8 ms·

I used to not do Adblock, because you know, ads make the internet go round and all that. But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what

by neals 12y ago

I used to not do Adblock, because you know, ads make the internet go round and all that. But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.

zo1 12y ago
I got tricked once by one of those while on Sourceforge. Words can not describe how annoyed I was that day.
- jackmaney 12y ago
  Thankfully, we shouldn't see GitHub pulling any shit like that anytime soon (or if they do, I won't be able to see it, as I use Adblock Plus...).
- nandhp 12y ago
  And if you try to download Windows binaries from Sourceforge, your download may be enhanced with WinZip, the Ask.com toolbar, and other optional offers. http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-bundles-program-downloads-with-adware/ http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-...
  - benbristow 12y ago
    This is a nice little app recently developed that can help you out with those 'installers'. http://unchecky.com/ http://unchecky.com/
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      In many cases it's not the program authors that added those installers, but SourceForge and/or its mirrors.
vacri 12y ago
Flashblock is my middleground. The advertisers can have images, but the worst offenders are the Flash ads, and they get blocked.
- dstroot 12y ago
  Flashblock is not needed on Chrome - go to settings/advanced/content settings/plugins and select "click to play". Now flash will not run automatically. But you can decide to click on something and allow it to play if you want. Works great - no plugin needed.
  - wukkuan 12y ago
    Same in Firefox. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-plugins-blocklist-style/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-p... Though I just never bothered installing Flash. If I need Flash for a site, I use Chrome (which comes with Flash embedded, I believe).
    - m_ram 12y ago
      Firefox differs from Chrome in that it will enable Flash for a whole page, rather than per-element. This means you still need an extension for blocking Flash ads on Flash video sites.
      - pwr22 12y ago
        And that extension doesn't work if javascript isn't enabled for that page :(
      - rewqfdsa 12y ago
        Firefox's model is better, I think. Plenty of sites use hidden flash videos for various utility functionality. How are you supposed to click on these hidden videos so that you can enable them?
        12y ago
lostcolony 12y ago
What pushed me into using it was when comics.com (now gocomics.com; the official online source of a number of syndicated newspaper comics) had ads that would -minimize my browser-, display a pop up designed to look like a Windows system warning, that advised me to download some malware masquerading as a virus scanner.
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  Gocomics.com is a particularly good example - I find it surprising that they appear to accept such low quality (one weird old tip) and shady (download now/you have 1 new messages/etc) ads.
  - Encosia 12y ago
    It can be tricky to balance between going broke and accidentally showing ads that some users dislike when you're using a large network like AdSense. As someone with a browsing profile that isn't targeted by those kind of ads, I've found out second-hand that I've been running ads like that a few times. Trying to prune specific ads is an endless game of whack-a-mole that I've never been able to win, and disabling an entire category of ads just to prevent 1% of them from running is very tough on the bottom line.
    - jamiek88 12y ago
      That really is a problem and it took me a while to figure out that sites weren't actually/necessarily endorsing those ads. There should be an easier way of black/white listing certain types of ads when setting up adsense.
      - GhotiFish 12y ago
        Is actually very easy to solve. When someone wants to run an ad on your ad network. The vetting process should be more than "how much money you got?" If not for their own sakes anyway. Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someone in the industry that aggressively hostile ads are ruining their industry rather than being a staple of it. If they don't... Then I don't mind seeing that industry die.
rtpg 12y ago
Honestly, I've only seen the "tricky" Download Now buttons on shady video websites (read: those that have all the episodes of Seinfeld on them). Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be somew immoral , violating the contract with which you're looking at someone's content. I have less sympathy for people who are basically showing stolen content (not technically stolen , but still), though...
- ntakasaki 12y ago
  They are pretty common on program download sites, not just on pirate sites. http://marc.durdin.net/2012/08/rant-of-the-day-the-big-green-download-button/ http://marc.durdin.net/2012/08/rant-of-the-day-the-big-green...
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)? Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the motto really should be all the news that fits, we print.
  - voyou 12y ago
    "they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads" That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      > When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?" Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators, as they are on opposite sides of the building. There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.
tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
AdBlock+ is bad, but intrusive e-marketing is worse.
bnr 12y ago
I'd love an adblocker with a blacklist instead of whitelist so I could keep the ads on for the long tail of my browsing and remove them only on sites that go overboard.
- nkantar 12y ago
  Could you somehow whitelist all domains and go from there? Not on a computer right now to try it out for myself, but it sounds like an interesting approach.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Just remove the default block lists. I do this with adblock+, only adding rules for things that I decide are obnoxious (mostly trackers).
beagle3 12y ago
I would be ok with some (not-too-intrusive) ads to make the internet go around. But every single website now links to 30 trackers that try to track and profile your every move on the internet, with no accountability anywhere. In addition to the NSA, GCHQ, SVR RF, Mossad and other n-letter agencies, there are some 30 corporations that know everything about what and where you browse, keep that data not-very-secure, sell it to the highest bidder - any bidder, actually. Do you like that? I don't.
- funkyy 12y ago
  Yeah, the best example is YouTube - sometimes more than 100 elements shows up in AdBlock. There are afaik 3 blocks of ads + possible few trackers. Then what is the other 90?
JeremyBanks 12y ago
What sites are you encountering those ads on? You could blacklist them, rather than universally denying revenue.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  This is what I've never understood about the people claiming that "they have no choice" or that they feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators. I don't use ABP, but it's really not that much effort to have to see bad ads on each "bad" domain _once_, and then blacklist and not have to deal with that entire domain and their bad ads ever again. I do something quite similar with a JS blacklist (mostly for poorly-coded newspapers where I can't even scroll until they fetch some non-main-content resources over JS).
  - fwn 12y ago
    > "feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators" I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it. edit: While I agree that the blacklisting solution shouldn't be too much work, the charming "setup and forget" experience most adblockers provide will probably win through.
    - tracker1 12y ago
      O pretty much never click on ads, so ppc campaigns are worthless on me... as to ppv ads, most of them are obnoxious.. including on the main site I work for... I tend to whitelist it only because I need to make sure ads work. That said, thankfully the new design has fewer ads, which should help a lot. It really just depends, it's easy to go down a rabbit whole with ads... but we get 90% if our ad revenue from 40% of our ads. So cutting out a lot changes the layout of income without nearly so much impact on revenue.
    - wutbrodo 12y ago
      > I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it. This is possibly true, but not particularly relevant, as my comment mentions that I'm talking specifically about those who _do_ engage in moral justification. Among the people with whom I've talked about it, those who claim a moral justification are far more common than those who simply say "I don't like ads and I don't care about creators not getting paid". I would be surprised if there weren't many HNers whose sample is similar to mine. Tangentially but not importantly, I'm not convinced that only a small portion of users openly think "yes I'm consuming a product without paying and I have no other justification other than 'i dont want to pay' ". Part of the reason you see such contortions in an attempt at moral justification is because one can draw a pretty clear parallel to "I would shoplift if I didn't think I'd get caught", with the only (somewhat dubious) distinction being differences in marginal cost. Note that I have talked to people who have a moral stance on adblocking and piracy that _is_ consistent, but this is rare since it's usually accompanied by a pretty radical stance along the lines of "all information (music, art, writing, etc) should be completely free", which requires a pretty massive amount of philosophical baggage in terms of having a sense of how this affects the incentive to create said information.
spain 12y ago
Thankfully whitelists are a thing.
davidgerard 12y ago
For me it was my first autoplaying video with sound in a pop-under. Fuck that. You pull that shit, your whole industry can just go and get fucked. If you need to pull that shit to live, you need to fucking die. This laptop has 8GB because Firefox with ABP is really fat. It's worth every byte. I use FF for personal stuff, Chromium for work; occasionally I load a non-work page in Chromium and am bloody horrified at what the web looks like with ads.
r0s 12y ago
I barely use it myself, but for friends and family who need tech support I always install it. It reduces so much risk.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
I've been using the web for pretty much as long as it has existed ('94) and I've always held off on using an adblocker mostly just as a test to see if I could. I finally broke down recently and started using abp on chrome. Sometimes pages will take a while to load but overall it's just such a better experience. I should note that I have no qualms about blocking ads I would never click anyway. I don't harbor ridiculous puritanical notions that I must suffer in exchange for "free" content. Nor do I abide by the notion that anyone else has the right to sell my attention merely because they make content. Monetization should be cooperative, not coercive (and I also support content creators directly quite often).

by neals 12y ago

zo1 12y ago

I got tricked once by one of those while on Sourceforge. Words can not describe how annoyed I was that day.

jackmaney 12y ago
Thankfully, we shouldn't see GitHub pulling any shit like that anytime soon (or if they do, I won't be able to see it, as I use Adblock Plus...).
nandhp 12y ago
And if you try to download Windows binaries from Sourceforge, your download may be enhanced with WinZip, the Ask.com toolbar, and other optional offers. http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-bundles-program-downloads-with-adware/ http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-...
- benbristow 12y ago
  This is a nice little app recently developed that can help you out with those 'installers'. http://unchecky.com/ http://unchecky.com/
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    In many cases it's not the program authors that added those installers, but SourceForge and/or its mirrors.

vacri 12y ago

Flashblock is my middleground. The advertisers can have images, but the worst offenders are the Flash ads, and they get blocked.

dstroot 12y ago
Flashblock is not needed on Chrome - go to settings/advanced/content settings/plugins and select "click to play". Now flash will not run automatically. But you can decide to click on something and allow it to play if you want. Works great - no plugin needed.
- wukkuan 12y ago
  Same in Firefox. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-plugins-blocklist-style/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-p... Though I just never bothered installing Flash. If I need Flash for a site, I use Chrome (which comes with Flash embedded, I believe).
  - m_ram 12y ago
    Firefox differs from Chrome in that it will enable Flash for a whole page, rather than per-element. This means you still need an extension for blocking Flash ads on Flash video sites.
    - pwr22 12y ago
      And that extension doesn't work if javascript isn't enabled for that page :(
    - rewqfdsa 12y ago
      Firefox's model is better, I think. Plenty of sites use hidden flash videos for various utility functionality. How are you supposed to click on these hidden videos so that you can enable them?
      - 12y ago

lostcolony 12y ago

What pushed me into using it was when comics.com (now gocomics.com; the official online source of a number of syndicated newspaper comics) had ads that would -minimize my browser-, display a pop up designed to look like a Windows system warning, that advised me to download some malware masquerading as a virus scanner.

jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
Gocomics.com is a particularly good example - I find it surprising that they appear to accept such low quality (one weird old tip) and shady (download now/you have 1 new messages/etc) ads.
- Encosia 12y ago
  It can be tricky to balance between going broke and accidentally showing ads that some users dislike when you're using a large network like AdSense. As someone with a browsing profile that isn't targeted by those kind of ads, I've found out second-hand that I've been running ads like that a few times. Trying to prune specific ads is an endless game of whack-a-mole that I've never been able to win, and disabling an entire category of ads just to prevent 1% of them from running is very tough on the bottom line.
  - jamiek88 12y ago
    That really is a problem and it took me a while to figure out that sites weren't actually/necessarily endorsing those ads. There should be an easier way of black/white listing certain types of ads when setting up adsense.
    - GhotiFish 12y ago
      Is actually very easy to solve. When someone wants to run an ad on your ad network. The vetting process should be more than "how much money you got?" If not for their own sakes anyway. Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someone in the industry that aggressively hostile ads are ruining their industry rather than being a staple of it. If they don't... Then I don't mind seeing that industry die.

rtpg 12y ago

Honestly, I've only seen the "tricky" Download Now buttons on shady video websites (read: those that have all the episodes of Seinfeld on them). Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be somew immoral , violating the contract with which you're looking at someone's content. I have less sympathy for people who are basically showing stolen content (not technically stolen , but still), though...

ntakasaki 12y ago
They are pretty common on program download sites, not just on pirate sites. http://marc.durdin.net/2012/08/rant-of-the-day-the-big-green-download-button/ http://marc.durdin.net/2012/08/rant-of-the-day-the-big-green...
frostmatthew 12y ago
> the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)? Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the motto really should be all the news that fits, we print.
- voyou 12y ago
  "they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads" That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    > When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?" Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators, as they are on opposite sides of the building. There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.

tdsamardzhiev 12y ago

AdBlock+ is bad, but intrusive e-marketing is worse.

bnr 12y ago

I'd love an adblocker with a blacklist instead of whitelist so I could keep the ads on for the long tail of my browsing and remove them only on sites that go overboard.

nkantar 12y ago
Could you somehow whitelist all domains and go from there? Not on a computer right now to try it out for myself, but it sounds like an interesting approach.
maxerickson 12y ago
Just remove the default block lists. I do this with adblock+, only adding rules for things that I decide are obnoxious (mostly trackers).

beagle3 12y ago

I would be ok with some (not-too-intrusive) ads to make the internet go around. But every single website now links to 30 trackers that try to track and profile your every move on the internet, with no accountability anywhere. In addition to the NSA, GCHQ, SVR RF, Mossad and other n-letter agencies, there are some 30 corporations that know everything about what and where you browse, keep that data not-very-secure, sell it to the highest bidder - any bidder, actually. Do you like that? I don't.

funkyy 12y ago
Yeah, the best example is YouTube - sometimes more than 100 elements shows up in AdBlock. There are afaik 3 blocks of ads + possible few trackers. Then what is the other 90?

JeremyBanks 12y ago

What sites are you encountering those ads on? You could blacklist them, rather than universally denying revenue.

wutbrodo 12y ago
This is what I've never understood about the people claiming that "they have no choice" or that they feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators. I don't use ABP, but it's really not that much effort to have to see bad ads on each "bad" domain _once_, and then blacklist and not have to deal with that entire domain and their bad ads ever again. I do something quite similar with a JS blacklist (mostly for poorly-coded newspapers where I can't even scroll until they fetch some non-main-content resources over JS).
- fwn 12y ago
  > "feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators" I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it. edit: While I agree that the blacklisting solution shouldn't be too much work, the charming "setup and forget" experience most adblockers provide will probably win through.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    O pretty much never click on ads, so ppc campaigns are worthless on me... as to ppv ads, most of them are obnoxious.. including on the main site I work for... I tend to whitelist it only because I need to make sure ads work. That said, thankfully the new design has fewer ads, which should help a lot. It really just depends, it's easy to go down a rabbit whole with ads... but we get 90% if our ad revenue from 40% of our ads. So cutting out a lot changes the layout of income without nearly so much impact on revenue.
  - wutbrodo 12y ago
    > I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it. This is possibly true, but not particularly relevant, as my comment mentions that I'm talking specifically about those who _do_ engage in moral justification. Among the people with whom I've talked about it, those who claim a moral justification are far more common than those who simply say "I don't like ads and I don't care about creators not getting paid". I would be surprised if there weren't many HNers whose sample is similar to mine. Tangentially but not importantly, I'm not convinced that only a small portion of users openly think "yes I'm consuming a product without paying and I have no other justification other than 'i dont want to pay' ". Part of the reason you see such contortions in an attempt at moral justification is because one can draw a pretty clear parallel to "I would shoplift if I didn't think I'd get caught", with the only (somewhat dubious) distinction being differences in marginal cost. Note that I have talked to people who have a moral stance on adblocking and piracy that _is_ consistent, but this is rare since it's usually accompanied by a pretty radical stance along the lines of "all information (music, art, writing, etc) should be completely free", which requires a pretty massive amount of philosophical baggage in terms of having a sense of how this affects the incentive to create said information.

spain 12y ago

Thankfully whitelists are a thing.

davidgerard 12y ago

For me it was my first autoplaying video with sound in a pop-under. Fuck that. You pull that shit, your whole industry can just go and get fucked. If you need to pull that shit to live, you need to fucking die. This laptop has 8GB because Firefox with ABP is really fat. It's worth every byte. I use FF for personal stuff, Chromium for work; occasionally I load a non-work page in Chromium and am bloody horrified at what the web looks like with ads.

r0s 12y ago

I barely use it myself, but for friends and family who need tech support I always install it. It reduces so much risk.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

I've been using the web for pretty much as long as it has existed ('94) and I've always held off on using an adblocker mostly just as a test to see if I could. I finally broke down recently and started using abp on chrome. Sometimes pages will take a while to load but overall it's just such a better experience. I should note that I have no qualms about blocking ads I would never click anyway. I don't harbor ridiculous puritanical notions that I must suffer in exchange for "free" content. Nor do I abide by the notion that anyone else has the right to sell my attention merely because they make content. Monetization should be cooperative, not coercive (and I also support content creators directly quite often).