24 ms·

Ad block and you don't stop

103 points by cjlm 6y ago

romanovcode 6y ago
Real ads are now different, they are masked as regular content published by regular users.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Native advertising (as it's known) seems like a hit amongst consumers: https://web.archive.org/web/20161212173926/http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7815.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161212173926/http://sciencebul... Such "passive" advertisements (including billboards or the ones you see on the TV) are okay compared to the hyper-targeted advertisements which have pretty much lead us to present-day's dragnet-style surveillance.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I would actually just prefer this model take over completely. The model where you just stick ads into some unused screen space, popups, commercial breaks, ad segments are hot garbage. Like I don't really have an issue with someone posting a thread "BIFL Request: Spatulas" and some brand rep being like "Hey I work for $company and we have a thing that might work for you." One of the best answers I ever saw on /r/femalefasionadvice was a Lululemon rep doing a full breakdown of their different product lines, model differences, prices ranges, target markets. Like god damn I wish all ads were like that. It was an actual informative sales pitch. I think some light regulation that says reps have to be upfront about their affiliations is all that's really needed here.
- _tulpa 6y ago
  So far most of the the sibling comments miss the goddamn point: Lululemon reps, salesmen on quora, and in generall situations where you know the person is selling you something are not a problem. The real thing is shills posing as independent third parties posting praise/visibility/reviews or even complaints about some thing that they have a vested interest in you buying or using. It's most egregious and obvious on reddit, but I guarantee you it's here on HN too.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    I've never seen someone here who I thought was legitimately a "shill". I bet 99% of accusations of "shilling" are false. It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking.
    - throwaway2245 6y ago
      I agree that a lot of people are willing to regurgitate corporate marketing without being paid. I'm still prepared to call that "shilling". So-called influencers exist on this basis. Influencers' work is initially unpaid, until they show they have a following and can be comfortably loyal to brands. If you follow growing social media accounts, especially on TikTok and streaming platforms, they'll quite often make it clear they hope to be rewarded later (correctly or incorrectly).
    - _tulpa 6y ago
      The word 'shill' was a poor choice, my bad. > It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking. Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association. It's not about disagreement or conspiracies, just that everyone talks like they're selling you things now even if they just own the thing and aren't being paid or intentionally 'influencing'. And I remember when it wasn't like that - even on reddit. I don't think it's an intentional thing (which would be your conspiratorial thinking) so much as an emergent property of large, anonymous, loosely connected groups of people where some of the people are only there to sell stuff, which just so happens to be convenient if you're there to sell.
      - foobazzle 6y ago
        > Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association. I mean, it's HN. The orange-username "voting ring" is built right in.
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  I'll take sponsored posts over constant online tracking.
bzb6 6y ago
> Who will win, a multibillion dollar industry or a couple of txt files? I don’t want to read the whole thing because I don’t care too much, so I may be a little bit off topic here, but afaik nobody has managed to block Facebook’s sponsored posts with these lists.
- everdrive 6y ago
  It's very easy to block them: don't visit facebook, and you'll never see the ads.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Certainly an effective strategy which most would call boycott. Blocking ads implies consuming the content without the ads.
    - SllX 6y ago
      Boycott implies some form of coordination that’s more than just rejecting the premise and/or use of Facebook.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    Messenger is the best thing facebook has done imo. Since facebook is like a driver's license atm, you can be certain other people use it and having a chat client tied to it is very nice to have. I know we all like to rip on them but at least it's better than WhatsApp or discord where someone has to actively create and account and learn the platform before using it.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      > Since facebook is like a driver's license atm, you can be certain other people use it and having a chat client tied to it is very nice to have. This is an unfortunate situation to be in.
      - 6y ago
sacks2k 6y ago
This is a simplistic view of our current Internet. Google owns all of the spam filters used by 99.9% of all email providers. If they don't like your content, the majority of your intended audience will never see it. This isn't including search traffic. They regularly censor news organizations without telling them. Recently, Mailchimp announced that they will block any content they deem unacceptable. They get to decide what your recipients will see. Payment providers like Paypal and sites like Kickstarter also regularly ban people they deem 'unacceptable'. The phone company isn't allowed to block you because you said something politically incorrect to my friends and tech companies should be no different. The tech community isn't protesting this right now because their perceived enemies are being blocked and censored en masse. Don't be shocked one day when you are censored and blocked and people like me just don't give a shit anymore
- 0df8dkdf 6y ago
  >The phone company isn't allowed to block you because you said something politically incorrect to my friends and tech companies should be no different. AT&T does block their customer's email content without informing their paying customer. At this point I trust NSA more than these private companies. At least NSA has some government oversight and subject to FOIL request with these private companies it is basically the East India company all over again, wild wild west. They can do pretty much what they want. And like the Federal Reserve has their own private armies. Vote with your money and internet usage.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    AT&T ISP/cell and AT&T the phone company are probably two different companies held under an umbrella company. Verizon does the same thing. The tech companies are running headlong into being regulated as much as ma bell was. They just do not realize it yet.
    - athms 6y ago
      >The tech companies are running headlong into being regulated as much as ma bell was. The government will need to overcome free speech first.
Freak_NL 6y ago
My hypothesis is that on major platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, tech-savvy users with a solid ad-blocker (like UBlock Origin) contribute valuable content and provide valuable interaction with the bulk of the users without. We are a vocal group who on the whole have a decent understanding of the mechanisms used to influence people, and if we didn't have ad-blockers, we would complain loudly, entertain alternatives, or try to subvert the comfortable business model that is targetted advertising. We'd raise awkward questions, constantly. As the author points out, to our eyes the internet is unusable without an ad-blocker. With an ad-blocker, it is somewhat OK, and with it we grudgingly accept the status quo. This is fine as far as those platforms are concerned. The working ad-blocker is our pacifier. We are being tolerated.
- nsgi 6y ago
  How do tech-savvy users contribute more valuable content than non-tech savvy users? Maybe when it comes to content about tech but that's not the majority of content on Facebook and Twitter
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    Yeah, this doesn't seem right to me. I don't think my family consumes content by the tech-savvy - they come for the content by friends and family members, and get sucked in via the rest of the stuff Facebook throws at them via the feed. Nowhere in that pipeline do "tech-savvy users with a solid ad-blocker", "who on the whole have a decent understanding of the mechanisms used to influence people" come into play - unless you're counting Russian agencies and others who are explicitly using it for propaganda (not to be confused with people who like-and-reshare David Icke nonsense.)
  - jen729w 6y ago
    Hypothesis: we're in the net rather than just being on the net. That gives us access to a wider range of material. For example, I found Nightline [0] on itch.io earlier today. I'd never even heard of itch.io but I follow a cool nerd on Twitter and she retweeted [1] another cool nerd. We know about RSS. I have dozens of feeds and they're really varied. I've been following many of them for at least a decade. You're just not finding this stuff on /r/yourregionalcity unless someone like us posts it there. [0]: https://colorfiction.itch.io/nightline https://colorfiction.itch.io/nightline [1]: https://twitter.com/colorfiction/status/1330575276561063937 https://twitter.com/colorfiction/status/1330575276561063937
rcarmo 6y ago
The Kafka bit was totally on-point.
estebank 6y ago
> (I love that around 3:19, where the narrator says they’re in for a “tough battle”, you can clearly see all of them playing Wolfenstein.) It was Duke Nukem 3D. :)
- haddr 6y ago
  I spotted the same thing :) that pistol and rocket launcher are quite memorable :)
bambax 6y ago
> Using the internet without adblockers is intolerable. Yes it is. I remember conversations here on HN years ago where some would argue that people in fact loved ads. Now it seems this line of argument is gone for good. Everybody agrees ads are horrible. The only question that remains is, are they indispensable? I think not. We'll see.
- ticmasta 6y ago
  Maybe the "we love ads" argument is gone, but I still see the "I've trained myself to ignore ads" line of reasoning, which is countered by dark patterns exploiting thousands of years of evolution against ignoring things like motion and bright colours. Plus I'm not sure how you "ignore" non-optional ads between what you want and where you're at...
- a_imho 6y ago
  Advertisement is euphemism for spam.
- twblalock 6y ago
  There still isn't a good alternative model. Without ads, businesses will put up subscription-only features and paywalls. People hate those too. But we need to accept the fact that businesses can't make money by giving everything away for free. I'd rather put up with ads than see the internet devolve into paywalls on most sites -- paywalls are more annoying to work around.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    It's already happened. More and more news sites are behind paywalls. A lot of the articles posted on HN are behind paywalls, and half the time I'm too lazy to try archive.is or one of the other paywall workarounds, so I end up doing without. On the other hand, if I'm reading an aggregator like Google News, the interesting thing is that the top article for a particular sub-topic might be from the NYT or another site with a paywall, but if you look down the list you can get a similar article from a non-paywalled site. The cool thing about this is I get exposed to a bunch of random sources, and often they are local news sites. I've looked into subscribing to some sites, but most want north of $10 per month, some in the $20-$30 per month range, and I just don't get that much value out of them to justify paying, especially when I'd end up having to pay for several of them, which would add up to several hundred dollars a month. It's still a real shame that micropayments isn't a thing; I wouldn't have an issue reading the first paragraph or two of an article, and then having to spend something like 5c to 25c to read more. I fully understand why micropayments haven't taken off, but it's a shame nonetheless.
dzonga 6y ago
there's this false notion that users hate ads. that's why they use ad-blockers. people hate intrusive ads. I do. I don't like auto-playing video. dynamically loaded ads. don't like ads that track me. brand ads i.e banner ads, that're just a simple picture are acceptable to me - like the ones we used to have in paper newspapers. creatives worked on those. now it's just random shit.
- mental1896 6y ago
  I am a user and I also hate ads. It is not a false notion.
- CuriouslyC 6y ago
  My dislike of ads is directly correlated to how visible they are in a linear fashion. The only ads that I find to be unobtrusive are invisible (i.e. non-existent).
- kelnos 6y ago
  I hate ads. I don't care how visible or not they are. Ads are emotional manipulation designed to get us to open our wallets to spend on things we wouldn't otherwise buy. I refuse to subject myself to that when there is an alternative. I fully admit that my opinion is not the only one. I'm sure there are some people whose attitude matches the one you describe. But my guess is that sentiment toward ads is declining. At the very least, publications are deciding that they can make more money off subscriptions than ads. Not sure if the revenue for ads is declining, or what.
- euodeioads 6y ago
  Another data point here, I'm a user who utterly hate ads. Ads is just another word for manipulation. I see ads as an amalgam of screaming signaling noise that feed our primitive brains with ideas that are not ours. I don't care if it's a huge, medium, small, unobtrusive. I simply can't stand ads at all. All this disgust is on ads on a very basic level, imagine what I think about target ads/tracking. edit. spelling.
loosescrews 6y ago
This post discusses the history of ad blocking, but doesn't mention my favorite from the era, Proxomitron. Anyone else remember it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron
- skrause 6y ago
  I used https://www.privoxy.org/ https://www.privoxy.org/ back then.
anotherevan 6y ago
They are not ad-blockers, they are HTML firewalls.
erulabs 6y ago
Fairly sure the point about not understanding how a car works when you turn the key is meant to represent increasingly complex systems - and for sure knowing “every single bit” is a tall order... but that expression (using a car engine as an example of an unknowably complex system) always struck me as odd: is the author unaware of how internal combustion works? With the clear intelligence of the writing one has to guess that getting a cursory knowledge of how a gasoline motor, clutch, transmission and differential works would take far less time than this article took to write! Maybe I’m being pedantic here but if you can make sense of Kafka - turning a car key shouldn’t be much of a mystery!
- vaccinator 6y ago
  > always struck me as odd: is the author unaware of how internal combustion works? Cars are much more then that nowadays... They are computers with code that fails... The other day my car stopped by itself because it got scared and almost got me in an accident
- classified 6y ago
  Don't worry, bikeshedding insignificant details is very common on HN. Moreover, this kung fu of splitting hairs with your bare hand while blindfolded seems to be a competition among some commenters.
unnouinceput 6y ago
Quote: "Something I worry about a lot is that I don’t understand how the internet works. And by that, I mean the entire web, the whole shebang, from when I press “Send Newsletter”, to how Normcore makes it way up and through WiFi and then thick cables somewhere in the darkness of the Atlantic, through seas of malware, bypassing the dark web, and finally finds its way to your inbox, all of it. " Well, this implies that dark web and the sea of malware are some dragon land in the middle that needs to be quietly trespassed to reach the other safety. But the better analogy is more like current pandemic where people navigate elbow to elbow and some of them have COVID-19, regardless of the physical location. Trust me, your packets can be next to some malware/dark web packets right after they left your router and are still traveling inside your building, even before reaching your ISP gateway.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
"Who will win, a multibillion dollar industry or a couple of txt files?" The textfiles! [1] "Howard said his gripe is not with advertising per se, but with the time it takes to view a page with advertising. "It can take 4 to 6 seconds to download each ad, and if you are on the Web a lot, that really gets annoying," he said. "If the advertisers want to pay for a high-speed Net connection to my house, then I would take the ads, but right now it is costing me money to look at their ads."" This is reason #1. As a user, I chose minimalism. I prefer a UNIX-like research OS instead of a corporate branded one from a FAANG company. I prefer text-based software and the VGA console. I rely heavily on programs other than web browsers for making HTTP requests. Sometimes I forget why I became a software minimalist. When I started using the internet in the early 90's, there were time limits; I had to use the time as cost efficiently as possible. Thus the answer is speed, cost and reliability. Through this choice of minimalism I am able to avoid, to a noticeable extent, others usurping as much of my resources as they can get away with. I am able to minimise having to allocate computer resources and bandwidth to subsidise the "multibillion dollar industry" of serving internet ads. I can use the internet on slow connections and it is still reliable. IMO, when users debate the merits of internet ads, we are in fact debating the merits of allowing this "multibillion dollar industry" to use our self-financed resources; the computers we bought, and the bills we pay to keep them powered on and connected to the internet. "Now, whenever you load a website, scroll on social media, or hit Enter on a Google search, hundreds or thousands of companies compete in a cascade of auctions to show you their ad. The process, known as "programmatic" advertising, occurs in milliseconds, tens of billions of times each day. Only automated software can manage it." This is reason #2. As above, when users debate whether internet ads are acceptable, IMO we are debating whether to let others use some of our computer resources and bandwidth. Specifically, we are debating whether to subsidise the operation of the "multibillion dollar industry" of internet ads. In addition, arguably we are debating whether it is acceptable for others to add milliseconds of delay to the fulfillment of our HTTP requests while ad selections are made in real-time -- for the purpose of supporting a "multibillion dollar" industry. Users self-finance their internet use. However the "multibillion dollar" internet ads business and those companies who rely on internet ads-related revenue for survival are not self-financing. They rely on the contribution of user resources. I have not seen much debate on the question of internet ads framed as a debate over donation of user resources nor user consent to millisecond delays. However, for me, these comprise 100% of the reasons I cannot tolerate internet ads. This is why I use a text-only browser to read things posted to HN. I enjoyed this article and the historical perspective it offers. I think that Privoxy and other similar projects not focused on a single application deserve mention when recounting the history of combating the attempted advertising-driven commercialisation of the internet. 1. However I am not sure that the "block" list model is scalable if ad tech keeps growing -- I think we may see some antitrust regulation that could result in an even greater number of ad servers on the internet. Personally I use an "allow" list approach since I do not need to worry about images nor JavaScript.
Jedd 6y ago
> People told us if you put ads online, the internet would throw up on us. I thought the opposition was ridiculous. There is hardly an area of human activity that isn’t commercial. Why should the internet be the exception? One can never be 100% confident of the accuracy of quotes from decades past, but it's interesting to note the conflation of advertising and commerce here -- perhaps even more so if it's a contemporary reminiscence. At the time Wired produced physical magazines (albeit with advertisements within) so the idea of people paying them for thoughtful content was not alien.
mrlagmer 6y ago
I wonder how many people would be well paid and working in tech if we did not have ads. Without ads, most of the big tech company would not exist and you would not be so highly paid. So not sure I understand the hate ads get. I like having a job and getting paid.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Most of us don't so much hate ads so much as the super creepy tracking, fingerprinting, etc which inevitably seems to follow internet advertising.
sMarsIntruder 6y ago
Oh, did I read "blocklists"?
AntiImperialist 6y ago
I see ads all the time, in-app, which is where they have moved. Is there an easy way to block them too? I guess not because they securely get delivered right into the app along with rest of the content.
- CannisterFlux 6y ago
  The advert contents is still delivered from 3rd party servers, so on Android you can side-load Blokada, which provides host-based ad-blocking. It runs as a local VPN routing all traffic through it, and blocks the ad hosts. You'll probably still see advert place holders in a lot of apps, and on my phone at least I have to be vigilant that the OS doesn't kill the VPN process, but it's well worth it.
  - AntiImperialist 6y ago
    Thanks! I remember that I had tried Blockada but was annoyed with the VPN disconnecting, the battery usage and my phone just killing the app. I have now installed PiHole. Not sure how effective it is, but I'll try it out.
- makruiten 6y ago
  NextDNS in combination with AdGuard Mobile Ads filter will do just that and it will encrypt your DNS traffic too.

103 points by cjlm 6y ago

romanovcode 6y ago

Real ads are now different, they are masked as regular content published by regular users.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ignoramous 6y ago
Native advertising (as it's known) seems like a hit amongst consumers: https://web.archive.org/web/20161212173926/http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7815.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161212173926/http://sciencebul... Such "passive" advertisements (including billboards or the ones you see on the TV) are okay compared to the hyper-targeted advertisements which have pretty much lead us to present-day's dragnet-style surveillance.
Spivak 6y ago
I would actually just prefer this model take over completely. The model where you just stick ads into some unused screen space, popups, commercial breaks, ad segments are hot garbage. Like I don't really have an issue with someone posting a thread "BIFL Request: Spatulas" and some brand rep being like "Hey I work for $company and we have a thing that might work for you." One of the best answers I ever saw on /r/femalefasionadvice was a Lululemon rep doing a full breakdown of their different product lines, model differences, prices ranges, target markets. Like god damn I wish all ads were like that. It was an actual informative sales pitch. I think some light regulation that says reps have to be upfront about their affiliations is all that's really needed here.
_tulpa 6y ago
So far most of the the sibling comments miss the goddamn point: Lululemon reps, salesmen on quora, and in generall situations where you know the person is selling you something are not a problem. The real thing is shills posing as independent third parties posting praise/visibility/reviews or even complaints about some thing that they have a vested interest in you buying or using. It's most egregious and obvious on reddit, but I guarantee you it's here on HN too.
- twblalock 6y ago
  I've never seen someone here who I thought was legitimately a "shill". I bet 99% of accusations of "shilling" are false. It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking.
  - throwaway2245 6y ago
    I agree that a lot of people are willing to regurgitate corporate marketing without being paid. I'm still prepared to call that "shilling". So-called influencers exist on this basis. Influencers' work is initially unpaid, until they show they have a following and can be comfortably loyal to brands. If you follow growing social media accounts, especially on TikTok and streaming platforms, they'll quite often make it clear they hope to be rewarded later (correctly or incorrectly).
  - _tulpa 6y ago
    The word 'shill' was a poor choice, my bad. > It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking. Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association. It's not about disagreement or conspiracies, just that everyone talks like they're selling you things now even if they just own the thing and aren't being paid or intentionally 'influencing'. And I remember when it wasn't like that - even on reddit. I don't think it's an intentional thing (which would be your conspiratorial thinking) so much as an emergent property of large, anonymous, loosely connected groups of people where some of the people are only there to sell stuff, which just so happens to be convenient if you're there to sell.
    - foobazzle 6y ago
      > Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association. I mean, it's HN. The orange-username "voting ring" is built right in.
emptyparadise 6y ago
I'll take sponsored posts over constant online tracking.

bzb6 6y ago

> Who will win, a multibillion dollar industry or a couple of txt files? I don’t want to read the whole thing because I don’t care too much, so I may be a little bit off topic here, but afaik nobody has managed to block Facebook’s sponsored posts with these lists.

everdrive 6y ago
It's very easy to block them: don't visit facebook, and you'll never see the ads.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Certainly an effective strategy which most would call boycott. Blocking ads implies consuming the content without the ads.
  - SllX 6y ago
    Boycott implies some form of coordination that’s more than just rejecting the premise and/or use of Facebook.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Messenger is the best thing facebook has done imo. Since facebook is like a driver's license atm, you can be certain other people use it and having a chat client tied to it is very nice to have. I know we all like to rip on them but at least it's better than WhatsApp or discord where someone has to actively create and account and learn the platform before using it.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    > Since facebook is like a driver's license atm, you can be certain other people use it and having a chat client tied to it is very nice to have. This is an unfortunate situation to be in.
    - 6y ago

sacks2k 6y ago

This is a simplistic view of our current Internet. Google owns all of the spam filters used by 99.9% of all email providers. If they don't like your content, the majority of your intended audience will never see it. This isn't including search traffic. They regularly censor news organizations without telling them. Recently, Mailchimp announced that they will block any content they deem unacceptable. They get to decide what your recipients will see. Payment providers like Paypal and sites like Kickstarter also regularly ban people they deem 'unacceptable'. The phone company isn't allowed to block you because you said something politically incorrect to my friends and tech companies should be no different. The tech community isn't protesting this right now because their perceived enemies are being blocked and censored en masse. Don't be shocked one day when you are censored and blocked and people like me just don't give a shit anymore

0df8dkdf 6y ago
>The phone company isn't allowed to block you because you said something politically incorrect to my friends and tech companies should be no different. AT&T does block their customer's email content without informing their paying customer. At this point I trust NSA more than these private companies. At least NSA has some government oversight and subject to FOIL request with these private companies it is basically the East India company all over again, wild wild west. They can do pretty much what they want. And like the Federal Reserve has their own private armies. Vote with your money and internet usage.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  AT&T ISP/cell and AT&T the phone company are probably two different companies held under an umbrella company. Verizon does the same thing. The tech companies are running headlong into being regulated as much as ma bell was. They just do not realize it yet.
  - athms 6y ago
    >The tech companies are running headlong into being regulated as much as ma bell was. The government will need to overcome free speech first.

Freak_NL 6y ago

My hypothesis is that on major platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, tech-savvy users with a solid ad-blocker (like UBlock Origin) contribute valuable content and provide valuable interaction with the bulk of the users without. We are a vocal group who on the whole have a decent understanding of the mechanisms used to influence people, and if we didn't have ad-blockers, we would complain loudly, entertain alternatives, or try to subvert the comfortable business model that is targetted advertising. We'd raise awkward questions, constantly. As the author points out, to our eyes the internet is unusable without an ad-blocker. With an ad-blocker, it is somewhat OK, and with it we grudgingly accept the status quo. This is fine as far as those platforms are concerned. The working ad-blocker is our pacifier. We are being tolerated.

nsgi 6y ago
How do tech-savvy users contribute more valuable content than non-tech savvy users? Maybe when it comes to content about tech but that's not the majority of content on Facebook and Twitter
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Yeah, this doesn't seem right to me. I don't think my family consumes content by the tech-savvy - they come for the content by friends and family members, and get sucked in via the rest of the stuff Facebook throws at them via the feed. Nowhere in that pipeline do "tech-savvy users with a solid ad-blocker", "who on the whole have a decent understanding of the mechanisms used to influence people" come into play - unless you're counting Russian agencies and others who are explicitly using it for propaganda (not to be confused with people who like-and-reshare David Icke nonsense.)
- jen729w 6y ago
  Hypothesis: we're in the net rather than just being on the net. That gives us access to a wider range of material. For example, I found Nightline [0] on itch.io earlier today. I'd never even heard of itch.io but I follow a cool nerd on Twitter and she retweeted [1] another cool nerd. We know about RSS. I have dozens of feeds and they're really varied. I've been following many of them for at least a decade. You're just not finding this stuff on /r/yourregionalcity unless someone like us posts it there. [0]: https://colorfiction.itch.io/nightline https://colorfiction.itch.io/nightline [1]: https://twitter.com/colorfiction/status/1330575276561063937 https://twitter.com/colorfiction/status/1330575276561063937

rcarmo 6y ago

The Kafka bit was totally on-point.

estebank 6y ago

> (I love that around 3:19, where the narrator says they’re in for a “tough battle”, you can clearly see all of them playing Wolfenstein.) It was Duke Nukem 3D. :)

haddr 6y ago
I spotted the same thing :) that pistol and rocket launcher are quite memorable :)

bambax 6y ago

> Using the internet without adblockers is intolerable. Yes it is. I remember conversations here on HN years ago where some would argue that people in fact loved ads. Now it seems this line of argument is gone for good. Everybody agrees ads are horrible. The only question that remains is, are they indispensable? I think not. We'll see.

ticmasta 6y ago
Maybe the "we love ads" argument is gone, but I still see the "I've trained myself to ignore ads" line of reasoning, which is countered by dark patterns exploiting thousands of years of evolution against ignoring things like motion and bright colours. Plus I'm not sure how you "ignore" non-optional ads between what you want and where you're at...
a_imho 6y ago
Advertisement is euphemism for spam.
twblalock 6y ago
There still isn't a good alternative model. Without ads, businesses will put up subscription-only features and paywalls. People hate those too. But we need to accept the fact that businesses can't make money by giving everything away for free. I'd rather put up with ads than see the internet devolve into paywalls on most sites -- paywalls are more annoying to work around.
- kelnos 6y ago
  It's already happened. More and more news sites are behind paywalls. A lot of the articles posted on HN are behind paywalls, and half the time I'm too lazy to try archive.is or one of the other paywall workarounds, so I end up doing without. On the other hand, if I'm reading an aggregator like Google News, the interesting thing is that the top article for a particular sub-topic might be from the NYT or another site with a paywall, but if you look down the list you can get a similar article from a non-paywalled site. The cool thing about this is I get exposed to a bunch of random sources, and often they are local news sites. I've looked into subscribing to some sites, but most want north of $10 per month, some in the $20-$30 per month range, and I just don't get that much value out of them to justify paying, especially when I'd end up having to pay for several of them, which would add up to several hundred dollars a month. It's still a real shame that micropayments isn't a thing; I wouldn't have an issue reading the first paragraph or two of an article, and then having to spend something like 5c to 25c to read more. I fully understand why micropayments haven't taken off, but it's a shame nonetheless.

dzonga 6y ago

there's this false notion that users hate ads. that's why they use ad-blockers. people hate intrusive ads. I do. I don't like auto-playing video. dynamically loaded ads. don't like ads that track me. brand ads i.e banner ads, that're just a simple picture are acceptable to me - like the ones we used to have in paper newspapers. creatives worked on those. now it's just random shit.

mental1896 6y ago
I am a user and I also hate ads. It is not a false notion.
CuriouslyC 6y ago
My dislike of ads is directly correlated to how visible they are in a linear fashion. The only ads that I find to be unobtrusive are invisible (i.e. non-existent).
kelnos 6y ago
I hate ads. I don't care how visible or not they are. Ads are emotional manipulation designed to get us to open our wallets to spend on things we wouldn't otherwise buy. I refuse to subject myself to that when there is an alternative. I fully admit that my opinion is not the only one. I'm sure there are some people whose attitude matches the one you describe. But my guess is that sentiment toward ads is declining. At the very least, publications are deciding that they can make more money off subscriptions than ads. Not sure if the revenue for ads is declining, or what.
euodeioads 6y ago
Another data point here, I'm a user who utterly hate ads. Ads is just another word for manipulation. I see ads as an amalgam of screaming signaling noise that feed our primitive brains with ideas that are not ours. I don't care if it's a huge, medium, small, unobtrusive. I simply can't stand ads at all. All this disgust is on ads on a very basic level, imagine what I think about target ads/tracking. edit. spelling.

loosescrews 6y ago

This post discusses the history of ad blocking, but doesn't mention my favorite from the era, Proxomitron. Anyone else remember it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron

skrause 6y ago
I used https://www.privoxy.org/ https://www.privoxy.org/ back then.

anotherevan 6y ago

They are not ad-blockers, they are HTML firewalls.

erulabs 6y ago

Fairly sure the point about not understanding how a car works when you turn the key is meant to represent increasingly complex systems - and for sure knowing “every single bit” is a tall order... but that expression (using a car engine as an example of an unknowably complex system) always struck me as odd: is the author unaware of how internal combustion works? With the clear intelligence of the writing one has to guess that getting a cursory knowledge of how a gasoline motor, clutch, transmission and differential works would take far less time than this article took to write! Maybe I’m being pedantic here but if you can make sense of Kafka - turning a car key shouldn’t be much of a mystery!

vaccinator 6y ago
> always struck me as odd: is the author unaware of how internal combustion works? Cars are much more then that nowadays... They are computers with code that fails... The other day my car stopped by itself because it got scared and almost got me in an accident
classified 6y ago
Don't worry, bikeshedding insignificant details is very common on HN. Moreover, this kung fu of splitting hairs with your bare hand while blindfolded seems to be a competition among some commenters.

unnouinceput 6y ago

Quote: "Something I worry about a lot is that I don’t understand how the internet works. And by that, I mean the entire web, the whole shebang, from when I press “Send Newsletter”, to how Normcore makes it way up and through WiFi and then thick cables somewhere in the darkness of the Atlantic, through seas of malware, bypassing the dark web, and finally finds its way to your inbox, all of it. " Well, this implies that dark web and the sea of malware are some dragon land in the middle that needs to be quietly trespassed to reach the other safety. But the better analogy is more like current pandemic where people navigate elbow to elbow and some of them have COVID-19, regardless of the physical location. Trust me, your packets can be next to some malware/dark web packets right after they left your router and are still traveling inside your building, even before reaching your ISP gateway.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

"Who will win, a multibillion dollar industry or a couple of txt files?" The textfiles! [1] "Howard said his gripe is not with advertising per se, but with the time it takes to view a page with advertising. "It can take 4 to 6 seconds to download each ad, and if you are on the Web a lot, that really gets annoying," he said. "If the advertisers want to pay for a high-speed Net connection to my house, then I would take the ads, but right now it is costing me money to look at their ads."" This is reason #1. As a user, I chose minimalism. I prefer a UNIX-like research OS instead of a corporate branded one from a FAANG company. I prefer text-based software and the VGA console. I rely heavily on programs other than web browsers for making HTTP requests. Sometimes I forget why I became a software minimalist. When I started using the internet in the early 90's, there were time limits; I had to use the time as cost efficiently as possible. Thus the answer is speed, cost and reliability. Through this choice of minimalism I am able to avoid, to a noticeable extent, others usurping as much of my resources as they can get away with. I am able to minimise having to allocate computer resources and bandwidth to subsidise the "multibillion dollar industry" of serving internet ads. I can use the internet on slow connections and it is still reliable. IMO, when users debate the merits of internet ads, we are in fact debating the merits of allowing this "multibillion dollar industry" to use our self-financed resources; the computers we bought, and the bills we pay to keep them powered on and connected to the internet. "Now, whenever you load a website, scroll on social media, or hit Enter on a Google search, hundreds or thousands of companies compete in a cascade of auctions to show you their ad. The process, known as "programmatic" advertising, occurs in milliseconds, tens of billions of times each day. Only automated software can manage it." This is reason #2. As above, when users debate whether internet ads are acceptable, IMO we are debating whether to let others use some of our computer resources and bandwidth. Specifically, we are debating whether to subsidise the operation of the "multibillion dollar industry" of internet ads. In addition, arguably we are debating whether it is acceptable for others to add milliseconds of delay to the fulfillment of our HTTP requests while ad selections are made in real-time -- for the purpose of supporting a "multibillion dollar" industry. Users self-finance their internet use. However the "multibillion dollar" internet ads business and those companies who rely on internet ads-related revenue for survival are not self-financing. They rely on the contribution of user resources. I have not seen much debate on the question of internet ads framed as a debate over donation of user resources nor user consent to millisecond delays. However, for me, these comprise 100% of the reasons I cannot tolerate internet ads. This is why I use a text-only browser to read things posted to HN. I enjoyed this article and the historical perspective it offers. I think that Privoxy and other similar projects not focused on a single application deserve mention when recounting the history of combating the attempted advertising-driven commercialisation of the internet. 1. However I am not sure that the "block" list model is scalable if ad tech keeps growing -- I think we may see some antitrust regulation that could result in an even greater number of ad servers on the internet. Personally I use an "allow" list approach since I do not need to worry about images nor JavaScript.

Jedd 6y ago

> People told us if you put ads online, the internet would throw up on us. I thought the opposition was ridiculous. There is hardly an area of human activity that isn’t commercial. Why should the internet be the exception? One can never be 100% confident of the accuracy of quotes from decades past, but it's interesting to note the conflation of advertising and commerce here -- perhaps even more so if it's a contemporary reminiscence. At the time Wired produced physical magazines (albeit with advertisements within) so the idea of people paying them for thoughtful content was not alien.

mrlagmer 6y ago

I wonder how many people would be well paid and working in tech if we did not have ads. Without ads, most of the big tech company would not exist and you would not be so highly paid. So not sure I understand the hate ads get. I like having a job and getting paid.

ogre_codes 6y ago
Most of us don't so much hate ads so much as the super creepy tracking, fingerprinting, etc which inevitably seems to follow internet advertising.

sMarsIntruder 6y ago

Oh, did I read "blocklists"?

AntiImperialist 6y ago

I see ads all the time, in-app, which is where they have moved. Is there an easy way to block them too? I guess not because they securely get delivered right into the app along with rest of the content.

CannisterFlux 6y ago
The advert contents is still delivered from 3rd party servers, so on Android you can side-load Blokada, which provides host-based ad-blocking. It runs as a local VPN routing all traffic through it, and blocks the ad hosts. You'll probably still see advert place holders in a lot of apps, and on my phone at least I have to be vigilant that the OS doesn't kill the VPN process, but it's well worth it.
- AntiImperialist 6y ago
  Thanks! I remember that I had tried Blockada but was annoyed with the VPN disconnecting, the battery usage and my phone just killing the app. I have now installed PiHole. Not sure how effective it is, but I'll try it out.
makruiten 6y ago
NextDNS in combination with AdGuard Mobile Ads filter will do just that and it will encrypt your DNS traffic too.