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I am not sure how to react. On the one hand, it seems like a good thing at the first sight. On the other, with ad-blocking becoming more and more mainstream, an

by raldu 11y ago

I am not sure how to react. On the one hand, it seems like a good thing at the first sight. On the other, with ad-blocking becoming more and more mainstream, and the discussion looking more like clashes and agreements between companies, wouldn't advertisements find new ways of seeking attention, eventually evolving into something that we cannot escape? What if they find a way to ban ad-blocking? What if web becomes completely binary, somehow making ad-blockers obsolete?[1][2] What do you think? [1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to-webassembly-its-happening/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to-webassembly-i... [2]: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/17/google-microsoft-mozilla-and-others-team-up-to-launch-webassembly-a-new-binary-format-for-the-web/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/17/google-microsoft-mozilla-an...

franciscop 11y ago
That's highly speculative and phrased in a way impossible to answer: > eventually evolving into something that we cannot escape? What I think: if they find a way to block adblockers, we'll find a way to block the adblock blockers! It looks like a fight that will keep going on for some time. Until they make ads so good that they are indistinguishable from good content, then we'd won [1] I now block the blockers naturally, just not following those pesky links. I would love some statistics for instance, from the times Forbes and others are in the top HN page before vs after they completely started blocking adblock. [1] https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- blackoil 11y ago
  Or they make content even worse to make it difficult to differ and we lose
- untog 11y ago
  I think the "something that we cannot escape" the OP is describing is already here in the form of "native ads", which are advertisements presented as articles. Buzzfeed does a lot of them, and there's a non-zero cognitive load in differentiating (since they look so much like articles). I'm really not sure they're better than ads. They're certainly more deceiving.
  - wagglycocks 11y ago
    That's where curated media comes into play. No-one's going to upvote an article that's literally just filler text.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  I don't think it's possible. At the end of the day, the browser (user) determines if and how any given piece of markup will be rendered. There are server side hacks of course, but those are still relying on the user's agent to reply to them a certain way. As long as the web is based mostly on HTML, the blockers win.
pjc50 11y ago
There's always the possibility of moving to another protocol, another ecosystem. Especially if it can be bidirectionally hyperlinked with the existing ecosystem. It might be something a bit more like USENET or Gopher, just adapted for the 21st century. With a huge Butlerian-Jihad-like opposition to active content - it would almost certainly be constrained to text, pictures, and video.
- AJ007 11y ago
  The other "ecosystem" is mobile apps, and it is how most younger people use the internet. The less revenue from a traditional website there is, the more incentive there is to make certain features app-only.
  - Touche 11y ago
    Young people use social apps, they don't read articles in mobile apps just like no one does that. The social apps are just a replacement for talking on the phone and text messaging, it's not like they are doing it instead of things they used to do on the web.
- seagreen 11y ago
  > Butlerian-Jihad-like opposition to active content Genius line. Individuals are already trying to improve things within their own spheres, witness the static site movement. Many people using static sites are trying to output some form of "reduced HTML" (without popups etc.) but it's very informal. It would be nice if there was actually a RestrictedHTML document format they could target, if you're trying to start a movement it's important to have words for what you're doing. Note that while you'd be dropping huge amounts of features from the current HTML+CSS+JS stack, there are some features you'd want to add as well. For instance, the source of a webpage not being included with the page itself is not really optimal. (Think of how few pages are written in HTML directly -- they're written in Markdown on LaTeX or something else and then compiled to HTML). It would be nice to have native support for "ctrl+click on part of the HTML and then be taken to the original source".
  - 11y ago
akerro 11y ago
>wouldn't advertisements find new ways of seeking attention, eventually evolving into something that we cannot escape? Advertisers make more money on profiling and tracking users than showing you ads.
darkxanthos 11y ago
One possible solution is that it may mean more sponsored content. Even in mainstream media a surprising amount of content is sponsored. If you aren't paying for your content, your content needs to pay for itself.
bsharitt 11y ago
I think at some point /etc/hosts level blocking will be the only thing effective.
- anc84 11y ago
  /etc/hosts blocking is very ineffective. Getting around it is as simple as hosting the malware on your own domain(s).
tomjen3 11y ago
How would they be able to ban adblocking? Browsers can be made and distributed anywhere in the world - even after a decade the pirate bay is still active. I have looked at webassembly. Let them do whatever they want there, ultimately they still have to write the text in the clear either in the dom or in a canvas (and a canvas is really slow to write, especially on a mobile phone) and in either case as long as your code can run before theirs in the same javascript, you can redefine a few key built in functions (e.g document.createElement, document.getElementsByTagName) you can force their code to call your implementation of whatever functions they want to write the information with - and you can write their text elsewhere, or filter images or whatever you want. Webassembly makes their code more difficult to debug, but they still have to call the same javascript functions straight javascript does. So adblockers won't become obsolete, but it is possible that it will no longer be enough just to filter the dom.
- rlidwka 11y ago
  Hmm... I wonder, if they put everything (both navigation and ads) on the same canvas (maybe pixel-by-pixel even), is there any way to block ads inside? If webgl will be adopted widely enough, this might even look plausible for some.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    Pixel by pixel would be unbeleavably horribly slow in WebGL - OpenGL is all about loading graphics and moving verticies. I think I am getting what you are saying though, but functionally that would be the same as just rendering it server side and serve it as an image (if you write the pixels randomly you still have to use the correct coordinates) which is possible today, yet nobody is talking about doing that. So as long as they are still going to be rendering text client-side we can filter it. The moment they are not, we will have to start analysing the image, which should be fairly straight forward (ads are going to be in a rectangular area at least 20x20 pixels; text is going to a lot smaller and in ugly shapes).
Dirlewanger 11y ago
This is an upheaval that is a long time coming. So many websites we browse rely 100% on ad revenue. And with adblocking slowly entering the mainstream, it's going to get ugly. Literally anything could happen. I'm excited to see what happens. This will be a massive culling of shit and junk on the Internet that rightly deserves to go under.

by raldu 11y ago

franciscop 11y ago

That's highly speculative and phrased in a way impossible to answer: > eventually evolving into something that we cannot escape? What I think: if they find a way to block adblockers, we'll find a way to block the adblock blockers! It looks like a fight that will keep going on for some time. Until they make ads so good that they are indistinguishable from good content, then we'd won [1] I now block the blockers naturally, just not following those pesky links. I would love some statistics for instance, from the times Forbes and others are in the top HN page before vs after they completely started blocking adblock. [1] https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

blackoil 11y ago
Or they make content even worse to make it difficult to differ and we lose
untog 11y ago
I think the "something that we cannot escape" the OP is describing is already here in the form of "native ads", which are advertisements presented as articles. Buzzfeed does a lot of them, and there's a non-zero cognitive load in differentiating (since they look so much like articles). I'm really not sure they're better than ads. They're certainly more deceiving.
- wagglycocks 11y ago
  That's where curated media comes into play. No-one's going to upvote an article that's literally just filler text.
Karunamon 11y ago
I don't think it's possible. At the end of the day, the browser (user) determines if and how any given piece of markup will be rendered. There are server side hacks of course, but those are still relying on the user's agent to reply to them a certain way. As long as the web is based mostly on HTML, the blockers win.

pjc50 11y ago

There's always the possibility of moving to another protocol, another ecosystem. Especially if it can be bidirectionally hyperlinked with the existing ecosystem. It might be something a bit more like USENET or Gopher, just adapted for the 21st century. With a huge Butlerian-Jihad-like opposition to active content - it would almost certainly be constrained to text, pictures, and video.

AJ007 11y ago
The other "ecosystem" is mobile apps, and it is how most younger people use the internet. The less revenue from a traditional website there is, the more incentive there is to make certain features app-only.
- Touche 11y ago
  Young people use social apps, they don't read articles in mobile apps just like no one does that. The social apps are just a replacement for talking on the phone and text messaging, it's not like they are doing it instead of things they used to do on the web.
seagreen 11y ago
> Butlerian-Jihad-like opposition to active content Genius line. Individuals are already trying to improve things within their own spheres, witness the static site movement. Many people using static sites are trying to output some form of "reduced HTML" (without popups etc.) but it's very informal. It would be nice if there was actually a RestrictedHTML document format they could target, if you're trying to start a movement it's important to have words for what you're doing. Note that while you'd be dropping huge amounts of features from the current HTML+CSS+JS stack, there are some features you'd want to add as well. For instance, the source of a webpage not being included with the page itself is not really optimal. (Think of how few pages are written in HTML directly -- they're written in Markdown on LaTeX or something else and then compiled to HTML). It would be nice to have native support for "ctrl+click on part of the HTML and then be taken to the original source".
- 11y ago

akerro 11y ago

>wouldn't advertisements find new ways of seeking attention, eventually evolving into something that we cannot escape? Advertisers make more money on profiling and tracking users than showing you ads.

darkxanthos 11y ago

One possible solution is that it may mean more sponsored content. Even in mainstream media a surprising amount of content is sponsored. If you aren't paying for your content, your content needs to pay for itself.

bsharitt 11y ago

I think at some point /etc/hosts level blocking will be the only thing effective.

anc84 11y ago
/etc/hosts blocking is very ineffective. Getting around it is as simple as hosting the malware on your own domain(s).

tomjen3 11y ago

How would they be able to ban adblocking? Browsers can be made and distributed anywhere in the world - even after a decade the pirate bay is still active. I have looked at webassembly. Let them do whatever they want there, ultimately they still have to write the text in the clear either in the dom or in a canvas (and a canvas is really slow to write, especially on a mobile phone) and in either case as long as your code can run before theirs in the same javascript, you can redefine a few key built in functions (e.g document.createElement, document.getElementsByTagName) you can force their code to call your implementation of whatever functions they want to write the information with - and you can write their text elsewhere, or filter images or whatever you want. Webassembly makes their code more difficult to debug, but they still have to call the same javascript functions straight javascript does. So adblockers won't become obsolete, but it is possible that it will no longer be enough just to filter the dom.

rlidwka 11y ago
Hmm... I wonder, if they put everything (both navigation and ads) on the same canvas (maybe pixel-by-pixel even), is there any way to block ads inside? If webgl will be adopted widely enough, this might even look plausible for some.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Pixel by pixel would be unbeleavably horribly slow in WebGL - OpenGL is all about loading graphics and moving verticies. I think I am getting what you are saying though, but functionally that would be the same as just rendering it server side and serve it as an image (if you write the pixels randomly you still have to use the correct coordinates) which is possible today, yet nobody is talking about doing that. So as long as they are still going to be rendering text client-side we can filter it. The moment they are not, we will have to start analysing the image, which should be fairly straight forward (ads are going to be in a rectangular area at least 20x20 pixels; text is going to a lot smaller and in ugly shapes).

Dirlewanger 11y ago

This is an upheaval that is a long time coming. So many websites we browse rely 100% on ad revenue. And with adblocking slowly entering the mainstream, it's going to get ugly. Literally anything could happen. I'm excited to see what happens. This will be a massive culling of shit and junk on the Internet that rightly deserves to go under.