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As someone else, I'd gladly ruin advertising and all businesses that rely on it; it's immoral (involuntary invasion of other people's minds) and a terrible busi
by tomp 9y ago
As someone else, I'd gladly ruin advertising and all businesses that rely on it; it's immoral (involuntary invasion of other people's minds) and a terrible business model and should die ASAP.
Edit: most ad-blockers don't actually block ads; they just block cross-domain, spying widgets. Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted, untracked image that's actually an ad. The fact that you complain about adblockers implies that you don't do that, which implies that you're using bad practices (e.g. spying on users).
- zdkl 9y agoI dislike advertising too and would gladly see it and the related industry burn in a fire but it's neither immoral or a terrible business model. Many business benefit greatly from some amount of advertisement and it's a practical way to monetise people's attention. What is immoral is the cohort of brilliant minds who've made the optimisation of advertisement the quest of the century.
- LukaD 9y agoSo there is nothing wrong with involuntary invasion of other people's minds?
- convery 9y agoI love how you people always find new ways of wording shit to gain some moral superiority. Can't wait for the logical conclusion, "Netflix's servers are heating up the planet while processing my request; I DO NOT CONSENT TO THIS!! Thus my piracy is for the good of the land".
- icebraining 9y agoIf sites warned that they will load trackers beforehand, your accusation would make sense: people could just not enter the site. But as it stands, even if you're willing to forgo using such sites, you have to load trackers to know that the site uses them. So an adblocker/anti-tracker is a necessary protection.
- LukaD 9y agoYou got me. Gaining moral superiority is what I was after.
- yew 9y agoThe only thing you'll achieve with that attitude is convincing people that there's no point in slowing down or talking things over.
- wott 9y ago> wording shit The head of the first French TV channel himself bragged that "his job was to sell available brain time".
- zdkl 9y agoWell so far I've lived fairly well, being "involuntarily invaded" by art for instance, so I'm not sure I see merit in the invasion argument. On the the other hand if you're complaining about the shady manipulations going on behind the scenes to fuel the data driven marketing and advertising schemes then sure you have a point.
- wyager 9y agoYou consent to go to the website that has ads on it. On the other hand, you don't consent to seeing a billboard whilst on public roads, so I don't think I'd object to people "defending themselves" (whatever that looks like) from billboards.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- convery 9y ago> Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted, untracked image that's actually an ad. Which is largely impossible for smaller sites. If you contact companies directly and ask if they'd like to advertise (or just have a contact page) they expect you to have millions of daily users. Not to mention that you have to build systems to track how many times the banner is shown to the users and have some way to verify this (e.g. that they are not bots/crawlers). Saying; "just host your own ads" is a lot similar to "if you don't like the software, just make your own from scratch". It's not that easy for most people.
- tomp 9y agoMost sites have tracking via GA as well, why not just show advertisers that, and let them buy e.g. 1/3 of the monthly traffic? AFAIK most ad-blockers don't block GA (though other plugins do). Edit: Ah, I just checked, uBlock apparently blocks GA whereas AdBlock doesn't.
- LeoNatan25 9y agoIf you add any privacy related list to any blocker, GA is blocked, thankfully.
- takeda 9y agoAdBlock now allows ads and trackers from companies that satisfy their proper ad criteria. One of the criteria is also a payment that depends on the size of your company.
- icebraining 9y agoRight, but it won't be impossible when the alternative is not advertising at all in millions of sites.
- gfody 9y agothis is the real shame. people don't block ads because they can't stand the site of them. it's because the whole ad infrastructure is so janky that it makes the browsing experience glitchy and unstable. nobody wants cookie stuffing popunder free download now buttons on their site but ad providers don't really give much in the way of being able to selectively filter those out.
- tannhaeuser 9y agoI'm hearing this moralistic (and naive IMHO) argument a lot lately. Do you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead? Please don't rant against "evil ads" like that; rather, think about an economically feasible model which allows content creation and the web to thrive. The problem with ads, and the sole reason I'm personally using an ad blocker, is tracking. For me, mass surveillance isn't an adequate compromise to make for free content. I don't have a problem at all with classic banner ads OTOH. By merely switching off JavaScript you used to able to switch off most tracking years ago. But today's web pretty much requires JavaScript for even the simplest interactivity. Thank you W3C and WHATWG and Google for HTML5's lameness.
- icebraining 9y agoDo you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead? As if we didn't have that already?
- DarkCrusader2 9y agoOne thing I wanted to do was to allow ads everywhere and only block ones with obtrusive ads. That is instead of whitelisting good ones, I would have to only blacklist bad ones. But could find out how to do that with uBlock. Maybe somebody here can help.
- KGIII 9y agoYou can try uMatrix. Same author. Adjust the defaults. There is a learning curve.
- jasonkostempski 9y agoDo you not count tracking as obtrusive?
- mess110 9y agoLets see if Basic-Attention-Token works
- Semaphor 9y agoThe majority of our companies income comes from Amazon affiliate sales. We have our own widget, backend pulls the information from Amazon via their API, front end shows the products (we have a lot of structured data, so we know which products are actually relevant to show and don't have to rely on Amazon). No adblocker blocks this and it pulls no external resources besides the product image from amazon.
- gfody 9y agoyou're doing it right. what's needed is tooling that allows other publishers to do this for basic ads.
- featherverse 9y agoWhat's your website? I will post some feature requests to ad blockers to block the advertising you're using.
- peddamat 9y agoIf the current generation of ad technologies ever get completely blocked, alternate technologies will emerge for companies to recreate a dark version of ad networks, sharing web server logs, etc.
- endymi0n 9y agoNot only that, but like the "War on Drugs" is doomed to fail, so is the "war on Ads" - or any other market in which there is significant demand. Companies need to advertise. If they don't sell their products, they go to die. Here's some real world impact of Adblockers: Advertorials, Fake Reviews, increasily covert forum spam and Influencer Marketing. Not to mention increasing hard work of PR agencies chiseling away at reputable sources like Wikipedia. I basically can't trust anyone on the internet anymore - and this trend will only accelerate if companies can't reach interested prospects via clearly marked ad slots anymore. All this advertising need and money isn't going away over night if banner ads are finally gotten rid of: it will simply go somewhere else.
- gaius 9y agoCompanies need to advertise. If they don't sell their products, they go to die. Nonsense. If I or anyone NEEDS a product or service, we'll happily go out and buy it. Ads exist purely to drive unnecessary consumption-for-the-sake-of-consumption. It's telling that even a generally capitalist, free-market demographic like HN's thinks they are a sleazy way to make money. It's not a "war on drugs" its more like a war on some disease - and those are very winnable.
- joshuamorton 9y agoThis is naive. How will you know what product to buy? And I mean this quite seriously. Where I work, there are initiatives to internally advertise tools and libraries that exist so people don't go reinventing them. For certain niches, it's not clear that a product exists unless you've seen it before.
- 9y ago
- Muges 9y ago> most ad-blockers don't actually block ads; they just block cross-domain, spying widgets. Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted, untracked image that's actually an ad. Most ad-blockers I know of use cosmetic filters, which can hide any element from a page, including self-hosted and non-tracking ads (see https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem/ https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...). Sadly, showing ads that are respectful to the user is not that easy...
- halayli 9y agoone day you'll run a business and your opinion will likely shift as you'll understand it's purpose.
- tomp 9y agoI'd gladly exploit existing social structures to make a profit, and still oppose them.
- gggdvnkhmbgjvbn 9y agoMany adblockers block random images with “track“ or “ad“ in their css classlist.