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I think it's at least worth having the discussion about "acceptable ads". While reasonable people can disagree, I personally think that unobtrusive advertising

by whakim 5y ago

I think it's at least worth having the discussion about "acceptable ads". While reasonable people can disagree, I personally think that unobtrusive advertising that doesn't harvest your data should be a valid business model.

pmlnr 5y ago
Static pictures or text, no JS, and nothing more is such a big change for current ads people they can't even comprehend it.
sdfjkl 5y ago
Advertising shits in your head.
WoahNoun 5y ago
For example, the text advertisements on the side of Advent of Code. It wouldn't feel right to block those.
ahelwer 5y ago
Then let people who believe that go stare at ads. Submitting yourself to manipulation out of a sense of duty to the viability of a business model is deeply weird. Alternatively, if you believe those ads don't affect you then why does it matter whether they're displayed in your browser or not?
- drdeca 5y ago
  I do see potential value in being informed by an ad of a type of product I didn’t know existed. The type of ads I strongly dislike for reasons beyond like, breaking pages and tracking, are ones that repeatedly show for something which I already know exists in order to promote a brand. If someone wants to put up an ad for “we make any bronze parts”, well, I looked to see if any of them were cheap enough to get as a gag (none of them were, but still). If a company wants to remind me over and over of their company name that everyone is already familiar with, that is irritating.
  - ahelwer 5y ago
    If you didn't have a pre-existing desire for that product which led you to search out its existence then why was having the desire for it instilled in you a good thing? Why deliberately create the hole of dissatisfaction within yourself?
    - drdeca 5y ago
      Dissatisfaction? You see a potential for dissatisfaction, I see a potential for opportunity. Also, allocating time for “searching for products that I don’t know of but which seems like they might exist, which would improve things” seems, slow an inefficient? Like, I previously had thought “it is bad that printers basically all have drm-ish ink cartridges.” When I saw an ad for a printer which instead had refillable ink tanks, I regarded that as an improvement. (As it happened the printer had some unfortunate bugs where it semi-frequently needs to be forcibly rebooted by unplugging it, but it is otherwise seems to work nice.) I don’t see how this is not a benefit? It isn’t like I otherwise wouldn’t be using a printer, or like it increased average rate of printer purchasing non-negligibly . It mostly just changed which printer got purchased. Like, I suppose if every time I thought “I wish there was a product such the [x]”, I put a description of that into a web form (in terms of keywords I guess?) and then when a product was released, the company releasing the product could send info to the company running the website demonstrating the novel properties, and then the website could notify all the people whose descriptions appeared to match, and that could be an alternative to ads? I really do not buy many things, if your concern is that ads would compel me to buy too many things, in like, a consumerist way. (Actually, the example with the printer was when I was living with my parents, so it was actually my dad who bought the printer after I pointed out it existed, and after he evaluated the price taking the ink into account.)
roenxi 5y ago
It was a surprise to me, but there is a group of people - possibly native to tech circles, possibly a broader group - who appear to be genuinely angry about the existence of advertising as a thing. Let alone if they personally have to view ads. It is a bit confusing to be honest. There seems to be something very upsetting happening but exactly what is causing that response I can't pick out.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  You can't pick out the issue with large corporations sinking billions of dollars into trying to manipulate your behavior?
  - roenxi 5y ago
    No, I can't. There are many things that influence my behaviour and that is low down on the list of influences that worry me. Even Hacker News is probably a worse influence than the average ad. What do you think is the problem here? And it isn't billions, you need to normalise by audience size. Any company spending billions to influence my behaviour is bankrupt, I don't have enough money for them to make that back.
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    - ahelwer 5y ago
      Okay, so you actually can pick out the issue. You just don't mind being manipulated by corporations. Fine, but strange that the angle you took was "aw shucks geez guys I'm so confused about all this".
      - 5y ago
rjbwork 5y ago
Cool. Then websites can sell direct placement banners hosted on their own servers.
bostik 5y ago
It is possible to do ads acceptably, but pre-loading a list of offenders who get around your choices is not it. If you want to do ads online, here are the initial rules of engagement: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
- nkurz 5y ago
  FYI, when I tried to follow your link, Safari on Mac blocked your link with a warning that the certificate is invalid. Oddly, the "details" section (which helpfully cannot be cut-and-pasted) mentioned that "the website's certificate will be valid 0 days from now". I'm guessing this means there is a clock or timezone error, either on your end or my laptop. Ignore or look into at your option.
  - bostik 5y ago
    Well that's funny, the cert is valid until 2022-01-16. It might have something to do with the LE intermediate root rotation - Chrome variants and Firefox are happy with the chain, but Safari's CA trust store may not have the new intermediate CA in place. I'll upgrade the system over the holidays in any case, and the new lighttpd finally has native support for CA chain inclusions. That should make all the clients happy again.
cmeacham98 5y ago
Maybe, but AB+'s acceptable ads program does not whitelist "acceptable ads", it whitelists "acceptable ads who have paid AB+ 30% of their ad revenue". Bonus points for the obvious conflict of interest of AB+ privately determining what "acceptable" means (where remember, if they say yes they make money). AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.
- whakim 5y ago
  I'm not directly disputing what you're saying, just wanted to point out for context that (1) you have to reach some threshold before you have to start paying AB+ to whitelist you (I don't know much about the business of advertising so unclear how high a bar this is to clear); (2) technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable" (I don't know how independent it actually is in practice). > AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads. Surely you admit that the "acceptable" criteria are at least directionally correct? So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)? Given the shortcomings of AB+, what do you think is a better way of (1) defining acceptable ad standards; (2) generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists? Genuine questions to provoke discussion :)
  - cmeacham98 5y ago
    > you have to reach some threshold before you have to start paying AB+ to whitelist you Irrelevant. I (and 99% of other users) spend the majority of my time on the internet on websites large enough to meet the threshold. > technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable" Skimming the first page of that "independent" committee's bylaws: they self describe as being "hosted by eeyeo" (the developer of AB+). > So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)? I don't care about via what mechanism advertisers improve their ads - that is their job to worry about not mine. > what do you think is a better way of defining acceptable ad standards I, the user, choose what is acceptable in my browser, not a for-profit company that benefits from bribes to whitelist ads. Believe it or not I do whitelist some websites with what I consider acceptable ads, but I do not and will never use an ad whitelist. > generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists Ad whitelists that generate revenue essentially always have a conflict of interest. Web advertising's abysmal reputation isn't some freak accident. Websites and advertisers should work together to create actually acceptable ads rather than trying to bribe adblockers and hope users don't notice.
tadfisher 5y ago
I agree, which is why I run Privacy Badger, which only blocks domains performing tracking and ignoring my "do not track" preference. Turns out that just doing that blocks 99% of ads and triggers anti-adblock detection. Which begs the question, of course.
tjpnz 5y ago
What's an "acceptable ad"? The text only ads Google sold way back in their infancy seemed acceptable but the goalposts were constantly shifted towards the distracting, privacy disrespecting, security nightmare which is now an integral part of the hellscape that is the "modern web". Why should I trust the advertising industry again? Is advertising a valid business model? For some apps and services perhaps, but it's not the only option and in many cases serves the business and users poorly. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the best products I've used recently have actually put some thought into how to monetize.
brnt 5y ago
That sounds exactly like what Brave is trying to do. They're pretty upfront about that, unlike Adblock, last I checked. It's not hard to check out of this in Brave in any case. I'm not sure the author has checked the same for the alternatives he mentions. The closed source nature of Vivaldi (their tarballs only contain their copy of Chromium) makes it a weird recommendation, in any case.
ACow_Adonis 5y ago
isn't that for the consumer of the data to decide? in fact, I'll go so far as to say that's exactly what most proper ad-blockers are: user implemented acceptable ads. if the user wants to view ads, they have it in their power to whitelist a site or domain. perhaps a business could be made where you provide a list of acceptable ads and people can pay money to view them. on the one hand, I think that's a more reasonable business model than the one you've suggested, as at least it aligns the user's interest with their own explicit actions. of course, there is the little problem that such a business model would probably never work, because fundamentally, most people don't want ads. they tolerate them because they don't know they could have a choice otherwise...
rglullis 5y ago
"Acceptable ads" still track you. Now it's only a racket run by the current owners of AdBlock.
fileeditview 5y ago
As a consumer you should ask yourself: do the ads provide any benefit to me? And if there is none, you should just block the them. Sure it's nothing new that companies try to show you ads. But in the same spirit I always turned down volume or switched channel on TV when ads were on. This was in the past. These days I don't even bother watching channels with ads. I personally would not be sad if the whole ad industry became less significant and we had more paid services. They also tend to be longer-lasting than many ad-sponsored services. Also I am the customer and can demand certain things, whereas with a free service I can demand nothing and I am not the customer. As a student I made a few small Android games with ads. They brought in a few hundred bucks. Then I was blocked by Admob for whatever reason. At this point I learned what a crooked business this is and I swore that I will never make an ad-sponsored app again. If I have an idea for a product/service that will only work in that setting it will not even go on my list.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  There’s no free lunch, the ads provide you with the ability to see things on the internet for free.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    I think FLOSS people ought to disagree with you. Also, this very site has no ads. Neither does wikipedia. Nor librivox, or Project Gutemberg...
    - tinus_hn 5y ago
      Many of these projects are funded by sponsors that couldn’t exist without internet ads.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      HN has ads for YC companies.
  - fileeditview 5y ago
    As I said.. I would prefer to pay for valuable content. Then the rest splits into two categories. Truly free (maybe with donations, or totally free) and a load of crap content I don't need to see anyways.
bee_rider 5y ago
Do ad blockers now block first party images, or something? I'm fine with a site just hosting static images by itself. Typically I think the bad behavior comes from the third party ad networks. So, the way to get acceptable ads is for everyone to run an ad blocker. If we block the abusive entrants from the market, it might give the good ones room to grow.
marcodiego 5y ago
At the current state, I don't think there is such thing as "acceptable ads".
jks 5y ago
There is e.g. https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ which I have chosen to allow in my uBlock Origin settings, since their ads aren't too obtrusive and they (at least claim that they) only target ads using IP geolocation and site keywords. But I'm sure it's hard for them to grow their business, since most people in the target audience will probably be using an ad blocker in which they will have to make a specific exception.
tomjen3 5y ago
I can see why you would say that, but remember ads are ultimately paid for by the person watching the ad. If the company didn’t have to pay marketing expenses, it would be able to sell the product cheaper.
freediver 5y ago
The only acceptable ads are those that are unobtrusive and people have opted-into seeing while not being incentivized to see them (for example being paid to see ads as this is a perverse incentive). For example when I share this link to my favorite ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49fDwqwK5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49fDwqwK5E and you decide to check it out, it satisfies the above criteria.
taneq 5y ago
As long as that discussion begins by defining "acceptable ads" as "ads that I accept", not "ads which the advertiser doesn't think are quite that bad." And by "ads that I accept" I mean "ads that I can turn off".

by whakim 5y ago

pmlnr 5y ago

Static pictures or text, no JS, and nothing more is such a big change for current ads people they can't even comprehend it.

sdfjkl 5y ago

Advertising shits in your head.

WoahNoun 5y ago

For example, the text advertisements on the side of Advent of Code. It wouldn't feel right to block those.

ahelwer 5y ago

Then let people who believe that go stare at ads. Submitting yourself to manipulation out of a sense of duty to the viability of a business model is deeply weird. Alternatively, if you believe those ads don't affect you then why does it matter whether they're displayed in your browser or not?

drdeca 5y ago
I do see potential value in being informed by an ad of a type of product I didn’t know existed. The type of ads I strongly dislike for reasons beyond like, breaking pages and tracking, are ones that repeatedly show for something which I already know exists in order to promote a brand. If someone wants to put up an ad for “we make any bronze parts”, well, I looked to see if any of them were cheap enough to get as a gag (none of them were, but still). If a company wants to remind me over and over of their company name that everyone is already familiar with, that is irritating.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  If you didn't have a pre-existing desire for that product which led you to search out its existence then why was having the desire for it instilled in you a good thing? Why deliberately create the hole of dissatisfaction within yourself?
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Dissatisfaction? You see a potential for dissatisfaction, I see a potential for opportunity. Also, allocating time for “searching for products that I don’t know of but which seems like they might exist, which would improve things” seems, slow an inefficient? Like, I previously had thought “it is bad that printers basically all have drm-ish ink cartridges.” When I saw an ad for a printer which instead had refillable ink tanks, I regarded that as an improvement. (As it happened the printer had some unfortunate bugs where it semi-frequently needs to be forcibly rebooted by unplugging it, but it is otherwise seems to work nice.) I don’t see how this is not a benefit? It isn’t like I otherwise wouldn’t be using a printer, or like it increased average rate of printer purchasing non-negligibly . It mostly just changed which printer got purchased. Like, I suppose if every time I thought “I wish there was a product such the [x]”, I put a description of that into a web form (in terms of keywords I guess?) and then when a product was released, the company releasing the product could send info to the company running the website demonstrating the novel properties, and then the website could notify all the people whose descriptions appeared to match, and that could be an alternative to ads? I really do not buy many things, if your concern is that ads would compel me to buy too many things, in like, a consumerist way. (Actually, the example with the printer was when I was living with my parents, so it was actually my dad who bought the printer after I pointed out it existed, and after he evaluated the price taking the ink into account.)

roenxi 5y ago

It was a surprise to me, but there is a group of people - possibly native to tech circles, possibly a broader group - who appear to be genuinely angry about the existence of advertising as a thing. Let alone if they personally have to view ads. It is a bit confusing to be honest. There seems to be something very upsetting happening but exactly what is causing that response I can't pick out.

ahelwer 5y ago
You can't pick out the issue with large corporations sinking billions of dollars into trying to manipulate your behavior?
- roenxi 5y ago
  No, I can't. There are many things that influence my behaviour and that is low down on the list of influences that worry me. Even Hacker News is probably a worse influence than the average ad. What do you think is the problem here? And it isn't billions, you need to normalise by audience size. Any company spending billions to influence my behaviour is bankrupt, I don't have enough money for them to make that back.
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  - ahelwer 5y ago
    Okay, so you actually can pick out the issue. You just don't mind being manipulated by corporations. Fine, but strange that the angle you took was "aw shucks geez guys I'm so confused about all this".
    - 5y ago

rjbwork 5y ago

Cool. Then websites can sell direct placement banners hosted on their own servers.

bostik 5y ago

It is possible to do ads acceptably, but pre-loading a list of offenders who get around your choices is not it. If you want to do ads online, here are the initial rules of engagement: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html

nkurz 5y ago
FYI, when I tried to follow your link, Safari on Mac blocked your link with a warning that the certificate is invalid. Oddly, the "details" section (which helpfully cannot be cut-and-pasted) mentioned that "the website's certificate will be valid 0 days from now". I'm guessing this means there is a clock or timezone error, either on your end or my laptop. Ignore or look into at your option.
- bostik 5y ago
  Well that's funny, the cert is valid until 2022-01-16. It might have something to do with the LE intermediate root rotation - Chrome variants and Firefox are happy with the chain, but Safari's CA trust store may not have the new intermediate CA in place. I'll upgrade the system over the holidays in any case, and the new lighttpd finally has native support for CA chain inclusions. That should make all the clients happy again.

cmeacham98 5y ago

Maybe, but AB+'s acceptable ads program does not whitelist "acceptable ads", it whitelists "acceptable ads who have paid AB+ 30% of their ad revenue". Bonus points for the obvious conflict of interest of AB+ privately determining what "acceptable" means (where remember, if they say yes they make money). AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.

whakim 5y ago
I'm not directly disputing what you're saying, just wanted to point out for context that (1) you have to reach some threshold before you have to start paying AB+ to whitelist you (I don't know much about the business of advertising so unclear how high a bar this is to clear); (2) technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable" (I don't know how independent it actually is in practice). > AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads. Surely you admit that the "acceptable" criteria are at least directionally correct? So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)? Given the shortcomings of AB+, what do you think is a better way of (1) defining acceptable ad standards; (2) generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists? Genuine questions to provoke discussion :)
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  > you have to reach some threshold before you have to start paying AB+ to whitelist you Irrelevant. I (and 99% of other users) spend the majority of my time on the internet on websites large enough to meet the threshold. > technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable" Skimming the first page of that "independent" committee's bylaws: they self describe as being "hosted by eeyeo" (the developer of AB+). > So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)? I don't care about via what mechanism advertisers improve their ads - that is their job to worry about not mine. > what do you think is a better way of defining acceptable ad standards I, the user, choose what is acceptable in my browser, not a for-profit company that benefits from bribes to whitelist ads. Believe it or not I do whitelist some websites with what I consider acceptable ads, but I do not and will never use an ad whitelist. > generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists Ad whitelists that generate revenue essentially always have a conflict of interest. Web advertising's abysmal reputation isn't some freak accident. Websites and advertisers should work together to create actually acceptable ads rather than trying to bribe adblockers and hope users don't notice.

tadfisher 5y ago

I agree, which is why I run Privacy Badger, which only blocks domains performing tracking and ignoring my "do not track" preference. Turns out that just doing that blocks 99% of ads and triggers anti-adblock detection. Which begs the question, of course.

tjpnz 5y ago

What's an "acceptable ad"? The text only ads Google sold way back in their infancy seemed acceptable but the goalposts were constantly shifted towards the distracting, privacy disrespecting, security nightmare which is now an integral part of the hellscape that is the "modern web". Why should I trust the advertising industry again? Is advertising a valid business model? For some apps and services perhaps, but it's not the only option and in many cases serves the business and users poorly. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the best products I've used recently have actually put some thought into how to monetize.

brnt 5y ago

That sounds exactly like what Brave is trying to do. They're pretty upfront about that, unlike Adblock, last I checked. It's not hard to check out of this in Brave in any case. I'm not sure the author has checked the same for the alternatives he mentions. The closed source nature of Vivaldi (their tarballs only contain their copy of Chromium) makes it a weird recommendation, in any case.

ACow_Adonis 5y ago

isn't that for the consumer of the data to decide? in fact, I'll go so far as to say that's exactly what most proper ad-blockers are: user implemented acceptable ads. if the user wants to view ads, they have it in their power to whitelist a site or domain. perhaps a business could be made where you provide a list of acceptable ads and people can pay money to view them. on the one hand, I think that's a more reasonable business model than the one you've suggested, as at least it aligns the user's interest with their own explicit actions. of course, there is the little problem that such a business model would probably never work, because fundamentally, most people don't want ads. they tolerate them because they don't know they could have a choice otherwise...

rglullis 5y ago

"Acceptable ads" still track you. Now it's only a racket run by the current owners of AdBlock.

fileeditview 5y ago

As a consumer you should ask yourself: do the ads provide any benefit to me? And if there is none, you should just block the them. Sure it's nothing new that companies try to show you ads. But in the same spirit I always turned down volume or switched channel on TV when ads were on. This was in the past. These days I don't even bother watching channels with ads. I personally would not be sad if the whole ad industry became less significant and we had more paid services. They also tend to be longer-lasting than many ad-sponsored services. Also I am the customer and can demand certain things, whereas with a free service I can demand nothing and I am not the customer. As a student I made a few small Android games with ads. They brought in a few hundred bucks. Then I was blocked by Admob for whatever reason. At this point I learned what a crooked business this is and I swore that I will never make an ad-sponsored app again. If I have an idea for a product/service that will only work in that setting it will not even go on my list.

tinus_hn 5y ago
There’s no free lunch, the ads provide you with the ability to see things on the internet for free.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I think FLOSS people ought to disagree with you. Also, this very site has no ads. Neither does wikipedia. Nor librivox, or Project Gutemberg...
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Many of these projects are funded by sponsors that couldn’t exist without internet ads.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    HN has ads for YC companies.
- fileeditview 5y ago
  As I said.. I would prefer to pay for valuable content. Then the rest splits into two categories. Truly free (maybe with donations, or totally free) and a load of crap content I don't need to see anyways.

bee_rider 5y ago

Do ad blockers now block first party images, or something? I'm fine with a site just hosting static images by itself. Typically I think the bad behavior comes from the third party ad networks. So, the way to get acceptable ads is for everyone to run an ad blocker. If we block the abusive entrants from the market, it might give the good ones room to grow.

marcodiego 5y ago

At the current state, I don't think there is such thing as "acceptable ads".

jks 5y ago

There is e.g. https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ which I have chosen to allow in my uBlock Origin settings, since their ads aren't too obtrusive and they (at least claim that they) only target ads using IP geolocation and site keywords. But I'm sure it's hard for them to grow their business, since most people in the target audience will probably be using an ad blocker in which they will have to make a specific exception.

tomjen3 5y ago

I can see why you would say that, but remember ads are ultimately paid for by the person watching the ad. If the company didn’t have to pay marketing expenses, it would be able to sell the product cheaper.

freediver 5y ago

The only acceptable ads are those that are unobtrusive and people have opted-into seeing while not being incentivized to see them (for example being paid to see ads as this is a perverse incentive). For example when I share this link to my favorite ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49fDwqwK5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49fDwqwK5E and you decide to check it out, it satisfies the above criteria.

taneq 5y ago

As long as that discussion begins by defining "acceptable ads" as "ads that I accept", not "ads which the advertiser doesn't think are quite that bad." And by "ads that I accept" I mean "ads that I can turn off".