6 ms·

> doesn't have a shady track record Care to expand on that?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Macha 9y ago
The eventual setup of their acceptable ads policy ended up being seen as pay-to-whitelist by users and advertisers. It felt that way to advertisers especially when the fee was 30% of ad revenue rather than say, a processing fee for time spent verifying it met the criteria. A lot of them were more ok to ignore ad blocking before they were held to ransom. Users were unhappy at an adblocker's default config allowing ads.
- def_true_false 9y ago
  I can see why people would be upset, but it doesn't seem especially shady to me - they were upfront about what they are doing and why. I do remember that multiple forks appeared immediately, but I don't see how trusting someone else in addition to the ABP developers is an improvement... until UBO there was nothing to switch to, and UBO had other advantages.
  - epicide 9y ago
    So as long as I tell you I'm screwing you over, it's okay?
- DarronWyke 9y ago
  And it can be turned off. It's not a big deal at all. People are making mountains out of molehills.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    Ah, so opt-out is suddenly totally OK. A feature being able to be turned off is a plus, but default features not in the interest of the user are a minus. Especially not when users don't have an easy way to opt-out. If users reasonably want to only opt-in such a feature, you as developer should implement it as such.
    - UncleEntity 9y ago
      > Especially not when users don't have an easy way to opt-out. When I first heard about it took me like 35 seconds to opt-out -- open options and unclick the little clicky box, easy peasy.
      - Fnoord 9y ago
        Good for you. If I need to be happy every time I opt-out "when I hear about it" which is often "when I already used the software" and get USDs for every hour I didn't opt-out even though I'd have loved to opt-out right away, then I'd be one hell of a happy Richie Rich. Having to go through settings in software when you install it, to get the software to work the way the average user wants it to, is annoying. An example could be removing a bitcoin miner from the software, or disabling ads in uTorrent, or disabling telemetry in Windows 10. Firefox as well, but at least they tell you about it right away, and they started doing it later. Not good, but less bad. Why do software developers get away treating their customers like stupid sheep either wasting their time or getting their data? Ah well, at least in Europe we're getting GDPR.
        UncleEntity 9y ago
        > Good for you. If I need to be happy every time I opt-out "when I hear about it" which is often "when I already used the software" and get USDs for every hour I didn't opt-out even though I'd have loved to opt-out right away, then I'd be one hell of a happy Richie Rich. It's not like they owe me anything, I downloaded their software for free and use it for free with absolutely no expectation other than "I'll use it as long as it works for me." If it gets annoying I'll replace it with something that isn't just in this particular case it was a lot easier to click a box than search out a new adblocker. > Why do software developers get away treating their customers like stupid sheep either wasting their time or getting their data? Because they want to use Windows 10 or uTorrent or something with a bitcoin miner instead of searching out alternatives. Personally, other than ABP, I can think of no other cases of this happening on my stock (other than the chrome repo) Fedora box.
munchbunny 9y ago
A couple years ago, on top of their acceptable ads program that was more or less pay-to-bypass, Eeyo announced that it was going to start an ad exchange to let people buy placements on spots that ABP blocked. In effect ABP was forcing itself in as a middle man and taking a fee from both the site owner and the advertiser. As an example, if I, your local newspaper, sell a placement to your local car dealership, ABP comes in and says "people won't see the car ads, but if you split the revenue you were going to get with me, I'll sell those placements to someone else for you." So let's say 10% of my visitors use ABP. I can now either lose it or get back some smaller percentage of it by paying ABP. That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket. In addition, when Eeyo made that announcement, they also announced that they were working with AppNexus and Google on the new exchange, which just wasn't true. Though I believe Google does pay to get some ads into the acceptable ads program. If you're going to be in the business of blocking ads, stay out of the business of selling ads.
- mindslight 9y ago
  > That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket. Your specific condemnation rests on this tired narrative that "ad spots" are something belonging to the site owner. In the reality of the web, it's all the user's display area - the user agent decides what and how to render. The real critique is that the software is working against the user's interest for its own gain. This is par for the course of proprietary software, but generally seen as unsustainable poor taste in the Free world. Fortunately, having achieved the activation energy of installing extensions for one's self, switching is not hard.
  - munchbunny 9y ago
    > In the reality of the web I'm willing to concede that I assume a specific view of the nature of ad spots, but you're going to have to reeeeeeaaaaally stretch your argument to claim that this is the reality of the web. For the vast majority of people the browser is the renderer that happens to be customizable, not the arbiter of what is rendered, regardless of the browser's capability to decide. Regardless, you don't have to accept the online advertising business model, even at a moral level, to acknowledge the shadiness of the other aspects of the practice that I pointed out.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

The eventual setup of their acceptable ads policy ended up being seen as pay-to-whitelist by users and advertisers. It felt that way to advertisers especially when the fee was 30% of ad revenue rather than say, a processing fee for time spent verifying it met the criteria. A lot of them were more ok to ignore ad blocking before they were held to ransom. Users were unhappy at an adblocker's default config allowing ads.

def_true_false 9y ago
I can see why people would be upset, but it doesn't seem especially shady to me - they were upfront about what they are doing and why. I do remember that multiple forks appeared immediately, but I don't see how trusting someone else in addition to the ABP developers is an improvement... until UBO there was nothing to switch to, and UBO had other advantages.
- epicide 9y ago
  So as long as I tell you I'm screwing you over, it's okay?
DarronWyke 9y ago
And it can be turned off. It's not a big deal at all. People are making mountains out of molehills.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  Ah, so opt-out is suddenly totally OK. A feature being able to be turned off is a plus, but default features not in the interest of the user are a minus. Especially not when users don't have an easy way to opt-out. If users reasonably want to only opt-in such a feature, you as developer should implement it as such.
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    > Especially not when users don't have an easy way to opt-out. When I first heard about it took me like 35 seconds to opt-out -- open options and unclick the little clicky box, easy peasy.
    - Fnoord 9y ago
      Good for you. If I need to be happy every time I opt-out "when I hear about it" which is often "when I already used the software" and get USDs for every hour I didn't opt-out even though I'd have loved to opt-out right away, then I'd be one hell of a happy Richie Rich. Having to go through settings in software when you install it, to get the software to work the way the average user wants it to, is annoying. An example could be removing a bitcoin miner from the software, or disabling ads in uTorrent, or disabling telemetry in Windows 10. Firefox as well, but at least they tell you about it right away, and they started doing it later. Not good, but less bad. Why do software developers get away treating their customers like stupid sheep either wasting their time or getting their data? Ah well, at least in Europe we're getting GDPR.
      - UncleEntity 9y ago
        > Good for you. If I need to be happy every time I opt-out "when I hear about it" which is often "when I already used the software" and get USDs for every hour I didn't opt-out even though I'd have loved to opt-out right away, then I'd be one hell of a happy Richie Rich. It's not like they owe me anything, I downloaded their software for free and use it for free with absolutely no expectation other than "I'll use it as long as it works for me." If it gets annoying I'll replace it with something that isn't just in this particular case it was a lot easier to click a box than search out a new adblocker. > Why do software developers get away treating their customers like stupid sheep either wasting their time or getting their data? Because they want to use Windows 10 or uTorrent or something with a bitcoin miner instead of searching out alternatives. Personally, other than ABP, I can think of no other cases of this happening on my stock (other than the chrome repo) Fedora box.

munchbunny 9y ago

A couple years ago, on top of their acceptable ads program that was more or less pay-to-bypass, Eeyo announced that it was going to start an ad exchange to let people buy placements on spots that ABP blocked. In effect ABP was forcing itself in as a middle man and taking a fee from both the site owner and the advertiser. As an example, if I, your local newspaper, sell a placement to your local car dealership, ABP comes in and says "people won't see the car ads, but if you split the revenue you were going to get with me, I'll sell those placements to someone else for you." So let's say 10% of my visitors use ABP. I can now either lose it or get back some smaller percentage of it by paying ABP. That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket. In addition, when Eeyo made that announcement, they also announced that they were working with AppNexus and Google on the new exchange, which just wasn't true. Though I believe Google does pay to get some ads into the acceptable ads program. If you're going to be in the business of blocking ads, stay out of the business of selling ads.

mindslight 9y ago
> That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket. Your specific condemnation rests on this tired narrative that "ad spots" are something belonging to the site owner. In the reality of the web, it's all the user's display area - the user agent decides what and how to render. The real critique is that the software is working against the user's interest for its own gain. This is par for the course of proprietary software, but generally seen as unsustainable poor taste in the Free world. Fortunately, having achieved the activation energy of installing extensions for one's self, switching is not hard.
- munchbunny 9y ago
  > In the reality of the web I'm willing to concede that I assume a specific view of the nature of ad spots, but you're going to have to reeeeeeaaaaally stretch your argument to claim that this is the reality of the web. For the vast majority of people the browser is the renderer that happens to be customizable, not the arbiter of what is rendered, regardless of the browser's capability to decide. Regardless, you don't have to accept the online advertising business model, even at a moral level, to acknowledge the shadiness of the other aspects of the practice that I pointed out.