20 ms·

“We're considering banning domains that require users to disable ad blockers”

521 points by Hjugo 10y ago

anonymousab 10y ago
I should think flair would be enough. The community would naturally downvote those links when they thought the content wasn't worth it.
econnors 10y ago
As noted other comments, this would only apply to the /r/technology subreddit. The general feedback is in favor of blocking these types of sites. I'm pretty amazed at the current state of ads. With multiple ad exchanges, private sellers, and static brand deals, the entire serving process is a mess and users are paying for it. I don't think publishing websites are being malicious; they're incentived to make money and just haven't figured out how to do it at a high enough margin while keeping users happy. I just think the entire internet ad industry is in shambles and nobody really knows a solution that makes everyone happy.
- tomp 10y ago
  Of course they are malicious. They're serving the high-profit ads, which obviously includes malware, where they could be serving low-profit, safe (but boring) ads. That's equivalent to pharmacists selling illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine) simply because they obviously make them more profits.
  - cstross 10y ago
    There's a subtle difference: pharmacists are regulated by statute and are legally liable if medication they dispense on prescription causes injury. (Source: I used to be a pharmacist -- in the UK, > 25 years ago, precise regulations vary by jurisdiction.) Ad networks are utterly unregulated. In terms of this pharmacy metaphor they're snake-oil salesmen.
    - Retric 10y ago
      All industry's are regulated. The general case is normal laws. Ad networks serving links to compromised websites is likely already illegal.
      - cstross 10y ago
        I'm talking about professional registration (exams, licenses to practice, supervisory body, jail sentences for impersonation, forefeiture of registration for ethics infractions), not bog-standard trade law.
        Retric 10y ago
        In the case of Ad networks serving up malware I don't know if that's a real defense. Yes, proactive regulation is often far more effective, but reactive regulation can often catch the worst offenders.
  - econnors 10y ago
    It's not that simple. At any one time, a publisher can be serving ads from a few exchanges, a few different private sellers, and custom built ads for brands. And these all are served in different combinations across several different ad units on multiple pages. And some of those ad sellers may be backfilling with other ad networks, or maybe the publisher is backfilling certain ads from the ad exchanges at certain CPM prices. I'd liken it more to a hardware product being shipped with faulty materials when multiple manufacturers are involved and it's extremely difficult to identify the responsible party. Sure, they're responsible for the end product, but it's not so black and white.
    - newjersey 10y ago
      Whatever the combination, I'll blame the site I visit. I've seen bad ads on imgur one time I used the Internet without blocking ads. The ad just started downloading "Firefox patch" without me clicking anything. It is not black and white but it is pretty close. Edit: I have to give Firefox credit here. It actually just prompted me whether I'd like to save the file. I did and uploaded it to virus total. Probably not a good idea if you do anything sensitive on your computer.
    - belorn 10y ago
      Your description doesn't show why a pharmacist selling illegal drugs is dissimilar to a website selling ad space to illegal ad-space buyers. Any time where you've got multiple producers and multiple retailers, you get middle people like those you describe that must juggle demand and supply. Pharmacists have an equally complex path from producer to customer as ads have from ad-space buyer to website visitor. However, let's instead look at the chain of events: An innocent gets malware from an advertisement. The publisher blames the ad-network who in turn blames the criminal. The ad-network claims that they can't curate the advertisements or the margins becomes to small. In the end, the innocent has to take the full fallout of the crime. An innocent gets mistreated by a fake doctor. The hospital blames the hiring agency, who in turn blames the criminal. The hiring agency claims that they can't do background checks and verify CVs of applicants or the margins becomes to small. In the end, the innocent has to take the full fallout of the crime? Why is there such discrepancy between the two cases? Why can one agency do curation and still function, while the other can't? Why can the publisher get away with using a bad ad-network while a hospital is fully legally responsible for using a bad hiring agency? Those seem to be very simple questions, ones that should have very simple answers.
  - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
    In this case, high-profit ads include dynamic content (JavaScript or Flash). Safe (but boring) ads would simply be an image or text link with no tracking capabilities that doesn't use CSS hacks to interrupt your page reading. It just sits up there saying, "If you want it, check this out."
    - colejohnson66 10y ago
      I can honestly say that I've clicked on quite a few static ads with the intention of learning more. Dynamic ads, however, I refuse to click.
      - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
        Same, and in a few cases I didn't realize they were ads because they were so non-intrusive.
    - puddintane 10y ago
      Tracking still happens with "safe" ads. Generally "image pixels" as they call em are actually server side scripts that then pretend to be an image that way they can still track the users IP and what they were doing at that point in time.
      - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
        That data is already sent to the server. This doesn't give the server control over the user's hardware.
    - wlesieutre 10y ago
      Javascript and Flash ads are the more immediately dangerous ads, but you can still distribute malware over image and text links. You just move from exploiting browser vulnerabilities to exploiting user trust, like all of the imitation VLC download pages that have popped up over the years. We'd be better off with only static image/text ads, yes, but malware distribution by means of poorly vetted advertising wouldn't totally vanish.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    I don't think most ad networks are intentionally serving ads like that. Occam's razor, etc. Doesn't make them less culpable for the damage they cause, I'm just saying I don't think it's something they make additional money on, I think it's something that gets slipped under the radar by a few bad actors. They obviously aren't incentivized enough to stop it though so why not implement a more direct compensation? If a user gets a malware program on their machine and it can be traced back to a given provider, that provider should be billed accordingly for the cost of the removal (including if the user can do it themselves, they should get paid for that anyway) as well as lost productivity time. Currently any ad network serving malware just gets to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and keep on making money, and considering how damaging some of this shit can be I'd say that's the first point that needs addressing.
  - eyeinthepyramid 10y ago
    You've clearly never worked with ad networks. Even Google serves up malicious ads every once in a while.
    - riskable 10y ago
      There's a difference between merely malicious ads ("Click here for free stuff!"->takes you to a site that exploits your browser) and ads that actively exploit the browser. Any ad network can fall victim to malicious ads but only ad networks that allow embedded scripts can be abused to actively exploit browsers. The solution is dead simple: Don't allow embedded scripts in ads. Period. End of story. Problem no longer a problem. "We're all done here."
- chris_wot 10y ago
  If it expanded to the rest of Reddit then it might be the impetuous for the news industry to clean up their act. And no, that's not a mistake. It's not advertisers I direct my ire but those who should know better and who apparently are meant to exist for the greater public good: The Press.
  - rkangel 10y ago
    Agree: companies will sell what others will buy.
  - mtbcoder 10y ago
    If Facebook were to do this, I would agree, but traffic from the vast majority of subreddits and pages is not as substantial as you may think. Some publishers might take notice but I do not think it would stir any kind of immediate action response across the news world.
  - prawn 10y ago
    I think you mean impetus rather than impetuous?
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Oops. Dratted iPhone autocorrect. On another reply I was forced to hit edit because I told someone that most editors on HN "unstalk" uBlock Plus. I have no idea under what context I made my iPhone learn that word.
- deprave 10y ago
  I don't know about "only applies to /r/technology" - we've been there before. Remember when ad blockers were mostly prevalent among techies and visitors to tech sites? Yeah, well, that changed. It may start with /r/technology, but I'm pretty sure it won't end there...
  - MBCook 10y ago
    This discussion is specifically from the mods of /r/technology. Will other parts of Reddit follow suit? Maybe. But right now it's just /r/technology.
    - agrona 10y ago
      A mod of /r/sports (~6M users? is that right?) said >Send me your automoderator rule once it's done, we'll add it our sub as well. Seems likely to spread pretty quickly.
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    Well, yeah. Things tend to have origins. And if those things are good they tend to expand from those origins...
- baldfat 10y ago
  > nobody really knows a solution that makes everyone happy Impossible and usually the worst approach to have. The best thing is to have a visionary that blazes the path for the rest to follow. Sadly the vast majority of visionaries will fail.
  - riskable 10y ago
    I think the problem here is that regardless of the "visionary"... * You make an ad network that makes advertisers happy. In reality this will pretty much *always* make users *unhappy*. * You make an ad network that makes users happy. In reality this makes advertisers *unhappy*. There's not much middle ground there. The only possible win-win scenario is you make an ad network that makes users happy by only allowing users to advertise to other users. AKA classifieds. ...or you could just have one ad network that advertisers hate that users are happy with but because there's only one the advertisers just have to live with it.
- vijayr 10y ago
  The other side of the story is that most users don't want to pay for anything on the internet. Not making this up - I've had people tell me they pay for the internet connection, so they don't see a reason to pay for any services on top of it :( So the same person who wouldn't think twice about dropping $5 on a cup of starbucks coffee every day will not pay $5 per month for email (without ads). Not defending the shitty ad scene online. Just want to point out that most people don't want to pay for anything online, they are at least partially responsible for this mess.
mcbits 10y ago
I share the sentiment of the proposal, but what I really don't understand is why user moderation fails to suppress those sites despite their tactics angering so many people.
- gabemart 10y ago
  Often the demographic that votes on stories can be quite different from the demographic that comments on stories and forms the "community", especially for default subreddits. The majority of people voting on the story may only be reading the headline.
  - na85 10y ago
    Reddit is also routinely gamed by bots or paid upvoters.
alblue 10y ago
The nub of the thread is: these sites have put up ad blocker blockers, so you can't see the content without disabling your ad blocker. And yet when you do you are either exposed to full screen or video auto play ads, or in some cases, malware: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-rea... Given that Reddit is a large source of incoming referrals this stance (if implemented) might be a sufficient lever to send a signal to get those sites to improve their environment. In any case since the sites are still able to use curated self hosted ads (ie not JavaScript redirects to externally hosted providers) they are able to sell static ad space to make money even with adblockers enabled. It might be worth seeing what the outcome for the experiment is (if it goes ahead) and then seeing if the same logic would work for HN.
- chmike 10y ago
  The problem is that sites with advertisement are shooting themselves in the foot. They produce valuable and high quality content attracting readers and increase revenues by providing more advertisement. The amount of advertisement drops the efficiency of advertisement, so price drops and you put more advertisement. None of these people really considered the user experience on their site, except google on the google search result page. This is like thinking that you would increase a crop yield by increasing the amount of fertilizer you put on it. There is an optimal balance beyond which you burn the crop with too much fertilizer. I would suggest to significantly reduce the amount of advertisement on the site. Sell the add space with auction. Less advertisement increase the add efficiency. Increase the quality of content to increase the number of readers. Select high quality none intrusive adds that don't disrupt people's experience on the site. In short take back the control of your site advertisement. Prohibit tricks your readers don't like (e.g. tracking), etc. This is not much different from companies and hallmarks selling unhealthy food. The difference with adblocks is that people have a tool filtering out unhealthy food from their view. Who is the bad guy ? The client with its filter or the companies providing unhealthy food ? Regulation doesn't work. We should know it by now. We have to take things in our own hand because the system is not able to keep a sane course by itself (cf. liberalism).
keypusher 10y ago
This only applies to r/technology. Which is a large sub, but still a very small part of reddit.
return0 10y ago
Anything that expedites the process of moving from ads to paying "somehow else" for good content is good. But it falls on the technologists side to come up with something that replaces ads. Redditors are only curing a symptom.
- HappyTypist 10y ago
  Ads have been fine for years until they started tracking you around, flashing annoying animations, auto playing sound or video or taking up the whole page. I'm perfectly content with banner and text ads, as long as they're not animated.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Ads have never been safe. I got adware from an ad ~15 years ago.
    - emp_zealoth 10y ago
      I believe it was said about web experience itself, not security side of things
      - mirimir 10y ago
        That was the focus, yes. But "ads have been fine" was a far broader claim, and just too wrong to ignore. One bloody ad cost me hours of unbillable time. I even invoiced the site ;)
  - gedrap 10y ago
    I don't think that ads were fine for the past decade (I'd even say that they got better but that's just based on my memory). What has changed is that adblocking reached mainstream.
  - LeoNatan25 10y ago
    Good for you being content. I am not. I do not want to see advertisement. I am willing to pay for high quality content. Now where are my options?
rodionos 10y ago
Banning these sites altogether would be too much. Assign a pre-defined downvote so that the hurdle for ad-driven sources is higher to overcome.
- asdfaoeu 10y ago
  They don't have that option as moderators of a subreddit
- phaemon 10y ago
  I don't think it would be too much. Why would it? I'd like to see those ad-laden pages dropped from HN also. As well as sites with paywalls. There are plenty of other pages on the web that can be featured instead.
  - rodionos 10y ago
    Maybe a simple tagging system, like AD for AD-blocked sites, and PW for paywalls. Tags should be community assigned as well so that there is no central authority involved.
  - morgante 10y ago
    Genuine question: do you think all journalism should be done for free? I can somewhat an understand an opposition to advertising or paywalls. Opposing both is unconscionable.
    - criddell 10y ago
      I have no problem with advertising but I don't want to be tracked. So often these are talked about as a single entity but they really aren't, or at least don't have to be.
    - zem 10y ago
      you could argue that you support either or both, but draw the line at free publicity for paid journalism
    - 10y ago
jcoffland 10y ago
I think HN should automatically penalize the scores of paywalled sites. Although I'm not sure HN's pro-corporate politics would ever allow it.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  I think that in practice this happens through the normal voting process.
  - sambe 10y ago
    Why is this sufficient for HN but not for Reddit? If opinion is less divided on Reddit I'd also expect it to be less of a problem and thus less likely to require (auto) moderator input.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Scale. Reddit is bigger with hundreds, if not thousands, of subcultures and norms. While HN has a single stream of stories being voted on, the guidelines for story submissions limits the scope for what can be submitted. The people who read HN are pretty much all technically astute, so when they see an article behind a paywall they don't vote it up - heck, many probably just flag it on principle. If the article is chock full of intrusive advertising, it gets flagged pretty fast. If it is an interesting article that gets to the front page I guarantee you that there will be vocal complaints about the advertising. But most of us here, I would hazard to guess, have installed uBlock Plus of some sort of ad blocker so we probably largely miss it. And the things we find interesting are usually from sources clueful enough not to be so stupid as to employ anti-adblockers.
      - oarsinsync 10y ago
        > Scale. Reddit is bigger with hundreds, if not thousands, of subcultures and norms. But the link is about /r/technology only, not reddit as a whole.
Zelmor 10y ago
Same should go for HN, really. Paywalls and adwalls are a great way to make me not even read the article and thread. Yet, they make frontpage due to buzz.
- Strom 10y ago
  It may surprise you, but there are people here who don't mind these sites. It's already possible to flag links that you think have no place on HN. Please use that instead of trying to setup preemptive censorship.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    I don't think you understand what censorship is.
    - talmand 10y ago
      I see nothing wrong in that usage of the word censorship. Please explain.
- morgante 10y ago
  Yea, it's horrible that high-quality journalists won't just work for free.
  - krapp 10y ago
    No one is saying "high quality" journalists should work for free (although their employers would probably prefer it), only that they can no longer depend on advertising for revenue. If companies want to remain on the web and continue making money they're going to have to be more creative, begging people to view their ads by blocking ad blockers (while understandable) probably isn't going to work in the long run.
    - morgante 10y ago
      The parent was railing against both adwalls and paywalls. If you don't want advertising and refuse to pay for content, I don't see how that's anything less than expecting free journalism.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
I wonder if you could sue a website for serving you malware. Here's my idea for an ad company: * People who want to post ads have to provide their name, address, verified email, and a security deposit(say $500). Larger volumes of ad purchases require either a long history, insurance, or a bank letter to vouch for you. If you load malware anywhere into the system, you get fined and your information gets turned over to the police. * People who want to earn money with advertisements have to provide name, address, verified email, and a security deposit. The security deposit could be funded out of earnings(or not). Fraud is countered by randomly sampling websites and fining offenders if the ad isn't visible. Also they get their information turned over to the police if it was intentional fraud. * Security deposits are returned within 1 month after the advertising relationship is terminated. * Fines are paid out of the security deposit, and your access is restricted until you refill the account(possible with an even bigger deposit). * People who are higher risk(from a shady lawless country, no history or background, etc.) have to pay a higher security deposit. * Ads can be either text or banner ads. Anything Turing-complete needs insurance or a bank letter. * If someone pushes through a porn ad to get advertised on the NYT by miscategorizing it, they get fined. Now all the ads are guaranteed to be of high quality, and the websites you're advertising on are probably higher quality too.
- na85 10y ago
  Sounds great, here's my deposit paid via bitcoin. My business is at 123 fakenschaft, Zurch. My email is a newly created Gmail account.
  - uptown 10y ago
    Your vector of attack doesn't scale very well.
  - MichaelBurge 10y ago
    * Require businesses to provide a tax id or registration number appropriate to their country. * Require security deposits to be paid with a bank transfer, cashier's check, or money order from a country with strong anti-money-laundering laws. * For countries like the US where business information is public, verify the provided business address against public records. * Allow larger sites like the NYT to require higher standards of verification(maybe 6 months active history on your account), so even if you went ahead with your malware attacking(say, using a homeless person to shield you from the cops) it at least wouldn't hit the NYT. Honestly, I think at least taking their security deposit would deter a lot of attackers. You're probably right that it wouldn't help much against targeted attacks at smaller sites.
willvarfar 10y ago
Tangentially, I would like Google to put a warning on navigating to a site that has served malware any time in the past month. This will increase the penalty of serving malware so much that sites will suddenly push back on the ad networks and improve quality dramatically.
- wslh 10y ago
  The problem with Google is that they are labeling as malware a lot of software that is not malware just because they have an .exe. Source: it is happening at my company. It seems like just signing the software is enough to remove this labelling but their policies are not transparent. At the end Google is behaving like a vigilante.
  - tunap 10y ago
    When the IP for a shared hosting server is flagged, the result in search for all sites residing under that IP are saddled with an alt URL titled "This site may be hacked". Their solution to fix it for the dozens/hundreds of benign sites co-hosted on said server? Sign up for more Google services(Google Search Console). In that way, they are behving like a typical corporation.
    - evilDagmar 10y ago
      Sadly for your argument, what Google does there is the correct solution, because it is true.
      - tunap 10y ago
        I disagree. Subscription plays no part in the solution, regardless of what the problem entails. Google could post the reason they mettled in the results page in the first place and require subscription for their expertise in correcting said issue.
    - wslh 10y ago
      I don't use a shared hosting server.
pmontra 10y ago
I second that. I also don't like those sites that require JavaScript to read plain text content. Forbes is an example of both cases, with a twist. The text of the article is embedded in a script tag inside the HTML page and then added to the visible DOM. I could understand a SPA getting JSON from the server but here the content is already in the page.
snappythrowaway 10y ago
I would suggest a emoji based labeling system. Not too intrusive (grey scale) that somehow could signal if article is paywalled / blocking visitors with ad-blockers. For a subset of users (either detected or by user preference), there might be another useful symbol as well for indicating if a website is not tor friendly.
- cooper12 10y ago
  PLOS uses this logo for open access: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLoS_white.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLo.... (an open lock) Based on that Wikipedia uses a closed lock to indicate paywalled sources: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Closed_Access_logo_alternative.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Closed_Access_logo_a.... So how about these: [Closed lock] [Open lock]? (TIL HN doesn't support emoji) I think reddit also allows image use via CSS.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    I would prefer not reusing closed lock since it represents encryption in most browsers.
    - cooper12 10y ago
      Hmm that's a fair point even if it's in a different context since ideally each symbol would retain its own meaning. I'm not sure what a better icon would be then that would be intuitive unless one was decided upon and widely used.
      - protomyth 10y ago
        Its a recent user training issue, so, if it wasn't so soon I would be all happy, but finding a better icon would probably be better. A book with a lock might work.
ctulek 10y ago
Sidenote: we should call it ad-company blockers, not ad blockers
awinter-py 10y ago
Hmm; how about a +5 point boost instead for sites doing paywall innovation? Free content isn't the end goal. Don't we want people to make a living off content? I can't imagine anybody here wouldn't pay 1 or 5 pennies for the second half of a useful article.
- gedrap 10y ago
  In theory, it would work pretty well and there are startups in this space. The problem is that there is a number of different publishers and maintaining account with each of them doesn't sound very convenient. Unified payments system/interface might be better but it's a tough achievement to make.
- joenot443 10y ago
  AFAIK, reddit moderators aren't able to arbitrarily boost posts without the use of bots, which are obviously against reddit TOS.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Don't forget that the world does not only consist of rich Silicon Valley engineers. How on earth should someone from Bangladesh use Reddit? They can't even access PayPal.
  - awinter-py 10y ago
    Agreed -- people in low-cost countries have barriers. They also have opportunities. The income from content goes a much longer way if rent & food are cheaper.
moron4hire 10y ago
You would think, if they have the ability to detect that a user has an ad blocker in place, they could just as easily redirect them to a subscription form for an ad-free experience, rather than block people and lose revenue completely.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  That works only in theory, subscription has a cost which is above and beyond whatever price listed: it's the mental cost tied to renewing, cancelling and tracking it. Single subscription multiple website model may work, but as soon as buy-in ramps up for that model expect everyone jumping in with me-too services, killing it.
  - LeoNatan25 10y ago
    All subscriptions I have on internet websites have been some of my easiest "mental cost". Sites that I visit often, have great content and allow subscription for full ad removal (not partial) - I'm there with my money.
threatofrain 10y ago
What consumers want is a combination of product or service (1) database, (2) curation by category + quality, (3) recommendation, and (4) discovery. As an odd category, there may also be product sponsorship, like with Kickstarter. Advertisements suck at all of these.
S_A_P 10y ago
Ive actually implemented this locally. I reached a breaking point with some of the intrusive ads, so I block ads. If a site(such as Wired) asks me to turn that off, I add it to simple blocker and dont go back. The funny thing is a) I have a print subscription to wired but I cant access the site without turning off ad blocking, and b) I dont miss the online version. If Im just being honest with myself, its doing me a favor by preventing procrastination.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I also have a print subscription to Wired. I don't pay for it directly. I use the airline miles I occasionally get from any company that puts me on a plane at their expense, just to keep the remaining balances from expiring due to inactivity. I usually don't even take it out of the plastic overwrap, because my eyes don't have ad-blockers installed. I guess next time, I can spend some miles on a cheapo flashlight keyfob, or something. I guess I was just sort of throwing them a bone out of 90s nostalgia, anyway. If they don't want me looking at their website on my own terms, I won't do it. And if I stop looking at their website, I don't have much use for their inky paper, either.
xrisk 10y ago
You should really post np.reddit links to prevent non-users of said reddit community from voting. It's the standard practice -- https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro
- Angostura 10y ago
  Since non-users would have to create an account anyway in order to vote, I'm not sure that this is an issue.
  - noneTheHacker 10y ago
    np is meant for Reddit users that are not subscribed to the subreddit. For example, when I am logged into reddit and go to https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4if65h/mod_announcement_were_considering_banning_all/ https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4if65h/mod_annou... I don't see the voting arrows.
  - y4mi 10y ago
    it originates from the meta subreddits ( subreddits that only crosslink to other subreddits, such as bestof ) completely derailed any meaningful discussion as soon as threads were posted in said meta subreddits. its less of an issue if you link from here, as not everybody on this side will be a logged in user on reddit, but it should still be considered polite, considering that there is an actual 'best-practice' for linking
- ManlyBread 10y ago
  It's an unwritten and unofficial rule, no one has to respect that, to me it only fuels the "omg our site that relies on linking to stuff on the internet has been linked somewhere on the internet" victim complex.
aaron695 10y ago
How about they bugger off and not censor my content. Power hungry censors from either the government or forums piss me off. People who own forums have a right to regulate content, true. But bullshit like this aint cool, I and the users are not babies, bugger off, we'll decide with votes.
- Vendan 10y ago
  arguably, they are deciding with votes. There appears to be massive support for the idea, and it's getting lots of upvotes.
esoteric_nonces 10y ago
Maciej (HN handle 'idlewords') has an interesting take on this that I'm struggling to find in my history right now. The basic idea is that all of the data these companies collect is still ultimately useless in practice. We still don't have advertising that is even close to being relevant. But the data retains its toxic qualities (of being a database of every action I take on the Internet and some in the real world). I fire up the YouTube homepage and all of my recommendations are for UK daytime TV. Celebrities, 'Jeremy Kyle' (the UK Jerry Springer), etcetera. YouTube sends me adverts for female hygiene products and dog food. (I am male and I own no dog.) Even when I get advertising that's not selling me stuff that would require I buy something else first (sex change, dog) it's invariably for something vastly overpriced or some sort of megabrand.
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  I love Maciej's writings, though he hasn't published anything for a few months now. His last writing on advertising was this, might be what you're thinking of: http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm I agree with every word.
- slig 10y ago
  Do you use YouTube while logged in? In my experience, the content recommendation on YouTube is the best. I've been learning about electronics and watching a few videos about it. Now YouTube recommends me new content and channels that are extremely relevant. My brother is into guitars, and his frontpage is all about that.
  - evilDagmar 10y ago
    That's the thing... There's one company that figured out that the way to make money on ads is by simply making them relevant to the user, and that's Google. The majority of the other ad companies are still--despite all the massive dot-com failures during the boom--trying to just throw in ad referrals everywhere hoping something will stick, and trying to hand off those connections to the highest bidder... like, maybe if they just keep doing it for decades, somehow it will magically become profitable.
tacos 10y ago
Make it a user option -- sites really shouldn't be in the business of globally blocking domains. And then let me add sites to the .ignore file too, please. Anyone got the list of sites HN currently blocks/penalizes/rewards? I'd love to tweak those options, and add marco.org and buzzfeed to my personal blocklist.
jimbobimbo 10y ago
I wish search engines would start banning Forbes too: very often they're one of the top results, but their implementation of interstitial is broken and lands you on their home page instead of the page which search engine links to. And I don't even use ad blocker!
- spdegabrielle 10y ago
  Does the search engine have a relationship with the ad providers?
rdudek 10y ago
uBlock Origin and enable the anti-adblock killer under 3rd party options seem to usually work great. I also run Privacy Badger add-on which allows me to disable certain scripts and trackers from pages. Works great. I'll subscribe to sites that I visit on daily basis if they offer it with option to disable ads. I have no problem with this. I don't want to be served idiotic malware from some ad-exchange.
kinghrothgar 10y ago
All of this was started by a false accusation. The same guy that posted the tweet that went vial later said he was mistaken: http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware-why-forbes-was.html http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware... "Here is what is clear: The advertisement was not malware. Forbes is still whitelisted from my ad-blocker. We have no evidence of what exactly created this pop-up."
- evilDagmar 10y ago
  That article is kind of saddening because it's incredibly naive. At the very least the "ad" was being run by someone trying to create an air of legitimacy around events like... a random popup IN YOUR BROWSER telling you about host system software you might actually need and should therefore go right ahead and install. Oh HELL no. If it's part of someone's malware campaign, it should be categorized malware. That some dinky piece of their campaign doesn't involve machine-executable code does not matter in the slightest. The weasely logic needing to justify allowing deliberate attempts at mis-education is how one gets sites for which navigation is rather like attempting to defuse a bomb, blindfolded, while riding a stampeding buffalo.
- nickcano 10y ago
  The bottom line, though, is that ads DO serve malware. I work for an endpoint protection company and the most common traces we get from our customers are ones that originate from ads on legitimate websites.
_audakel 10y ago
One easy way I have found to get around some of these site's blocks is disabling javascript in the chrome console and then reloading the page. it works a good amount of the time. you can also wget the page and pass in headers that your a google bot to bypass paywalls on sites like economist and wsj. (this was documented in a previous hn post exactly how to do this)
- bsimpson 10y ago
  I wrote a bookmarklet that catches all scroll events in the capture phase and cancels them. It seems to work pretty well.
jasonkostempski 10y ago
I'm not sure this would be possible via normal subreddit admin tools but I'd like to see this done as an user opt-in feature. Let people post those link if they choose to but also let users choose if they see them or if they get a notice when they try to post a link to one.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Yes, ban both adblock blockers and paywalls. The first are overtly refusing to accept users' terms. The second are trying to have their cake and eat it too: viral content propogation whilst refusing to present content to those who come at it via link aggregators and discussion sites such as Reddit. Both actively thwart Reddit's intended aim: informed discussion of an article _by having read it_. If they don't want to participate, then don't participate. Moreover, advertising, the advertising infrastructure, and multiple aspects of it are creating a seriously problematic WWW information structure: crap content, user-hostile design, hugely excessive bandwidth usage, slow browser response, and privacy and security risks galore. At the same time, the actual creative producers and journalists responsible for primary content are hugely undercompensated. Eliminating the existing advertising regime would allow all of these to be addressed. That said, high-quality information has a very serious revenue problem, and I'd like to highlight that. It's a topic I've explored in some depth, "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/ https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_info...). Or if you prefer a real economist, Hal Varian's "Markets for Information Goods" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.html http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.h...). A frequently proposed solution is micropayments. I don't see those as viable, Clay Shirkey, Nick Szabo, and Andrew Odlyzko have all written at length on why not. Rather, a universal content tax or broadband tax seems an alternative. Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation have suggested this, I'd made my own universal content proposal some time back (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...) I've also done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on amounts. _Total_ global ad spend in 2013 was $500 billion, online was $100 billion. If _only_ the world's richest 1 billion (roughly: US, EU, Japan, Australia) were to contribute to this, the tax would be $100/year to eliminate _all_ online adverts, and $500/year for _all advertising entirely_. The money could fund existing creatives -- writers, editors, film producers, journalists, and musicians -- at roughly _twice_ today's compensation. It's worth a thought.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "The first are overtly refusing to accept users' terms." As they are refusing to accept theirs :) This is just contract negotiation. I'm not sure why you have an issue with it (or would desire to ban it). You have told them "we want to change the terms'. They are saying "no". Great, so move if you don't like that supplier. Humorously, the thing you (and reddit) want to perform by banning is known as "concerted refusal to deal": http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/concerted-refusal-to-deal.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/concerted-refus...
phereford 10y ago
This industry is ripe for innovation. I agree that the state of malware being served through Ad Exchanges is grotesque and I fully employ my ad blocker everywhere. Here is the thing I just dont get. Why doesnt some tech savvy organization create a white label solution that companies can either slap a subdomain on and invite "Customers" to fill ad supply. Self host the curated assets through said white label solution. Moderate with sophisticated computers that are not subject to the vast majority of mal ware (excluding 0-day obviously), and move on. Im sure someone could easily serve the ads off of the main domain anyway to circumvent all of the ad blockers on subdomains. This is a perspective from the outside looking in, but people seem to just complain about the problem instead of looking for solutions. EDIT: BAH, so there is a conversation from last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221859
- soared 10y ago
  Many adblockers use CSS to block ads, but that obviously wouldn't be terribly difficult to overcome. I just don't want to be that guy that lets everyone serve ads that can't be blocked by adblockers.
xg15 10y ago
"We're forcing our users not to post sites that would force them not to force the sites to not force the user's viewing habits by posting ads". You know an arm's race is in progress when...
niccaluim 10y ago
Have media companies ever considered something like the cable TV model? I'm thinking something like ten different sites form a network, and readers pay once (on a subscription basis) for access to the whole network instead of paying each site separately. I definitely am not interested in subscribing separately to (e.g.) Wired, the NY Times, the Economist, WSJ, the New Yorker, etc. But I think I'd be totally down for a single rate that gave me ad-free access to some or all of those.
- mnx 10y ago
  Attempts at that have been made, at least in poland. The "piano" system gives access to a whole bunch of local news publications, forbes, and a major national newspaper or two. It costs ~4.5 USD a month, so ~2-3 hours of an entry level supermarket position pay. I don't know anyone who subscribes.
- Buge 10y ago
  There's Google Contributor which you can pay monthly to see no or reduced ads on many sites that use Google ads. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- soared 10y ago
  If they ever become popular, I'll make a site that scrapes and mirrors the content, then serve malicious ads. The advertising revenue will outweigh my morals.
X86BSD 10y ago
I personally do not mind the "Deck" ad network. To me that is ads done right. I learned about the deck from daringfireball.
SEJeff 10y ago
I genuinely wish HN did this, but with uBlock origin, you can block most of the scripts that ask you to disable adblockers. In a cat/mouse game, the techies are going to win.
TheRealPomax 10y ago
Why are people commenting here, instead of in the reddit request for comments thread? It's literally a call for you to leave your comments on this matter for reddit to read, doing so here is in this case about as counter productive as it gets...
- Namrog84 10y ago
  I have seen in the past when there is a split like this. That there are often different styles and topics of conversation on the subject. I find reading and sometimes participating in both to be worthwhile.
cha5m 10y ago
I honestly like the sites that block adblock. I only use adblock because it is so easy and has such massive benefits, but I still feel guilty than I am not supporting content creators.
gjolund 10y ago
A simple solution to publishers: Curate your ads and serve them statically.
- soared 10y ago
  and still get blocked via CSS selectors.
  - gjolund 10y ago
    at least that is something you can control.
therealdrag0 10y ago
This week I noticed that StackOverflow has voting on ads. Hover over an ad and it shows thumbs up/down. I disable my ad-blocker on sites I want to support and just noticed this. Seems genius to me.

521 points by Hjugo 10y ago

I should think flair would be enough. The community would naturally downvote those links when they thought the content wasn't worth it.

econnors 10y ago

As noted other comments, this would only apply to the /r/technology subreddit. The general feedback is in favor of blocking these types of sites. I'm pretty amazed at the current state of ads. With multiple ad exchanges, private sellers, and static brand deals, the entire serving process is a mess and users are paying for it. I don't think publishing websites are being malicious; they're incentived to make money and just haven't figured out how to do it at a high enough margin while keeping users happy. I just think the entire internet ad industry is in shambles and nobody really knows a solution that makes everyone happy.

tomp 10y ago
Of course they are malicious. They're serving the high-profit ads, which obviously includes malware, where they could be serving low-profit, safe (but boring) ads. That's equivalent to pharmacists selling illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine) simply because they obviously make them more profits.
- cstross 10y ago
  There's a subtle difference: pharmacists are regulated by statute and are legally liable if medication they dispense on prescription causes injury. (Source: I used to be a pharmacist -- in the UK, > 25 years ago, precise regulations vary by jurisdiction.) Ad networks are utterly unregulated. In terms of this pharmacy metaphor they're snake-oil salesmen.
  - Retric 10y ago
    All industry's are regulated. The general case is normal laws. Ad networks serving links to compromised websites is likely already illegal.
    - cstross 10y ago
      I'm talking about professional registration (exams, licenses to practice, supervisory body, jail sentences for impersonation, forefeiture of registration for ethics infractions), not bog-standard trade law.
      - Retric 10y ago
        In the case of Ad networks serving up malware I don't know if that's a real defense. Yes, proactive regulation is often far more effective, but reactive regulation can often catch the worst offenders.
- econnors 10y ago
  It's not that simple. At any one time, a publisher can be serving ads from a few exchanges, a few different private sellers, and custom built ads for brands. And these all are served in different combinations across several different ad units on multiple pages. And some of those ad sellers may be backfilling with other ad networks, or maybe the publisher is backfilling certain ads from the ad exchanges at certain CPM prices. I'd liken it more to a hardware product being shipped with faulty materials when multiple manufacturers are involved and it's extremely difficult to identify the responsible party. Sure, they're responsible for the end product, but it's not so black and white.
  - newjersey 10y ago
    Whatever the combination, I'll blame the site I visit. I've seen bad ads on imgur one time I used the Internet without blocking ads. The ad just started downloading "Firefox patch" without me clicking anything. It is not black and white but it is pretty close. Edit: I have to give Firefox credit here. It actually just prompted me whether I'd like to save the file. I did and uploaded it to virus total. Probably not a good idea if you do anything sensitive on your computer.
  - belorn 10y ago
    Your description doesn't show why a pharmacist selling illegal drugs is dissimilar to a website selling ad space to illegal ad-space buyers. Any time where you've got multiple producers and multiple retailers, you get middle people like those you describe that must juggle demand and supply. Pharmacists have an equally complex path from producer to customer as ads have from ad-space buyer to website visitor. However, let's instead look at the chain of events: An innocent gets malware from an advertisement. The publisher blames the ad-network who in turn blames the criminal. The ad-network claims that they can't curate the advertisements or the margins becomes to small. In the end, the innocent has to take the full fallout of the crime. An innocent gets mistreated by a fake doctor. The hospital blames the hiring agency, who in turn blames the criminal. The hiring agency claims that they can't do background checks and verify CVs of applicants or the margins becomes to small. In the end, the innocent has to take the full fallout of the crime? Why is there such discrepancy between the two cases? Why can one agency do curation and still function, while the other can't? Why can the publisher get away with using a bad ad-network while a hospital is fully legally responsible for using a bad hiring agency? Those seem to be very simple questions, ones that should have very simple answers.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  In this case, high-profit ads include dynamic content (JavaScript or Flash). Safe (but boring) ads would simply be an image or text link with no tracking capabilities that doesn't use CSS hacks to interrupt your page reading. It just sits up there saying, "If you want it, check this out."
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    I can honestly say that I've clicked on quite a few static ads with the intention of learning more. Dynamic ads, however, I refuse to click.
    - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
      Same, and in a few cases I didn't realize they were ads because they were so non-intrusive.
  - puddintane 10y ago
    Tracking still happens with "safe" ads. Generally "image pixels" as they call em are actually server side scripts that then pretend to be an image that way they can still track the users IP and what they were doing at that point in time.
    - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
      That data is already sent to the server. This doesn't give the server control over the user's hardware.
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    Javascript and Flash ads are the more immediately dangerous ads, but you can still distribute malware over image and text links. You just move from exploiting browser vulnerabilities to exploiting user trust, like all of the imitation VLC download pages that have popped up over the years. We'd be better off with only static image/text ads, yes, but malware distribution by means of poorly vetted advertising wouldn't totally vanish.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  I don't think most ad networks are intentionally serving ads like that. Occam's razor, etc. Doesn't make them less culpable for the damage they cause, I'm just saying I don't think it's something they make additional money on, I think it's something that gets slipped under the radar by a few bad actors. They obviously aren't incentivized enough to stop it though so why not implement a more direct compensation? If a user gets a malware program on their machine and it can be traced back to a given provider, that provider should be billed accordingly for the cost of the removal (including if the user can do it themselves, they should get paid for that anyway) as well as lost productivity time. Currently any ad network serving malware just gets to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and keep on making money, and considering how damaging some of this shit can be I'd say that's the first point that needs addressing.
- eyeinthepyramid 10y ago
  You've clearly never worked with ad networks. Even Google serves up malicious ads every once in a while.
  - riskable 10y ago
    There's a difference between merely malicious ads ("Click here for free stuff!"->takes you to a site that exploits your browser) and ads that actively exploit the browser. Any ad network can fall victim to malicious ads but only ad networks that allow embedded scripts can be abused to actively exploit browsers. The solution is dead simple: Don't allow embedded scripts in ads. Period. End of story. Problem no longer a problem. "We're all done here."
chris_wot 10y ago
If it expanded to the rest of Reddit then it might be the impetuous for the news industry to clean up their act. And no, that's not a mistake. It's not advertisers I direct my ire but those who should know better and who apparently are meant to exist for the greater public good: The Press.
- rkangel 10y ago
  Agree: companies will sell what others will buy.
- mtbcoder 10y ago
  If Facebook were to do this, I would agree, but traffic from the vast majority of subreddits and pages is not as substantial as you may think. Some publishers might take notice but I do not think it would stir any kind of immediate action response across the news world.
- prawn 10y ago
  I think you mean impetus rather than impetuous?
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Oops. Dratted iPhone autocorrect. On another reply I was forced to hit edit because I told someone that most editors on HN "unstalk" uBlock Plus. I have no idea under what context I made my iPhone learn that word.
deprave 10y ago
I don't know about "only applies to /r/technology" - we've been there before. Remember when ad blockers were mostly prevalent among techies and visitors to tech sites? Yeah, well, that changed. It may start with /r/technology, but I'm pretty sure it won't end there...
- MBCook 10y ago
  This discussion is specifically from the mods of /r/technology. Will other parts of Reddit follow suit? Maybe. But right now it's just /r/technology.
  - agrona 10y ago
    A mod of /r/sports (~6M users? is that right?) said >Send me your automoderator rule once it's done, we'll add it our sub as well. Seems likely to spread pretty quickly.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  Well, yeah. Things tend to have origins. And if those things are good they tend to expand from those origins...
baldfat 10y ago
> nobody really knows a solution that makes everyone happy Impossible and usually the worst approach to have. The best thing is to have a visionary that blazes the path for the rest to follow. Sadly the vast majority of visionaries will fail.
- riskable 10y ago
  I think the problem here is that regardless of the "visionary"... * You make an ad network that makes advertisers happy. In reality this will pretty much *always* make users *unhappy*. * You make an ad network that makes users happy. In reality this makes advertisers *unhappy*. There's not much middle ground there. The only possible win-win scenario is you make an ad network that makes users happy by only allowing users to advertise to other users. AKA classifieds. ...or you could just have one ad network that advertisers hate that users are happy with but because there's only one the advertisers just have to live with it.
vijayr 10y ago
The other side of the story is that most users don't want to pay for anything on the internet. Not making this up - I've had people tell me they pay for the internet connection, so they don't see a reason to pay for any services on top of it :( So the same person who wouldn't think twice about dropping $5 on a cup of starbucks coffee every day will not pay $5 per month for email (without ads). Not defending the shitty ad scene online. Just want to point out that most people don't want to pay for anything online, they are at least partially responsible for this mess.

mcbits 10y ago

I share the sentiment of the proposal, but what I really don't understand is why user moderation fails to suppress those sites despite their tactics angering so many people.

gabemart 10y ago
Often the demographic that votes on stories can be quite different from the demographic that comments on stories and forms the "community", especially for default subreddits. The majority of people voting on the story may only be reading the headline.
- na85 10y ago
  Reddit is also routinely gamed by bots or paid upvoters.

alblue 10y ago

The nub of the thread is: these sites have put up ad blocker blockers, so you can't see the content without disabling your ad blocker. And yet when you do you are either exposed to full screen or video auto play ads, or in some cases, malware: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-rea... Given that Reddit is a large source of incoming referrals this stance (if implemented) might be a sufficient lever to send a signal to get those sites to improve their environment. In any case since the sites are still able to use curated self hosted ads (ie not JavaScript redirects to externally hosted providers) they are able to sell static ad space to make money even with adblockers enabled. It might be worth seeing what the outcome for the experiment is (if it goes ahead) and then seeing if the same logic would work for HN.

chmike 10y ago
The problem is that sites with advertisement are shooting themselves in the foot. They produce valuable and high quality content attracting readers and increase revenues by providing more advertisement. The amount of advertisement drops the efficiency of advertisement, so price drops and you put more advertisement. None of these people really considered the user experience on their site, except google on the google search result page. This is like thinking that you would increase a crop yield by increasing the amount of fertilizer you put on it. There is an optimal balance beyond which you burn the crop with too much fertilizer. I would suggest to significantly reduce the amount of advertisement on the site. Sell the add space with auction. Less advertisement increase the add efficiency. Increase the quality of content to increase the number of readers. Select high quality none intrusive adds that don't disrupt people's experience on the site. In short take back the control of your site advertisement. Prohibit tricks your readers don't like (e.g. tracking), etc. This is not much different from companies and hallmarks selling unhealthy food. The difference with adblocks is that people have a tool filtering out unhealthy food from their view. Who is the bad guy ? The client with its filter or the companies providing unhealthy food ? Regulation doesn't work. We should know it by now. We have to take things in our own hand because the system is not able to keep a sane course by itself (cf. liberalism).

keypusher 10y ago

This only applies to r/technology. Which is a large sub, but still a very small part of reddit.

return0 10y ago

Anything that expedites the process of moving from ads to paying "somehow else" for good content is good. But it falls on the technologists side to come up with something that replaces ads. Redditors are only curing a symptom.

HappyTypist 10y ago
Ads have been fine for years until they started tracking you around, flashing annoying animations, auto playing sound or video or taking up the whole page. I'm perfectly content with banner and text ads, as long as they're not animated.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Ads have never been safe. I got adware from an ad ~15 years ago.
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    I believe it was said about web experience itself, not security side of things
    - mirimir 10y ago
      That was the focus, yes. But "ads have been fine" was a far broader claim, and just too wrong to ignore. One bloody ad cost me hours of unbillable time. I even invoiced the site ;)
- gedrap 10y ago
  I don't think that ads were fine for the past decade (I'd even say that they got better but that's just based on my memory). What has changed is that adblocking reached mainstream.
- LeoNatan25 10y ago
  Good for you being content. I am not. I do not want to see advertisement. I am willing to pay for high quality content. Now where are my options?

rodionos 10y ago

Banning these sites altogether would be too much. Assign a pre-defined downvote so that the hurdle for ad-driven sources is higher to overcome.

asdfaoeu 10y ago
They don't have that option as moderators of a subreddit
phaemon 10y ago
I don't think it would be too much. Why would it? I'd like to see those ad-laden pages dropped from HN also. As well as sites with paywalls. There are plenty of other pages on the web that can be featured instead.
- rodionos 10y ago
  Maybe a simple tagging system, like AD for AD-blocked sites, and PW for paywalls. Tags should be community assigned as well so that there is no central authority involved.
- morgante 10y ago
  Genuine question: do you think all journalism should be done for free? I can somewhat an understand an opposition to advertising or paywalls. Opposing both is unconscionable.
  - criddell 10y ago
    I have no problem with advertising but I don't want to be tracked. So often these are talked about as a single entity but they really aren't, or at least don't have to be.
  - zem 10y ago
    you could argue that you support either or both, but draw the line at free publicity for paid journalism
  - 10y ago

jcoffland 10y ago

I think HN should automatically penalize the scores of paywalled sites. Although I'm not sure HN's pro-corporate politics would ever allow it.

chris_wot 10y ago
I think that in practice this happens through the normal voting process.
- sambe 10y ago
  Why is this sufficient for HN but not for Reddit? If opinion is less divided on Reddit I'd also expect it to be less of a problem and thus less likely to require (auto) moderator input.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Scale. Reddit is bigger with hundreds, if not thousands, of subcultures and norms. While HN has a single stream of stories being voted on, the guidelines for story submissions limits the scope for what can be submitted. The people who read HN are pretty much all technically astute, so when they see an article behind a paywall they don't vote it up - heck, many probably just flag it on principle. If the article is chock full of intrusive advertising, it gets flagged pretty fast. If it is an interesting article that gets to the front page I guarantee you that there will be vocal complaints about the advertising. But most of us here, I would hazard to guess, have installed uBlock Plus of some sort of ad blocker so we probably largely miss it. And the things we find interesting are usually from sources clueful enough not to be so stupid as to employ anti-adblockers.
    - oarsinsync 10y ago
      > Scale. Reddit is bigger with hundreds, if not thousands, of subcultures and norms. But the link is about /r/technology only, not reddit as a whole.

Zelmor 10y ago

Same should go for HN, really. Paywalls and adwalls are a great way to make me not even read the article and thread. Yet, they make frontpage due to buzz.

Strom 10y ago
It may surprise you, but there are people here who don't mind these sites. It's already possible to flag links that you think have no place on HN. Please use that instead of trying to setup preemptive censorship.
- coldpie 10y ago
  I don't think you understand what censorship is.
  - talmand 10y ago
    I see nothing wrong in that usage of the word censorship. Please explain.
morgante 10y ago
Yea, it's horrible that high-quality journalists won't just work for free.
- krapp 10y ago
  No one is saying "high quality" journalists should work for free (although their employers would probably prefer it), only that they can no longer depend on advertising for revenue. If companies want to remain on the web and continue making money they're going to have to be more creative, begging people to view their ads by blocking ad blockers (while understandable) probably isn't going to work in the long run.
  - morgante 10y ago
    The parent was railing against both adwalls and paywalls. If you don't want advertising and refuse to pay for content, I don't see how that's anything less than expecting free journalism.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

I wonder if you could sue a website for serving you malware. Here's my idea for an ad company: * People who want to post ads have to provide their name, address, verified email, and a security deposit(say $500). Larger volumes of ad purchases require either a long history, insurance, or a bank letter to vouch for you. If you load malware anywhere into the system, you get fined and your information gets turned over to the police. * People who want to earn money with advertisements have to provide name, address, verified email, and a security deposit. The security deposit could be funded out of earnings(or not). Fraud is countered by randomly sampling websites and fining offenders if the ad isn't visible. Also they get their information turned over to the police if it was intentional fraud. * Security deposits are returned within 1 month after the advertising relationship is terminated. * Fines are paid out of the security deposit, and your access is restricted until you refill the account(possible with an even bigger deposit). * People who are higher risk(from a shady lawless country, no history or background, etc.) have to pay a higher security deposit. * Ads can be either text or banner ads. Anything Turing-complete needs insurance or a bank letter. * If someone pushes through a porn ad to get advertised on the NYT by miscategorizing it, they get fined. Now all the ads are guaranteed to be of high quality, and the websites you're advertising on are probably higher quality too.

na85 10y ago
Sounds great, here's my deposit paid via bitcoin. My business is at 123 fakenschaft, Zurch. My email is a newly created Gmail account.
- uptown 10y ago
  Your vector of attack doesn't scale very well.
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  * Require businesses to provide a tax id or registration number appropriate to their country. * Require security deposits to be paid with a bank transfer, cashier's check, or money order from a country with strong anti-money-laundering laws. * For countries like the US where business information is public, verify the provided business address against public records. * Allow larger sites like the NYT to require higher standards of verification(maybe 6 months active history on your account), so even if you went ahead with your malware attacking(say, using a homeless person to shield you from the cops) it at least wouldn't hit the NYT. Honestly, I think at least taking their security deposit would deter a lot of attackers. You're probably right that it wouldn't help much against targeted attacks at smaller sites.

willvarfar 10y ago

Tangentially, I would like Google to put a warning on navigating to a site that has served malware any time in the past month. This will increase the penalty of serving malware so much that sites will suddenly push back on the ad networks and improve quality dramatically.

wslh 10y ago
The problem with Google is that they are labeling as malware a lot of software that is not malware just because they have an .exe. Source: it is happening at my company. It seems like just signing the software is enough to remove this labelling but their policies are not transparent. At the end Google is behaving like a vigilante.
- tunap 10y ago
  When the IP for a shared hosting server is flagged, the result in search for all sites residing under that IP are saddled with an alt URL titled "This site may be hacked". Their solution to fix it for the dozens/hundreds of benign sites co-hosted on said server? Sign up for more Google services(Google Search Console). In that way, they are behving like a typical corporation.
  - evilDagmar 10y ago
    Sadly for your argument, what Google does there is the correct solution, because it is true.
    - tunap 10y ago
      I disagree. Subscription plays no part in the solution, regardless of what the problem entails. Google could post the reason they mettled in the results page in the first place and require subscription for their expertise in correcting said issue.
  - wslh 10y ago
    I don't use a shared hosting server.

pmontra 10y ago

I second that. I also don't like those sites that require JavaScript to read plain text content. Forbes is an example of both cases, with a twist. The text of the article is embedded in a script tag inside the HTML page and then added to the visible DOM. I could understand a SPA getting JSON from the server but here the content is already in the page.

snappythrowaway 10y ago

I would suggest a emoji based labeling system. Not too intrusive (grey scale) that somehow could signal if article is paywalled / blocking visitors with ad-blockers. For a subset of users (either detected or by user preference), there might be another useful symbol as well for indicating if a website is not tor friendly.

cooper12 10y ago
PLOS uses this logo for open access: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLoS_white.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLo.... (an open lock) Based on that Wikipedia uses a closed lock to indicate paywalled sources: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Closed_Access_logo_alternative.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Closed_Access_logo_a.... So how about these: [Closed lock] [Open lock]? (TIL HN doesn't support emoji) I think reddit also allows image use via CSS.
- protomyth 10y ago
  I would prefer not reusing closed lock since it represents encryption in most browsers.
  - cooper12 10y ago
    Hmm that's a fair point even if it's in a different context since ideally each symbol would retain its own meaning. I'm not sure what a better icon would be then that would be intuitive unless one was decided upon and widely used.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Its a recent user training issue, so, if it wasn't so soon I would be all happy, but finding a better icon would probably be better. A book with a lock might work.

ctulek 10y ago

Sidenote: we should call it ad-company blockers, not ad blockers

awinter-py 10y ago

Hmm; how about a +5 point boost instead for sites doing paywall innovation? Free content isn't the end goal. Don't we want people to make a living off content? I can't imagine anybody here wouldn't pay 1 or 5 pennies for the second half of a useful article.

gedrap 10y ago
In theory, it would work pretty well and there are startups in this space. The problem is that there is a number of different publishers and maintaining account with each of them doesn't sound very convenient. Unified payments system/interface might be better but it's a tough achievement to make.
joenot443 10y ago
AFAIK, reddit moderators aren't able to arbitrarily boost posts without the use of bots, which are obviously against reddit TOS.
angry-hacker 10y ago
Don't forget that the world does not only consist of rich Silicon Valley engineers. How on earth should someone from Bangladesh use Reddit? They can't even access PayPal.
- awinter-py 10y ago
  Agreed -- people in low-cost countries have barriers. They also have opportunities. The income from content goes a much longer way if rent & food are cheaper.

moron4hire 10y ago

You would think, if they have the ability to detect that a user has an ad blocker in place, they could just as easily redirect them to a subscription form for an ad-free experience, rather than block people and lose revenue completely.

LoSboccacc 10y ago
That works only in theory, subscription has a cost which is above and beyond whatever price listed: it's the mental cost tied to renewing, cancelling and tracking it. Single subscription multiple website model may work, but as soon as buy-in ramps up for that model expect everyone jumping in with me-too services, killing it.
- LeoNatan25 10y ago
  All subscriptions I have on internet websites have been some of my easiest "mental cost". Sites that I visit often, have great content and allow subscription for full ad removal (not partial) - I'm there with my money.

threatofrain 10y ago

What consumers want is a combination of product or service (1) database, (2) curation by category + quality, (3) recommendation, and (4) discovery. As an odd category, there may also be product sponsorship, like with Kickstarter. Advertisements suck at all of these.

S_A_P 10y ago

Ive actually implemented this locally. I reached a breaking point with some of the intrusive ads, so I block ads. If a site(such as Wired) asks me to turn that off, I add it to simple blocker and dont go back. The funny thing is a) I have a print subscription to wired but I cant access the site without turning off ad blocking, and b) I dont miss the online version. If Im just being honest with myself, its doing me a favor by preventing procrastination.

logfromblammo 10y ago
I also have a print subscription to Wired. I don't pay for it directly. I use the airline miles I occasionally get from any company that puts me on a plane at their expense, just to keep the remaining balances from expiring due to inactivity. I usually don't even take it out of the plastic overwrap, because my eyes don't have ad-blockers installed. I guess next time, I can spend some miles on a cheapo flashlight keyfob, or something. I guess I was just sort of throwing them a bone out of 90s nostalgia, anyway. If they don't want me looking at their website on my own terms, I won't do it. And if I stop looking at their website, I don't have much use for their inky paper, either.

xrisk 10y ago

You should really post np.reddit links to prevent non-users of said reddit community from voting. It's the standard practice -- https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro

Angostura 10y ago
Since non-users would have to create an account anyway in order to vote, I'm not sure that this is an issue.
- noneTheHacker 10y ago
  np is meant for Reddit users that are not subscribed to the subreddit. For example, when I am logged into reddit and go to https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4if65h/mod_announcement_were_considering_banning_all/ https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4if65h/mod_annou... I don't see the voting arrows.
- y4mi 10y ago
  it originates from the meta subreddits ( subreddits that only crosslink to other subreddits, such as bestof ) completely derailed any meaningful discussion as soon as threads were posted in said meta subreddits. its less of an issue if you link from here, as not everybody on this side will be a logged in user on reddit, but it should still be considered polite, considering that there is an actual 'best-practice' for linking
ManlyBread 10y ago
It's an unwritten and unofficial rule, no one has to respect that, to me it only fuels the "omg our site that relies on linking to stuff on the internet has been linked somewhere on the internet" victim complex.

aaron695 10y ago

How about they bugger off and not censor my content. Power hungry censors from either the government or forums piss me off. People who own forums have a right to regulate content, true. But bullshit like this aint cool, I and the users are not babies, bugger off, we'll decide with votes.

Vendan 10y ago
arguably, they are deciding with votes. There appears to be massive support for the idea, and it's getting lots of upvotes.

esoteric_nonces 10y ago

Maciej (HN handle 'idlewords') has an interesting take on this that I'm struggling to find in my history right now. The basic idea is that all of the data these companies collect is still ultimately useless in practice. We still don't have advertising that is even close to being relevant. But the data retains its toxic qualities (of being a database of every action I take on the Internet and some in the real world). I fire up the YouTube homepage and all of my recommendations are for UK daytime TV. Celebrities, 'Jeremy Kyle' (the UK Jerry Springer), etcetera. YouTube sends me adverts for female hygiene products and dog food. (I am male and I own no dog.) Even when I get advertising that's not selling me stuff that would require I buy something else first (sex change, dog) it's invariably for something vastly overpriced or some sort of megabrand.

throwaway7767 10y ago
I love Maciej's writings, though he hasn't published anything for a few months now. His last writing on advertising was this, might be what you're thinking of: http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm I agree with every word.
slig 10y ago
Do you use YouTube while logged in? In my experience, the content recommendation on YouTube is the best. I've been learning about electronics and watching a few videos about it. Now YouTube recommends me new content and channels that are extremely relevant. My brother is into guitars, and his frontpage is all about that.
- evilDagmar 10y ago
  That's the thing... There's one company that figured out that the way to make money on ads is by simply making them relevant to the user, and that's Google. The majority of the other ad companies are still--despite all the massive dot-com failures during the boom--trying to just throw in ad referrals everywhere hoping something will stick, and trying to hand off those connections to the highest bidder... like, maybe if they just keep doing it for decades, somehow it will magically become profitable.

tacos 10y ago

Make it a user option -- sites really shouldn't be in the business of globally blocking domains. And then let me add sites to the .ignore file too, please. Anyone got the list of sites HN currently blocks/penalizes/rewards? I'd love to tweak those options, and add marco.org and buzzfeed to my personal blocklist.

jimbobimbo 10y ago

I wish search engines would start banning Forbes too: very often they're one of the top results, but their implementation of interstitial is broken and lands you on their home page instead of the page which search engine links to. And I don't even use ad blocker!

spdegabrielle 10y ago
Does the search engine have a relationship with the ad providers?

rdudek 10y ago

uBlock Origin and enable the anti-adblock killer under 3rd party options seem to usually work great. I also run Privacy Badger add-on which allows me to disable certain scripts and trackers from pages. Works great. I'll subscribe to sites that I visit on daily basis if they offer it with option to disable ads. I have no problem with this. I don't want to be served idiotic malware from some ad-exchange.

kinghrothgar 10y ago

All of this was started by a false accusation. The same guy that posted the tweet that went vial later said he was mistaken: http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware-why-forbes-was.html http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware... "Here is what is clear: The advertisement was not malware. Forbes is still whitelisted from my ad-blocker. We have no evidence of what exactly created this pop-up."

evilDagmar 10y ago
That article is kind of saddening because it's incredibly naive. At the very least the "ad" was being run by someone trying to create an air of legitimacy around events like... a random popup IN YOUR BROWSER telling you about host system software you might actually need and should therefore go right ahead and install. Oh HELL no. If it's part of someone's malware campaign, it should be categorized malware. That some dinky piece of their campaign doesn't involve machine-executable code does not matter in the slightest. The weasely logic needing to justify allowing deliberate attempts at mis-education is how one gets sites for which navigation is rather like attempting to defuse a bomb, blindfolded, while riding a stampeding buffalo.
nickcano 10y ago
The bottom line, though, is that ads DO serve malware. I work for an endpoint protection company and the most common traces we get from our customers are ones that originate from ads on legitimate websites.

_audakel 10y ago

One easy way I have found to get around some of these site's blocks is disabling javascript in the chrome console and then reloading the page. it works a good amount of the time. you can also wget the page and pass in headers that your a google bot to bypass paywalls on sites like economist and wsj. (this was documented in a previous hn post exactly how to do this)

bsimpson 10y ago
I wrote a bookmarklet that catches all scroll events in the capture phase and cancels them. It seems to work pretty well.

jasonkostempski 10y ago

I'm not sure this would be possible via normal subreddit admin tools but I'd like to see this done as an user opt-in feature. Let people post those link if they choose to but also let users choose if they see them or if they get a notice when they try to post a link to one.

dredmorbius 10y ago

Yes, ban both adblock blockers and paywalls. The first are overtly refusing to accept users' terms. The second are trying to have their cake and eat it too: viral content propogation whilst refusing to present content to those who come at it via link aggregators and discussion sites such as Reddit. Both actively thwart Reddit's intended aim: informed discussion of an article _by having read it_. If they don't want to participate, then don't participate. Moreover, advertising, the advertising infrastructure, and multiple aspects of it are creating a seriously problematic WWW information structure: crap content, user-hostile design, hugely excessive bandwidth usage, slow browser response, and privacy and security risks galore. At the same time, the actual creative producers and journalists responsible for primary content are hugely undercompensated. Eliminating the existing advertising regime would allow all of these to be addressed. That said, high-quality information has a very serious revenue problem, and I'd like to highlight that. It's a topic I've explored in some depth, "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/ https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_info...). Or if you prefer a real economist, Hal Varian's "Markets for Information Goods" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.html http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.h...). A frequently proposed solution is micropayments. I don't see those as viable, Clay Shirkey, Nick Szabo, and Andrew Odlyzko have all written at length on why not. Rather, a universal content tax or broadband tax seems an alternative. Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation have suggested this, I'd made my own universal content proposal some time back (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...) I've also done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on amounts. _Total_ global ad spend in 2013 was $500 billion, online was $100 billion. If _only_ the world's richest 1 billion (roughly: US, EU, Japan, Australia) were to contribute to this, the tax would be $100/year to eliminate _all_ online adverts, and $500/year for _all advertising entirely_. The money could fund existing creatives -- writers, editors, film producers, journalists, and musicians -- at roughly _twice_ today's compensation. It's worth a thought.

DannyBee 10y ago
"The first are overtly refusing to accept users' terms." As they are refusing to accept theirs :) This is just contract negotiation. I'm not sure why you have an issue with it (or would desire to ban it). You have told them "we want to change the terms'. They are saying "no". Great, so move if you don't like that supplier. Humorously, the thing you (and reddit) want to perform by banning is known as "concerted refusal to deal": http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/concerted-refusal-to-deal.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/concerted-refus...

phereford 10y ago

This industry is ripe for innovation. I agree that the state of malware being served through Ad Exchanges is grotesque and I fully employ my ad blocker everywhere. Here is the thing I just dont get. Why doesnt some tech savvy organization create a white label solution that companies can either slap a subdomain on and invite "Customers" to fill ad supply. Self host the curated assets through said white label solution. Moderate with sophisticated computers that are not subject to the vast majority of mal ware (excluding 0-day obviously), and move on. Im sure someone could easily serve the ads off of the main domain anyway to circumvent all of the ad blockers on subdomains. This is a perspective from the outside looking in, but people seem to just complain about the problem instead of looking for solutions. EDIT: BAH, so there is a conversation from last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221859

soared 10y ago
Many adblockers use CSS to block ads, but that obviously wouldn't be terribly difficult to overcome. I just don't want to be that guy that lets everyone serve ads that can't be blocked by adblockers.

xg15 10y ago

"We're forcing our users not to post sites that would force them not to force the sites to not force the user's viewing habits by posting ads". You know an arm's race is in progress when...

niccaluim 10y ago

Have media companies ever considered something like the cable TV model? I'm thinking something like ten different sites form a network, and readers pay once (on a subscription basis) for access to the whole network instead of paying each site separately. I definitely am not interested in subscribing separately to (e.g.) Wired, the NY Times, the Economist, WSJ, the New Yorker, etc. But I think I'd be totally down for a single rate that gave me ad-free access to some or all of those.

mnx 10y ago
Attempts at that have been made, at least in poland. The "piano" system gives access to a whole bunch of local news publications, forbes, and a major national newspaper or two. It costs ~4.5 USD a month, so ~2-3 hours of an entry level supermarket position pay. I don't know anyone who subscribes.
Buge 10y ago
There's Google Contributor which you can pay monthly to see no or reduced ads on many sites that use Google ads. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
soared 10y ago
If they ever become popular, I'll make a site that scrapes and mirrors the content, then serve malicious ads. The advertising revenue will outweigh my morals.

X86BSD 10y ago

I personally do not mind the "Deck" ad network. To me that is ads done right. I learned about the deck from daringfireball.

SEJeff 10y ago

I genuinely wish HN did this, but with uBlock origin, you can block most of the scripts that ask you to disable adblockers. In a cat/mouse game, the techies are going to win.

TheRealPomax 10y ago

Why are people commenting here, instead of in the reddit request for comments thread? It's literally a call for you to leave your comments on this matter for reddit to read, doing so here is in this case about as counter productive as it gets...

Namrog84 10y ago
I have seen in the past when there is a split like this. That there are often different styles and topics of conversation on the subject. I find reading and sometimes participating in both to be worthwhile.

cha5m 10y ago

I honestly like the sites that block adblock. I only use adblock because it is so easy and has such massive benefits, but I still feel guilty than I am not supporting content creators.

gjolund 10y ago

A simple solution to publishers: Curate your ads and serve them statically.

soared 10y ago
and still get blocked via CSS selectors.
- gjolund 10y ago
  at least that is something you can control.

therealdrag0 10y ago

This week I noticed that StackOverflow has voting on ads. Hover over an ad and it shows thumbs up/down. I disable my ad-blocker on sites I want to support and just noticed this. Seems genius to me.