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Seeing this in this context just made me realize that it's weird to consider them "blockers", a loaded term. As if we're starting from some default, correct sta

Seeing this in this context just made me realize that it's weird to consider them "blockers", a loaded term. As if we're starting from some default, correct state, and then blocking part of it. We've always been able to choose what content we navigate to. These are content selectors/choosers, which just support our existing ability to choose what content we request and actions we take.

swores 4y ago
I disagree completely, "blockers" is accurate. The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive. Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.
- _flux 4y ago
  The "end game" from the user's point of view would if someone indeed came up with "content selectors". It would be quite an achievement to build one that was actually useful. Maybe easy version could work exactly the same way as blockers do, except they'd invert the way the rules are evaluted, and of course the rules would need to be custom as well. And then if the rules would fail to find some actual content on the page, then I guess you might not even know about it :).
  - amelius 4y ago
    The end game would be some AI running on a gpu in your monitor, so the browser nor the originating website need to know about any blocking.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Except you'd still have client-side execution in that case. Obviously not everyone cares, but there are some straightforward objective reasons to care if you're blocking it being rendered anyway, like why waste cycles on it.
      - amelius 4y ago
        True, but it's hard to block execution without the website not knowing about it.
  - noisem4ker 4y ago
    That closely describes uMatrix in default deny mode. For each individual site and subdomain, the user gets to choose if they want to allow cookies, images, CSS, JS, XHR, frames. Too bad it's unmaintained, with most of its practical and commonly intended use cases fitting the simpler uBlock Origin.
    - _flux 4y ago
      But the underlying principle is still filtering out the undesired content instead of selecting the desired content.
      - Karellen 4y ago
        Surely the principle the parent suggested was to initially filter out all of the content, and then selecting the desired content to load. But isn't "filtering out all of the content" just another way of saying, "not loading any content" - until explicitly requested?
        _flux 4y ago
        Perhaps I misunderstood. But let's say I do run uMatrix in deny more, I get the site HTML as the Tim Berners-Lee intended. Yet that already may contain some kind of advertising material, so to view only the actual content I'd need to have e.g. an XPath do it. So I would have a database of sites and XPath (or other ways) describing how to find the content, instead of describing how to get rid of non-content. Can I tell uMatrix to only show a certain XPath from the page? If so, I agree it is a content selector, albeit pretty impractical :).
    - jjav 4y ago
      uMatrix is the absolute best, I can't imagine browsing without it. So the unmaintaned part is very sad and troubling. I do install uBlock Origin for all non-technical family members, but uMatrix is so much more capable.
  - unixbane 4y ago
    The end game for the web to be scraped into entries in a database to be displayed by real software instead of a web browser.
    - mattl 4y ago
      Sounds miserable and authoritarian
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    That's basically what the "reader mode" in the various browsers do
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    Anyone remember Proxomitron?
- Dotnaught 4y ago
  While that's true of software set up to specifically subtract content from a server response, the code could just as well be set up to add page elements (e.g. for easier navigation) or just rearrange things. So "content customizer" or "user preference enforcer" would both be apt and less arguably pejorative. "Blocker" implies a specific set of assumptions about a publisher having some say in how content gets presented. "UserAgent" entails a different worldview, one that the companies making browsers seem increasingly unwilling to defend against competing interests.
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  > "but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs." No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way. When I first started browsing the web I didn't have a graphical browser at home. My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not. It was not "blocking" anything, it was rendering the available content according to the capabilities of my system. > "Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive." It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display, when the web was specifically designed such that they should not. > "Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content" I modify many aspects of webpage display to help me assimilate content. When a website has chosen difficult to read colors, I change them so they're easier to see. I change fonts and font sizes. I modify page layouts, sometimes collapsing many separate pages into one long page, and sometimes I use screen readers and I don't even look at a visual rendering at all. I often remove annoying, obnoxious or intrusive content which also make it harder for me to read a page, many of which are ads. The web is specifically designed from inception to give this agency to clients. Websites provide units of content and suggestions on how to best display it. That is all.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way. It was designed with this technical capability. But the social contract was always that you went to a site for it to tell you what to display. And we have many very nice, very non-standard sites because of it. There is nothing wrong on blocking part of that content, but everybody's state of mind is that by default, any site content is expected to load.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load Source that this is just a side effect from other design decisions? >My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard. >It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  The websites are _requesting_ the users’ browsers to execute certain extra code the users deem unnecessary to their experience in using the site. The users have no moral responsibility to execute that code. If website owners want to detect and block users making such choices, that is their prerogative, but as long as they don’t, the users may continue to exercise the control and autonomy given by them by the website owners without any moral concerns.
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    > If website owners want to detect and block users Oops. I guess you meant to say user request selector/filter then if the term "block" is so loaded.
    - CogitoCogito 4y ago
      I meant what I said.
- jrootabega 4y ago
  The website usually includes the address of the content to display or script to run. My post meant that I don't think we should take it as a given that our browser must fetch and run all of those resources automatically or else violate some protocol. And if a user wants to have a policy of selectively choosing what content they want, but that content is hard to define or whitelist, then using a blacklist mechanism doesn't mean that the policy is to block. It's just the most common, practical method of choosing the content you want.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  Blocking useless content makes finding useful content much more easier. No one has enough time in the world to block all the infinite amount of useless content. We already do that perpetually by what we personally value the most and what we choose to ignore.
- eric_cc 4y ago
  This is just not true. The host serves data to a client which can do what it wants with it. The client can interpret the data from the website however it wants regardless of the intention of the website. A website, for example, can use tags that a client doesn’t comply with. The client is and always has been opinionated. It does not and never has had to obey the websites intentions.
- int_19h 4y ago
  With CSS, at least, users being able to override styles was explicitly the goal of its first edition: "One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps."
Bakary 4y ago
Ideologically, I am inclined to agree. I have an epidermic reaction to advertising in general. However, these extensions exist in a context where they depend on the majority of users not using them. If every browser had them, the economy of the web would change completely. Very few users who take active steps against ads want to pull a Stallman and relinquish entire parts of the Internet altogether; they want to see the content they are seeing, content that is most of the time supported by ads, without ads. The word 'blocker' is thus appropriate because the explicit goal is an asymmetric relationship based on other people making ads profitable. In reality, the more interesting question would be whether we shouldn't limit our media consumption to begin with, or form a culture that is less dependent on advertising. If browsing with ads becomes mandatory some day, I will probably make the choice to severely cut the amount of Internet I gorge on. It will take some willpower, but every time I switch off the blocker and see what websites really are like I want to gag, so I won't be that difficult.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  How much would be gained if every piece of content actually had to actively earn your patronage versus passively pulling your eyes. I feel like that's the dynamic most AdBlock users see. I personally don't care if click bait tabloids and exploitative re-hosters we're to crumble overnight.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    This sounds very reasonable on paper. The elephant in the room, however, is that most people and even those who claim to want to move past ads don't want to pay that much for what they consume. The barrier between consuming something for free and paying even a tiny sum towards supporting the author is an enormous psychological chasm. The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too. The case of HN is particularly enlightening because the community is very hostile to ads and for the most part has the technical ability to avoid them with a higher degree of sophistication than just installing Ublock. But there is also the majority of the focus and admiration placed on SWEs and companies that are directly and indirectly tied to the ad ecosystem. The energy given off is similar to McDonald's executives yelling at their children if they see them with a processed patty in hand.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
I’m fine with “content blockers”. They block content the same way my eyelids and eye muscles do when I decide to not look at billboards. If you don’t have moral qualms with using your eyelids to block ads then you shouldn’t have with software content blockers either. It just outsources the act of blocking from your eyes into the computer.
- jrootabega 4y ago
  To be honest, no, I don't use my eyelids to block anything, and I don't think that's a reasonable thing for a person to do. I don't use any muscles to block billboards; I just look at whatever I was originally planning to look at (usually the road ahead of me), and don't expend much mental or muscular effort to pay attention to OR ignore billboards. The closest I might come is to turn away from ads playing at the gas pump. But that could easily be classified as choosing not to look vs. blocking.
  - brokenmachine 4y ago
    If I could wear blinkers that only block the billboards while driving, I would definitely wear them. Ad blockers on the PC are the same thing.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
the "block" ads. Not everything needs to be analyzed to death for some sort of symbolism.
anotherevan 4y ago
I call them HTML firewalls.
llimos 4y ago
Bouncers?

swores 4y ago

I disagree completely, "blockers" is accurate. The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive. Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.

_flux 4y ago
The "end game" from the user's point of view would if someone indeed came up with "content selectors". It would be quite an achievement to build one that was actually useful. Maybe easy version could work exactly the same way as blockers do, except they'd invert the way the rules are evaluted, and of course the rules would need to be custom as well. And then if the rules would fail to find some actual content on the page, then I guess you might not even know about it :).
- amelius 4y ago
  The end game would be some AI running on a gpu in your monitor, so the browser nor the originating website need to know about any blocking.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Except you'd still have client-side execution in that case. Obviously not everyone cares, but there are some straightforward objective reasons to care if you're blocking it being rendered anyway, like why waste cycles on it.
    - amelius 4y ago
      True, but it's hard to block execution without the website not knowing about it.
- noisem4ker 4y ago
  That closely describes uMatrix in default deny mode. For each individual site and subdomain, the user gets to choose if they want to allow cookies, images, CSS, JS, XHR, frames. Too bad it's unmaintained, with most of its practical and commonly intended use cases fitting the simpler uBlock Origin.
  - _flux 4y ago
    But the underlying principle is still filtering out the undesired content instead of selecting the desired content.
    - Karellen 4y ago
      Surely the principle the parent suggested was to initially filter out all of the content, and then selecting the desired content to load. But isn't "filtering out all of the content" just another way of saying, "not loading any content" - until explicitly requested?
      - _flux 4y ago
        Perhaps I misunderstood. But let's say I do run uMatrix in deny more, I get the site HTML as the Tim Berners-Lee intended. Yet that already may contain some kind of advertising material, so to view only the actual content I'd need to have e.g. an XPath do it. So I would have a database of sites and XPath (or other ways) describing how to find the content, instead of describing how to get rid of non-content. Can I tell uMatrix to only show a certain XPath from the page? If so, I agree it is a content selector, albeit pretty impractical :).
  - jjav 4y ago
    uMatrix is the absolute best, I can't imagine browsing without it. So the unmaintaned part is very sad and troubling. I do install uBlock Origin for all non-technical family members, but uMatrix is so much more capable.
- unixbane 4y ago
  The end game for the web to be scraped into entries in a database to be displayed by real software instead of a web browser.
  - mattl 4y ago
    Sounds miserable and authoritarian
- kalleboo 4y ago
  That's basically what the "reader mode" in the various browsers do
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Anyone remember Proxomitron?
Dotnaught 4y ago
While that's true of software set up to specifically subtract content from a server response, the code could just as well be set up to add page elements (e.g. for easier navigation) or just rearrange things. So "content customizer" or "user preference enforcer" would both be apt and less arguably pejorative. "Blocker" implies a specific set of assumptions about a publisher having some say in how content gets presented. "UserAgent" entails a different worldview, one that the companies making browsers seem increasingly unwilling to defend against competing interests.
throwaway09223 4y ago
> "but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs." No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way. When I first started browsing the web I didn't have a graphical browser at home. My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not. It was not "blocking" anything, it was rendering the available content according to the capabilities of my system. > "Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive." It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display, when the web was specifically designed such that they should not. > "Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content" I modify many aspects of webpage display to help me assimilate content. When a website has chosen difficult to read colors, I change them so they're easier to see. I change fonts and font sizes. I modify page layouts, sometimes collapsing many separate pages into one long page, and sometimes I use screen readers and I don't even look at a visual rendering at all. I often remove annoying, obnoxious or intrusive content which also make it harder for me to read a page, many of which are ads. The web is specifically designed from inception to give this agency to clients. Websites provide units of content and suggestions on how to best display it. That is all.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way. It was designed with this technical capability. But the social contract was always that you went to a site for it to tell you what to display. And we have many very nice, very non-standard sites because of it. There is nothing wrong on blocking part of that content, but everybody's state of mind is that by default, any site content is expected to load.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load Source that this is just a side effect from other design decisions? >My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard. >It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS.
CogitoCogito 4y ago
The websites are _requesting_ the users’ browsers to execute certain extra code the users deem unnecessary to their experience in using the site. The users have no moral responsibility to execute that code. If website owners want to detect and block users making such choices, that is their prerogative, but as long as they don’t, the users may continue to exercise the control and autonomy given by them by the website owners without any moral concerns.
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  > If website owners want to detect and block users Oops. I guess you meant to say user request selector/filter then if the term "block" is so loaded.
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    I meant what I said.
jrootabega 4y ago
The website usually includes the address of the content to display or script to run. My post meant that I don't think we should take it as a given that our browser must fetch and run all of those resources automatically or else violate some protocol. And if a user wants to have a policy of selectively choosing what content they want, but that content is hard to define or whitelist, then using a blacklist mechanism doesn't mean that the policy is to block. It's just the most common, practical method of choosing the content you want.
ThunderSizzle 4y ago
Blocking useless content makes finding useful content much more easier. No one has enough time in the world to block all the infinite amount of useless content. We already do that perpetually by what we personally value the most and what we choose to ignore.
eric_cc 4y ago
This is just not true. The host serves data to a client which can do what it wants with it. The client can interpret the data from the website however it wants regardless of the intention of the website. A website, for example, can use tags that a client doesn’t comply with. The client is and always has been opinionated. It does not and never has had to obey the websites intentions.
int_19h 4y ago
With CSS, at least, users being able to override styles was explicitly the goal of its first edition: "One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps."

Bakary 4y ago

Ideologically, I am inclined to agree. I have an epidermic reaction to advertising in general. However, these extensions exist in a context where they depend on the majority of users not using them. If every browser had them, the economy of the web would change completely. Very few users who take active steps against ads want to pull a Stallman and relinquish entire parts of the Internet altogether; they want to see the content they are seeing, content that is most of the time supported by ads, without ads. The word 'blocker' is thus appropriate because the explicit goal is an asymmetric relationship based on other people making ads profitable. In reality, the more interesting question would be whether we shouldn't limit our media consumption to begin with, or form a culture that is less dependent on advertising. If browsing with ads becomes mandatory some day, I will probably make the choice to severely cut the amount of Internet I gorge on. It will take some willpower, but every time I switch off the blocker and see what websites really are like I want to gag, so I won't be that difficult.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
How much would be gained if every piece of content actually had to actively earn your patronage versus passively pulling your eyes. I feel like that's the dynamic most AdBlock users see. I personally don't care if click bait tabloids and exploitative re-hosters we're to crumble overnight.
- Bakary 4y ago
  This sounds very reasonable on paper. The elephant in the room, however, is that most people and even those who claim to want to move past ads don't want to pay that much for what they consume. The barrier between consuming something for free and paying even a tiny sum towards supporting the author is an enormous psychological chasm. The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too. The case of HN is particularly enlightening because the community is very hostile to ads and for the most part has the technical ability to avoid them with a higher degree of sophistication than just installing Ublock. But there is also the majority of the focus and admiration placed on SWEs and companies that are directly and indirectly tied to the ad ecosystem. The energy given off is similar to McDonald's executives yelling at their children if they see them with a processed patty in hand.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

I’m fine with “content blockers”. They block content the same way my eyelids and eye muscles do when I decide to not look at billboards. If you don’t have moral qualms with using your eyelids to block ads then you shouldn’t have with software content blockers either. It just outsources the act of blocking from your eyes into the computer.

jrootabega 4y ago
To be honest, no, I don't use my eyelids to block anything, and I don't think that's a reasonable thing for a person to do. I don't use any muscles to block billboards; I just look at whatever I was originally planning to look at (usually the road ahead of me), and don't expend much mental or muscular effort to pay attention to OR ignore billboards. The closest I might come is to turn away from ads playing at the gas pump. But that could easily be classified as choosing not to look vs. blocking.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  If I could wear blinkers that only block the billboards while driving, I would definitely wear them. Ad blockers on the PC are the same thing.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

the "block" ads. Not everything needs to be analyzed to death for some sort of symbolism.

anotherevan 4y ago

I call them HTML firewalls.

llimos 4y ago

Bouncers?