This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.
I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore.
I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website.
But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussions with publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to abandon ad blockers.
This looks interesting. We had problems with AdBlocks breaking functionality on the parts of our pages that talk about ads. Super annoying. We basically had to rename all the assets and file paths to words with no meaning.
I had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked.
I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content?
I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long the issue was there before I realised it :/
My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka adman)
Not just basically - it is a hit piece. It's a website run by and for advertisers, publishers, and media, aiming to monetize content as much as possible. They are supported by advertisers masquerading as ad blockers (uBlock trying to pretend to be uBlock Origin) and sites that literally just advertise.
Just another day of unsavory corporations and the assholes that run them trying to mislead the average consumer.
In nature, the best parasites divert a 'balanced' amount of resources from the host so as to prolong the interaction for as long as possible.
Sometimes reading about things like "balancing publisher monetization" puts the picture in my head of a bunch of anthropomorphized tapeworms trying to have a public policy debate.
It reminds me of the famous spam form letter [1], where one of the standard objections is "Why should we have to trust you and your servers? [to identify which domains should be blocked]"
Seriously -- every Adblocker will allow you to subscribe to custom lists, there's no vendor lock-in, there's no network effect, there aren't significant regulatory or commercial barriers to entry. This isn't like Facebook.
Blockers like Ublock Origin also don't benefit from legitimate sites breaking; if they're turning on EasyList by default it's because they think it's currently the best balance available for their users.
If anyone can make a better list than Easylist, then they should just go do it. In fact, companies already tried to make an alternative with the Acceptable Ads initiative -- and if their list is better, people will switch to it. The only barrier of entry to displacing EasyList here is quality over time.
I really think it was a mistake not to rename the project completely after the Origin fork. It's super confusing, especially since most of us still refer to Origin as "ublock" for short.
On both Google and DDG ublock.org is still the first match when you search for "ublock". I wonder how many people install this crap extension by mistake every day.
uBlock Origin really really needs to do something to distinguish itself from uBlock. Every thread I read about ad blockers has a comment trying to clarify.
Quote: "In the past six months, EasyList changes have broken the buy buttons on commerce site The Inventory, the video player on Animal Planet, disrupted site navigation on Fandom, and disrupted the style and CSS loading process on job search site Indeed."
Good, very good. Break them all. Learn to go back to basics, use TABLE, not gazzilion of nested DIV's for what should be a single BUTTON element instead. I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up. Your shitty site has the same merchandise like many others and if your "buy" button is broke I'll just go to the next site...and while on this, how come Amazon "buy" button is not broke? Almost feels like Amazon devs actually test with ad-blockers their content before allowing it on the wild.
> I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up.
Yes! I'm doing this too, as a kind of community service. If sites get broken because their privacy-invading "like" button doesn't work, that's on them. People will just move on.
Fandom (aka Wikia), in particular, has run some incredibly intrusive -- and occasionally even malicious -- ads on some of their sites. I have very little sympathy for them.
No, for big sites the adblock users report issues, or more likely the adblock list developers just fix the issues right away. The issue is small sites with no sizeable adblock-using population.
I don't get the title - Just four dudes. What if it was four dudettes/chicks?
Maybe it's because they started the project and they have the right to be in charge?
Also, you don't have to use EasyList if you don't like it..
FYI those four dudes are whats keeping me from disabling javascript and images from every website on the face of the earth.
>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.”
Why would you ever want your adblocking list run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization"?
Yea seriously.. that dude seems so out of touch. Unfortunate that they set cadence of adding exclusion rules when they really could have leveraged this situation to make a real change on a lot of websites.
Sounds like they would be balancing publisher monetization and serving malware and intrusive ads to users. Exactly the right kind of people we need to be running a adblocker list.
Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad.
However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.
> But there are occasions when those changes are hard to make. In Autotrader UK’s case, for example, the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages.
I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask about why exactly that's a big task.
This is not journalism. This is a hit-piece on EasyList, with a clickbait and false title.
It seems even plausible, reading it, that the author knows about uBlock origin but avoids naming it, instead listing the two sellouts that are morally shady.
I fear that with adblocking nearing 25% market penetration we're going to see fundamental changes in the way ads are delivered in response. Maybe a transition from third party ad servers to locally hosted ads that have to be added to block lists individually. Maybe YouTube will start inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream.
Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.
If that happens, projects like Adblock Radio will hopefully step in to make "unblockable" ads more tolerable, by automatically turning the volume down for example.
> inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream.
In a sense, it's already kinda happening with Twitch. A few months ago, they rolled out Server Side Ad Insertion [1] which broke ad blockers. Now, ublock origin and streamlink can still block them though but the arms race will continue. I don't think it'll ever come to reencoding the video to incorporate ads because most ads are dynamics but maybe future encoders or hardware are really fast.
>but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.
Yes! I think what has staved it off is the lack of adblocking on mobile devices. I use uBlock on every computer I have, but on my iPhone? Not so much. I think as more traffic moved to mobile it has offset ad blocking to some degree. I can't imagine that 25% of people are blocking ads on mobile?
I think you're right. For me personally, if a site was toxic enough with ads (eg: the reason I started using an adblocker originally) I'd just completely avoid it. I did originally try that, but in particular "chum boxes" started appearing everywhere on more sites than I could remember to avoid and that was the last straw. The easiest solution was an ad blocker, and unfortunately for publishers, it's just easier to block all ads everywhere than try to be selective and only block annoying ones.
If enough sites started using anti-adblock techniques with toxic ads, my next step would be a 'site blocker' plugin that would effectively eradicate it from the internet for me. This is kind of the nuclear option. No links from others sites, no showing up in search results. The technology exists already for blocking adult sites: the thing missing is the ability to add to your block list from a search result page or on the site itself.
The next logical extension to that is sharing block lists among users, and projects that maintain block lists you can subscribe to.
It actually would be nice if there's a way to notify the site when you were blocking them, such as your browser hitting `/.well-known/eradicated?origin=http://page/containing/link`.
At some point, for popular sites, the strategy will flip from filtering to scrapping.
We'll need some clever strategies to counter the arms race.
Image side-by-side visual diffing. Some process renders pages with and without ads. Ads are progressively identified and removed until it renders like the "print" or "reader" view.
Temporal diffing. Snap shot popular websites over time. The meat (content) will likely remain the same. Everything else is chrome or ads.
My other ad detecting notions are even more harebrained, so I'll stop there.
I remember https://serpapi.com breaking with EasyList because we use Prism.js for code syntax coloration. And Prism.js is also the name of a tracker. Opened a ticket with them. However it has been easier to just rename `prism.js` to `pri-secure-sm.js`. Not sure why author is so upset about that. It's not like they are trying to break websites on purpose.
Because they're breaking things without much regard to it.
We discovered a few years ago that our list of advertisers (in a digital magazine) was being blocked by ad blockers. It was coming over the wire with the word "advertisers" in the URL. These aren't ads that pop up and display on the pages, but simply a list of advertisers in the issue.
Rather than try to get adblockers not to block it, we simply used another word in our URL and went on with things. We shouldn't have had to. Those are lazy adblock rules and are incredibly likely to get false positives and break sites.
But we're realists and knew that even if we fixed the existing adblockers, another would come along and do the same lazy thing.
Many (even pretty well-known) Open Source projects would be happy to have four regularly active maintainers.
"Just four dudes" sounds dismissive, but everyone starts out as "just one dude" (or dudette, or whatever the proper female form of dude is), and sometimes, more join. Often that's not the case, and the project's health hinges on just one maintainer.
> the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages
Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using <insert your favorite text editor>.
EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for the project. Both of these impacts are small, but they can't afford to accommodate for every website like that.
If they want their users to use their site, they should make it work on their user's environments. I doubt they would demand Google or Mozilla accommodate for them like that.
Several years ago I worked on a monolithic website that used static files with no templating engine. The problem is they had so many contractors working on changes for specific ranges of content that there were a variety of ways that even a mundane meta tag with the same content value was written (is the tag self-closing, is the value placed before the property, are certain characters in the value encoded, etc.). Find & Replace can quickly end up becoming a bigger game of Trial & Error especially if there are no standards in place.
[+] [-] luma|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patd|6 years ago|reply
I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website.
But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussions with publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to abandon ad blockers.
[+] [-] eli|6 years ago|reply
I'll be taking a closer look at the tool.
[+] [-] GordonS|6 years ago|reply
I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content?
I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long the issue was there before I realised it :/
[+] [-] sterkekoffie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raed667|6 years ago|reply
My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka adman)
[+] [-] Joking_Phantom|6 years ago|reply
Just another day of unsavory corporations and the assholes that run them trying to mislead the average consumer.
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
Sometimes reading about things like "balancing publisher monetization" puts the picture in my head of a bunch of anthropomorphized tapeworms trying to have a public policy debate.
[+] [-] SilasX|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
[+] [-] targonca|6 years ago|reply
They were elected by people voluntarily installing EasyList. We had enough of you experts™, thanks.
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
Blockers like Ublock Origin also don't benefit from legitimate sites breaking; if they're turning on EasyList by default it's because they think it's currently the best balance available for their users.
If anyone can make a better list than Easylist, then they should just go do it. In fact, companies already tried to make an alternative with the Acceptable Ads initiative -- and if their list is better, people will switch to it. The only barrier of entry to displacing EasyList here is quality over time.
[+] [-] gen3|6 years ago|reply
TIL According to Wikipedia: "In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by AdBlock"[1]
This is not uBlock Origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin
[+] [-] Operyl|6 years ago|reply
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-comp...
[+] [-] asaddhamani|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|6 years ago|reply
On both Google and DDG ublock.org is still the first match when you search for "ublock". I wonder how many people install this crap extension by mistake every day.
[+] [-] kgwxd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
Yeah they are, the balance they're targeting is zero ads.
[+] [-] unnouinceput|6 years ago|reply
Good, very good. Break them all. Learn to go back to basics, use TABLE, not gazzilion of nested DIV's for what should be a single BUTTON element instead. I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up. Your shitty site has the same merchandise like many others and if your "buy" button is broke I'll just go to the next site...and while on this, how come Amazon "buy" button is not broke? Almost feels like Amazon devs actually test with ad-blockers their content before allowing it on the wild.
[+] [-] lioeters|6 years ago|reply
Yes! I'm doing this too, as a kind of community service. If sites get broken because their privacy-invading "like" button doesn't work, that's on them. People will just move on.
[+] [-] duskwuff|6 years ago|reply
Fandom (aka Wikia), in particular, has run some incredibly intrusive -- and occasionally even malicious -- ads on some of their sites. I have very little sympathy for them.
[+] [-] Mathnerd314|6 years ago|reply
No, for big sites the adblock users report issues, or more likely the adblock list developers just fix the issues right away. The issue is small sites with no sizeable adblock-using population.
[+] [-] blattimwind|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orliesaurus|6 years ago|reply
FYI those four dudes are whats keeping me from disabling javascript and images from every website on the face of the earth.
Thank you EasyList maintainers!
[+] [-] henry_flower|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnaccy|6 years ago|reply
Why would you ever want your adblocking list run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization"?
[+] [-] GraemeL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tru3_power|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eoShe7th|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papln|6 years ago|reply
However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|6 years ago|reply
I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask about why exactly that's a big task.
[+] [-] paulcarroty|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hartator|6 years ago|reply
And also they should talk about uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock Plus or UBlock.
[+] [-] grive|6 years ago|reply
It seems even plausible, reading it, that the author knows about uBlock origin but avoids naming it, instead listing the two sellouts that are morally shady.
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.
[+] [-] yepguy|6 years ago|reply
https://www.adblockradio.com/en/
[+] [-] squaresmile|6 years ago|reply
In a sense, it's already kinda happening with Twitch. A few months ago, they rolled out Server Side Ad Insertion [1] which broke ad blockers. Now, ublock origin and streamlink can still block them though but the arms race will continue. I don't think it'll ever come to reencoding the video to incorporate ads because most ads are dynamics but maybe future encoders or hardware are really fast.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/media/tech/what-server-side-ad-insert...
[+] [-] lunchables|6 years ago|reply
Yes! I think what has staved it off is the lack of adblocking on mobile devices. I use uBlock on every computer I have, but on my iPhone? Not so much. I think as more traffic moved to mobile it has offset ad blocking to some degree. I can't imagine that 25% of people are blocking ads on mobile?
[+] [-] gregmac|6 years ago|reply
If enough sites started using anti-adblock techniques with toxic ads, my next step would be a 'site blocker' plugin that would effectively eradicate it from the internet for me. This is kind of the nuclear option. No links from others sites, no showing up in search results. The technology exists already for blocking adult sites: the thing missing is the ability to add to your block list from a search result page or on the site itself.
The next logical extension to that is sharing block lists among users, and projects that maintain block lists you can subscribe to.
It actually would be nice if there's a way to notify the site when you were blocking them, such as your browser hitting `/.well-known/eradicated?origin=http://page/containing/link`.
[+] [-] specialist|6 years ago|reply
We'll need some clever strategies to counter the arms race.
Image side-by-side visual diffing. Some process renders pages with and without ads. Ads are progressively identified and removed until it renders like the "print" or "reader" view.
Temporal diffing. Snap shot popular websites over time. The meat (content) will likely remain the same. Everything else is chrome or ads.
My other ad detecting notions are even more harebrained, so I'll stop there.
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
[+] [-] hartator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|6 years ago|reply
We discovered a few years ago that our list of advertisers (in a digital magazine) was being blocked by ad blockers. It was coming over the wire with the word "advertisers" in the URL. These aren't ads that pop up and display on the pages, but simply a list of advertisers in the issue.
Rather than try to get adblockers not to block it, we simply used another word in our URL and went on with things. We shouldn't have had to. Those are lazy adblock rules and are incredibly likely to get false positives and break sites.
But we're realists and knew that even if we fixed the existing adblockers, another would come along and do the same lazy thing.
[+] [-] perlgeek|6 years ago|reply
"Just four dudes" sounds dismissive, but everyone starts out as "just one dude" (or dudette, or whatever the proper female form of dude is), and sometimes, more join. Often that's not the case, and the project's health hinges on just one maintainer.
[+] [-] tomc1985|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CivBase|6 years ago|reply
Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using <insert your favorite text editor>.
EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for the project. Both of these impacts are small, but they can't afford to accommodate for every website like that.
If they want their users to use their site, they should make it work on their user's environments. I doubt they would demand Google or Mozilla accommodate for them like that.
[+] [-] eswat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jankotek|6 years ago|reply