3 ms·

Maybe we need smarter ad blockers. Publications right now have little incentive to improve their ads with regards to security, readers' resources or quality –

Maybe we need smarter ad blockers. Publications right now have little incentive to improve their ads with regards to security, readers' resources or quality – because if the LA Times motivates you to install an ad blocker, the NYT is getting hit as well. The tragedy of the commoners, so to speak. If ad blockers would aggressively judge each publisher, ad network and/or advertiser and rewarded good behaviour by showing the ads, I could see publishers prioritising the user experience. I'm pretty sure the publishers and journalists themselves look at these websites with horror, and they'll jump at the chance to regain some quality. The adblock+ model is tangentially similar, but charging the publishers is simply too close to blackmail to be acceptable.

bsder 10y ago
> Maybe we need smarter ad blockers. And maybe we ad purveyors who don't suck. I occasionally do tech support on relative's computers and am appalled by how slow they are without an ad blocker. I'll go even more extreme, if my browsing experience on your site invokes more than your domain and a single CDN domain, you FAIL. If you want to serve ads, you should have to put your resources and the reputation of your domain at risk to serve them.
bigbugbag 10y ago
In other parts of the world they would find who is making those ads and who is in charge of those and burn their houses down or chop them with machetes. Suddenly the number of people willing to produce ads for clients and said clients is dramatically reduced. I'm not suggesting this kind of extreme response, my point is there's no punishment for putting up those ads so there's no incentive to behave correctly and we're stuck in a spiraling vicious cycle. Breaking this cycle and turn into a virtuous cycle requires a paradigm shift and I'm afraid this is not going to happen by itself. Moving away from ads as a business model means wiping out google, facebook and a few others big players so whatever effort to emerge a new business model will be resisted by those who have the power and can burn money for years without even noticing it. Until then I have two solution, the first is a combination of noscript[1] and ublock origin[2] in my browser and the the second is wallabag[3] which for the LAT page given as example gives this: http://share.pho.to/AegpU http://share.pho.to/AegpU [1]: http://noscript.net/ http://noscript.net/ [2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [3]: https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en and https://wallabag.it/en https://wallabag.it/en
- matt4077 10y ago
  Those are some pretty racist stereotypes you have of wherever you think people are going around chopping each other with machetes.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    I don't think he singled out a specific race. I would say that it's not too far put though. The world is a pretty ugly place in some parts. I think we in the tech community need to work on smarter ad blocker. The history goes that ad folks abused window.popup and then browser vendors blocked that. Then came chrome who is supported by world's largest ad engine, but they were nice to give us extensions. So we had adblock extensions that gave us a ton of CSS injected in every page. Now need smart js to fool the page thinking it has ads. I would love to see browser support showing a big fat red icon when you're being tracked and page is misbehaving.

bsder 10y ago

> Maybe we need smarter ad blockers. And maybe we ad purveyors who don't suck. I occasionally do tech support on relative's computers and am appalled by how slow they are without an ad blocker. I'll go even more extreme, if my browsing experience on your site invokes more than your domain and a single CDN domain, you FAIL. If you want to serve ads, you should have to put your resources and the reputation of your domain at risk to serve them.

bigbugbag 10y ago

In other parts of the world they would find who is making those ads and who is in charge of those and burn their houses down or chop them with machetes. Suddenly the number of people willing to produce ads for clients and said clients is dramatically reduced. I'm not suggesting this kind of extreme response, my point is there's no punishment for putting up those ads so there's no incentive to behave correctly and we're stuck in a spiraling vicious cycle. Breaking this cycle and turn into a virtuous cycle requires a paradigm shift and I'm afraid this is not going to happen by itself. Moving away from ads as a business model means wiping out google, facebook and a few others big players so whatever effort to emerge a new business model will be resisted by those who have the power and can burn money for years without even noticing it. Until then I have two solution, the first is a combination of noscript[1] and ublock origin[2] in my browser and the the second is wallabag[3] which for the LAT page given as example gives this: http://share.pho.to/AegpU http://share.pho.to/AegpU [1]: http://noscript.net/ http://noscript.net/ [2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [3]: https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en and https://wallabag.it/en https://wallabag.it/en

matt4077 10y ago
Those are some pretty racist stereotypes you have of wherever you think people are going around chopping each other with machetes.
- nojvek 10y ago
  I don't think he singled out a specific race. I would say that it's not too far put though. The world is a pretty ugly place in some parts. I think we in the tech community need to work on smarter ad blocker. The history goes that ad folks abused window.popup and then browser vendors blocked that. Then came chrome who is supported by world's largest ad engine, but they were nice to give us extensions. So we had adblock extensions that gave us a ton of CSS injected in every page. Now need smart js to fool the page thinking it has ads. I would love to see browser support showing a big fat red icon when you're being tracked and page is misbehaving.