, are off limits to many outlets partially because of this.
Advertisers also routinely lie about the products they're selling, so people are being deceived about the products they're buying, sometimes with very serious negative consequences (such as advertising of cigarettes or medical products that are actually harmful).
[+] [-] wutbrodo|6 years ago|reply
I'm not dismissing the possibility of conversations about whether advertising for services is a type of transaction that's difficult to reason about, and that users need to be protected from themselves by regulation. But looking at only the outflow half of a transaction and asking "I don't benefit from this part, we should ban it" is utter gibberish.
"Did anyone ever investigate what benefits payment systems have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, since payment systems cost money to operate and in the end all they do is reduce the amount of money a user has. While payment systems may allow you to 'buy' services, we are still paying for these systems directly and indirectly
Why then, doesn't the government bring currency and bank accounts and credit cards to a halt?"
[+] [-] frou_dh|6 years ago|reply
This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.
[+] [-] s1k3s|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomaskafka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
[+] [-] gergles|6 years ago|reply
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations.
Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more complicated than you're making it seem. I don't need Javascript to put a tracking pixel in your email.
[+] [-] codingdave|6 years ago|reply
JavaScript is the same. We'd have a cleaner, safer web without it. And only a small fraction of people would be happy with that.
[+] [-] booleandilemma|6 years ago|reply
Isn’t this like saying atoms are to blame for nuclear warfare? Atoms enabled nuclear weapons?
[+] [-] dfawcus|6 years ago|reply
Originally I used NoScript (and Firefox 'View>Page Style>No Style'), now I just tend to use uMatrix, with appropriate media types disabled.
It makes for a faster, and easier to read web, where I still see the occasional ad, but once configured, usually not.
I'd guess that use with Javascript disabled seems to be accepted in part due to Safari on iOS supporing it - possibly it was the default (I can't remember).
[+] [-] catotheyoungest|6 years ago|reply
I won't ever apologize for doing so. As far as I'm concerned, any advertisement that depends on JavaScript is malware, and I think that my right to protect myself online outweighs the need of publishers to turn a profit.
IMO, profits are like respect. They must be earned, and if the only way you can turn a profit is by spying on people then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place. If the only way you can get me to use your product is by giving it away and selling my data, then maybe your product shouldn't exist?
As far as I'm concerned, the data I generate by using a search engine should be treated with the same care as my medical records. It should not be mined or traded. It should not be kept longer than 30 days.
And if that breaks the internet, so be it. You brought this on yourselves.
[+] [-] person_of_color|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|6 years ago|reply
So sure: maybe someday un-adblockable content will be a thing. Do I care about that content? Turns out maybe I'll just walk away entirely. The internet has a lot of utterly ad-ridden services with far too high an opinion of how important they really are.
[+] [-] bobblywobbles|6 years ago|reply
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
[+] [-] jokoon|6 years ago|reply
I often use firefox reader mode just because websites use custom fonts, and to remove all the clutter, even when there is no ads.
Also, it won't be long until reddit is sued and must remove comments where people copy-paste the entire article because of pay walls and ad blockers. Same for outline. I guess website will start findings ways to prevent copy pasting, and maybe someone will create some app that just let their users browse a PNG rendering of websites.
It's almost as if normal newspapers might be considered a good alternative.
[+] [-] DoubleGlazing|6 years ago|reply
I know it has been attempted in the past with little success, but all those attempts were just companies going it alone and hoping for the best. If the W3C, browser makers, banks and publishers all got together a standard could be developed. Something that would be core to web standards. It wouldn't be easy, but it would solve a lot of problems.
[+] [-] beloch|6 years ago|reply
This is why the way web ads are served is utterly farcical. How can you build a person's trust by invading their privacy in a hundred different ways just so you can be sure the ads they're seeing are a little bit more targeted than what's on TV?
People often say that they would be happy to have reasonable ads that don't interfere with website function and which respect their privacy, but it's been so bad for so long that it would likely be very difficult for an ethical, privacy respecting ad service to get off the ground. Many people have been burned too many times to believe and unblock such an ad service. EME shows that there is no interest in even trying this approach. They're just going to continue escalating the arms war.
They're going to lose.
Companies advertising on the internet need to wake up to the fact you can't support a war against the privacy of your potential customer base and expect them to trust you. Yes, you've dug quite the hole for yourselves over the last couple of decades. Why keep digging?
[+] [-] ori_b|6 years ago|reply
Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.
[+] [-] kgwxd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|6 years ago|reply
Eventually we may make a hard break from the old internet into a new one. I'm looking for practical and scalable cryptocurrency and smart contract solutions to become popular. After that you may see a new type of browser protocol that does not have a full operating system in it and can be implemented by mere mortals. It might depend on one or more decentralized protocols such as IPFS or dat or even one of the many less popular academic content-oriented-networking systems. There is a strong possibility it will not have any JavaScript.
[+] [-] grenoire|6 years ago|reply
Let's see who wins.
[+] [-] blackoil|6 years ago|reply
Right now Verge created a wordpress website put google ads on it and can afford a team to right some content. If all third party ads are blocked option left would be `paid content` or go to Google/FB platform to publish wherein you'll have lesser control but more revenue as all ads are first party.
[+] [-] mlguy456|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] butz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noisy_boy|6 years ago|reply