I am extremely insulated from ads online and have been for about a decade. Once in a while I have to browse on a device that does not have an ad blocker or most of the times does not even let you install one. Seeing a website that is SEoptimised and heavily ad supported feels like walking into a crack den. That this is the normal experience for the vast majority of users is sad.
Whenever I open Google's Play Store on Android I get this feeling of walking into some dystopic shopping mall. I hardly ever come there (F-Droid covers all utilities for me, so Google's own app store is really only for official apps from banks, public transport, etc.), so its user hostile design always hits me like a wall of visual noise and clutter.
At these moments that feeling that for most people getting bombarded by ads is normal hits hard. I'm always wondering when the ride will end and uBlock Origin can't protect us any longer.
Unless you have a specific reason to use Google Play Store (as in the app, not the distribution medium), I would highly recommend using Aurora Store (which you can handily get via F-droid). I use it on my Sailfish OS phone (C2) to similarly get apps not available via F-Droid.
The problem with this approach is that many "secure" apps nowadays (bank, authenticators, etc.), at least here in the Nordics, are checking (among other things) if the app has been installed from the Play Store. If you install the very same signed APK from Aurora, or another source, it will refuse to work.
What always surprises me is the sheer amount of fake, scammy, apps trying to appear as if they're something else. Trying to steal clicks from users looking for Adblock, VLC or other legitimate apps... it's a mess!
Nevermind the fake stuff, the real stuff is scammy enough.
When you select an app to install on Google Play, it takes you to another screen confirming the install. But that install button on top is not for the app you selected, it's for a different, advertised app. You have to scroll down to find the confirmation button for the app you already instructed the store to install.
This isn't going to ruin any lives, but it's gross.
At what point does a small bad thing, but one that impacts billions of lives, rise to the level of not acceptable? Google is stealing how many human years of peoples lives with these little things? Are we losing millions of years of people time a year to Googles slimy practices? That is unacceptable. I can't see how Google employees are OK with that.
If it serves any purpose just today I've published docscandroid.app just because the document scanners out there are really scary and do not really fit my purpose. My app is not perfect but its mine and that is enough.
The parent poster decries fake and scammy apps, and you post a link to an app that contains absolutely zero information on who controls it, how my data is used, where my data is stored, etc.
I love that google removed the search bar from the front page. If you tap where it should be, you get a popup informing you that search has moved to the bottom. So you tap that and it takes you to a new screen with the search bar at the top.
I have never seen such absolute design and engineering genius.
It's as if they are not Android users at all. Maybe someone told an intern to move the button to the bottom, he showed that he did it, and that was it. Nobody actually performed a search with this new layout.
I get the same feeling, but from my new Google TV.
I chose it because I liked the previous iterations of Google TV. It integrated with everything else, had a nice app ecosystem, and you could put the stuff you watched within a couple of remote key presses. In this new version you are forced to click over icon after icon of paid content before are allowed to see the icons you are allowed to arrange.
Replacing the TV is out, unfortunately. Finding a different UI is on my to-do list. Google TV used to a checkbox feature for me. They've turned it into "check if a device has it, and run away screaming if it does" feature.
Chrome on Android was their first move in that direction, with it's inability to host ad blockers. It must have been a wild success for them because now many Google products have the same "ads shoved down your throat" feel to them, and yes the Play store is another stand out example.
I assume once the Chinese TV manufacturers figure out Google TV is an anti-feature, they will come up with their own replacement. That day can't come fast enough. That's an odd, because I never thought I'd be cheering Chinese software on, given their repeated attacks on the infrastructure of my country. And the the bastards are still doing it. But Trump has lowered the bar so dramatically on so many things. It's a strange new world.
They made such a retarded change where you now have the search button at the bottom, instead of at the top, but the actual search box is at the top, so you reposition the grab in order to reach to the bottom, only to then be forced to reposition again in order to reach the top.
I'm in the same boat. I never see ads anywhere (and not just on the web: I never watch regular TV (I don't even have a TV), never listen to ads-supported radio stations, etc.)
> I never see ads anywhere (and not just on the web: I never watch regular TV (I don't even have a TV), never listen to ads-supported radio stations, etc.)
Ads in public places, bus stops, etc. are kinda hard to avoid unfortunately.
Have you filled a car with gas any time in the last ~5 years? The pumps around here (New England, USA) start playing ads with sound once you start pumping fuel. It's an absolute delight when your pump and the pump on the other side of your island are playing different ads with different audio or the same ad with the audio just out of sync.
Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button. Occasionally, none of them are, and rarely does anyone else seem to even try to mute their pump.
Pumping gas became pretty infrequent for me once I got a plug in hybrid, but when the closest gas station near me first started playing an ad my immediate reaction was to spam all of the side buttons on the screen until I found the one that muted it. Sweet quiet...
I rarely see these any more (USA, not a small town). Could be the set of gas stations I visit doesn’t have them, but I do remember them being popular for a while. Now I haven’t seen one in a very long time.
This is one of the top things pushing me to an EV, so I can charge at home and be done with gas stations. As EVs get more market share, these intrusive ads will only get worse.
While being recorded from 6 different angles while standing next to your vehicle with a license plate on it?
You get arrested. That’s what happens.
Kiosk makers have already thought of all of these possibilities. There isn’t a nicely exposed speaker. It’s behind a metal plate with tiny holes in it.
Maybe cops are different where you live, but here in Seattle, I cannot imagine a crime so trivial as "someone broke the speaker on a gas pump" ever rising high enough on the SPD priority list for anyone to lift a finger about it, no matter how well-documented it may have been.
It would not surprise me to hear that someone had committed a crime of that scale while being watched by an SPD officer and still gotten away with it.
At one point I was so infuriated that I would feel for the speaker and punch the pump so hard it would knock the speaker out of place (many pumps flimsy plastic.) I did that as many times as I could until the service company started gluing them in better. So I upped and ante by ripping open the front of the pump and tear the speaker out with my bear hands and smash it. Did that a bunch of times until the volumes were turned down.
> Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button
I found out that's the help button and sometimes a clerk will come out and ask what I need help with and I tell that it stops the annoying noise coming from the pump.
I’m reminded of the film Falling Down but I’ve given you an Internet point (upvote) for fighting the good fight. If good people do nothing, evil will triumph. In Ireland, we don’t (yet?) have such devilish instruments of torture but I imagine my cortisol levels would be through the roof if I had to deal with them.
Get a bicycle and learn the car free routes into town and to your work. Nobody puts up adverts on cycle paths. It isn't against the law, it just makes no commercial sense to do so.
By making the bicycle however you get about, you cut down on seeing ads.
It depends on where you live, however, I noted my 'ad free life' whilst in London. I went from the usual commute on trains and tubes with the odd bus thrown in for good measure to just riding my bicycle along the Thames. I went from seeing everything with adverts to seeing everything with herons, gulls, squirrels, trees and flowers. Rather than being tuned in to the latest junk to buy, I became tuned in to the ever changing seasons and what was in blossom.
Incidentally almost all my trips are already by bicycle, with on foot and with public transport numbers 2 and 3. Unfortunately, since almost everybody uses these modes of transportation here, there actually are ads everywhere still.
(Besides the idea of me having to adjust my route to -for now- not see ads being somewhat offensive to me too.)
> Ads in public places, bus stops, etc. are kinda hard to avoid unfortunately.
These are very different - and largely interesting to me in their colorfulness and often whimsy. (The cities around here are otherwise NOT visually interesting).
This is something that web sites have always had at their disposal: use static locally-hosted images as ads and respect my screen real-estate, don't try to track me with 20-200 trackers, and I WILL allow them (and do). I will even allow some animation if it respects my bandwidth.
But no, very few web sites feel satisfied with this so multiple ad blockers they get. A few sites do small static image ads. I don't block these and even frequently follow their links.
In France I have yet to go to a waiting room with a TV with the sound on; I think people would get upset.
I went once to a dentist with a TV above my head (sound off); I refused to sit in the chair until it was turned off. The assistant sighed and said "everybody asks the same thing, I wonder why we installed this".
You do also get used to it. Banner blindness is absolutely a thing (and something that still trips me up where I miss the most important information on a page, despite using adblock most of the time)
Never mind the dozens of pop-up ads and banners on the site. Random words in the article turn into ads that popup while you're scrolling. And it's easy to accidentally click one because there's more pixels covered by ads than not.
I've been telling her to get an adblocker for years because she, like you, feels like she doesn't need one. But that article last night made her rethink her stance on ads.
For me, I don't mind advertisements. I scroll Instagram a few times a week and there are ads there. I get more ads than actual posts. They're easy enough to ignore. And honestly, sometimes they're interesting.
It's when the ads disrupt my browsing session that pisses me off. If sites didn't have shitty ads that cover your screen and just get in the way, I wouldn't have an adblocker.
I also use adblocker to get rid of shitty non-ad pop-ups, like "you have to install our shitty mobile app to use this site!" Yeah, fuck that. Ublock origin zaps it away.
Equally life-changing would be to keep the ads blocked, and visit the “Buy it for life” subreddit, which has recommendations for the best products and services that will last you a lifetime.
If you really needed those things, you would have thought of getting them on your own time. Being tempted into it is consumerism and kinda why we're in this mess
Mullvad has a free DoH service, FYI. It can potentially replace your self-hosted service, at least for your phone, so you don't forget to set it up when you leave home.
Brave did this they ran ads on Facebook and YouTube where they would show ads telling you how to install brave to stop receiving them.
Also they criticized because brave themselves was showing ads
People love a good black-or-white purity attack on companies that try to do better. Yes, they show ads, but at what cost for your personal privacy? We have to be able to handle nuance rather than absolutist positions.
eh, thats tough to critique imo, it might be an end, but the end result is considerably less ads in the future. only thing that makes it a little odd of a spot is that its THEIR product, but i think a nice person randomly trying to spread the word of ublock or something through ads is more than justified.
i guess its also a bummer they are financially supporting facebook/youtube, but maybe the end result would be break even if they get enough people to utilize adblocking. thats pretty crazy compound interest over time for even just like 3 people
You'd have to be very careful not to run afoul of insider trading and/or market manipulation laws. Whether you would or not would depend on all the details and the jurisdiction.
Not in the US. There's no insider trading angle at all, and it's not fraudulent market manipulation to attempt to persuade consumers to cease supporting a business you're shorting as long as you're not lying about it.
Hence why I qualified that it depends on the details and the jurisdiction. I didn't say it is insider trading, just that you need to be careful to avoid that.
> There's no insider trading angle at all
Such a blanket statement would definitely be wrong in the UK for example. Insider trading is defined at Section 52(1) of the Criminal Justice act 1993 as: "(1)An individual who has information as an insider is guilty of insider dealing if, in the circumstances mentioned in subsection (3), he deals in securities that are price-affected securities in relation to the information."
Whether you trigger the offence depends on a number of factors such as whether the information is "inside" information and whether you were an "insider" (these terms are defined in subsequent sections of the Act). As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.
I'm not particularly familiar with the US legal system so I can't claim you're wrong there.
IMO you don't need to be particularly careful to avoid insider trading if you were never at risk of doing it. It's pretty obvious when you have a duty of confidentiality and when you don't (again, in the US). The hypothetical scenario upthread just doesn't have any of the elements.
> As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.
Yeah, that isn't the scenario described earlier at all. Here's what was proposed:
> I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.
In this sentence, the entity performing the short and performing the advertising are one and the same.
Realistically, the vast majority of people don't have a "few million" lying around that they can just casually risk on a huge gamble like this. It's likely you have at least several tens of millions but more likely hundreds of millions before the risk/reward would even come close to making sense (because you wouldn't want to commit most of your resources). The most plausible scenario is therefore something like a hedge fund.
You're reading "you" to mean the reader (highly implausible), I'm reading it as the generic/impersonal "you" (as in "one could spend...").
So sure, there are a tiny percentage of people who might consider doing this themselves and they don't need to worry about insider trading (although we're still pretty close to market manipulation where the sole purpose of the adverts is to crash the share price and profit from that). A much larger percentage of people who might consider such a thing would need to at least examine whether they might trigger insider trading laws.
IIRC insider trading is any trading based on any non-public information. Everyone knows you're running ads because they can see the ads, but not everyone knows how long you're going to run them for, or how much you're paying for them, and that would be enough. Also if you do it before you start the ad campaign, that's non-public knowledge, similar to a pump-and-dump.
Wrong. Insider trading is about breaching your duty of confidentiality to some other party who owns the information (your employer, some other business you have an NDA with, etc). The owner of the non-public information is fully allowed to trade on it.
Pump and dumps are fraud because you lie about the target stock in order to achieve the pump. The lying is a crucial element to make it fraudulent.
> Insider trading is the trading of a public company's stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company.[1] In many countries, some kinds of trading based on insider information are illegal. The rationale for this prohibition of insider trading differs between countries and regions.
The context of this thread[1], which you replied to, is specifically the US law. You are wrong on the US law. Wikipedia's general statements about what some countries do is not authoritative or specific to the US.
US law does not generally prohibit insiders from trading. It prohibits doing so only in breach of some obligation to keep that information private[2] ("in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence").
> The context of this thread[1], which you replied to, is specifically the US law.
That's not correct. I started this particular sub-thread, and in my original comment I specifically said that the answer is jurisdiction dependent. Your reply may have been US-centric but the overall topic was not.
The quality control of even mainline ad platforms is abysmal as well. Like on YouTube, I used to get deep-fakes of the Canadian prime minister trying to sell some crypto scam. You'd literally click through to a phishing site disguised as a Canada Revenue Agency page.
Yeah. I use brave on all my devices. When somebody shows me a YouTube video on their device and three ads play before the video, or loads a local news page with all the ads, my reaction is "Wow! They sure are bombarding you guys to make up for us free-riders!"
I really can't comprehend how aggressive ad blocking isn't the norm and at 90%+ at this point. Whenever someone just doesn't seem to care i'm concerned something is wrong with them. Youtube ad blocking was briefly not working for me recently and the volume of ads just while doing some chores which forced interrupting flow to go manually skip was astounding and enraging. It's like if I was at a quiet library and every 30 seconds someone randomly started screaming yet half the people have a reaction of "meh, doesn't bother me".
Most people don't use the internet at a whole - if you just stick to the 10 biggest apps/websites, the experience is acceptable without an adblocker.
As for YouTube, blocking their ads is basically a part-time job at this point. On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.
I hear this often. My experience is totally different. I've installed ublock origin and I'm using Vivaldi as my blink engine wrapper. I've never seen a YouTube ad since years. I wonder why anyone has to fight for an ad free YouTube.
They often release new "features" in a A/B fashion to a small percentage of users. It's most obvious with UI changes, where a portion of users will get a disfigured version of the site for a month, but it's probably true for their ad-blocking endeavors as well.
Is cinema mode new? Or did they change it somehow? Last I checked all it did was resize the video to take up most of the width of the browser. That was a pretty happy medium between "video for ants" and "take over my entire monitor in full screen mode"
I don't even think YouTube is anywhere near the worst advert offender.
My local newspaper website is stuffed full of adverts. Between a large picture, article heading and advert, you often don't see a signle line of new content above the fold on a 1080p screen.
I do not regularly visit such sites. I do unblock websites that I return to often.
> I wonder why anyone has to fight for an ad free YouTube.
90% of my YouTube use is on my smart TV. There's not really a straightforward way to block ads there. Used to be many years ago that a PiHole or similar would work, but they clued onto that years ago.
If it's a Google TV, there's an app you can sideload called SmartTube, which doesn't play ads and has SponsorBlock built-in. I went from often using my laptop just to play videos without being interrupted constantly, to actually enjoying using the TV app.
There’s a very simply way to avoid ads on YouTube tv — pay some money.
I spend less in nominal terms, let alone inflation terms, for my tv entertainment now than I did 20 year ago, even with Disney, Netflix, bbc, Paramount and YouTube subscriptions.
I have a Chromecast with Google TV, and it allows sideloading of APKs. I installed SmartTube which is a YouTube client that incorporates Adblocking and also SponsorBlock.
It periodically has issues loading videos when Google change something, but the app gets updated every time within a day.
> While YouTube Premium provides an ad-free experience for most content, promotional ads can sometimes appear for specific partnerships or limited-time offers. These promotions are often targeted based on various factors, including your location, viewing history, and account settings.
Consider yourself lucky. Some of their A/B tests seem to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60 seconds before they start playing, navigation taking 15+ seconds.
If that happens to you, this thread [1] is sometimes updated with manual workarounds that sometimes work:
>to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60
I don't mean this as an attack on you. I find it perplexing that this could be such a difficult thing. If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching? Consider a comparison to reading a book or watching a DVD. With the DVD you must stand up, walk to the DVD, remove the plastic wrap, turn on the DVD player place the DVD in the tray, wait for the tray to close, load the DVD, wait for the main menu to load, and finally press play to watch your movie. (potentially after navigating through settings to configure audio / subtitles / etc)
The DVD experience could obvious be _better_ (and if you don't care about picture quality you might be shocked how much more convenient a VHS tape is) but this hardly strikes me as any sort of real problem.
Youtube might actually be doing you an accidental favor here; it is the extreme reduction of friction which degrades your impulse control, and is part of what keeps you on the platform too long. By imposing an small but perceptible cost, they might actually keep from your zoning out and watching and instead intentionally watching only the videos you care the most about.
> If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching?
I won't know that until the video starts playing. I'm not watching a 90 minute movie here and I don't know if the video I'm about to play is the one I want. Spending a minute setting up a 90 minute movie is very different than spending a minute waiting for a video to load that I'm likely going to spend <30 seconds on.
Maybe I'm learning how to use certain software and I'm trying to find a video that demonstrates how to use a specific feature. In that case I might be clicking through 10+ videos to find the niche thing I'm looking for. If I was just vegging out on Youtube this wouldn't bother me nearly as much.
And don't forget that the time penalty doesn't only apply to the initial load, it would pause and fake-buffer every time I jumped around the video.
No ads but it's far worse than just annoying — for me. I get annoyed when a video buffers for 10 seconds due to a technical hiccup. Being made to wait for up to a minute with pretend-technical issues and mocking messages like "Why am I seeing this?" that try to convince me that they're not doing this on purpose is insulting and enraging.
I would gladly pay for an independent alternative but I will never pay for Youtube Premium on principle [1]. If these workarounds stop working I'll just use third party clients all the time, I already use SmartTube on TV.
[1] If I give you my money, I want you to respect me as a customer. Google will continue tracking me, abuse my personal information, and almost certainly re-introduce ads at some point in the future in pursuit of infinite growth. It's never going to be enough, the only winning move (with them) is not to play.
It doesn't stop there, it would also fake-buffer when you jumped to a different point in the video, it would be stuck in a broken transitional UI state for 10-30 seconds any time you navigated to a different page. Clearly they want people to get pissed off enough that they turn off the ad blocker, it's been getting worse over time.
I use the same setup, on Windows Linux and Android. It will break when they decide to roll out their aggressive anti-adblock measures more widely, currently they seem to be A/B testing and turning it on and off at random.
I'm surprised they haven't gone for the "refuse to serve the video stream for 20 seconds or however long the ad would take" card yet, although it's probably a matter of time.
You were just lucky, because YouTube uses A/B testing and does not roll out anti-adblock-measures to everyone simultaneously. This gives UBO some time to react.
I use uBlock Origin, plus I've configured my Firefox to open YouTube always in a dedicated container, that logs me out of any Google-related stuff as I never upvote or comment anyway. Browsing YouTube anonymously might have helped.
I have stopped ads in everywhere for YouTube and they haven't broke: Mobile revanced so far good new pipe it broke but I only use it for downloading videos. On Firefox I use ublock and it has never failed me. Then on tv I'm using smartube
This isn't really true. Firefox + uBlock origin works fine on the desktop and on mobile. You don't need to use the official YT app. (It is true thought that NewPipe is often broken).
> On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.
yeah, I often download things via yt-dlp to watch later and I'm encountering frequent failures that I assume are related to the whack-a-mole yt has been doing for the last two years or so.
NewPipe has been working for me as of late though, and I've not updated it in some time (although my use is infrequent)
I hate ads and avoid them, but haven’t had to install an ad blocker yet. I only really notice them when searching for recipes, and if I had to go through that multiple times a day I probably would get an ad blocker. I do pay for YouTube to avoid ads, and don’t watch much user generated content because it’s too ad-like imo.
I quit podcasts 3 years ago, because those ads made them become unlistenable just like terrestrial radio and I just can’t go back to that kind of listening experience. I started listening to audiobooks instead and don’t miss podcasts at all.
I think people are just hopelessly used to their lives being saturated with ads. On TV, on the Internet, on radio, on billboards, at restaurants, at the airport, at the gas station, in stores, out of stores, almost every surface that could have an ad on it either does now or will one day. This saturation has been so complete and normalized that people are blind to it.
It's a tragedy, when it comes to digital and specifically web literacy, but most people don't know they can.
I sat on calls with teachers at my previous job and they had no extensions installed. My own sister (a milennial) wasn't aware. Before that, I was at a place where devs could join UX interviews; it was even worse given the generational divide: older folks couldn't even tell when a link was obviously malicious.
We either install good browsers/extensions for our relatives, or let them be easy prey to the current state of affairs.
i took the route of only allowing myself the youtube search bar, everything else is not displayed. if i want to watch a video its because im seeking it out, i dont get fed anything.
hearing friends and family discuss youtube now, it sounds like they are being held prisoner. its snuck up on a lot of people, the slow push of shorts is what really made me realize youtube was becoming a major issue in my life, despite not seeing ads or anything.
> I really can't comprehend how aggressive ad blocking isn't the norm and at 90%+ at this point
Mr Krabs voice: money!
No but seriously, if the FBI is telling you to use an ad blocker, use a fucking ad blocker.
My workplace doesn't allow ad blockers for security. Except ads are a MUCH bigger security concern and everyone knows it.
I'm so sick and tired of everyone playing dumb and acting like it's fine. No, it's not fine. Its not okay that Google is serving you a phishing ad that drains your bank account. They should be held liable. Why is everyone acting like their balls have been chopped off?
Do something about it. Minimum is run an aggressive ad blocker. MINIMUM!
It can't survive as the norm. That would cause the economics of sites to collapse. We have to accept that the people clicking on the ads (and sometimes getting scammed) are funding the sites for the rest of us. Like gatcha games are F2P because of whales.
Then let them collapse. It isn't the end of the world. And then we can see what was formerly unable to grow because it was stuck under their canopy not receiving enough light.
The fact that you don't just pay for YouTube Premium makes me think something is wrong with you. A Premium view gives much more money to the creator but I guess "just let me pay" is only relevant when you can't.
Are ad hominems back in vogue? (that is partially snide and partially serious. I feel like I've also/unconsciously been doing more of them recently.)
Regardless, your argument surrounding the insult was well worn 20 years ago. And so was the first response; why would I pay into some nebulous system where I don't know how much is really going to whom?
One of the nicer things about the hellscape that is the modern internet is the low-friction ability to pay creators directly.
...oh, I know why! Because if I pay Google, then Sundar pinky swears not to mercilessly track and monetize everything I do on youtube. \s
GP was simply mirroring the language of its parent post:
> Whenever someone just doesn't seem to care i'm concerned something is wrong with them.
Which IMO is indeed way out of line.
Speaking for myself, no, nothings “wrong” with me. I watch YouTube enough that I consider it a valuable service. So do what you may think is insane: I pay for it. And it gives me no ads.
"I am extremely insulated from ads online and have been for about a decade."
I am insulted by the so-called "modern" browser controlled and distributed by (a) companies that sell internet advertising services or (b) their business partners
The ad annoyances would not be possible but for these bloated, sluggish, omnibus programs enabling data collection, ads and tracking by default^1
Every time I have to use one of these programs to access the web it is a terrible experience. Never having visited a crack den, I cannot say whether it is similar. In any event, it's bad
Sometimes I use these browsers to access files offline or on own local network, such as MP4s and PDFs; I think maybe that is all they might be good for
As "ad blockers" depend 100% on the so-called "modern" browser I would be very surprised if "ad blockers" remain effective for much longer, maybe 5-10 years at most; I dislike making predictions but I believe the end of the "ad blocker" as browser extension is inevitable
Already this prediction is starting to come true in Chrome
1. "The message won't be shown in browsers that don't support JavaScript, because those don't need adblockers to begin with." Even just a browser that did not enable Javascript by default would suffice
Indeed seeing ads almost feels like I’ve been physically assaulted. Using YouTube in our streaming devices reminds me of the old Cable days where you watch 2minutes of something and get slapped in the face with 5 minutes of ads.
It really feels like being assaulted. Watching chill content only to have some ad scream at you, does not make me want to buy your product. I actively go out of my way not to buy things advertised to me on YouTube.
With uBlock Origin you can actually click on the first Google results for any search, scroll down a bit the initial yadda yadda and find the actual answer to your search even in those webSEOtes that are usually just ads over ads.
> No adblocker detected. Consider using an extension like uBlock Origin to save time and bandwidth.
And attention and privacy.
This notice is a great idea.
I might remove the "like" from the notice, since "uBlock Origin" is good, but some others are questionable or even outright malware.
BTW, note that the `ublockorigin.com` Web site that is linked to isn't by Raymond Hill, leader of uBlock Origin. It looks well-intended, and is nicely polished UX, but good practice would be to be careful (since it doesn't appear to be under Hill's control, and is an additional point of potential compromise in what would be very valuable malware). Hill seems to operate from <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock>. One link that isn't too bad to view <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md>. Another that isn't great but OK is <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki>.
The recent PuTTY domain squatting debacle has made me suspicious, and indeed... if you look closer, you'll notice that the owner of ublockorigin.com is also advertising his completely unrelated products in a "my other tools" section.
Your average internet user is not going to have any idea what to do with a link to GitHub. It's a shame there's no official website with easy install instructions. (But I agree with you that it's not a great idea to link to a website not under control of the author.)
I don't understand why DNS ad blockers (Ad Guard, Pi-Hole, other) aren't frequently used across corporates. Especially given the regular-ish training on cybersecurity and related.
I don't understand why Apple does not ship Safari with an adblocker. They advertise how they keep you safe on the web but deliver one of the worst browser experiences and don't even support the plugins that would make it better, let alone include them.
I found the Orion browser and am never touching Safari again.
I'm skeptical that inside counsel would really have an issue with adblock or a moderate approach -- whitelist a subset of a subset of sites like YouTube that they might see risk.
Malware is absolutely distributed through ads. In the case of more reputable ad platforms that don’t allow arbitrary scripts, it’s by linking to malware, but they’re also used to serve drive-by exploits.
> You have higher chance of getting a malware from `pnpm add` than seeing an ad on the web.
If you’re a normal computer user who browses the web without an ad blocker and never runs `pnpm add`, the relevant chance is a little different. (Fun side fact: current pnpm wisely doesn’t run install scripts by default.)
Ads are basically running a program they wrote on your computer. If there’s any exploitable feature in your browser’s JS sandbox, count on someone sending you an ad that will exploit it.
To add to the other reply, there were even targeted malware campaigns through ad networks. Because nowadays, you can choose who sees your ads so precisely (by IP block or geolocation) that you can target individual organizations.
I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.
My view is that core bargain was fine, but advertisers have broken the agreement with other offenses, like:
* Autoplay videos that preemptively take my bandwidth.
* Autoplay audio that takes over my speakers unexpectedly and interrupts other things.
* Forms of pop-ups that clutter or disrupt my tab/window control.
* Being spied-on by a system that tries to aggregate and track all of my browsing habits.
* A mostly unaccountable vector for malware and phishing sites.
* Just a genuinely horrible experience whenever a page is one part content to three parts blinking blooping ever shifting ads that would make Idiocracy blush.
They try to pretend customer resistance is just over the most innocent and uncontroversial display of ads, but it's not true, and it hasn't been for decades.
I wish there was a middle ground where I could block ads like the ones you mention, while allowing privacy-respecting ads that don't ruin my browsing experience. I know Adblock Plus have their "Acceptable Ads" policy [1], but that just meant letting through ads from companies that paid them, like Google [2].
Ads are only easy to block because they load from centralized, third-party domains. Physical print publishers don't leave blanks in their newspapers and send them off to advertisers to fill in. They approve and print the ads, just like any other content. If digital publishers made similar agreements to embed static ads, they would not be affected by ad blockers.
I don't mind ads that are targeted based on the content of the page, like how DuckDuckGo ads work. Google AdWords used to be the same, and it paid publishers much more than it does now.
My approach today is Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection and then keeping Google, Meta/Facebook, and Amazon logins sequestered to individual containers. At that point a lot of the worst ad networks will complain that you are using "an ad blocker" simply because most of their trackers fail and won't even bother showing ads.
(Then on mobile, similarly using Firefox on iOS, being heavy and fast on the "ask app not to track" buttons and keeping logins to first party apps only and almost never in either Safari or Firefox.)
Again, I use no real "ad blocker", just the above steps.
It's probably not an approach for everyone, and entails a bit of paranoia to operate, but I think it sends the right message that I don't mind untracked/untargeted ads and don't think companies deserve my unfiltered data.
I wrote this one to remove all <iframe> elements, which is where most of the worst distractions live. I mostly only use it when a site has gone too far.
Yeah, no thanks.
I used to think like this, and i remember exactly what happened the day i installed my first adblocker:
i was already annoyed that some sites i visited employed very annoying ads, on both sides of the window, occupying about 20% of the screen, each. And they were serving an animation with _very_ loud music.
That day instead, when i opened the page 3-4 other pages opened as soon as the website loaded, all serving loud and obnoxious virus alerts, porn and some other crap. But how? I disabled popups a long time ago.
That day i found out about self-clicking ads.
That day i installed an ad blocker.
It is THEM that have broken the social contract. Screw them and screw ads.
(good thing that i wasn't on dialup anymore. Anybody remember that? scam sites that would make your dialup bill go up crazy, as if you were calling a courier's help line)
Well, hang on. Your comment is fair minded, but to be fair we have to consider the context.
The context is that the courts have found Google holds two illegal monopolies within the online adtech market [1], the remedy for which has yet to be determined. Furthermore the DoJ has sued Meta for holding one as well and that trial is now underway. [2]
I don't know about you, but to me, if the counterparty breaches a contract, that contract is now null and void. Same goes for a social contract, and if someone tries to kill me or rob me, whatever social contract we may have had, is now null and void.
Fortunately Google and Meta aren't actually taking hits out on anyone as far as I know, but the fact remains that the market makers for these online ads, are either outright convicted criminals, or being sued by the government for such. I don't see that we have any social contract to respect or allow any of this. It is right, just and moral to oppose the very existence of online advertising in my opinion, until the illegal abuses are corrected.
If the court has resolved that Google's breaking the law, how about we get an injunction ordering them to halt their ad tech business until the remedies are implemented. Why are we going so easy on them?
You don't owe crooks anything, neither do I.
This isn't about being cheap or breaking a fair deal. It's about asking that law and order be restored within American business and society. What's the point of this society, what moral justification does it have to exist as it is, if it keeps on breaking its own laws to protect the most powerful?
Now it's unfortunate that publishers (websites) get caught in the crossfire of this, they might not agree with me when I say you should oppose all online ads full stop until the problem is corrected, but they are getting screwed by Google and Meta and they would be more than happy to see justice done.
This is the best counterargument I have hard so far. Saving it and using it next time someone brings that up, hope you dont mind I stole it without generating $0.000000001 of ad revenue in compensation.
Dang I'll just have to pay for 0.00000001ml of my morning coffee some other way! Thanks and please share by all means. One of my siblings rightly points out how terrible modern online ads are: autoplay, clutter, surveillance, intrusion, malware, etc.
They're totally right of course and my question is - how bad would all this be if the biggest ad market maker wasn't an actual literal convicted-by-multiple-courts criminal with the second biggest market maker not far behind? What if these guys had just followed the existing laws that are on the books?
Well I don't know but I bet it would be better somehow and the only way to find out is to finally start enforcing the law.
I'm sure ads would be better somehow if there were fewer criminals involved. One obvious theory is that Google is underpaying the publishers and the publishers have resorted to dirtier tricks in response. Another is that Google implements stuff everyone else hates because hello monopoly, where else are you going to go? Maybe the lawbreakers cause the slop.
You could block only ads from Google and Meta. Most large sites use header bidding, where Google's ads are a fallback only if no other ad company bids higher, so most ad revenue come from those other companies. And IIRC Meta doesn't participate in that at all, so for them you'd just have to block ads on their own sites.
This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost.
Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. There is no social contract with them. They just sell your data.
If you know what they are doing, know how to block it, and refuse to, you are complicit in making the world a worse place. Corporations are not people that should be treated with the respect you are talking about.
For so many arguments, I'm also thinking copyright here, the framing is always about the little guy. These laws/practices are there to protect/enable small businesses and content creators.
The reality is very much the opposite, they're about maximising revenue for monopolies. I see no social contract here.
>This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost.
The trouble is the ad-blockers will block their ads as well. Visit somewhere like John Gruber's Daring Fireball site which has the least offensive ad placement possible yet his adverts are still blocked.
With Ad Nauseum, the extension destroys your ad profile by clicking on all or nearly all of the blocked ads. The only people that lose anything are the companies.
> Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people.
IMHO this is a very wrong take. Mega corporations are people. Demonstration: nobody goes to work at Google for a while. Everything stops, technical stuff and non technical stuff. No people, no corporations, small ones and large ones.
Sure, then governments are also just people. How about we restore Monarchy now so someone can actually be held responsible? Also we should completely abandon Nulla poena sine lege since evidently the imbalanced power does not exist between people and also people (government).
Easy bet that most of those people disagree with the corporation's ad (and other) practices also. I'd even bet the ones working directly in ad tech are probably the most likely to always use an ad blocker.
> However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
No it isn't. Free websites exist: Wordpress, Blogger, Wix, Weebly etc. The only "ad" they show is a static banner for their own platform, not the giant scripts Google loads for Google Ads. Neocities and Digital Ocean are $5/mo for a custom domain and hosting, theme it anyway you like.
Most "content"-focused websites like Buzzfeed, The Verge, Gizmodo etc simply embed third party content (Youtube, Vimeo, Giphy, random poll generators) instead of hosting them on their domain. Much of their content is rehashing news articles with a paper-thin layer of "analysis" on top. Then they add metric tons of ads, and throw in affilliate link garbage "product reviews" on top.
This is the dropship-ification of the web and it pretty much killed the free website culture of the Geocities/Anglefire era.
The websites you speak of don't get to decide what my hardware and my software does when running in my hands. Their content is a suggestion for my user agent, not some unbreakable law. If they don't like it, they should shut down completely.
>Their content is a suggestion for my user agent, not some unbreakable law. If they don't like it, they should shut down completely.
Alternatively, they can also refuse to serve you their content unless you turn off your ad blocker. Which would be fine. It is their content they're hosting after all.
And it's also fine for you to decide not to turn off your ad blocker and not view their content.
There are some that do this and I also think it is fair. I just close the website and do not view the content. Nobody is forced to either serve or be served so I do not see what is the problem to be discussed here.
I wonder why not many websites do this """adblocking freeloaders""" is such a big issue?
That's why the parent said it was a social contact based on the honor system. Just because you can technically block ads, it doesn't meant it's the right thing to do.
It is not a social contract. They track me whether I use their services or not, on websites that are completely unrelated. I do not get a choice, not to mention the monopolies they built (yeah, fuck YouTube). These ads eat up my resources and affect my battery life.
There is no more honour involved as when someone pays the mob for protection. I strongly reject this argument. I am bound by honour but they can do anything and change the contract unilaterally? Fuck them, that’s no contract at all.
When sites like these host a large part of our culture, I think it’s reasonable to think about non compliance because the alternative is essentially to become a digital hermit and not to be able to understand the world one is in.
I never agreed to have all public spaces for Dr age ad-supported, for example. These illegal monopolies have made it impossible to talk to large chunks of the population without either watching ads or using an ad blocker. That feels wrong.
Just because a place hosts culture, it doesn't mean that you are entitled for it. For example new movies are pay of culture, but that doesn't mean you should sneak in to a theater without buying a ticket because every movie theater requires paying. Compensating creators for their work is a part of experiencing creative works that are culturally relevant.
The US constitution absolutely does recognize that the public is entitled to all cultural works, which is why copyright is required to be time limited.
Their software is running on my computer. I decide what scripts I want or don't, and I can and will block whatever the fuck with impunity.
If they can't prevent that, or it's too expensive, or they don't care, that's not my problem. That's a business problem. Its not my business. I don't care.
Its like getting a free sample at Costco and then taking it home and throwing it away. That's my right. I can do that if I want.
If you want to run software on my computer, you play by my rules. That means an ad blocker. If you don't like that then figure it out. I'm not gonna figure it out for you.
No one is saying ad blocking is not technically possible. Wanting everyone to play by your rules is selfish and doesn't acknowledge the needs of others.
>Its like getting a free sample at Costco and then taking it home and throwing it away. That's my right. I can do that if I want.
It's also like stealing a TV from Costco. Just because you technically can pick up a TV and then bring it to your car without paying and drive off, doesn't mean you should do it. It's unfair to Costco for them to play by your rules.
But why is it illegal if it's physically possible for you to take it? By your line of reasoning it shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
>You are REQUESTING to run advertisement scripts on my computer.
That's an implementation detail of how the webpage works and does not matter. You are focusing too much on the way it's implemented and not the high level picture of how it works. If you have to get to the point of describing the HTTP protocol to justify why what you are doing is moral, you need to realize that you are just coming up with a justification for your actions to not feel bad about doing bad things. You should just accept that you are being greedy and you will block ads because you don't care if creators make money from ads and want to prioritize having an ad free experience.
> That's an implementation detail of how the webpage works and does not matter.
Lol, not bending over and letting whoever the fuck run whatever the fuck programs on my computer is an "implementation detail".
> You should just accept that you are being greedy and you will block ads because you don't care if creators make money from ads and want to prioritize having an ad free experience.
This is so, so obviously wrong it's actually frustrating I have to reply to this level of rhetoric.
Once again, I am not your accountant. It is not my responsibility to make sure your business model makes sense.
I don't have the time to babysit and hand hold every corporation in my life and make sure their business model makes sense. I just don't, and it's not my responsibility.
If your business model relies solely on me allowing you to run potential malware on my computer, then that is YOUR problem. Not mine. Figure it out, or don't. Youre always allowed to go bankrupt. Not every business model is viable.
You are not entitled to a viable business model. You are not God. If your business model doesn't work, then you lose. Too bad, so sad, not my fucking problem.
And on the topic of money: running ads on my computer is a computer system security problem.
The FBI recommends running an aggressive ad blocker. The reality is most ads are basically malware and often literally malware. They can be phishing, linking to malicious sites. They can be deceptive. They can be spyware, collecting information about my computer, identity, or web browsing activity.
Google, Meta, et. all have demonstrated they simply do not take adequate steps to prevent malicious advertisement payloads.
You do not have a god-given right to run software on my computer, but you CERTAINLY don't have a god-given right to run malware on my computer.
If you disagree, take it up with the FBI, I don't care.
> This is an exaggeration. There are ad free alternatives.
Again, their (mostly Google and Facebook’s, but there are many companies tracking me with whom I never had direct contact) trackers are all over the web and I see them in the blocked list very regularly on websites that have nothing to do with them.
> Youtube has a subscription you can pay for no ads. There other video sites who charge a subscription instead of offering ads too.
Yeah, cool. They changed their terms of use, and I changed mine. Happy to negotiate when they are available.
Ad blockers typically only block ads, and not the website too. That way people can experience content for free without compensating the creator hy giving them an ad impression.
It's not any kind of contract. A contract (even an unwritten "social" one) implies at the very least some kind of agreement, some meeting of the minds. There is no meeting of the minds on the web: Your browser simply says "Hey, give me this content," then the server says, "Here's what I'd like you to show," and finally the browser decides what out of that stream of bytes gets shown. There's no agreement by the user in that conversation, not even an implied one. The site can decide whether or not to reply, whether or not to send anything, and the user agent then decides what to show. There's no contract.
>Your browser simply says "Hey, give me this content,"
The technical details do not matter. Social contacts are about societal expectations, not about your personal ones. Do you think a thief has a meeting of the minds about not stealing something from a shop keeper? It's not the theifs world view that matters here. Similar to your example the physics of the world say it's possible for a human to pick up an item without paying for it, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
I disagree that there is a societal expectation in this case. If I request HackerNews, it will start sending me bytes. There is no societal expectation around what I do with those bytes. Maybe I'll have my browser render them as-is. Maybe I'll strip out the HTML and render them as plain text in a green 80x24 terminal. Maybe I'll drop every second character and print out the result as wall art.
Or (back on topic) when I'm watching cable TV and they send an ad over the wire. There's no societal expectation that I watch that ad. I could hit the mute button. I could get up to take a piss or grab a beer. I could record the broadcast and watch it later, fast forwarding through the ads.
This is not like a store where there's a clear societal expectation that I don't go in and rob them. I don't think anyone would equate leaving the sofa during a commercial with robbery.
>There is no societal expectation around what I do with those bytes
Yes, there is. If you had a group of 100 people and asked what google.com should look like and showed them how Chrome renders the page and your 80x24 modification does that all 100 would say that yours is not expected. You are still too hung up on these technical details of how things are implemented than how the average person thinks of these things.
A consensus answer to "what should google.com look like?" does not suggest or imply any sort of "social contract".
There is not, and has never been, a social contract that says I have to look at the ads served with any website. If you think there is, then I'm sorry, but you're sorely mistaken.
Similarly, there is no social contract that says I have to watch commercials while I'm watching TV (not that I've watched linear TV in over a decade, but...). I can mute it, change the channel, go to the bathroom, whatever. If you think there is, then I'm not sure what to tell you; your opinions on this are so outside the mainstream that we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this.
My browser already automatically mutes video ads on my behalf. And an ad blocker effectively "clicks the X button" for me. Sometimes I don't even scroll down far enough to see an ad. How is one of those activities breaking the social contract and others not? Or are they all breaking the social contract? Or none of them? I have no idea because I don't know who's defining the terms of this social contract.
If there is no meeting of minds, why are you going to websites? You go to websites to see information that was in someone else's mind and load it into your mind.
You are pushing your opinion of it being "wrong" as though it were something objective. You are acting as though others are choosing to do something "wrong", rather than that they do not believe it to be wrong in the first place.
If I am allowed not to look at the screen when an advert is playing, then I should be allowed not to play it in the first place. There is no moral obligation on the part of the viewer here.
An advert is an investment: someone pays money to broadcast something and hopes that will generate awareness. Any investment is allowed to fail.
The problem is that commercial ad-supported websites force themselves into all available online spaces: search results, discords, social media, affiliate links on blogs. The only way to stop them doing so is to take away their source of revenue.
If ads weren't profitable, you wouldn't find no results for your search about which kitchen knife to buy, you would would find better, less weaponised, more relevant results. If you don't block ads then you are directly contributing to a world with more ads and less content.
Sites are using ads to be anti-competitive, such that you literally cannot compete with them on price because their price is $0. I'm rather surprised that we haven't seen the emergence of a site where you are literally paid to use it, because that business model is 100% viable.
And the reason that business model is viable is because people don't realize how literally valuable their attention is. And most people also think they're not heavily affected by advertising. Sites are actively exploiting this to deter competition. I would not be, in the least bit, sad to see this state of affairs end.
SomethingAwful forums have this for ages but also newspapers do, too. As do streaming services. Turns out youth don't have much to spend (nor to people generally outside of West), and it stops sockpuppets somewhat.
Generally speaking youth have more than enough money to pay the same rates advertisers pay. But publishers want to take users who earn them $0.10 per month through ads and charge them $10 per month as a subscription, that's where the business model obviously breaks down and they claim that ads are the only thing that works.
That existed in past. It was a program you had to run, and it would force you to watch ads (while browsing?). IIRC it embedded MSIE. I was still in high school, and my classmate who had cable internet would run this almost 24/7. It made him earn a couple of hundreds of dollars (end of 90s). There were also all kind of hacks to make it not so annoying (because you had to watch it all the time). Eventually, they quit paying.
There's also a TV you can get for free (it being worth 600 EUR?), but it has a camera and watches your living room 24/7 (if the TV is in your living room?). It also has very strict ToS.
We had static ads. We called them banners and websites abused them. Some sites were so bad that it was challenging to find content between horizontal and vertical banners. Animated GIFs followed soon and then everything else we know. Some sites are still as bad as those old ones. I'm can't believe what eyes are seeing any time I look at friends browsing on their computers.
Good point. My point still stands that it's possible to have ad revenue with unintrusive ads.
For instance, I'm fine with video creators having sponsored sequences because I can skip them if I want. And there's no way for them to know if I watched the ad. In fact, they don't care because they already got paid.
Youtube creators get access to watchtime stats which show a dip for sponsored segments. My understanding is that sponsor contracts typically don't ask to get access to that data though, instead they look at views and refferals
Hey, are you interested in whey powd... <skip> I guess not. And often it is the same sponsor in multiple video/audio. No, I am not interested in Crowdstrike. No, i don't want to become a Lord by owning a small amount of land in Scotland. Yes, I know about Ground News but I won't need it and yes, I know you can cheaply buy whey powder, add some flavor and hype it up.
And yet, HN (a text-based website) has advertising. It is a small headline in the list. Do people block this? I don't, and I am quite an adblocking person.
I actually believe billboards are a net minus for public safety. Just like you wouldn't want all kind of unnecessary traffic signs.
Unintrusive ads are still there to manipulate you into acting against your own interests and therefore unethical.
> I'm fine with video creators having sponsored sequences because I can skip them if I want.
I'm not fine with them because skipping the obvious segments doesn't mean the rest of the content isn't compromised due to the financial incentive to not upset those advertisers.
The problem is not with the ads but all the bad things that come along with it. Collecting unnecessary personal data, targetting, disregard for others privacy and list goes on.
These small bloggers/websites are letting the huge ad corporations take up the butcher job and cry when people use adblock.
Google provides a way to turn off ad personalization and when i turn it off you know what i see. Scam/adult/gambling ads and these small websites/bloggers are ok with showing scams to earn 0.01cents. then where they broke the social contract.
Google/meta with all the policing of billion youtube/fb videos/posts dont have same policing for ads quality. Thats where they broke the social contract.
Yes they need to make money, one alternative, I am ok with companies using my compute to run crypto mining( or scientific worlloadw ) when i use their website instead of ads. Small companies should look out of box for money rather than employing a butcher to make money.
Ads in and of themselves aren't really the issue. It's the tracking that is.
If the ad was delivered without cookies and without tracking, as just a stationary gif, I'd be more okay with it.
But without tracking, back in 2008/9 ish before the real estate crash, the Simpsons made a reference to the dancing cowboys ad for selling mortgages. These were the adjustable rate mortgages that went sky high shortly after closing on the house.
> Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads.
That hasn't been true for decades. In a way the race to bottom has already finished, we are at "100% clickbait" stage. I checked it very carefully and both Android build in "news" page and Microsoft's equivalent in Win11 Weather&News Widget are just that.
Yes, there is. It's, "I ask your server for bytes, and if your server gives them to me, I interpret and display them however I wish".
The idea that someone downloading a webpage from a publicly-hosted web server could be a "freeloader" is ludicrous.
If you really must extract some form of payment from literally everyone who visits your site, you'll have to put up a paywall. Otherwise, if you give me content when I request it, I'm going to display it however I want.
> If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine
The "contract" you describe is just something you made up. I've been on the internet since the early 90s, and that has never ever ever been the deal.
Advertising is malware for your brain. I won't let it in, and no one else should either.
Yes, the paywall is reasonable, I agree. I think what the OP meant by 'social contract' is that if everybody were to use an adblocker, we would end up with a mostly paywalled internet. All the sites that currently have ads, would have a paywall.
The reason why some people get to browse the internet free, and without ads, is because there are some people that don't. Hence the 'leeching' part.
The part that annoys me sometimes, is that when there IS the option to pay to remove ads, and people still use adblockers in this case. How is this justifiable, morally?
We didn't have a paywalled internet before ads became commonplace. Most content on the internet is still user-generated and almost all of those users do not get paid anything from the ads put on their works. Hosting is quite cheap unless you want to run a centralized service that serves literally everyone.
If anything is a social contract then it's that if you want to provide a paid service you are up front about requiring payment. Ad-supported websites don't much care about that social contract because they think it's more profitable to pretend to be free when they are not.
I wanted to point out that the users that download websites to read them aren't the freeloaders.
The actual freeloaders are the ISPs, because they don't share the profits with the networks they provide access to.
In a better world, Browsers would all be peer to peer, and share their caches end-to-end, with verifiable content hashes, so that websites don't need to provide the majority of bandwidth.
But here we are, Google not giving a fuck because they actually like being a monopoly that does not need to create a healthy ecosystem because everyone involved is paying them anyways. With resources, and with money. Who would have thought?
Ad networks have been that invasive since the early 2000s. They now only support more channels. It is a stone old business and literal the source of Google finances for a very long time.
My eyeballs and attention are not for sale, I will pay you a reasonable fee for your effort but I will never watch ads and subject myself to tracking as payment, just like I won't provide you with sexual favours as payment, no matter how much you declare it to be "the social contract".
Ad-supported services undercut honest ones by pretending they are free when you are paying for them indirectly. They are also incentivized to engage in other bad behavior like gaming SEO or wasting your time with low quality content that's designed to increase ad impressions instead of helping you. I do not recognize the social contract you are implying there is and would be happy if all ad supported sites shut down so that better ones (either actually free or paid honestly) could take their place.
There is no social contract with any corporation, only legal contracts. If you want social contracts, you have to use the things that are owned and built by actual people with a reputation.
gentle reminder: online advertisements are so dangerous that the fbi recommends you use an ad blocker [1]. If there’s a social contract at play, users aren’t the ones breaking it.
Their behavior is abusive, and our behavior is self defense.
Let the ads networks do the hard work of 1) cleaning up their act, and 2) rebuilding trust before you worry about your end of the social contract.
>However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
You know what's even uglier? The notion that because I got access to a bit of your free content, I should then be completely fine with utterly pervasive, deeply granulated parasitic tracking, measuring, watching, spying and recording of as many of my habits as possible. This is a sick notion, an idiotically, disgustingly fucked up concept of fairness and those who subscribe to it are either deluded or neatly entrenched in earning from it.
No, nobody has any "right" to expect people to submit to utter surveillance because that person created content that they can't get enough people to pay for directly. I'd rather see any sites on the web that can't sustain themselves without such ad garbage burn and die than make it somehow punishable to evade their shitty cookies and other trash.
With that said, unlike many on HN comments, I also don't think ads should be banned.
There needs to be a balance. I don't block ads on sites that respect me enough not to drown out the main content with ads. However, I always block sites that have excessive ads or use pop-ups. On a side note, whoever invented pop-up ads should be sentenced to life in prison on a diet of pickled beets and prune juice.
I don't consider myself/users responsible for solving the broken business model of a big part of the modern web. The problem of ads is not just "I do not like ads", which is also a valid reason imo concerning how intrusive and distracting they are blinking and yelling around and making everything slower, but a matter of privacy and safety. There is no social contract that accepts this. Moreover, I have no way to actually know or consent to be served ads before actually loading them, so I have to use an adblocker just in case. I would not mind if a website detects my adblocker and not serving me the content either. So in this sense, imo if a website decides to serve me the content without ads it is up to them, not me.
I would care much less if tracking/personalisation was not part of the ad systems and we were just shown ads based on the content of a webpage. Actually, I am ok with stuff like sponsor segments from content creators, sponsored articles etc. There are ways to serve ads without invading privacy or making it disturbing, but modern advertising industry has chosen a different path.
There are also alternative models, subscriptions, actually buying and *owning* the content (how outdated! let's have ads instead), donations, having a "pro" version with extra optional features etc. There is important stuff in the internet (eg wikipedia) that works fine without ads at all. But if you want to scale to a billion $$$ business maybe it makes sense to rely more on ads, but I do not find this compelling as an argument for users to suffer ads or part of any social contract.
> I would not mind if a website detects my adblocker and not serving me the content either.
How do you feel about ad blockers continually trying to evade detection, though?
Or guides about how to avoid things that block access to users of ad blockers?
I think the "you're free to block me for using an ad blocker!" argument doesn't mean much when said ad blockers do their best to not let that happen in the first place.
I believe that if websites actually cared, if adblockers was a big issue for them, they would get to detect when a user uses one, eg by looking at specific parts of the webpage that are not loaded. There are some that do it. Even if it turned out to be an arm's race, it is a socially beneficial one imo, because it could reduce the appeal of the tracking-advertising model, by increasing the cost of keeping it up. But that's not what is going on here.
Personally I don't just block ads, but as much of any third party js/requests I can without breaking a website. Websites do not load any third party js etc by default except from some whitelisted domains. This takes care of a big part of the most annoying things out there. If you do not want to serve me the website if I block this stuff, don't do so, I don't care.
The websites are in their right to try to detect adblockers, and the adblockers are equally in their right to avoid detection. If a website really cares, they can try harder.
The goal of an adblocker is not just to block ads, but to block anything that isn't the content the user wishes to see. This includes calls to action, consent banners (despite websites wishing otherwise, the default answer is still "no"), and of course "please disable your adblocker."
If you had a switch you could turn on that makes your browser send a header that states you use an ad blocker, and that the website could reliably use to decide to show you nothing (including no ads, obviously), would you use it?
If the websites had a similar switch to make it easy for me to decline being tracked, sure. But why should I care about making it "easy for them" if they do not make it easy for me? So that they make more $$$ more easily?
> I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
This is why I don't go as far as running sponsorblock. Yes the sponsored segments can be irritatingly repetative¹ but at least they don't result in direct commercial stalking, popups, surprise audio/video, etc, and they more directly benefit the content makers.
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[1] sponsor segments are actually useful for juding creators: if one I would otherwise trust starts parroting the smae script as others but trying to make it sound like they wrote it themselves ("my favourite feature is …") then I know to tone my level of trust down a notch as it is then clear their opinions have a price.
Its not my responsibility to make your stupid ass business model profitable.
If your business model is stupid, that's not my business. I don't run your accounting department, I'm not your CFO.
Figure it out, or don't. I don't have the time to handhold every corporation I interact with and make sure they're getting their money. They are not babies, and I am not their father.
I feel like SEO and click bait of all kinds has already broken that unwritten social contract. I feel like your argument is that using an adblocker is impolite, borderline unfair. But I also feel like we, the users, have been exploited by surveillance capitalism. If anyone broke the social contract, it's the websites that participated in [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification).
How can you say there's some sort of a social contract here when the ads side has no problem with psychologically manipulating me, outright lying to me and putting me in danger just so they can extract a tiny bit of profit from me? In any other context such a party would be classified as sociopathic. Why should the ad industry get a pass?
I've come to feel that the unwritten social contract was broken decades ago when ad networks decided their best bet was to become data farms and to sell ads and private data to any bidder regardless of ethics (and morality and truth in advertising laws).
My only "ad blocker" is Firefox enhanced tracking protection and walling off Facebook (Meta, but their only app I still use is Facebook), Amazon, and Google logins to separate containers and/or apps and/or private browsing tools. I feel like this is a good ethical compromise still fills my part of the social contract. If a site wants to show me the most generic, untargeted ads, I welcome that.
They don't get my data for free, that's not part of an ethical relationship with ad networks in my mind. I am happiest to keep them in the dark and feed them junk and lies, that is all I think that they deserve.
It's fascinating how the ad networks respond to this. Several, like Admiral (to especially call out at least one offender) whine loudly that I'm using an ad blocker because they've confused targeting and tracker blocking with ad blocking and ask me to disable it. They don't even try to show ads. It seems pretty clear what their real slimy game is and I don't think they deserve to exist. Ads existed for centuries without tracking and privacy violations. Ad "common sense" up until about the 1980s was the broader the message and distribution the better; demographics and targeting was about saving money with the trade off of losing potential audiences. The more you target an ad the less you benefit from people that didn't even know your product might apply to them, or to people that might buy it for others or as gifts. "Everyone knew that."
Google is nasty in its own ways. ReCaptchas get worse. YouTube ads have several levels of hell, including interruptions in parts of videos it shouldn't interrupt, all sorts of racist and intellectually disgusting groups (including but not limited to allowing outright scams, platforming disinformation, and spreading malware) it allows to buy ads, and how much it allows those groups to serve 30 minute/1 hour/2+ hour videos as "ads". It's amazing how many ads I've felt I had to report from hate groups alone. All of that seems to background radiation for everyone with access to Google's ad networks, but the less tracking data you have the fewer targeted ads you see and the more the mask off greed feeds you terrifying things that make you wonder how humanity is okay with all this and why Google isn't seen as more of a greedy, evil company for how much of this stuff they fail to vet and continue to associate their brand with.
Show me old family friendly TV advertising staples like Clorox ads and whatever the latest cereal fad is, please, I don't mind. That's a written social contract that worked for a long time, especially because it had rules like Truth in Advertising laws and followed ethics boundaries like brand contamination by association with criminals and liars. Targeted advertising is and was a mistake. Ad networks believing private data was their new playground and revenue gold mine was a mistake. Neither of those, I think fit the old social contracts about ad-subsidized content, and I think all we can do is send a message that both of them break the spirit of the contract and it is past time for a change/fix.
But that's also maybe just me and a personal crusade at this point. I don't see a lot of people going to the sort of privacy minded extremes I have and also still not install an actual ad blocker. But that's how I'm trying to square the ethics dilemma of appreciating ad-subsidized content, but also understanding that the internet is no longer safe without some sort of privacy-minded safeguards that companies like Admiral and Google are going around and calling "ad blocking", because it is starting to interfere with their real, more lucrative, and much more evil business models.
Ads are not the problem. It's the ad-tech surveillance and the malvertising. There are ways to show ads that are not a threat. When online services choose to become hostile, adblockers are the defense. I don't mind ads, I don't mind paying for services without ads, in fact I do for multiple services and news. I don't want surveillance ad-tech anywhere near my devices. It's the business decision of the company, that aides the worst enduring tech businesses with data collection and targeted scams and malware. So fuck'em. I'll steal gladly from overt assholes.
Big tech has slowly convinced us that it is their right to violate us. Because they give us so much for free. But they also take things away from us, without our knowledge and consent, they manipulate us, they make barriers between us en the information we need. They change the human condition for the worse.
We do not have to feel guilty to act against them.
Btw, yesterday Chromium told me Ublock Origin is no longer supported. Well, thank you, now I know why I wasn't using Chromium for anything other than MS365 stuff. It's working just fine on Firefox.
> Unfortunately, I have no way to detect DNS based blocking short of loading an actual ad.
Before that point I'd already spotted that limitation, but there might be an easy solution: get a domain added to a common block list used by DNS based blockers. If you get the right content from a resource on a host with that name (or the other test passes, so we test for both forms of blocker) show the message.
Of course there will be false positives if the page goes down or if they're is some other network issue, but no test like this will be perfect.
Anyone want to save me the research to find out the easiest way to get a domain on the lists? I have no objection to sacrificing a few £ per year on a name to use and I've got spare resource to serve the pile of tiny requests that'll go through because people aren't running a blocker.
EDIT: as a secondary note, I wouldn't just flip between “display:none” and “display:block” on one element upon detection result. That might cause visual disturbance in many page layouts as things load. I would leave a block of the same positioning and size properties in the flow in either case, either blank or with a message like “You'll be pleased to know that your ad blocker seems to be working.”, perhaps leaving the space blank (but still in the flow with the same dimensions) initially so an incorrect message isn't displayed if something (scripting being disabled client-side for instance) stops the tests running at all.
I think getting a domain is well worth the effort. If you set up the domain and write a small blog post I'm sure HN will be willing to help add the domain to every blocklist imaginable. If you do, I also think it's worth adding a donate button.
Even CERN would advice everyone to use ad-blocker [1] for a safer internet experience. I am sure ads as it is today wasn't part of the web plan when it started.
Guess nowadays they recommend everyone to use Firefox or some other non-crippling browser then also?
I helped my wife with something the other day, noticed the ads everywhere, while I was sure I had installed uBlock for her in the past. Went to the Chrome's addons page, and Google apparently is automatically disabling uBlock and calling it unsupported, yet you can enable it until next time you restart Chrome. But seems Chrome is actively trying to get rid of adblockers lately.
I think that's impossible to do with an extension, there are far too many holes to plug and it's a moving target, it has to be done in the browser. I believe GrapheneOS is trying to do that with Vanadium (security and privacy hardened fork of Chromium for Android).
I don't think that will work, because that will also provide false information to the logic.
You will have messed up layouts and unneeded quirks. Moreover, banks are using fingerprinting to detect fraud so you will have a hard time on those websites as well.
By this logic you cannot use anything, because there's likely at least one website that uses its featureset.
Of course I wouldn't farble on my bank's website, that would be pretty stupid.
But by default I would want trackers to get the farbled data, and only allowlist the websites I trust. Same trust concept as with uBlock Origin, NoScript and others.
Old Opera (before it became another Chromium-shell) had an easy JS on/off toggle in the menu, but I don't remember if it only took effect on load or immediately.
Tried to browse a while with NoScript addon. But barely any page loads, so you need to whitelist almost every page you visit, which defeats the purpose.
I have been thinking about some kind of render proxy that runs all the JS for you somewhere else in a sandbox and sends you the screenshot or rendered HTML instead. Or maybe we could leverage an LLM to turn the Bloated JS garbage into the actual information you are looking for.
> Tried to browse a while with NoScript addon. But barely any page loads, so you need to whitelist almost every page you visit, which defeats the purpose.
Nah, this is just straight up false. Many pages work fine with NoScript blocking all scripts. For those that don't, you usually only have to allowlist the root domain, but you can still leave the other 32 domains they are importing blocked. It's actually surprisingly common for blocking JS to result in a better experience than leaving it enabled (eg no popups, no videos, getting rid of fade-ins and other stupid animations).
I won't argue if you think that is too much work, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it for a non-technical user, but it's not nearly as bad as you described.
I wasn't clear, but this is about my experience. Maybe you are in a different bubble. But I'm not able to book a hotel, browse GitHub, file my taxes, make a bank transfer or even look up the menu of a restaurant.
The only exceptions for me are HN and a handful of news websites.
UMatrix has a better interface. The problem is the same, one has to find the minimum set of scripts that does not break the core functionality of the site. It's an ability that can be trained but it's the reason for I don't install it on the browsers of my friends. However I considered installing it, keeping it disabled and using it as a tool to show how much stuff each site loads from so many different sources. Many domain names are very telling even for the uninitiated.
I am still running the NoScript, whitelisting the page I am on. It has benefits of not whitelisting other domains it tries to pull stuff from, which 90% is enough to get working site that is way cleaner than with all the bullshit loaded.
> If you want to support your favorite authors: send then money. A dollar helps more then viewing ads ever would.
This isn't really true. I ran an ad-supported site at one point with my content, just a small banner at the top of each page. The ads paid for a significant portion of my monthly rent. Getting a few dollars from the occasional viewer would not, since 99.99+% of people are not going to do that.
I don't like viewing ads, but let's not pretend like they don't make money for content creators. They absolutely do.
But it's not one person viewing ads on just your site. It's across all the sites they visit.
A person viewing ads over the course of a year is generating much, much more than a dollar in revenue.
And in a parallel universe without ads, they're definitely not sending a dollar to every site they visit.
You can't compare one person who sends a dollar to a site with one person's ad revenue to a site, because as I said, 99.99+% of people are never going to send you a dollar.
The author is implying ads don't generate meaningful revenue but paying a dollar does. That's just false.
But the ad dollars are ruining the internet, ad revenue based on impressions/clicks/tracking is whe we end up with more and more invasive ads and more and more content farm websites trying to get enough eyeballs and clicks to earn some of that money.
The parallel universe I'd like is where websites/publishers had small, privacy protecting, static banners or ad text on their sites. In that universe lots more people would feel comfortable with not using ad blockers.
Of course it's ruining the internet, zero disagreement there.
All I'm saying is that the author is painting this fantasy picture that individuals voluntarily sending a dollar to site creators is somehow a substitute for, or even better than, the ad revenue they get. It's not. It's not even close.
Everyone agrees ads are terrible. The issue is that nobody has been able to come up with a viable alternative. Lots of ideas around micropayments exist, but so far they've failed for all sorts of reasons.
I love it. But in the spirit of today's Internet, you should make this message an obnoxious pop-up that requires dismissal with a tiny "X" button that is dark-grey-on-black and placed tactically so as to be the least accessible. The touch target on touch devices should be tiny and slightly off. The pop-up should also fail completely on iPads, covering all the content with a dark overlay but giving the user no way to proceed.
I found it amusing that my proxy detected the "/ads/" in the URL and killed the connection automatically.
Of course highlighting this fact that the presence of an adblocker is detectable, unfortunately only results in escalating the cat-and-mouse game further.
I have also considered popularising a script that replaces the whole page's content with "JavaScript detected, please disable it to view this content and improve your security".
> I have also considered popularising a script that replaces the whole page's content with "JavaScript detected, please disable it to view this content and improve your security".
Bug report: There's a typo in the actual popup as shown to me, it says "extention". Consistently enough, the typo is present in the code snippet in the article:
if (!document.cookie.includes("notice-shown")) {
document.getElementById("ad-note-hidden").id = 'ad-note';
document.getElementById("ad-note-content-wrapper").innerHTML = "No adblocker detected. " +
"Consider using an extention like <a href=https://ublockorigin.com/>uBlock Origin</a> to save time and bandwidth." +
" <u onclick=hide()>Click here to close.</u>";
}
I wonder what the overlap between visitors to a site that would display this and visitors not already using an adblocker is. Then again I've seen developers with ads plastered all over their screens before, I'd like to believe it's a conscious decision on their part.
Now that I think of it, when a professional YouTuber shows their browser, more often than not, there is no ad-blocking. But as professional YouTubers, there is no way they are not aware of ad-blocking.
I wonder if they actually watch the ads on purpose, even in private or if they turn their adblocker off just for the video, as not to give ideas to their viewers and potentially losing ad revenue.
A while back Linus Tech Tips said ad blockers are a form of unethical piracy. His audience accused him of spreading self-serving bullshit. Oddly, his position changed a few years later and he started promoting adblocking.
The chance that he was using one the whole damn time? 100%
back in the heyday of the daily wtf there was a beautiful submission from a developer who worked for a banner ad company. got called into a VP's office one day and yelled at because some new annoying ad wasn't showing up where intended, a bunch of debugging later it turned out that the VP was running an ad blocker and had just forgotten about it.
Yea, I've seen a few videos from Low Level Learning where the content of the article he's reading from gets covered by annoying banner ads and such. I don't know why but security websites have really obnoxious ads. In any case, you can see the anguish on his face but the show must go on.
Instead of adblockers, I remember sites that are user hostile one way or another and just avoid those sites. Those sites that are heavy on ads usually aren't worth my time anyway, so the presence of those auto-playing videos in every corner ends up being a signal for me to go somewhere else.
Some services claim to turn "anonymous" visitors into actual email addresses (and some other basic info), likely via identity graphs (IP/device/hashed IDs).
I've heard of cases where people are getting outreached (via email) after just visiting a product website, even with an ad blocker on, using a private browser (Brave or similar).
Opensend is one example. They're pretty open about it in their FAQ [1].
Ironically a content blocker on iOS Safari blocks this page from loading at all, I’m guessing because of the /ads/ in the URL rather than the domain. I didn’t see the notice on iOS after disabling the content blockers, but that’s probably because of the not enough space/off to the side constraint?
> but if you use external CSS, it’s quite common for the request to fail resulting in an unstyled page
That’s a pretty crazy statement. How often do you see loading a CSS stylesheet fail to load? Most sites are completely unusable without their stylesheets and I don’t recall the last time I saw a stylesheet fail to load.
> How often do you see loading a CSS stylesheet fail to load?
I wouldn't say often, but it certianly happens often enough that I make sure my own designs work well enough (the content is visible at least, even if it is hellish ugly) if external resources like that fail to load.
The most frequent cause is a site that is overloaded due to a hug from HN or similar, the main request going through OK but some of the subsequent ones timing out. It is getting less common with servers that support HTTP2/HTTP3 so pipeline better, as the usual failure point in these cases is in opening a connection not while reading the response (or the server generating that response).
It can also happen if static content is served from a different place, and that is down but the host serving the main content is not.
That checks out, I feel like the place I've seen it the most is on Github, which also seems to be the site I use regularly that has the most frequent outages (which also aren't quite at the level I'd call them common, but still _somewhat_ common_ compared to everything else I use anywhere close to daily)
It's bad enough we got extra work for those who use adblockers.
Wasting peoples' time and attention for not using one (out of personal choice or necessity) feels like overreach.
It's also deeply paternalistic: Even if it is meant well - and I assume that's the case here - it implies the site operator knows better than the user what is good for them.
Finally, this will also lower the guards of less technical users for installing random plug-ins on website demand.
From a subjective gut feeling: Please do not do this. Let people decide what they need, and what they don't need.
>Wasting peoples' time and attention for not using one (out of personal choice or necessity) feels like overreach.
This already happens with every ad successfully shown to a person. Why don't you criticize the ad business for much more extensive overreach instead of someone doing harmless activism on their own website?
> Wasting peoples' time and attention for not using one (out of personal choice or necessity) feels like overreach.
This is far from the same as the overreach of many (most?) ads. From the description: “It’s shown off to the side, and never covers content. It won’t be shown if there isn’t enough space.”. In fact the space issue is overly careful, on my protrait 1080p monitor it doesn't show because 1080 pixels is just a little too thin for its test.
And someone who is used to how things are without a blocker, is unlikely to notice this extra little (non-animated, soundless, out-of-the-way) message in the general melée!
> Finally, this will also lower the guards of less technical users for installing random plug-ins on website demand.
That is a fair point (though those guards seem so low enough already in general that this will make litle real world difference). Instead of pointing to a particular thing to install, when I do this on my output I'll point to a page listing common options and a warning about installing random stuff without at least minimal research.
I am not aware of a built in adblocker as a component. The browser is zero telemetry by default and quite a few sites helpfully point to howto disable adblock plugins in chrome and firefox tutorials when they encounter Orion.
Instead of document.cookie consider document.localStorage since there’s verbiage around showing a notice on your site if you use cookies, etc, for tracking purposes. At least with local storage, you aren’t using cookies :P
See, this is where you are wrong. The law applies if you target people living in the EU (such as using one of the languages spoken within the EU. English applies thanks to Malta and Ireland. So does not explicitly removing tracking from EU IPs).
Whether it is technically enforceable in your particular case may be the question. But historically, it has been enforced outside the EU.
As you live in the Bay Area - the CCPA and the CPRA, which are similar in many ways and seem to require an opt-out mechanism (e.g. if you operate a commercial website with >100k devices accessing it during a year).
Talk to a lawyer, don't take advice from strangers on the internet.
> The law applies if you target people living in the EU
I disagree with this. Tencent WeChat targets the entire world, including people living in the EU. They do not follow GDPR.
Likewise, Facebook targets people living everywhere, including in China. They do not follow Chinese laws.
Hence, China sets up a firewall and blocks Facebook.
EU can set up a firewall too if they don't like something.
"Oh but EU doesn't do firewalls?" Not my problem. Tough luck. China, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, all did it, you can too if you have beef with foreign websites.
But no, I do not need to follow EU law just because EU users use my thing. It's on them to firewall it if they don't like my website.
> CCPA and the CPRA
This is fine. I live in California, I need to follow California law, and I can choose to live somewhere else if I don't like it. What I'm not okay with is some distant jurisdiction thinking they can make laws that I "need" to follow.
What's even worse is that I have my browser set to block cookies on ALL sites by default and only enable them for a handful of sites that I login to.
This causes all the stupid GDPR popup sites to not "remember" my preferences because they ironically need to use a cookie to store the preference of declining cookies, so they appear again each time because my browser doesn't store that decline cookie between sessions.
Except it's not tracking. Remembering user preferences is the original goal of cookies, and doesn't come with any legal requirements.
The law is (paraphrasing) "You must use cookies or similar to be evil without permission". Advertising companies decided that instead of not being evil, they'd annoy users into giving permission.
I am extremely insulated from ads online and have been for about a decade. Once in a while I have to browse on a device that does not have an ad blocker or most of the times does not even let you install one. Seeing a website that is SEoptimised and heavily ad supported feels like walking into a crack den. That this is the normal experience for the vast majority of users is sad.
Whenever I open Google's Play Store on Android I get this feeling of walking into some dystopic shopping mall. I hardly ever come there (F-Droid covers all utilities for me, so Google's own app store is really only for official apps from banks, public transport, etc.), so its user hostile design always hits me like a wall of visual noise and clutter.
At these moments that feeling that for most people getting bombarded by ads is normal hits hard. I'm always wondering when the ride will end and uBlock Origin can't protect us any longer.
Unless you have a specific reason to use Google Play Store (as in the app, not the distribution medium), I would highly recommend using Aurora Store (which you can handily get via F-droid). I use it on my Sailfish OS phone (C2) to similarly get apps not available via F-Droid.
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/
The problem with this approach is that many "secure" apps nowadays (bank, authenticators, etc.), at least here in the Nordics, are checking (among other things) if the app has been installed from the Play Store. If you install the very same signed APK from Aurora, or another source, it will refuse to work.
That's probably better for the sanity of all concerned. I'll have a look.
What always surprises me is the sheer amount of fake, scammy, apps trying to appear as if they're something else. Trying to steal clicks from users looking for Adblock, VLC or other legitimate apps... it's a mess!
Nevermind the fake stuff, the real stuff is scammy enough.
When you select an app to install on Google Play, it takes you to another screen confirming the install. But that install button on top is not for the app you selected, it's for a different, advertised app. You have to scroll down to find the confirmation button for the app you already instructed the store to install.
This isn't going to ruin any lives, but it's gross.
At what point does a small bad thing, but one that impacts billions of lives, rise to the level of not acceptable? Google is stealing how many human years of peoples lives with these little things? Are we losing millions of years of people time a year to Googles slimy practices? That is unacceptable. I can't see how Google employees are OK with that.
It's always been acceptable to steal, as long as you're already rich.
Yes, this is exactly why Google's claims of locking down apps on Android for security are such hot bullshit. Its such an obvious lie.
I don't need alternative app stores to download malware and scams, that play store is full of that. And it's advertised front and center.
If it serves any purpose just today I've published docscandroid.app just because the document scanners out there are really scary and do not really fit my purpose. My app is not perfect but its mine and that is enough.
The parent poster decries fake and scammy apps, and you post a link to an app that contains absolutely zero information on who controls it, how my data is used, where my data is stored, etc.
If you built your own app that does exactly what you want for your own use, kudos and more power to you. But otherwise...
You're competing with Google. The built-in Drive app does document scanning.
I love that google removed the search bar from the front page. If you tap where it should be, you get a popup informing you that search has moved to the bottom. So you tap that and it takes you to a new screen with the search bar at the top.
I have never seen such absolute design and engineering genius.
It's as if they are not Android users at all. Maybe someone told an intern to move the button to the bottom, he showed that he did it, and that was it. Nobody actually performed a search with this new layout.
I've been using NextDNS since I've seen it mentioned here a month ago or so and it's working amazingly well. Like Pihole but no hassle setting it up.
I get the same feeling, but from my new Google TV.
I chose it because I liked the previous iterations of Google TV. It integrated with everything else, had a nice app ecosystem, and you could put the stuff you watched within a couple of remote key presses. In this new version you are forced to click over icon after icon of paid content before are allowed to see the icons you are allowed to arrange.
Replacing the TV is out, unfortunately. Finding a different UI is on my to-do list. Google TV used to a checkbox feature for me. They've turned it into "check if a device has it, and run away screaming if it does" feature.
Chrome on Android was their first move in that direction, with it's inability to host ad blockers. It must have been a wild success for them because now many Google products have the same "ads shoved down your throat" feel to them, and yes the Play store is another stand out example.
I assume once the Chinese TV manufacturers figure out Google TV is an anti-feature, they will come up with their own replacement. That day can't come fast enough. That's an odd, because I never thought I'd be cheering Chinese software on, given their repeated attacks on the infrastructure of my country. And the the bastards are still doing it. But Trump has lowered the bar so dramatically on so many things. It's a strange new world.
They made such a retarded change where you now have the search button at the bottom, instead of at the top, but the actual search box is at the top, so you reposition the grab in order to reach to the bottom, only to then be forced to reposition again in order to reach the top.
I mean, absolutely retarded.
I'm in the same boat. I never see ads anywhere (and not just on the web: I never watch regular TV (I don't even have a TV), never listen to ads-supported radio stations, etc.)
How people put up with ads is a complete mystery.
> I never see ads anywhere (and not just on the web: I never watch regular TV (I don't even have a TV), never listen to ads-supported radio stations, etc.)
Ads in public places, bus stops, etc. are kinda hard to avoid unfortunately.
But those are ok. They (usually) don't have sound, auto playing videos, shock content or cover something I want to look at.
Have you filled a car with gas any time in the last ~5 years? The pumps around here (New England, USA) start playing ads with sound once you start pumping fuel. It's an absolute delight when your pump and the pump on the other side of your island are playing different ads with different audio or the same ad with the audio just out of sync.
Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button. Occasionally, none of them are, and rarely does anyone else seem to even try to mute their pump.
Someone has put caulking in many of speakers at my usual gas station. Not all heros wear capes.
Pumping gas became pretty infrequent for me once I got a plug in hybrid, but when the closest gas station near me first started playing an ad my immediate reaction was to spam all of the side buttons on the screen until I found the one that muted it. Sweet quiet...
I rarely see these any more (USA, not a small town). Could be the set of gas stations I visit doesn’t have them, but I do remember them being popular for a while. Now I haven’t seen one in a very long time.
This is one of the top things pushing me to an EV, so I can charge at home and be done with gas stations. As EVs get more market share, these intrusive ads will only get worse.
I wonder what happens if you take a sharp object such a screwdriver and poke all the speakers…
While being recorded from 6 different angles while standing next to your vehicle with a license plate on it?
You get arrested. That’s what happens.
Kiosk makers have already thought of all of these possibilities. There isn’t a nicely exposed speaker. It’s behind a metal plate with tiny holes in it.
> You get arrested. That’s what happens.
For petty vandalism? That seems like an expensive overreaction.
Perhaps it depends on your demography.
People get arrested for petty vandalism all the time, even if they didn't petty vandalize.
The police won't bother to track down who graffitied your fence, but money-making companies are a different matter.
And it definitely depends on demography. I assume they're still using it, but maybe they just plug everyone's face into Palantir now.
Maybe cops are different where you live, but here in Seattle, I cannot imagine a crime so trivial as "someone broke the speaker on a gas pump" ever rising high enough on the SPD priority list for anyone to lift a finger about it, no matter how well-documented it may have been.
It would not surprise me to hear that someone had committed a crime of that scale while being watched by an SPD officer and still gotten away with it.
There's no need to. If the unit is older than a few months, you'll find that the speakers have already been perforated.
This usually doesn't stop them from working, because people don't break the voice coil at the center.
You probably get a visit from the police.
At one point I was so infuriated that I would feel for the speaker and punch the pump so hard it would knock the speaker out of place (many pumps flimsy plastic.) I did that as many times as I could until the service company started gluing them in better. So I upped and ante by ripping open the front of the pump and tear the speaker out with my bear hands and smash it. Did that a bunch of times until the volumes were turned down.
> Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button
I found out that's the help button and sometimes a clerk will come out and ask what I need help with and I tell that it stops the annoying noise coming from the pump.
That's pretty unhinged, but I'm glad there's someone out there vandalizing annoying pumps. It's important work, I think.
I’m reminded of the film Falling Down but I’ve given you an Internet point (upvote) for fighting the good fight. If good people do nothing, evil will triumph. In Ireland, we don’t (yet?) have such devilish instruments of torture but I imagine my cortisol levels would be through the roof if I had to deal with them.
No, they are far from OK. You've just become used to that part of the dystopia like others have become used to online ads.
All ads are designed to psychologically manipulate you into acting against your best interest.
billboards are still pretty obnoxious, especially when they block the view on say, a highway through a relatively undeveloped natural environment
Get a bicycle and learn the car free routes into town and to your work. Nobody puts up adverts on cycle paths. It isn't against the law, it just makes no commercial sense to do so.
By making the bicycle however you get about, you cut down on seeing ads.
this feels like a ridiculous sub-optimization, and I ride my bike pretty much everywhere
It depends on where you live, however, I noted my 'ad free life' whilst in London. I went from the usual commute on trains and tubes with the odd bus thrown in for good measure to just riding my bicycle along the Thames. I went from seeing everything with adverts to seeing everything with herons, gulls, squirrels, trees and flowers. Rather than being tuned in to the latest junk to buy, I became tuned in to the ever changing seasons and what was in blossom.
Incidentally almost all my trips are already by bicycle, with on foot and with public transport numbers 2 and 3. Unfortunately, since almost everybody uses these modes of transportation here, there actually are ads everywhere still.
(Besides the idea of me having to adjust my route to -for now- not see ads being somewhat offensive to me too.)
Do you live here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w
I do live in that country, and I have cycled (and walked and trained through) there yes :)
> Ads in public places, bus stops, etc. are kinda hard to avoid unfortunately.
These are very different - and largely interesting to me in their colorfulness and often whimsy. (The cities around here are otherwise NOT visually interesting).
This is something that web sites have always had at their disposal: use static locally-hosted images as ads and respect my screen real-estate, don't try to track me with 20-200 trackers, and I WILL allow them (and do). I will even allow some animation if it respects my bandwidth.
But no, very few web sites feel satisfied with this so multiple ad blockers they get. A few sites do small static image ads. I don't block these and even frequently follow their links.
Barber shops and doctors' waiting rooms are hellish for me, since I can't not-hear the radio/TV they usually have playing.
In France I have yet to go to a waiting room with a TV with the sound on; I think people would get upset.
I went once to a dentist with a TV above my head (sound off); I refused to sit in the chair until it was turned off. The assistant sighed and said "everybody asks the same thing, I wonder why we installed this".
Hey Vinni
Ditto
I dont see any ads online.
I dont have a TV either, I stopped watching that ad infested garbage in 2005.
too old to walk to the bus stop, too much of an introvert to hang out near pulblic places with other people
I don't use adblock. That's not a problem for me. May be I don't visit those ad-ridden websites often enough.
You do also get used to it. Banner blindness is absolutely a thing (and something that still trips me up where I miss the most important information on a page, despite using adblock most of the time)
Try uBlock Origin. You'll notice the difference immediately.
Last night my wife clicked on an article in her news feed. It wasn't this article, but it was this site.
https://3dvf.com/le-realisateur-philippe-vidal-dumas-nous-qu...
Never mind the dozens of pop-up ads and banners on the site. Random words in the article turn into ads that popup while you're scrolling. And it's easy to accidentally click one because there's more pixels covered by ads than not.
I've been telling her to get an adblocker for years because she, like you, feels like she doesn't need one. But that article last night made her rethink her stance on ads.
For me, I don't mind advertisements. I scroll Instagram a few times a week and there are ads there. I get more ads than actual posts. They're easy enough to ignore. And honestly, sometimes they're interesting.
It's when the ads disrupt my browsing session that pisses me off. If sites didn't have shitty ads that cover your screen and just get in the way, I wouldn't have an adblocker.
I also use adblocker to get rid of shitty non-ad pop-ups, like "you have to install our shitty mobile app to use this site!" Yeah, fuck that. Ublock origin zaps it away.
Have you noticed that being around other people who choose to consume media with ads lowers your opinion of them a little?
Like if you’re at a friend’s house and they’re listening to pandora with ads, or watching Hulu with ads?
Even worse, being at a restaurant where they're playing commercial FM radio or a music stream with ads. I won't go back.
I'm almost there. I haven't figured out how to block billboards yet.
Flick the bean once a month to see which products and services you’re missing out on.
Picked up a nice cleaner and hiking boots that my ad blockers were denying me last month.
Life changing.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flick%20the%...
Interesting choice of phrase
A real donkey punch of a metaphore
Hello fellow 2000s era Urban Dictionary reader.
Equally life-changing would be to keep the ads blocked, and visit the “Buy it for life” subreddit, which has recommendations for the best products and services that will last you a lifetime.
ADHD means I’m not maintaining anything and everything on that reddit is maximised for maintenance.
Nice Reddit if that lifestyle appeals, but not for me.
If you really needed those things, you would have thought of getting them on your own time. Being tempted into it is consumerism and kinda why we're in this mess
The ads apply focus to a problem and suggest a possible solution.
That focusing is the key to the benefit of letting them through the keyhole irregularly.
Could I interest you in a bridge?
Are you sure you needed them? What was stopping you from doing the research without a third party shoving whatever they will make money on?
Attention. The ads sent it to the front and kickstarted the research phase which led to purchase.
I didn’t need them. But it’s like walking on a cloud and the fit is perfect. Mostly chance, but that ad started the push.
Dropship instagram ad products are famously high quality and not a scam!
I have DNS based adblocking on home router, plus adblock extension.
Every time I use the web using 5G data or public wifi, I regret the experience. Then I immediately turn on an adblocking VPN.
Mullvad has a free DoH service, FYI. It can potentially replace your self-hosted service, at least for your phone, so you don't forget to set it up when you leave home.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
Firefox Mobile + uBlock solves this.
Firefox + Tailscale + setting the DNS server to your AdGuard/PiHole is actually the better solution overall.
I use AdNauseum instead of plain uBlock as just an added layer of protection but it's rarely needed.
Can't help with ads in embedded web content, e.g. nytimes app.
I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.
Brave did this they ran ads on Facebook and YouTube where they would show ads telling you how to install brave to stop receiving them. Also they criticized because brave themselves was showing ads
People love a good black-or-white purity attack on companies that try to do better. Yes, they show ads, but at what cost for your personal privacy? We have to be able to handle nuance rather than absolutist positions.
eh, thats tough to critique imo, it might be an end, but the end result is considerably less ads in the future. only thing that makes it a little odd of a spot is that its THEIR product, but i think a nice person randomly trying to spread the word of ublock or something through ads is more than justified.
i guess its also a bummer they are financially supporting facebook/youtube, but maybe the end result would be break even if they get enough people to utilize adblocking. thats pretty crazy compound interest over time for even just like 3 people
You'd have to be very careful not to run afoul of insider trading and/or market manipulation laws. Whether you would or not would depend on all the details and the jurisdiction.
Not in the US. There's no insider trading angle at all, and it's not fraudulent market manipulation to attempt to persuade consumers to cease supporting a business you're shorting as long as you're not lying about it.
Hence why I qualified that it depends on the details and the jurisdiction. I didn't say it is insider trading, just that you need to be careful to avoid that.
> There's no insider trading angle at all
Such a blanket statement would definitely be wrong in the UK for example. Insider trading is defined at Section 52(1) of the Criminal Justice act 1993 as: "(1)An individual who has information as an insider is guilty of insider dealing if, in the circumstances mentioned in subsection (3), he deals in securities that are price-affected securities in relation to the information."
Whether you trigger the offence depends on a number of factors such as whether the information is "inside" information and whether you were an "insider" (these terms are defined in subsequent sections of the Act). As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.
I'm not particularly familiar with the US legal system so I can't claim you're wrong there.
IMO you don't need to be particularly careful to avoid insider trading if you were never at risk of doing it. It's pretty obvious when you have a duty of confidentiality and when you don't (again, in the US). The hypothetical scenario upthread just doesn't have any of the elements.
> As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.
Yeah, that isn't the scenario described earlier at all. Here's what was proposed:
> I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.
In this sentence, the entity performing the short and performing the advertising are one and the same.
Realistically, the vast majority of people don't have a "few million" lying around that they can just casually risk on a huge gamble like this. It's likely you have at least several tens of millions but more likely hundreds of millions before the risk/reward would even come close to making sense (because you wouldn't want to commit most of your resources). The most plausible scenario is therefore something like a hedge fund.
You're reading "you" to mean the reader (highly implausible), I'm reading it as the generic/impersonal "you" (as in "one could spend...").
So sure, there are a tiny percentage of people who might consider doing this themselves and they don't need to worry about insider trading (although we're still pretty close to market manipulation where the sole purpose of the adverts is to crash the share price and profit from that). A much larger percentage of people who might consider such a thing would need to at least examine whether they might trigger insider trading laws.
Blanket statements don't work here.
IIRC insider trading is any trading based on any non-public information. Everyone knows you're running ads because they can see the ads, but not everyone knows how long you're going to run them for, or how much you're paying for them, and that would be enough. Also if you do it before you start the ad campaign, that's non-public knowledge, similar to a pump-and-dump.
Wrong. Insider trading is about breaching your duty of confidentiality to some other party who owns the information (your employer, some other business you have an NDA with, etc). The owner of the non-public information is fully allowed to trade on it.
Pump and dumps are fraud because you lie about the target stock in order to achieve the pump. The lying is a crucial element to make it fraudulent.
> Insider trading is the trading of a public company's stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company.[1] In many countries, some kinds of trading based on insider information are illegal. The rationale for this prohibition of insider trading differs between countries and regions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading
The context of this thread[1], which you replied to, is specifically the US law. You are wrong on the US law. Wikipedia's general statements about what some countries do is not authoritative or specific to the US.
US law does not generally prohibit insiders from trading. It prohibits doing so only in breach of some obligation to keep that information private[2] ("in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence").
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45178318
[2]: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
> The context of this thread[1], which you replied to, is specifically the US law.
That's not correct. I started this particular sub-thread, and in my original comment I specifically said that the answer is jurisdiction dependent. Your reply may have been US-centric but the overall topic was not.
The quality control of even mainline ad platforms is abysmal as well. Like on YouTube, I used to get deep-fakes of the Canadian prime minister trying to sell some crypto scam. You'd literally click through to a phishing site disguised as a Canada Revenue Agency page.
Yeah. I use brave on all my devices. When somebody shows me a YouTube video on their device and three ads play before the video, or loads a local news page with all the ads, my reaction is "Wow! They sure are bombarding you guys to make up for us free-riders!"
I really can't comprehend how aggressive ad blocking isn't the norm and at 90%+ at this point. Whenever someone just doesn't seem to care i'm concerned something is wrong with them. Youtube ad blocking was briefly not working for me recently and the volume of ads just while doing some chores which forced interrupting flow to go manually skip was astounding and enraging. It's like if I was at a quiet library and every 30 seconds someone randomly started screaming yet half the people have a reaction of "meh, doesn't bother me".
Most people don't use the internet at a whole - if you just stick to the 10 biggest apps/websites, the experience is acceptable without an adblocker.
As for YouTube, blocking their ads is basically a part-time job at this point. On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.
I hear this often. My experience is totally different. I've installed ublock origin and I'm using Vivaldi as my blink engine wrapper. I've never seen a YouTube ad since years. I wonder why anyone has to fight for an ad free YouTube.
They often release new "features" in a A/B fashion to a small percentage of users. It's most obvious with UI changes, where a portion of users will get a disfigured version of the site for a month, but it's probably true for their ad-blocking endeavors as well.
I wonder if they're testing the new useless cinema mode on me because I'm running an adblocker.
Is cinema mode new? Or did they change it somehow? Last I checked all it did was resize the video to take up most of the width of the browser. That was a pretty happy medium between "video for ants" and "take over my entire monitor in full screen mode"
I don't even think YouTube is anywhere near the worst advert offender. My local newspaper website is stuffed full of adverts. Between a large picture, article heading and advert, you often don't see a signle line of new content above the fold on a 1080p screen.
I do not regularly visit such sites. I do unblock websites that I return to often.
> I wonder why anyone has to fight for an ad free YouTube.
90% of my YouTube use is on my smart TV. There's not really a straightforward way to block ads there. Used to be many years ago that a PiHole or similar would work, but they clued onto that years ago.
If it's a Google TV, there's an app you can sideload called SmartTube, which doesn't play ads and has SponsorBlock built-in. I went from often using my laptop just to play videos without being interrupted constantly, to actually enjoying using the TV app.
There’s a very simply way to avoid ads on YouTube tv — pay some money.
I spend less in nominal terms, let alone inflation terms, for my tv entertainment now than I did 20 year ago, even with Disney, Netflix, bbc, Paramount and YouTube subscriptions.
I have a Chromecast with Google TV, and it allows sideloading of APKs. I installed SmartTube which is a YouTube client that incorporates Adblocking and also SponsorBlock.
It periodically has issues loading videos when Google change something, but the app gets updated every time within a day.
If you are using an internet-connected smart TV you already decided you don't care about ads. No one is forcing you to make that choice though.
SmartTube works reliably for me on the smartTV for years now
The straightforwards way is to give Google money to get rid of them.
Paid YouTube still shows some ads, so no, it's just a way to give Google some money.
Not ones run by YouTube.
Not sure this is correct. For example: https://vanced.to/posts/youtube-premium-shows-ads-users-conc...
There's also this email from YouTube support: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1gnaetv/paying_to_...
It reads:
> While YouTube Premium provides an ad-free experience for most content, promotional ads can sometimes appear for specific partnerships or limited-time offers. These promotions are often targeted based on various factors, including your location, viewing history, and account settings.
Firefox and UBlock Origin has never broken for me and works effectively.
Consider yourself lucky. Some of their A/B tests seem to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60 seconds before they start playing, navigation taking 15+ seconds.
If that happens to you, this thread [1] is sometimes updated with manual workarounds that sometimes work:
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1jbv1xn/youtu...>to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60
I don't mean this as an attack on you. I find it perplexing that this could be such a difficult thing. If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching? Consider a comparison to reading a book or watching a DVD. With the DVD you must stand up, walk to the DVD, remove the plastic wrap, turn on the DVD player place the DVD in the tray, wait for the tray to close, load the DVD, wait for the main menu to load, and finally press play to watch your movie. (potentially after navigating through settings to configure audio / subtitles / etc)
The DVD experience could obvious be _better_ (and if you don't care about picture quality you might be shocked how much more convenient a VHS tape is) but this hardly strikes me as any sort of real problem.
Youtube might actually be doing you an accidental favor here; it is the extreme reduction of friction which degrades your impulse control, and is part of what keeps you on the platform too long. By imposing an small but perceptible cost, they might actually keep from your zoning out and watching and instead intentionally watching only the videos you care the most about.
> If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching?
I won't know that until the video starts playing. I'm not watching a 90 minute movie here and I don't know if the video I'm about to play is the one I want. Spending a minute setting up a 90 minute movie is very different than spending a minute waiting for a video to load that I'm likely going to spend <30 seconds on.
Maybe I'm learning how to use certain software and I'm trying to find a video that demonstrates how to use a specific feature. In that case I might be clicking through 10+ videos to find the niche thing I'm looking for. If I was just vegging out on Youtube this wouldn't bother me nearly as much.
And don't forget that the time penalty doesn't only apply to the initial load, it would pause and fake-buffer every time I jumped around the video.
Although what you describe seems annoying, still no ads
No ads but it's far worse than just annoying — for me. I get annoyed when a video buffers for 10 seconds due to a technical hiccup. Being made to wait for up to a minute with pretend-technical issues and mocking messages like "Why am I seeing this?" that try to convince me that they're not doing this on purpose is insulting and enraging.
I would gladly pay for an independent alternative but I will never pay for Youtube Premium on principle [1]. If these workarounds stop working I'll just use third party clients all the time, I already use SmartTube on TV.
[1] If I give you my money, I want you to respect me as a customer. Google will continue tracking me, abuse my personal information, and almost certainly re-introduce ads at some point in the future in pursuit of infinite growth. It's never going to be enough, the only winning move (with them) is not to play.
On the other hand, I'd rather sit for 10-60 seconds waiting for (fake) buffering, than sit through a 10-60 second ad.
It doesn't stop there, it would also fake-buffer when you jumped to a different point in the video, it would be stuck in a broken transitional UI state for 10-30 seconds any time you navigated to a different page. Clearly they want people to get pissed off enough that they turn off the ad blocker, it's been getting worse over time.
With ads, at least you know that they will end. And when.
>videos "buffering" for 10-60 seconds before they start playing
Thanks, that explains a lot, why i sometime have trouble with youtube, while having perfectly fine internet connection.
I've noticed a big increase in time-to-first-content over the last few years, even on ever-increasing bandwidth and decreasing latency.
I should sniff traffic to find out why, but my assumption is that it's a mix of CRL bloat and code bloat.
Hit F5, buffering gone.
Don't you think that was the first thing I tried?
Works for me.
I use the same setup, on Windows Linux and Android. It will break when they decide to roll out their aggressive anti-adblock measures more widely, currently they seem to be A/B testing and turning it on and off at random.
I'm surprised they haven't gone for the "refuse to serve the video stream for 20 seconds or however long the ad would take" card yet, although it's probably a matter of time.
You were just lucky, because YouTube uses A/B testing and does not roll out anti-adblock-measures to everyone simultaneously. This gives UBO some time to react.
I haven't seen any ads for years either.
I use uBlock Origin, plus I've configured my Firefox to open YouTube always in a dedicated container, that logs me out of any Google-related stuff as I never upvote or comment anyway. Browsing YouTube anonymously might have helped.
I have stopped ads in everywhere for YouTube and they haven't broke: Mobile revanced so far good new pipe it broke but I only use it for downloading videos. On Firefox I use ublock and it has never failed me. Then on tv I'm using smartube
This isn't really true. Firefox + uBlock origin works fine on the desktop and on mobile. You don't need to use the official YT app. (It is true thought that NewPipe is often broken).
> On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.
yeah, I often download things via yt-dlp to watch later and I'm encountering frequent failures that I assume are related to the whack-a-mole yt has been doing for the last two years or so.
NewPipe has been working for me as of late though, and I've not updated it in some time (although my use is infrequent)
On mobile I use Youtube with Firefox and Ublock Origin never had any issue with it.
Consider using dedicated NewPipe repo in F-droid, fixes land much quicker
I hate ads and avoid them, but haven’t had to install an ad blocker yet. I only really notice them when searching for recipes, and if I had to go through that multiple times a day I probably would get an ad blocker. I do pay for YouTube to avoid ads, and don’t watch much user generated content because it’s too ad-like imo. I quit podcasts 3 years ago, because those ads made them become unlistenable just like terrestrial radio and I just can’t go back to that kind of listening experience. I started listening to audiobooks instead and don’t miss podcasts at all.
I think people are just hopelessly used to their lives being saturated with ads. On TV, on the Internet, on radio, on billboards, at restaurants, at the airport, at the gas station, in stores, out of stores, almost every surface that could have an ad on it either does now or will one day. This saturation has been so complete and normalized that people are blind to it.
Indignant Fry: But not in dreams! No siree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
Ugghh, gas stations. I remember being able to use a pump without ads :(
The second button down from the top right usually mutes them.
I wonder if they're effective at all at this point
It's a tragedy, when it comes to digital and specifically web literacy, but most people don't know they can.
I sat on calls with teachers at my previous job and they had no extensions installed. My own sister (a milennial) wasn't aware. Before that, I was at a place where devs could join UX interviews; it was even worse given the generational divide: older folks couldn't even tell when a link was obviously malicious.
We either install good browsers/extensions for our relatives, or let them be easy prey to the current state of affairs.
The solution for me was to not watch YouTube anymore, no ad-blocker required.
i took the route of only allowing myself the youtube search bar, everything else is not displayed. if i want to watch a video its because im seeking it out, i dont get fed anything. hearing friends and family discuss youtube now, it sounds like they are being held prisoner. its snuck up on a lot of people, the slow push of shorts is what really made me realize youtube was becoming a major issue in my life, despite not seeing ads or anything.
A wise man.
> I really can't comprehend how aggressive ad blocking isn't the norm and at 90%+ at this point
Mr Krabs voice: money!
No but seriously, if the FBI is telling you to use an ad blocker, use a fucking ad blocker.
My workplace doesn't allow ad blockers for security. Except ads are a MUCH bigger security concern and everyone knows it.
I'm so sick and tired of everyone playing dumb and acting like it's fine. No, it's not fine. Its not okay that Google is serving you a phishing ad that drains your bank account. They should be held liable. Why is everyone acting like their balls have been chopped off?
Do something about it. Minimum is run an aggressive ad blocker. MINIMUM!
It can't survive as the norm. That would cause the economics of sites to collapse. We have to accept that the people clicking on the ads (and sometimes getting scammed) are funding the sites for the rest of us. Like gatcha games are F2P because of whales.
Change is good, maybe it will be better if there is no ads and sites monetize in a sensible way
Then let them collapse. It isn't the end of the world. And then we can see what was formerly unable to grow because it was stuck under their canopy not receiving enough light.
The fact that you don't just pay for YouTube Premium makes me think something is wrong with you. A Premium view gives much more money to the creator but I guess "just let me pay" is only relevant when you can't.
Regardless, your argument surrounding the insult was well worn 20 years ago. And so was the first response; why would I pay into some nebulous system where I don't know how much is really going to whom?
One of the nicer things about the hellscape that is the modern internet is the low-friction ability to pay creators directly.
...oh, I know why! Because if I pay Google, then Sundar pinky swears not to mercilessly track and monetize everything I do on youtube. \s
> > ...something is wrong with you.
> Are ad hominems back in vogue?
GP was simply mirroring the language of its parent post:
> Whenever someone just doesn't seem to care i'm concerned something is wrong with them.
Which IMO is indeed way out of line.
Speaking for myself, no, nothings “wrong” with me. I watch YouTube enough that I consider it a valuable service. So do what you may think is insane: I pay for it. And it gives me no ads.
"I am extremely insulated from ads online and have been for about a decade."
I am insulted by the so-called "modern" browser controlled and distributed by (a) companies that sell internet advertising services or (b) their business partners
The ad annoyances would not be possible but for these bloated, sluggish, omnibus programs enabling data collection, ads and tracking by default^1
Every time I have to use one of these programs to access the web it is a terrible experience. Never having visited a crack den, I cannot say whether it is similar. In any event, it's bad
Sometimes I use these browsers to access files offline or on own local network, such as MP4s and PDFs; I think maybe that is all they might be good for
As "ad blockers" depend 100% on the so-called "modern" browser I would be very surprised if "ad blockers" remain effective for much longer, maybe 5-10 years at most; I dislike making predictions but I believe the end of the "ad blocker" as browser extension is inevitable
Already this prediction is starting to come true in Chrome
1. "The message won't be shown in browsers that don't support JavaScript, because those don't need adblockers to begin with." Even just a browser that did not enable Javascript by default would suffice
s/insulted/insulated/
But I'm insulted, too
Indeed seeing ads almost feels like I’ve been physically assaulted. Using YouTube in our streaming devices reminds me of the old Cable days where you watch 2minutes of something and get slapped in the face with 5 minutes of ads.
It really feels like being assaulted. Watching chill content only to have some ad scream at you, does not make me want to buy your product. I actively go out of my way not to buy things advertised to me on YouTube.
With uBlock Origin you can actually click on the first Google results for any search, scroll down a bit the initial yadda yadda and find the actual answer to your search even in those webSEOtes that are usually just ads over ads.
funny thought: i would speculate that the demographic intersection of web users and crack users has a higher utilization of adblock than all web users
... as well as all crack users.
idk those hardcore offline guys do A LOT of billboard vandalism
I have visited websites that are literally unusable because of ads.
Do companies even care anymore? Is everyone THAT desperate for advertising revenue?
> No adblocker detected. Consider using an extension like uBlock Origin to save time and bandwidth.
And attention and privacy.
This notice is a great idea.
I might remove the "like" from the notice, since "uBlock Origin" is good, but some others are questionable or even outright malware.
BTW, note that the `ublockorigin.com` Web site that is linked to isn't by Raymond Hill, leader of uBlock Origin. It looks well-intended, and is nicely polished UX, but good practice would be to be careful (since it doesn't appear to be under Hill's control, and is an additional point of potential compromise in what would be very valuable malware). Hill seems to operate from <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock>. One link that isn't too bad to view <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md>. Another that isn't great but OK is <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki>.
> It looks well-intended
The recent PuTTY domain squatting debacle has made me suspicious, and indeed... if you look closer, you'll notice that the owner of ublockorigin.com is also advertising his completely unrelated products in a "my other tools" section.
> The recent PuTTY domain squatting debacle
I knew they recently added a new official page under https://putty.software but was unaware of any squatting debacle. For those wanting to know more: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/17/puttyorg_website_cont...
Your average internet user is not going to have any idea what to do with a link to GitHub. It's a shame there's no official website with easy install instructions. (But I agree with you that it's not a great idea to link to a website not under control of the author.)
Fortunately, the GitHub README opens with a list of links to install ublock Origin.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock?tab=readme-ov-file#ublock-...
Underappreciated comment. But yeah, even on the README, way too much GitHub header. UBO really needs an official landing page.
The FBI also makes a good argument that adblockers prevent scammers from directing people to malicious sites.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230219020056/https://www.ic3.g...
I have said it years that adblocker is the best anti-virus these days.
I get miffed when corporations manage employee browsers and disable adblocker extensions.
I don't understand why DNS ad blockers (Ad Guard, Pi-Hole, other) aren't frequently used across corporates. Especially given the regular-ish training on cybersecurity and related.
I don't understand why Apple does not ship Safari with an adblocker. They advertise how they keep you safe on the web but deliver one of the worst browser experiences and don't even support the plugins that would make it better, let alone include them.
I found the Orion browser and am never touching Safari again.
Don't ad blockers breach Terms of Service? I assume this is one reason that corps don't roll out adblockers
Only on a specific handful of sites.
I'm skeptical that inside counsel would really have an issue with adblock or a moderate approach -- whitelist a subset of a subset of sites like YouTube that they might see risk.
The benefits are tremendous.
sosume.
Because ads are not how malware is distributed? You have higher chance of getting a malware from `pnpm add` than seeing an ad on the web.
> Because ads are not how malware is distributed?
Malware is absolutely distributed through ads. In the case of more reputable ad platforms that don’t allow arbitrary scripts, it’s by linking to malware, but they’re also used to serve drive-by exploits.
> You have higher chance of getting a malware from `pnpm add` than seeing an ad on the web.
If you’re a normal computer user who browses the web without an ad blocker and never runs `pnpm add`, the relevant chance is a little different. (Fun side fact: current pnpm wisely doesn’t run install scripts by default.)
And its users wisely read all of those scripts before manually running them, same as the library code, they read all of it before running.
This is very incorrect.
Ads are basically running a program they wrote on your computer. If there’s any exploitable feature in your browser’s JS sandbox, count on someone sending you an ad that will exploit it.
To add to the other reply, there were even targeted malware campaigns through ad networks. Because nowadays, you can choose who sees your ads so precisely (by IP block or geolocation) that you can target individual organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
GIMP is one of the best examples that comes to my mind:
https://www.techradar.com/news/this-fake-gimp-google-ad-just...
I took a careful look at the definition of malware on Wikipedia. Ads are malware.
For some industries, it's critical their employees are not spied upon. The CISO should prioritize this for those companies.
Banks, Defense, etc.
When I've worked in the public sector IT dept, I've made sure that the installed browser is Firefox and uBlock Origin is set up.
Do your part.
I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.
My view is that core bargain was fine, but advertisers have broken the agreement with other offenses, like:
* Autoplay videos that preemptively take my bandwidth.
* Autoplay audio that takes over my speakers unexpectedly and interrupts other things.
* Forms of pop-ups that clutter or disrupt my tab/window control.
* Being spied-on by a system that tries to aggregate and track all of my browsing habits.
* A mostly unaccountable vector for malware and phishing sites.
* Just a genuinely horrible experience whenever a page is one part content to three parts blinking blooping ever shifting ads that would make Idiocracy blush.
They try to pretend customer resistance is just over the most innocent and uncontroversial display of ads, but it's not true, and it hasn't been for decades.
I wish there was a middle ground where I could block ads like the ones you mention, while allowing privacy-respecting ads that don't ruin my browsing experience. I know Adblock Plus have their "Acceptable Ads" policy [1], but that just meant letting through ads from companies that paid them, like Google [2].
[1] https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/5/4496852/adblock-plus-eye-g...
Ads are only easy to block because they load from centralized, third-party domains. Physical print publishers don't leave blanks in their newspapers and send them off to advertisers to fill in. They approve and print the ads, just like any other content. If digital publishers made similar agreements to embed static ads, they would not be affected by ad blockers.
I don't mind ads that are targeted based on the content of the page, like how DuckDuckGo ads work. Google AdWords used to be the same, and it paid publishers much more than it does now.
My approach today is Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection and then keeping Google, Meta/Facebook, and Amazon logins sequestered to individual containers. At that point a lot of the worst ad networks will complain that you are using "an ad blocker" simply because most of their trackers fail and won't even bother showing ads.
(Then on mobile, similarly using Firefox on iOS, being heavy and fast on the "ask app not to track" buttons and keeping logins to first party apps only and almost never in either Safari or Firefox.)
Again, I use no real "ad blocker", just the above steps.
It's probably not an approach for everyone, and entails a bit of paranoia to operate, but I think it sends the right message that I don't mind untracked/untargeted ads and don't think companies deserve my unfiltered data.
Do people still use bookmarklets?
I wrote this one to remove all <iframe> elements, which is where most of the worst distractions live. I mostly only use it when a site has gone too far.
Privacy respecting ads are those on TV and printed newspapers. Targeted ads are where the money has been for a quarter of a century.
Yeah, no thanks. I used to think like this, and i remember exactly what happened the day i installed my first adblocker: i was already annoyed that some sites i visited employed very annoying ads, on both sides of the window, occupying about 20% of the screen, each. And they were serving an animation with _very_ loud music.
That day instead, when i opened the page 3-4 other pages opened as soon as the website loaded, all serving loud and obnoxious virus alerts, porn and some other crap. But how? I disabled popups a long time ago.
That day i found out about self-clicking ads. That day i installed an ad blocker.
It is THEM that have broken the social contract. Screw them and screw ads.
(good thing that i wasn't on dialup anymore. Anybody remember that? scam sites that would make your dialup bill go up crazy, as if you were calling a courier's help line)
Well, hang on. Your comment is fair minded, but to be fair we have to consider the context.
The context is that the courts have found Google holds two illegal monopolies within the online adtech market [1], the remedy for which has yet to be determined. Furthermore the DoJ has sued Meta for holding one as well and that trial is now underway. [2]
I don't know about you, but to me, if the counterparty breaches a contract, that contract is now null and void. Same goes for a social contract, and if someone tries to kill me or rob me, whatever social contract we may have had, is now null and void.
Fortunately Google and Meta aren't actually taking hits out on anyone as far as I know, but the fact remains that the market makers for these online ads, are either outright convicted criminals, or being sued by the government for such. I don't see that we have any social contract to respect or allow any of this. It is right, just and moral to oppose the very existence of online advertising in my opinion, until the illegal abuses are corrected.
If the court has resolved that Google's breaking the law, how about we get an injunction ordering them to halt their ad tech business until the remedies are implemented. Why are we going so easy on them?
You don't owe crooks anything, neither do I.
This isn't about being cheap or breaking a fair deal. It's about asking that law and order be restored within American business and society. What's the point of this society, what moral justification does it have to exist as it is, if it keeps on breaking its own laws to protect the most powerful?
Now it's unfortunate that publishers (websites) get caught in the crossfire of this, they might not agree with me when I say you should oppose all online ads full stop until the problem is corrected, but they are getting screwed by Google and Meta and they would be more than happy to see justice done.
[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/18/court-ruling-agains... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_v._Meta
This is the best counterargument I have hard so far. Saving it and using it next time someone brings that up, hope you dont mind I stole it without generating $0.000000001 of ad revenue in compensation.
Dang I'll just have to pay for 0.00000001ml of my morning coffee some other way! Thanks and please share by all means. One of my siblings rightly points out how terrible modern online ads are: autoplay, clutter, surveillance, intrusion, malware, etc.
They're totally right of course and my question is - how bad would all this be if the biggest ad market maker wasn't an actual literal convicted-by-multiple-courts criminal with the second biggest market maker not far behind? What if these guys had just followed the existing laws that are on the books?
Well I don't know but I bet it would be better somehow and the only way to find out is to finally start enforcing the law.
I'm sure ads would be better somehow if there were fewer criminals involved. One obvious theory is that Google is underpaying the publishers and the publishers have resorted to dirtier tricks in response. Another is that Google implements stuff everyone else hates because hello monopoly, where else are you going to go? Maybe the lawbreakers cause the slop.
You could block only ads from Google and Meta. Most large sites use header bidding, where Google's ads are a fallback only if no other ad company bids higher, so most ad revenue come from those other companies. And IIRC Meta doesn't participate in that at all, so for them you'd just have to block ads on their own sites.
This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost.
Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. There is no social contract with them. They just sell your data.
If you know what they are doing, know how to block it, and refuse to, you are complicit in making the world a worse place. Corporations are not people that should be treated with the respect you are talking about.
For so many arguments, I'm also thinking copyright here, the framing is always about the little guy. These laws/practices are there to protect/enable small businesses and content creators.
The reality is very much the opposite, they're about maximising revenue for monopolies. I see no social contract here.
>This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost.
The trouble is the ad-blockers will block their ads as well. Visit somewhere like John Gruber's Daring Fireball site which has the least offensive ad placement possible yet his adverts are still blocked.
With Ublock Origin at least, you can whitelist websites that you want to see ads on.
With Ad Nauseum, the extension destroys your ad profile by clicking on all or nearly all of the blocked ads. The only people that lose anything are the companies.
Yes, the large blue "power" icon in the menu turns uBlock off for the current site.
> Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people.
IMHO this is a very wrong take. Mega corporations are people. Demonstration: nobody goes to work at Google for a while. Everything stops, technical stuff and non technical stuff. No people, no corporations, small ones and large ones.
Sure, then governments are also just people. How about we restore Monarchy now so someone can actually be held responsible? Also we should completely abandon Nulla poena sine lege since evidently the imbalanced power does not exist between people and also people (government).
Easy bet that most of those people disagree with the corporation's ad (and other) practices also. I'd even bet the ones working directly in ad tech are probably the most likely to always use an ad blocker.
This proves that corporations require people, not that they are people. Am I a cell? If so, which kind?
> However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
No it isn't. Free websites exist: Wordpress, Blogger, Wix, Weebly etc. The only "ad" they show is a static banner for their own platform, not the giant scripts Google loads for Google Ads. Neocities and Digital Ocean are $5/mo for a custom domain and hosting, theme it anyway you like.
Most "content"-focused websites like Buzzfeed, The Verge, Gizmodo etc simply embed third party content (Youtube, Vimeo, Giphy, random poll generators) instead of hosting them on their domain. Much of their content is rehashing news articles with a paper-thin layer of "analysis" on top. Then they add metric tons of ads, and throw in affilliate link garbage "product reviews" on top.
This is the dropship-ification of the web and it pretty much killed the free website culture of the Geocities/Anglefire era.
Just a shame that Wordpress has been weaponised to create the crappy seo content affiliate spam sites that are making the web so shitty these days
The websites you speak of don't get to decide what my hardware and my software does when running in my hands. Their content is a suggestion for my user agent, not some unbreakable law. If they don't like it, they should shut down completely.
>Their content is a suggestion for my user agent, not some unbreakable law. If they don't like it, they should shut down completely.
Alternatively, they can also refuse to serve you their content unless you turn off your ad blocker. Which would be fine. It is their content they're hosting after all.
And it's also fine for you to decide not to turn off your ad blocker and not view their content.
There are some that do this and I also think it is fair. I just close the website and do not view the content. Nobody is forced to either serve or be served so I do not see what is the problem to be discussed here.
I wonder why not many websites do this """adblocking freeloaders""" is such a big issue?
That's why the parent said it was a social contact based on the honor system. Just because you can technically block ads, it doesn't meant it's the right thing to do.
It is not a social contract. They track me whether I use their services or not, on websites that are completely unrelated. I do not get a choice, not to mention the monopolies they built (yeah, fuck YouTube). These ads eat up my resources and affect my battery life.
There is no more honour involved as when someone pays the mob for protection. I strongly reject this argument. I am bound by honour but they can do anything and change the contract unilaterally? Fuck them, that’s no contract at all.
Your choice is to stop giving that place traffic.
When sites like these host a large part of our culture, I think it’s reasonable to think about non compliance because the alternative is essentially to become a digital hermit and not to be able to understand the world one is in. I never agreed to have all public spaces for Dr age ad-supported, for example. These illegal monopolies have made it impossible to talk to large chunks of the population without either watching ads or using an ad blocker. That feels wrong.
Just because a place hosts culture, it doesn't mean that you are entitled for it. For example new movies are pay of culture, but that doesn't mean you should sneak in to a theater without buying a ticket because every movie theater requires paying. Compensating creators for their work is a part of experiencing creative works that are culturally relevant.
The US constitution absolutely does recognize that the public is entitled to all cultural works, which is why copyright is required to be time limited.
Yes, or alternatively: use an ad blocker.
Their software is running on my computer. I decide what scripts I want or don't, and I can and will block whatever the fuck with impunity.
If they can't prevent that, or it's too expensive, or they don't care, that's not my problem. That's a business problem. Its not my business. I don't care.
Its like getting a free sample at Costco and then taking it home and throwing it away. That's my right. I can do that if I want.
If you want to run software on my computer, you play by my rules. That means an ad blocker. If you don't like that then figure it out. I'm not gonna figure it out for you.
No one is saying ad blocking is not technically possible. Wanting everyone to play by your rules is selfish and doesn't acknowledge the needs of others.
>Its like getting a free sample at Costco and then taking it home and throwing it away. That's my right. I can do that if I want.
It's also like stealing a TV from Costco. Just because you technically can pick up a TV and then bring it to your car without paying and drive off, doesn't mean you should do it. It's unfair to Costco for them to play by your rules.
> Wanting everyone to play by your rules is selfish and doesn't acknowledge the needs of others.
I'm not wanting anything, I'm telling you literally they are playing by my rules.
They are requesting to run scripts on my computer. It is my computer. If I say no, then the answer is no.
This is merely a request from them. I can abide, and I often will, but I have absolutely no moral, technical, or legal obligation to do so.
> I's also like stealing a TV from Costco.
No, because that's illegal.
You are REQUESTING to run advertisement scripts on my computer. I can deny that request.
If you don't like that, then don't allow me access. It is my responsibility, solely, to decide what scripts are running on my computer.
If Google asked you to download heartbleed and run it, you wouldn't do it, would you? Great, so you understand the concept.
The disconnect here is you believe I am entitled. And I am - I am entitled to deciding what runs on my computer.
You are not entitled to run arbitrary code on my computer because your business model requires it. I'm not your accountant, figure it out.
>No, because that's illegal.
But why is it illegal if it's physically possible for you to take it? By your line of reasoning it shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
>You are REQUESTING to run advertisement scripts on my computer.
That's an implementation detail of how the webpage works and does not matter. You are focusing too much on the way it's implemented and not the high level picture of how it works. If you have to get to the point of describing the HTTP protocol to justify why what you are doing is moral, you need to realize that you are just coming up with a justification for your actions to not feel bad about doing bad things. You should just accept that you are being greedy and you will block ads because you don't care if creators make money from ads and want to prioritize having an ad free experience.
> That's an implementation detail of how the webpage works and does not matter.
Lol, not bending over and letting whoever the fuck run whatever the fuck programs on my computer is an "implementation detail".
> You should just accept that you are being greedy and you will block ads because you don't care if creators make money from ads and want to prioritize having an ad free experience.
This is so, so obviously wrong it's actually frustrating I have to reply to this level of rhetoric.
Once again, I am not your accountant. It is not my responsibility to make sure your business model makes sense.
I don't have the time to babysit and hand hold every corporation in my life and make sure their business model makes sense. I just don't, and it's not my responsibility.
If your business model relies solely on me allowing you to run potential malware on my computer, then that is YOUR problem. Not mine. Figure it out, or don't. Youre always allowed to go bankrupt. Not every business model is viable.
You are not entitled to a viable business model. You are not God. If your business model doesn't work, then you lose. Too bad, so sad, not my fucking problem.
And on the topic of money: running ads on my computer is a computer system security problem.
The FBI recommends running an aggressive ad blocker. The reality is most ads are basically malware and often literally malware. They can be phishing, linking to malicious sites. They can be deceptive. They can be spyware, collecting information about my computer, identity, or web browsing activity.
Google, Meta, et. all have demonstrated they simply do not take adequate steps to prevent malicious advertisement payloads.
You do not have a god-given right to run software on my computer, but you CERTAINLY don't have a god-given right to run malware on my computer.
If you disagree, take it up with the FBI, I don't care.
That’s the thing: I cannot. The whole web is infested with their trackers and their ads.
And there is no alternative to YouTube, for example, including for videos that were uploaded before they went completely overboard with ads.
So no, I am not giving up on my ad blockers.
>The whole web is infested with their trackers and their ads.
This is an exaggeration. There are ad free alternatives.
>And there is no alternative to YouTube
Youtube has a subscription you can pay for no ads. There other video sites who charge a subscription instead of offering ads too.
> This is an exaggeration. There are ad free alternatives.
Again, their (mostly Google and Facebook’s, but there are many companies tracking me with whom I never had direct contact) trackers are all over the web and I see them in the blocked list very regularly on websites that have nothing to do with them.
> Youtube has a subscription you can pay for no ads. There other video sites who charge a subscription instead of offering ads too.
Yeah, cool. They changed their terms of use, and I changed mine. Happy to negotiate when they are available.
This is exactly what my ad blocker does.
Ad blockers typically only block ads, and not the website too. That way people can experience content for free without compensating the creator hy giving them an ad impression.
That is one choice. Another is to use an ad blocker.
It's not any kind of contract. A contract (even an unwritten "social" one) implies at the very least some kind of agreement, some meeting of the minds. There is no meeting of the minds on the web: Your browser simply says "Hey, give me this content," then the server says, "Here's what I'd like you to show," and finally the browser decides what out of that stream of bytes gets shown. There's no agreement by the user in that conversation, not even an implied one. The site can decide whether or not to reply, whether or not to send anything, and the user agent then decides what to show. There's no contract.
>Your browser simply says "Hey, give me this content,"
The technical details do not matter. Social contacts are about societal expectations, not about your personal ones. Do you think a thief has a meeting of the minds about not stealing something from a shop keeper? It's not the theifs world view that matters here. Similar to your example the physics of the world say it's possible for a human to pick up an item without paying for it, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
I disagree that there is a societal expectation in this case. If I request HackerNews, it will start sending me bytes. There is no societal expectation around what I do with those bytes. Maybe I'll have my browser render them as-is. Maybe I'll strip out the HTML and render them as plain text in a green 80x24 terminal. Maybe I'll drop every second character and print out the result as wall art.
Or (back on topic) when I'm watching cable TV and they send an ad over the wire. There's no societal expectation that I watch that ad. I could hit the mute button. I could get up to take a piss or grab a beer. I could record the broadcast and watch it later, fast forwarding through the ads.
This is not like a store where there's a clear societal expectation that I don't go in and rob them. I don't think anyone would equate leaving the sofa during a commercial with robbery.
>There is no societal expectation around what I do with those bytes
Yes, there is. If you had a group of 100 people and asked what google.com should look like and showed them how Chrome renders the page and your 80x24 modification does that all 100 would say that yours is not expected. You are still too hung up on these technical details of how things are implemented than how the average person thinks of these things.
A consensus answer to "what should google.com look like?" does not suggest or imply any sort of "social contract".
There is not, and has never been, a social contract that says I have to look at the ads served with any website. If you think there is, then I'm sorry, but you're sorely mistaken.
Similarly, there is no social contract that says I have to watch commercials while I'm watching TV (not that I've watched linear TV in over a decade, but...). I can mute it, change the channel, go to the bathroom, whatever. If you think there is, then I'm not sure what to tell you; your opinions on this are so outside the mainstream that we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this.
>does not suggest or imply any sort of "social contract"
We were talking about societal expectations.
>I can mute it, change the channel, go to the bathroom, whatever.
You are free to do the same for websites. You can click the x button on the ad, mute the video ad, or change to a different website.
My browser already automatically mutes video ads on my behalf. And an ad blocker effectively "clicks the X button" for me. Sometimes I don't even scroll down far enough to see an ad. How is one of those activities breaking the social contract and others not? Or are they all breaking the social contract? Or none of them? I have no idea because I don't know who's defining the terms of this social contract.
We are also free to install adblockers.
But then you are breaking the social contact.
We are rejecting your assertion that it ever existed or should exist.
All 100 would agree that the website looks better without ads, unless their paycheck came from them.
And those that disagreed would still think it in their heads.
And 100 people would agree that Apple selling them an iPhone for free is better than them charging $1000 for it.
People like free stuff.
So you agree that there is no societal expectation to view ads when you can get away with not doing so.
We are all very fortunate that the world is not limited to what the average person thinks things should be like.
If there is no meeting of minds, why are you going to websites? You go to websites to see information that was in someone else's mind and load it into your mind.
The social contract was broken by the website owner by including ads.
Even if so, while I disagree, two wrongs don't make a right.
You are pushing your opinion of it being "wrong" as though it were something objective. You are acting as though others are choosing to do something "wrong", rather than that they do not believe it to be wrong in the first place.
There has never in the history of the internet been a social contract that says to be a good netizen you have to look at the ads a website displays.
Attempting to normalize such a thing is disgusting.
no ads = no malware
If I am allowed not to look at the screen when an advert is playing, then I should be allowed not to play it in the first place. There is no moral obligation on the part of the viewer here.
An advert is an investment: someone pays money to broadcast something and hopes that will generate awareness. Any investment is allowed to fail.
Wait till they roll out advert quizzes. Answer the 3 questions correctly about the advert you watched before you're allowed to continue.
Then we will have finally found a useful application for AI.
The problem is that commercial ad-supported websites force themselves into all available online spaces: search results, discords, social media, affiliate links on blogs. The only way to stop them doing so is to take away their source of revenue.
If ads weren't profitable, you wouldn't find no results for your search about which kitchen knife to buy, you would would find better, less weaponised, more relevant results. If you don't block ads then you are directly contributing to a world with more ads and less content.
Sites are using ads to be anti-competitive, such that you literally cannot compete with them on price because their price is $0. I'm rather surprised that we haven't seen the emergence of a site where you are literally paid to use it, because that business model is 100% viable.
And the reason that business model is viable is because people don't realize how literally valuable their attention is. And most people also think they're not heavily affected by advertising. Sites are actively exploiting this to deter competition. I would not be, in the least bit, sad to see this state of affairs end.
SomethingAwful forums have this for ages but also newspapers do, too. As do streaming services. Turns out youth don't have much to spend (nor to people generally outside of West), and it stops sockpuppets somewhat.
Generally speaking youth have more than enough money to pay the same rates advertisers pay. But publishers want to take users who earn them $0.10 per month through ads and charge them $10 per month as a subscription, that's where the business model obviously breaks down and they claim that ads are the only thing that works.
Those are websites you have to pay, not websites that pay you to use them.
Yep, my bad I misread.
That existed in past. It was a program you had to run, and it would force you to watch ads (while browsing?). IIRC it embedded MSIE. I was still in high school, and my classmate who had cable internet would run this almost 24/7. It made him earn a couple of hundreds of dollars (end of 90s). There were also all kind of hacks to make it not so annoying (because you had to watch it all the time). Eventually, they quit paying.
There's also a TV you can get for free (it being worth 600 EUR?), but it has a camera and watches your living room 24/7 (if the TV is in your living room?). It also has very strict ToS.
I am fine with static ads like you would have in newspapers. Another answer to this thread lists things advertisers did.
Those are the reasons tracker blockers were created in the first place. Advertisers went too far and now they lost control and weep.
My privacy, attention and digital security is not worth sacrificing for those greedy, unregulated people.
Literally nothing prevents a blog from having static images for sponsored content. Yet, nobody does it.
We had static ads. We called them banners and websites abused them. Some sites were so bad that it was challenging to find content between horizontal and vertical banners. Animated GIFs followed soon and then everything else we know. Some sites are still as bad as those old ones. I'm can't believe what eyes are seeing any time I look at friends browsing on their computers.
Good point. My point still stands that it's possible to have ad revenue with unintrusive ads.
For instance, I'm fine with video creators having sponsored sequences because I can skip them if I want. And there's no way for them to know if I watched the ad. In fact, they don't care because they already got paid.
Youtube creators get access to watchtime stats which show a dip for sponsored segments. My understanding is that sponsor contracts typically don't ask to get access to that data though, instead they look at views and refferals
Hey, are you interested in whey powd... <skip> I guess not. And often it is the same sponsor in multiple video/audio. No, I am not interested in Crowdstrike. No, i don't want to become a Lord by owning a small amount of land in Scotland. Yes, I know about Ground News but I won't need it and yes, I know you can cheaply buy whey powder, add some flavor and hype it up.
And yet, HN (a text-based website) has advertising. It is a small headline in the list. Do people block this? I don't, and I am quite an adblocking person.
I actually believe billboards are a net minus for public safety. Just like you wouldn't want all kind of unnecessary traffic signs.
Unintrusive ads are still there to manipulate you into acting against your own interests and therefore unethical.
> I'm fine with video creators having sponsored sequences because I can skip them if I want.
I'm not fine with them because skipping the obvious segments doesn't mean the rest of the content isn't compromised due to the financial incentive to not upset those advertisers.
The problem is not with the ads but all the bad things that come along with it. Collecting unnecessary personal data, targetting, disregard for others privacy and list goes on.
These small bloggers/websites are letting the huge ad corporations take up the butcher job and cry when people use adblock.
Google provides a way to turn off ad personalization and when i turn it off you know what i see. Scam/adult/gambling ads and these small websites/bloggers are ok with showing scams to earn 0.01cents. then where they broke the social contract.
Google/meta with all the policing of billion youtube/fb videos/posts dont have same policing for ads quality. Thats where they broke the social contract.
Yes they need to make money, one alternative, I am ok with companies using my compute to run crypto mining( or scientific worlloadw ) when i use their website instead of ads. Small companies should look out of box for money rather than employing a butcher to make money.
Let us not forget the other major problem: ads.
Ads in and of themselves aren't really the issue. It's the tracking that is.
If the ad was delivered without cookies and without tracking, as just a stationary gif, I'd be more okay with it.
But without tracking, back in 2008/9 ish before the real estate crash, the Simpsons made a reference to the dancing cowboys ad for selling mortgages. These were the adjustable rate mortgages that went sky high shortly after closing on the house.
https://trailers.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/1f73a011-858b-418b-940...
> Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads.
That hasn't been true for decades. In a way the race to bottom has already finished, we are at "100% clickbait" stage. I checked it very carefully and both Android build in "news" page and Microsoft's equivalent in Win11 Weather&News Widget are just that.
> There is an unwritten social contract here.
Yes, there is. It's, "I ask your server for bytes, and if your server gives them to me, I interpret and display them however I wish".
The idea that someone downloading a webpage from a publicly-hosted web server could be a "freeloader" is ludicrous.
If you really must extract some form of payment from literally everyone who visits your site, you'll have to put up a paywall. Otherwise, if you give me content when I request it, I'm going to display it however I want.
> If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine
The "contract" you describe is just something you made up. I've been on the internet since the early 90s, and that has never ever ever been the deal.
Advertising is malware for your brain. I won't let it in, and no one else should either.
Yes, the paywall is reasonable, I agree. I think what the OP meant by 'social contract' is that if everybody were to use an adblocker, we would end up with a mostly paywalled internet. All the sites that currently have ads, would have a paywall.
The reason why some people get to browse the internet free, and without ads, is because there are some people that don't. Hence the 'leeching' part.
The part that annoys me sometimes, is that when there IS the option to pay to remove ads, and people still use adblockers in this case. How is this justifiable, morally?
We didn't have a paywalled internet before ads became commonplace. Most content on the internet is still user-generated and almost all of those users do not get paid anything from the ads put on their works. Hosting is quite cheap unless you want to run a centralized service that serves literally everyone.
If anything is a social contract then it's that if you want to provide a paid service you are up front about requiring payment. Ad-supported websites don't much care about that social contract because they think it's more profitable to pretend to be free when they are not.
I wanted to point out that the users that download websites to read them aren't the freeloaders.
The actual freeloaders are the ISPs, because they don't share the profits with the networks they provide access to.
In a better world, Browsers would all be peer to peer, and share their caches end-to-end, with verifiable content hashes, so that websites don't need to provide the majority of bandwidth.
But here we are, Google not giving a fuck because they actually like being a monopoly that does not need to create a healthy ecosystem because everyone involved is paying them anyways. With resources, and with money. Who would have thought?
> modern ad networks
Ad networks have been that invasive since the early 2000s. They now only support more channels. It is a stone old business and literal the source of Google finances for a very long time.
The first wave of ad blockers are a feature built in to all browsers, and nobody thinks twice about: pop-up blockers.
You are so right. I forgot the old times.
> Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads.
Read any SEO blog and you will see how absurd this claim is.
It is simply not true.
i host a website because i have information that i want to put on the internet, not because i want ad revenue.
My eyeballs and attention are not for sale, I will pay you a reasonable fee for your effort but I will never watch ads and subject myself to tracking as payment, just like I won't provide you with sexual favours as payment, no matter how much you declare it to be "the social contract".
There’s no social contract in advertising supported content. It’s a business model based on calculated, long term psychological manipulation[0].
At this point I’d prefer it all to disappear entirely along with the content that “can’t exist” without it. I’m pretty sure we’d be ok.
[0] Sounds dramatic, but it’s basically true.
Ad-supported services undercut honest ones by pretending they are free when you are paying for them indirectly. They are also incentivized to engage in other bad behavior like gaming SEO or wasting your time with low quality content that's designed to increase ad impressions instead of helping you. I do not recognize the social contract you are implying there is and would be happy if all ad supported sites shut down so that better ones (either actually free or paid honestly) could take their place.
There is no social contract with any corporation, only legal contracts. If you want social contracts, you have to use the things that are owned and built by actual people with a reputation.
gentle reminder: online advertisements are so dangerous that the fbi recommends you use an ad blocker [1]. If there’s a social contract at play, users aren’t the ones breaking it.
Their behavior is abusive, and our behavior is self defense.
Let the ads networks do the hard work of 1) cleaning up their act, and 2) rebuilding trust before you worry about your end of the social contract.
[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...
>However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
You know what's even uglier? The notion that because I got access to a bit of your free content, I should then be completely fine with utterly pervasive, deeply granulated parasitic tracking, measuring, watching, spying and recording of as many of my habits as possible. This is a sick notion, an idiotically, disgustingly fucked up concept of fairness and those who subscribe to it are either deluded or neatly entrenched in earning from it.
No, nobody has any "right" to expect people to submit to utter surveillance because that person created content that they can't get enough people to pay for directly. I'd rather see any sites on the web that can't sustain themselves without such ad garbage burn and die than make it somehow punishable to evade their shitty cookies and other trash.
With that said, unlike many on HN comments, I also don't think ads should be banned.
There needs to be a balance. I don't block ads on sites that respect me enough not to drown out the main content with ads. However, I always block sites that have excessive ads or use pop-ups. On a side note, whoever invented pop-up ads should be sentenced to life in prison on a diet of pickled beets and prune juice.
I don't consider myself/users responsible for solving the broken business model of a big part of the modern web. The problem of ads is not just "I do not like ads", which is also a valid reason imo concerning how intrusive and distracting they are blinking and yelling around and making everything slower, but a matter of privacy and safety. There is no social contract that accepts this. Moreover, I have no way to actually know or consent to be served ads before actually loading them, so I have to use an adblocker just in case. I would not mind if a website detects my adblocker and not serving me the content either. So in this sense, imo if a website decides to serve me the content without ads it is up to them, not me.
I would care much less if tracking/personalisation was not part of the ad systems and we were just shown ads based on the content of a webpage. Actually, I am ok with stuff like sponsor segments from content creators, sponsored articles etc. There are ways to serve ads without invading privacy or making it disturbing, but modern advertising industry has chosen a different path.
There are also alternative models, subscriptions, actually buying and *owning* the content (how outdated! let's have ads instead), donations, having a "pro" version with extra optional features etc. There is important stuff in the internet (eg wikipedia) that works fine without ads at all. But if you want to scale to a billion $$$ business maybe it makes sense to rely more on ads, but I do not find this compelling as an argument for users to suffer ads or part of any social contract.
> I would not mind if a website detects my adblocker and not serving me the content either.
How do you feel about ad blockers continually trying to evade detection, though?
Or guides about how to avoid things that block access to users of ad blockers?
I think the "you're free to block me for using an ad blocker!" argument doesn't mean much when said ad blockers do their best to not let that happen in the first place.
I believe that if websites actually cared, if adblockers was a big issue for them, they would get to detect when a user uses one, eg by looking at specific parts of the webpage that are not loaded. There are some that do it. Even if it turned out to be an arm's race, it is a socially beneficial one imo, because it could reduce the appeal of the tracking-advertising model, by increasing the cost of keeping it up. But that's not what is going on here.
Personally I don't just block ads, but as much of any third party js/requests I can without breaking a website. Websites do not load any third party js etc by default except from some whitelisted domains. This takes care of a big part of the most annoying things out there. If you do not want to serve me the website if I block this stuff, don't do so, I don't care.
The websites are in their right to try to detect adblockers, and the adblockers are equally in their right to avoid detection. If a website really cares, they can try harder.
The goal of an adblocker is not just to block ads, but to block anything that isn't the content the user wishes to see. This includes calls to action, consent banners (despite websites wishing otherwise, the default answer is still "no"), and of course "please disable your adblocker."
If you had a switch you could turn on that makes your browser send a header that states you use an ad blocker, and that the website could reliably use to decide to show you nothing (including no ads, obviously), would you use it?
If the websites had a similar switch to make it easy for me to decline being tracked, sure. But why should I care about making it "easy for them" if they do not make it easy for me? So that they make more $$$ more easily?
> I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
This is why I don't go as far as running sponsorblock. Yes the sponsored segments can be irritatingly repetative¹ but at least they don't result in direct commercial stalking, popups, surprise audio/video, etc, and they more directly benefit the content makers.
--------
[1] sponsor segments are actually useful for juding creators: if one I would otherwise trust starts parroting the smae script as others but trying to make it sound like they wrote it themselves ("my favourite feature is …") then I know to tone my level of trust down a notch as it is then clear their opinions have a price.
Its not my responsibility to make your stupid ass business model profitable.
If your business model is stupid, that's not my business. I don't run your accounting department, I'm not your CFO.
Figure it out, or don't. I don't have the time to handhold every corporation I interact with and make sure they're getting their money. They are not babies, and I am not their father.
I feel like SEO and click bait of all kinds has already broken that unwritten social contract. I feel like your argument is that using an adblocker is impolite, borderline unfair. But I also feel like we, the users, have been exploited by surveillance capitalism. If anyone broke the social contract, it's the websites that participated in [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification).
How can you say there's some sort of a social contract here when the ads side has no problem with psychologically manipulating me, outright lying to me and putting me in danger just so they can extract a tiny bit of profit from me? In any other context such a party would be classified as sociopathic. Why should the ad industry get a pass?
I've come to feel that the unwritten social contract was broken decades ago when ad networks decided their best bet was to become data farms and to sell ads and private data to any bidder regardless of ethics (and morality and truth in advertising laws).
My only "ad blocker" is Firefox enhanced tracking protection and walling off Facebook (Meta, but their only app I still use is Facebook), Amazon, and Google logins to separate containers and/or apps and/or private browsing tools. I feel like this is a good ethical compromise still fills my part of the social contract. If a site wants to show me the most generic, untargeted ads, I welcome that.
They don't get my data for free, that's not part of an ethical relationship with ad networks in my mind. I am happiest to keep them in the dark and feed them junk and lies, that is all I think that they deserve.
It's fascinating how the ad networks respond to this. Several, like Admiral (to especially call out at least one offender) whine loudly that I'm using an ad blocker because they've confused targeting and tracker blocking with ad blocking and ask me to disable it. They don't even try to show ads. It seems pretty clear what their real slimy game is and I don't think they deserve to exist. Ads existed for centuries without tracking and privacy violations. Ad "common sense" up until about the 1980s was the broader the message and distribution the better; demographics and targeting was about saving money with the trade off of losing potential audiences. The more you target an ad the less you benefit from people that didn't even know your product might apply to them, or to people that might buy it for others or as gifts. "Everyone knew that."
Google is nasty in its own ways. ReCaptchas get worse. YouTube ads have several levels of hell, including interruptions in parts of videos it shouldn't interrupt, all sorts of racist and intellectually disgusting groups (including but not limited to allowing outright scams, platforming disinformation, and spreading malware) it allows to buy ads, and how much it allows those groups to serve 30 minute/1 hour/2+ hour videos as "ads". It's amazing how many ads I've felt I had to report from hate groups alone. All of that seems to background radiation for everyone with access to Google's ad networks, but the less tracking data you have the fewer targeted ads you see and the more the mask off greed feeds you terrifying things that make you wonder how humanity is okay with all this and why Google isn't seen as more of a greedy, evil company for how much of this stuff they fail to vet and continue to associate their brand with.
Show me old family friendly TV advertising staples like Clorox ads and whatever the latest cereal fad is, please, I don't mind. That's a written social contract that worked for a long time, especially because it had rules like Truth in Advertising laws and followed ethics boundaries like brand contamination by association with criminals and liars. Targeted advertising is and was a mistake. Ad networks believing private data was their new playground and revenue gold mine was a mistake. Neither of those, I think fit the old social contracts about ad-subsidized content, and I think all we can do is send a message that both of them break the spirit of the contract and it is past time for a change/fix.
But that's also maybe just me and a personal crusade at this point. I don't see a lot of people going to the sort of privacy minded extremes I have and also still not install an actual ad blocker. But that's how I'm trying to square the ethics dilemma of appreciating ad-subsidized content, but also understanding that the internet is no longer safe without some sort of privacy-minded safeguards that companies like Admiral and Google are going around and calling "ad blocking", because it is starting to interfere with their real, more lucrative, and much more evil business models.
Ads are not the problem. It's the ad-tech surveillance and the malvertising. There are ways to show ads that are not a threat. When online services choose to become hostile, adblockers are the defense. I don't mind ads, I don't mind paying for services without ads, in fact I do for multiple services and news. I don't want surveillance ad-tech anywhere near my devices. It's the business decision of the company, that aides the worst enduring tech businesses with data collection and targeted scams and malware. So fuck'em. I'll steal gladly from overt assholes.
Big tech has slowly convinced us that it is their right to violate us. Because they give us so much for free. But they also take things away from us, without our knowledge and consent, they manipulate us, they make barriers between us en the information we need. They change the human condition for the worse.
We do not have to feel guilty to act against them.
Btw, yesterday Chromium told me Ublock Origin is no longer supported. Well, thank you, now I know why I wasn't using Chromium for anything other than MS365 stuff. It's working just fine on Firefox.
> Unfortunately, I have no way to detect DNS based blocking short of loading an actual ad.
Before that point I'd already spotted that limitation, but there might be an easy solution: get a domain added to a common block list used by DNS based blockers. If you get the right content from a resource on a host with that name (or the other test passes, so we test for both forms of blocker) show the message.
Of course there will be false positives if the page goes down or if they're is some other network issue, but no test like this will be perfect.
Anyone want to save me the research to find out the easiest way to get a domain on the lists? I have no objection to sacrificing a few £ per year on a name to use and I've got spare resource to serve the pile of tiny requests that'll go through because people aren't running a blocker.
EDIT: as a secondary note, I wouldn't just flip between “display:none” and “display:block” on one element upon detection result. That might cause visual disturbance in many page layouts as things load. I would leave a block of the same positioning and size properties in the flow in either case, either blank or with a message like “You'll be pleased to know that your ad blocker seems to be working.”, perhaps leaving the space blank (but still in the flow with the same dimensions) initially so an incorrect message isn't displayed if something (scripting being disabled client-side for instance) stops the tests running at all.
I think getting a domain is well worth the effort. If you set up the domain and write a small blog post I'm sure HN will be willing to help add the domain to every blocklist imaginable. If you do, I also think it's worth adding a donate button.
Even CERN would advice everyone to use ad-blocker [1] for a safer internet experience. I am sure ads as it is today wasn't part of the web plan when it started.
[1] https://home.cern/news/news/computing/computer-security-bloc...
Guess nowadays they recommend everyone to use Firefox or some other non-crippling browser then also?
I helped my wife with something the other day, noticed the ads everywhere, while I was sure I had installed uBlock for her in the past. Went to the Chrome's addons page, and Google apparently is automatically disabling uBlock and calling it unsupported, yet you can enable it until next time you restart Chrome. But seems Chrome is actively trying to get rid of adblockers lately.
I wish browsers could just provide a way to disable javascript after page `onload`.
Perhaps only enables js when user clicks something.
Is there a Browser extension that farbles all these APIs on purpose instead of blocking them?
By farbling I mean making the data look like it's the most common Windows configuration, for example.
I think that's impossible to do with an extension, there are far too many holes to plug and it's a moving target, it has to be done in the browser. I believe GrapheneOS is trying to do that with Vanadium (security and privacy hardened fork of Chromium for Android).
AdNauseam does something like this.
I don't think that will work, because that will also provide false information to the logic.
You will have messed up layouts and unneeded quirks. Moreover, banks are using fingerprinting to detect fraud so you will have a hard time on those websites as well.
And more importantly.
https://xkcd.com/1105/
By this logic you cannot use anything, because there's likely at least one website that uses its featureset.
Of course I wouldn't farble on my bank's website, that would be pretty stupid.
But by default I would want trackers to get the farbled data, and only allowlist the websites I trust. Same trust concept as with uBlock Origin, NoScript and others.
What the fuck up does this do?
Shadows bunch of builtin browser JS functions so they do nothing.
Amen to that. I used to think the Stop button in IE did this.
Old Opera (before it became another Chromium-shell) had an easy JS on/off toggle in the menu, but I don't remember if it only took effect on load or immediately.
Maybe this has changed, but ad scripts used document.write(), which runs immediately (before onLoad or etc). A big reason they are slow.
In Brave, you can disable JS by default, then toggle it on for specific sites.
Tried to browse a while with NoScript addon. But barely any page loads, so you need to whitelist almost every page you visit, which defeats the purpose.
I have been thinking about some kind of render proxy that runs all the JS for you somewhere else in a sandbox and sends you the screenshot or rendered HTML instead. Or maybe we could leverage an LLM to turn the Bloated JS garbage into the actual information you are looking for.
> Tried to browse a while with NoScript addon. But barely any page loads, so you need to whitelist almost every page you visit, which defeats the purpose.
Nah, this is just straight up false. Many pages work fine with NoScript blocking all scripts. For those that don't, you usually only have to allowlist the root domain, but you can still leave the other 32 domains they are importing blocked. It's actually surprisingly common for blocking JS to result in a better experience than leaving it enabled (eg no popups, no videos, getting rid of fade-ins and other stupid animations).
I won't argue if you think that is too much work, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it for a non-technical user, but it's not nearly as bad as you described.
> Nah, this is just straight up false.
I wasn't clear, but this is about my experience. Maybe you are in a different bubble. But I'm not able to book a hotel, browse GitHub, file my taxes, make a bank transfer or even look up the menu of a restaurant.
The only exceptions for me are HN and a handful of news websites.
UMatrix has a better interface. The problem is the same, one has to find the minimum set of scripts that does not break the core functionality of the site. It's an ability that can be trained but it's the reason for I don't install it on the browsers of my friends. However I considered installing it, keeping it disabled and using it as a tool to show how much stuff each site loads from so many different sources. Many domain names are very telling even for the uninitiated.
I am still running the NoScript, whitelisting the page I am on. It has benefits of not whitelisting other domains it tries to pull stuff from, which 90% is enough to get working site that is way cleaner than with all the bullshit loaded.
That's what I love most about using ChatGPT vs Google for finding information: less bloat, just what I asked for.
uBO's 'Click to Disable JavaScript' button is a very handy feature.
or mouseover.
> If you want to support your favorite authors: send then money. A dollar helps more then viewing ads ever would.
This isn't really true. I ran an ad-supported site at one point with my content, just a small banner at the top of each page. The ads paid for a significant portion of my monthly rent. Getting a few dollars from the occasional viewer would not, since 99.99+% of people are not going to do that.
I don't like viewing ads, but let's not pretend like they don't make money for content creators. They absolutely do.
Reread the statement though. Does one person viewing ads pay you more than one dollar?
But it's not one person viewing ads on just your site. It's across all the sites they visit.
A person viewing ads over the course of a year is generating much, much more than a dollar in revenue.
And in a parallel universe without ads, they're definitely not sending a dollar to every site they visit.
You can't compare one person who sends a dollar to a site with one person's ad revenue to a site, because as I said, 99.99+% of people are never going to send you a dollar.
The author is implying ads don't generate meaningful revenue but paying a dollar does. That's just false.
But the ad dollars are ruining the internet, ad revenue based on impressions/clicks/tracking is whe we end up with more and more invasive ads and more and more content farm websites trying to get enough eyeballs and clicks to earn some of that money.
The parallel universe I'd like is where websites/publishers had small, privacy protecting, static banners or ad text on their sites. In that universe lots more people would feel comfortable with not using ad blockers.
Of course it's ruining the internet, zero disagreement there.
All I'm saying is that the author is painting this fantasy picture that individuals voluntarily sending a dollar to site creators is somehow a substitute for, or even better than, the ad revenue they get. It's not. It's not even close.
Everyone agrees ads are terrible. The issue is that nobody has been able to come up with a viable alternative. Lots of ideas around micropayments exist, but so far they've failed for all sorts of reasons.
I love it. But in the spirit of today's Internet, you should make this message an obnoxious pop-up that requires dismissal with a tiny "X" button that is dark-grey-on-black and placed tactically so as to be the least accessible. The touch target on touch devices should be tiny and slightly off. The pop-up should also fail completely on iPads, covering all the content with a dark overlay but giving the user no way to proceed.
FYI you can nuke all that crap with a simple browser bookmark: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
There’s also a browser extension which does the same thing, but attempts to be a bit more content-aware: https://popupoff.org
I found it amusing that my proxy detected the "/ads/" in the URL and killed the connection automatically.
Of course highlighting this fact that the presence of an adblocker is detectable, unfortunately only results in escalating the cat-and-mouse game further.
I have also considered popularising a script that replaces the whole page's content with "JavaScript detected, please disable it to view this content and improve your security".
> I have also considered popularising a script that replaces the whole page's content with "JavaScript detected, please disable it to view this content and improve your security".
This is exactly what most dark net markets do.
Ironically, the latter would probably end up being cat-and-mouse blocked by tools like the former.
The cat/mouse are only interested in what happens in the mainstream.
Find something off the beaten path that works for you and it will rarely need updates.
The ads themselves are one thing, the more sinister part is that they eat battery life and cause extra network activity.
It's like a leech, and they want you to think it's a symbiotic relationship.
This is a very nice idea, nicely presented too.
Bug report: There's a typo in the actual popup as shown to me, it says "extention". Consistently enough, the typo is present in the code snippet in the article:
I wonder what the overlap between visitors to a site that would display this and visitors not already using an adblocker is. Then again I've seen developers with ads plastered all over their screens before, I'd like to believe it's a conscious decision on their part.
Now that I think of it, when a professional YouTuber shows their browser, more often than not, there is no ad-blocking. But as professional YouTubers, there is no way they are not aware of ad-blocking.
I wonder if they actually watch the ads on purpose, even in private or if they turn their adblocker off just for the video, as not to give ideas to their viewers and potentially losing ad revenue.
A while back Linus Tech Tips said ad blockers are a form of unethical piracy. His audience accused him of spreading self-serving bullshit. Oddly, his position changed a few years later and he started promoting adblocking.
The chance that he was using one the whole damn time? 100%
Nearly every human being has a hintergedanken. I think this one is pretty benign.
back in the heyday of the daily wtf there was a beautiful submission from a developer who worked for a banner ad company. got called into a VP's office one day and yelled at because some new annoying ad wasn't showing up where intended, a bunch of debugging later it turned out that the VP was running an ad blocker and had just forgotten about it.
Yea, I've seen a few videos from Low Level Learning where the content of the article he's reading from gets covered by annoying banner ads and such. I don't know why but security websites have really obnoxious ads. In any case, you can see the anguish on his face but the show must go on.
I see it since I don't have adblockers installed.
Instead of adblockers, I remember sites that are user hostile one way or another and just avoid those sites. Those sites that are heavy on ads usually aren't worth my time anyway, so the presence of those auto-playing videos in every corner ends up being a signal for me to go somewhere else.
Use the original adblocker: hosts
Adblockers might not be enough.
Some services claim to turn "anonymous" visitors into actual email addresses (and some other basic info), likely via identity graphs (IP/device/hashed IDs).
I've heard of cases where people are getting outreached (via email) after just visiting a product website, even with an ad blocker on, using a private browser (Brave or similar).
Opensend is one example. They're pretty open about it in their FAQ [1].
[1] https://www.opensend.com/faq
Proper adblockers like uBlock Origin block privacy invasive trackers that do this too.
Ironically a content blocker on iOS Safari blocks this page from loading at all, I’m guessing because of the /ads/ in the URL rather than the domain. I didn’t see the notice on iOS after disabling the content blockers, but that’s probably because of the not enough space/off to the side constraint?
> but if you use external CSS, it’s quite common for the request to fail resulting in an unstyled page
That’s a pretty crazy statement. How often do you see loading a CSS stylesheet fail to load? Most sites are completely unusable without their stylesheets and I don’t recall the last time I saw a stylesheet fail to load.
> How often do you see loading a CSS stylesheet fail to load?
I wouldn't say often, but it certianly happens often enough that I make sure my own designs work well enough (the content is visible at least, even if it is hellish ugly) if external resources like that fail to load.
The most frequent cause is a site that is overloaded due to a hug from HN or similar, the main request going through OK but some of the subsequent ones timing out. It is getting less common with servers that support HTTP2/HTTP3 so pipeline better, as the usual failure point in these cases is in opening a connection not while reading the response (or the server generating that response).
It can also happen if static content is served from a different place, and that is down but the host serving the main content is not.
> How often do you see loading a CSS stylesheet fail to load?
Often. It might have something to do with my adblock settings though...
> Most sites are completely unusable without their stylesheets
Those sites are generally completely trash anyway.
I've had it happen to me exactly once in the past few years. And a simple refresh fixed it. Definitely an overstatement to say it's common.
Somewhat common if a site is being overloaded.
That checks out, I feel like the place I've seen it the most is on Github, which also seems to be the site I use regularly that has the most frequent outages (which also aren't quite at the level I'd call them common, but still _somewhat_ common_ compared to everything else I use anywhere close to daily)
A few times a month for me. (Some combination of Comcast, a Qualcomm NFA765 on Linux, and ad-block. Probably mostly the second thing.)
It's bad enough we got extra work for those who use adblockers. Wasting peoples' time and attention for not using one (out of personal choice or necessity) feels like overreach.
It's also deeply paternalistic: Even if it is meant well - and I assume that's the case here - it implies the site operator knows better than the user what is good for them.
Finally, this will also lower the guards of less technical users for installing random plug-ins on website demand.
From a subjective gut feeling: Please do not do this. Let people decide what they need, and what they don't need.
>Wasting peoples' time and attention for not using one (out of personal choice or necessity) feels like overreach.
This already happens with every ad successfully shown to a person. Why don't you criticize the ad business for much more extensive overreach instead of someone doing harmless activism on their own website?
> Wasting peoples' time and attention for not using one (out of personal choice or necessity) feels like overreach.
This is far from the same as the overreach of many (most?) ads. From the description: “It’s shown off to the side, and never covers content. It won’t be shown if there isn’t enough space.”. In fact the space issue is overly careful, on my protrait 1080p monitor it doesn't show because 1080 pixels is just a little too thin for its test.
And someone who is used to how things are without a blocker, is unlikely to notice this extra little (non-animated, soundless, out-of-the-way) message in the general melée!
> Finally, this will also lower the guards of less technical users for installing random plug-ins on website demand.
That is a fair point (though those guards seem so low enough already in general that this will make litle real world difference). Instead of pointing to a particular thing to install, when I do this on my output I'll point to a page listing common options and a warning about installing random stuff without at least minimal research.
The message does not show on Orion and I have no adblocker installed. I was also not told any Jellyfish facts.
Have you disabled the bult-in adblocker?
I am not aware of a built in adblocker as a component. The browser is zero telemetry by default and quite a few sites helpfully point to howto disable adblock plugins in chrome and firefox tutorials when they encounter Orion.
It is enabled by default: https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/ad-tracking....
Can anyone explain why the ID of the div is modified?
Because the -hidden variant is styled "display: none".
I was wondering why I don't see such a for a second.
Make a Pi-hole ... you will not regret it.
The close button isn't working
There's no hope anymore of a solution.
Instead of document.cookie consider document.localStorage since there’s verbiage around showing a notice on your site if you use cookies, etc, for tracking purposes. At least with local storage, you aren’t using cookies :P
The law doesn't care whether it's a cookie or an equivalent.
And this cookie isn’t for tracking purposes anyway, so doesn’t require a notice.
The "law" only applies if you live in the EU anyway.
See, this is where you are wrong. The law applies if you target people living in the EU (such as using one of the languages spoken within the EU. English applies thanks to Malta and Ireland. So does not explicitly removing tracking from EU IPs).
Whether it is technically enforceable in your particular case may be the question. But historically, it has been enforced outside the EU.
As you live in the Bay Area - the CCPA and the CPRA, which are similar in many ways and seem to require an opt-out mechanism (e.g. if you operate a commercial website with >100k devices accessing it during a year).
Talk to a lawyer, don't take advice from strangers on the internet.
> The law applies if you target people living in the EU
I disagree with this. Tencent WeChat targets the entire world, including people living in the EU. They do not follow GDPR.
Likewise, Facebook targets people living everywhere, including in China. They do not follow Chinese laws.
Hence, China sets up a firewall and blocks Facebook.
EU can set up a firewall too if they don't like something.
"Oh but EU doesn't do firewalls?" Not my problem. Tough luck. China, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, all did it, you can too if you have beef with foreign websites.
But no, I do not need to follow EU law just because EU users use my thing. It's on them to firewall it if they don't like my website.
> CCPA and the CPRA
This is fine. I live in California, I need to follow California law, and I can choose to live somewhere else if I don't like it. What I'm not okay with is some distant jurisdiction thinking they can make laws that I "need" to follow.
I hate the GDPR popups more than the ads because they make no fucking sense.
Why don't we have a browser flag that sends a request header telling the site our preference automatically so we can avoid these popups?
What's even worse is that I have my browser set to block cookies on ALL sites by default and only enable them for a handful of sites that I login to.
This causes all the stupid GDPR popup sites to not "remember" my preferences because they ironically need to use a cookie to store the preference of declining cookies, so they appear again each time because my browser doesn't store that decline cookie between sessions.
Except it's not tracking. Remembering user preferences is the original goal of cookies, and doesn't come with any legal requirements.
The law is (paraphrasing) "You must use cookies or similar to be evil without permission". Advertising companies decided that instead of not being evil, they'd annoy users into giving permission.
How does this nonsense still get repeated in 2025?