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Ads are not of interest to users. I think their display is a waste of time and resources, as well as the risks associated. How blocking ads make a browser “mis

• tannhaeuser 7y ago
  For better or worse, ads are what finances the vast majority of online content out there. Even HN gets the occasional paid job posting, stripe (or other YC company) promo, etc., and I'm ok with it. For me, the problem isn't ads per se, but tracking and targetted ads which bring privacy invasion, monopolization, and security issues.
  • onyva 7y ago
    Which is not needed. Would love to see Breitbart, YouTube, Facebook and other similar hate-monetization platforms die. We don't have to commit collective social suicide in order to accommodate silicon valley.
• kbenson 7y ago
  > Ads are not of interest to users. If you think that's true, then your idea of what constitutes an ad is very narrow, to the point it leaves out a large swath of reality. An ad is an informational transaction between an entity offering a good or service and a consumer that may want that service. When done poorly, it's an exchange neither are happy with. When done well, it's an exchange that both are happy with. We're all familiar with poor ads. The perfect ad is likely the signage above a retail space that let's the person looking for it know it's at that location. Even then, for those not looking for that specific store, it could be seen as unwanted (and that's also why a lot of cities limit the size of signage for buildings). You might see this as a distinction without purpose, but I think viewing things completely (and often as a spectrum) helps put into focus the specific problems that we want to combat and let us focus our efforts on things that actually make poegress in those problems, rather than ineffectually attack a symptom. Advertising isn't the problem. Poorly matched advertising is annoying, in effective, and costly. Tracking and profiling of the individual has risencin use to combat this, but has many other negative consequences. If we prevent tracking and profiling, the market will shift to some other way to match advertising, and we'll have less privacy problems (but possibly worse targeted ads). But at least it isn't overly broad and done in a way that doesn't help the real problem, tracking. Do we really want to support something so draconian that even HN's minimal advertising articles, or someone's personal blog that endorses something would fall under those regulations? If not (if for not other reason it wouldn't help anything), we should be careful how we approach this, and target the real problem.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I think noticing a spectrum is a good first step, but a good second step is noticing the distribution of that spectrum. There is very, very few ads on-line that are "done well". There's also very few ads "done poorly", because nobody in their right mind would want to keep running an ad they're not happy with. The Internet is utterly dominated by ads that are bad for the viewer, and beneficial to the advertiser. They're all pushed (vs. pulled) or resource heavy or manipulative or outright lying or optimized to give you bad deal or tracking you to various degree, and I mean "or" in mathematical sense - a lot of ads have all of these qualities. Saying that not all ads are bad is - in the real world, accounting for the shape of the ad spectrum - like saying not all fungus you scrape off a wall is unsafe to eat.
    • kbenson 7y ago
      My point is really that once we start targeting "ads", and we note that online ads seem to be bad, as you say, then we end up with regulation or legislation about what you can advertise online and how you can do it. But that won't help us when the same techniques then shift towards the real world (and they already are), and then we've got ineffective rules for the new crisis, which is companies tracking you between all the real world locations you go to get a better idea of your interests and what to offer you. I note it's a spectrum not just to protect some ads. Almost the entirety of that spectrum may be taken up with horrible ads. The important part is identifying what attributes set something acceptable (or even useful) apart from something that is not? Those are the things we want to understand and target, and we'll never even consider them if our approach is "ads are bad". How we frame the question informs our solution. The last thing I want is to replay the spam legislation of the early 2000's (not because I think there was much of a spectrum of spam from good to bad, but because the legislation was laughably ineffective.
      • onyva 7y ago
        It's a risk we probably need to take. AdTech is monetizing hate and this is already effecting the real world in a very obvious way. We're talking about ads, not content. Removing the monetization incentive is one thing, the wastefulness another, but I'm not talking about legislation, rather giving users tools to deal with them. Google developed Chrome for obvious reasons. Microsoft has no interest in protecting users, and AdBuddy (Brave) is pure evil. Mozilla's raison d'etre is doing just that.
• IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  Brave (Stage 1) is a Trojan Horse for Brave Fraud (Stage 3, terminal), which is what it's called when you insert yourself between two parties on false pretences with the expectation of leveraging your power to regulate mutual access to make money.
• Bantros 7y ago
  You have to opt in to see ads as part of the Brave Rewards program and you also get credited for every ad notification you receive. It couldn't be more clear