10 ms·

I realize this won't be popular, but I really have no feelings for ad networks. - They allow shoddy security on their servers - They track users against their

• joopxiv 12y ago
  ... since I've paid to access the Interwebs You're paying for data transport, you're not paying for the content.
  • Ntrails 12y ago
    but the content is free - just ad supported. They can construct an "ad-wall" in the same way they construct a "pay-wall" and are free to do so. Otherwise they are offering free content.
  • greyman 12y ago
    Yes, I am not paying for the content, but the content creator also doesn't pay for the right to present his website publicly. It only pays for the webserver space and bandwidth. (I am following your logic). World Wide Web works in a way, that I can create a http request, and then do what I want with it, for example I can only take the text and throw away anything else. I paid for the data transport, as you said, and then I don't have any other obligations after downloading those data.
• carrier_lost 12y ago
  "There is no moral imperative for me to view ads since I've paid to access the Interwebs" When I go to McDonald's, I don't pay for my Big Mac. I already put gas in my car!
  • forca 12y ago
    Not even close with the analogy. Unless the content is behind a paywall, it's "free". Want to make money? Charge access. If your content is THAT compelling, people will line up and hand you money. Using a backhanded revenue machine like ads that track me and violate my "anonymity" is beyond the pale. So, yes. If I arrive on your site and there is no paywall, I will gladly view said content without allowing ads. If there is a paywall and your CONTENT, not ads, is good, I will gladly pay. There are sites I do pay for. Willingly. Because there is nothing better. I still block ads on these sites.
    • ivanca 12y ago
      Its extremely naive to believe everyone who needs access to the content in the internet has a credit card to pay for every bit of it that they need. This kind of behavior will only push the movement even more far away from mainstream popularity, slowly becoming a new form of extremism.
    • DanBC 12y ago
      No, it's a pretty good analogy. You're paying for the transport of the bits, you haven't paid for the content of those bits. The content seems to be good - you chose to use it after all. You could boycott ad-supported content but you chose not to. (I agree with the rest of what you say btw).
      • correcthorse 12y ago
        If I get a free burger with onions in it and I don't like onions, I won't eat the onions.
    • justinpaulson 12y ago
      You really want to live in a world where every single site is behind a paywall? because that is what you are advocating.
• jordanpg 12y ago
  I don't pretend to know what will come next, only that the UX and beauty of anything I do on a phone or a browser is severely diminished by the presence of ads. I will go to great lengths to make them go away. For these reasons and more, it strikes me as likely that advertising as a business model has a limited shelf life. It will exist only so long as there is no better alternative and not one moment longer.
• DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  Agreed. People forget, we half-stumbled into this ad supported content idea. The only thing keeping it that way is inertia. I think we've finally started to feel the limits -- it means being tracked 24-7. Enough already. We can do better than this.
  • Alupis 12y ago
    Are you doing anything about it? I mean, personally, I listen to about a half dozen podcasts, but haven't signed up for any of their monthly "donations" (most have re-occurring payments from paypal or amazon to help support the network/show). I do occasionally click through one of their product endorsements based on their review (often tagged with amazon affiliate links), so that is a small part.
  • JimmyM 12y ago
    I'd be interested in a "Kickstarter for articles" sort of site. Interesting article pitches presented to an audience, those that are most useful, interesting or unique are funded and writers get paid slightly more directly for their work. The difficulty would be determining whether to cut off certain types of content from the site, and where the line gets drawn on extreme material.
    • DanBC 12y ago
      A bit like ProPublica? http://www.propublica.org http://www.propublica.org
      • JimmyM 12y ago
        Very like that, or at least working towards the same outcome, thank you. I will certainly try to make a donation over the next few days.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
• jmount 12y ago
  Strongly agree. Ads (and even ads placed by primary distributors and authors) hijacked the internet without permission from browsers/surfers and routinely have additional negative consequences. The reader doesn't need permission to defend themselves.
  • vertex-four 12y ago
    Do ads in a newspaper "hijack the real world"?
    • stephancoral 12y ago
      Ads in a newspaper aren't vectors[0] for malware that can potentially ruin someone's finances or business. [0] http://www.invincea.com/2014/10/micro-targeting-malvertising-via-real-time-ad-bidding/ http://www.invincea.com/2014/10/micro-targeting-malvertising...
    • vinbreau 12y ago
      Ex-Advertising layout designer here for Hearst. Ads in a newspaper are typically laid out in a pyramid fashion to specifically avoid breaking up news articles into more difficult to read formats. 'Flow' is important when laying out every page. Ads on the web adhere to no such flow and often inhibit the experience of reading. Newspapers want their ads to be as unobtrusive as possible while still being seen. Advertisers on the web tend to scattershot ads and want to be seen at all costs without consideration for the viewer. I can easily skip the flow of ads in a newspaper only looking at those that interest me if I choose, I have no such options on the web and so block them all to be less distracted and able to easily digest content.
      • eli 12y ago
        It seems like your complaint is about the poor design of news sites (which I generally agree with) more than it is a philosophical objection to advertising. (There are some print publications with quite terrible ads too. Not everyone has the standards or resources of Hearst.)
• acdha 12y ago
  > There is no moral imperative for me to view ads since I've paid to access the Interwebs I dislike the ad model but this is dangerously wrong: you pay your ISP for transit – unless you're subscribing to a specific site, nobody else gets a dime from you to pay for their costs. Unless subscriptions or micropayments catch on, that means that sites are either going to rely on ads or will be limited to organizations with significant other revenue streams – neither of which is a particularly healthy prospect.
  • WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    How does the survival of web sites that depend on ads create a moral imperative though? These sites are instructing my browser to download content from ad networks using the ISP bandwidth that I paid for. I'm fully in my right to tell my browser not to download that content.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • aw3c2 12y ago
    A gazillion of websites that are run by collectives, communities, hobbyists and like-minded people are a big counterpoint to this. The internet got big on them, not commercial interests.
  • wpietri 12y ago
    I agree that the point you're replying to is ridiculous, but I still think there's no moral imperative. An equivalent moral case is broadcast TV ads. You aren't obligated to stay in the room and pay attention; going to the kitchen, using Tivo, and flipping channels are all morally ok. Part of the reason that subscriptions and micropayments haven't caught on is that people put up with ads. If ads stop working as a business model, I doubt we'll be looking at a bleak future of watching Love Boat reruns and rereading old Family Circle articles. We will find some other way of funding good content. Indeed, when I look at the way the quality of television has improved over the last couple of decades, I think it's a reasonable argument that blocking ads would be the moral imperative. As anybody who has worked in ad-supported industries knows, consumers aren't the customers, they're the product. Rather than being served, viewers and readers are being served up to advertisers. The system has a conflict of interest at the heart of it. It's reasonable to refuse to support corrupt systems.
• Alupis 12y ago
  While the spirit of this extension is good, it will ultimately harm the websites you frequent and like the most. Eventually those sites will get blacklisted from their ad networks due to what will be perceived as "fake clicks" (something ad networks are very, very sensitive to in order to guard against rouge site-owners clicking their own ads or having their buddies click). This extension will click the ads every time you visit the page, which is not a normal pattern, to say the least.
  • logfromblammo 12y ago
    An ad network cannot tell the difference between a real click and a fake click based on the HTTP request itself. They have to rely on probability models to guess whether clicks are real or fake. The mere existence of an extension like this should prompt them to reconsider their options. If you think about the ad model for print and broadcast media, they don't bother trying to track eyeballs. They know it's impossible. You pay for your ad to appear a certain number of times, and hope people pay attention to it. You can't know whether a specific newspaper gets read by a dozen people in a hotel lobby or lands on a driveway in the morning, to be trashed, unread, at night. If an ad runs on television, the advertiser doesn't know if it's being watched by the whole family, or just the dog. That's why ratings services, like Nielsen, exist. People get paid to have their habits monitored, and those samples are extrapolated. Ad networks can, if they so choose, blacklist sites based on a perception of "fake" clicks. Those sites are not necessarily responsible for fake clicks, and they certainly can't do anything to stop them. You would not, therefore be harming the site operators. You would be harming the ad networks that pretend that they know more about their own service than is possible. Destroying the viability of pay-per-click is (arguably) something that would be an improvement in the world of HTTP publishing.
    • Alupis 12y ago
      > An ad network cannot tell the difference between a real click and a fake click based on the HTTP request itself. No they can't, however they can tell what is a real user and what is not. Real users don't click every single ad presented to them on every single page. Real users don't click ads as soon as a page loads. Real users don't click on all ads at the same or near-the-same time. (If this worked, without getting flagged/blacklisted, site operators would have built bots long ago to click their own ads as there is a lot of money to be made that way) You absolutely will harm site operators. Ad networks do indeed blacklist sites that get high volume of perceived "fake clicks", whether they are fake or not. You will only harm the sites you like the most and frequent the most. This is a very naive view of how ad networks operate, and a very naive approach to "solving this problem" (likely built by someone who has not worked with ad networks, nor has operated an ad-driven site, ie. someone with little to no experience in the domain they are trying to solve a perceived problem).
• J_Darnley 12y ago
  I hope you don't make your user agent an obvious lie because that lets you stand out from the crowd by having a unique one. As for your other points, I am almost as paranoid as you.
• jbigelow76 12y ago
  Out of curiousity, if you were to go to one of your favorite sites that is currently ad supported, and the site admin presented a popup that states "We've detected you're using an ad blocker, we respectfully request not visiting our site." Would you respect the request or ignore it?
  • greyman 12y ago
    I wouldn't respect it. Because they publish a free content, and are taking advantage of many other Internet services, which provides them with free marketing - search engines, aggregators, social sites, etc. I can download their content and then display any subset I want - that is how WWW works. If they want to prevent me doing that, they should implement a pay-wall.
    • vdaniuk 12y ago
      I believe that you and anyone else should not have moral reservations to visit any site with an adblocker even if they request you not to do that. >free marketing - search engines, aggregators, social sites But, judging from this quote you don't know what you are talking about. Search engines and social network traffic is anything but free in any category that has significant competition.
    • jbigelow76 12y ago
      "Free marketing", doesn't make the creation of the content effortless. If you found an interesting article via Google or Twitter, (ostensibly) "free" marketing channels, does that mean the article magically popped into existence or did the journalist/content creator still have to put in time and effort to create it.
  • cousin_it 12y ago
    In the long run, ad blockers should evolve to become undetectable by websites. I don't see any way to reliably stop that from happening, without making the internet more Orwellian. That said, I agree that if a website respectfully asks visitors with ad blockers to leave, then leaving is the nice thing to do.
  • 12y ago
• nacho_weekend 12y ago
  > There is no moral imperative for me to view ads since I've paid to access the Interwebs That's an extremely juvenile way to view your browsing rights and behavior.
• einrealist 12y ago
  I guess, they feel pretty secure, because there are many devices with no or limited ad-block capabilities like phones and tablets. (Or are there addons for my ios Safari that work without jailbracking the device?)
  • tombrossman 12y ago
    As a workaround, you can use custom firmware (like DD-WRT) on your home router with a custom hosts file to block all ads. It takes some work and is only good for when you are home and connected to WiFi, but after you set it up it's great because all devices on your LAN are protected.
    • einrealist 12y ago
      Unfortunately, I am traveling most of the time and depend on mobile internet access or (the usual shitty) hotel APs. But thanks for this advice.
  • forca 12y ago
    I wonder what the viability of setting up a subscription service proxy that mobile users (and others) could point their mobile phones to that strips out all the dreck? I know there are VPS offerings that do this. Webhosting companies do offer unlimited bandwidth, so theoretically, bandwidth is not a problem.
    • einrealist 12y ago
      That is a good question. I would not use such a service because of the trust problems with secure communication. Mmmmh, but I could use a proxy on my own server, through which I route my VPN traffic anyway. Of course, such a proxy product must be light-weight and easy to use. It should be a proxy that I can trust - OSS or self-written. It should enrich a page with a button which sends me to a block configuration for that domain - like that one you would get from a adblock plugin.... git init... ;)
  • mitchty 12y ago
    My solution is to vpn into home, and have a bunch of firewall rules setup to prevent any ad network traffic getting past the firewall. Outside of the extra battery life hit, its extremely effective.
• hagbardgroup 12y ago
  This is pretty close to ad fraud. However, I agree with you that display ad networks suck. I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. The happy medium is to have users pay for content, making it so advertisers don't need to track users to verify that they're real humans, and improving the web for everyone except poor people. One way that this could be done is to use bitcoin for tiny micropayments, billed frictionlessly. Rough for legal reasons among others, but ideas like this are sensible if only for human verification reasons. If you want the web to largely free content, to pay for that you must accept privacy-destroying ad networks to bear that cost. We've created a situation where the choice is to free ride on other people, or to surrender privacy. If you want the web to be largely teasers for paid content, then you can have significantly more privacy also. Instead of the articles being articles, you will get articles that are actually big ads for paid content (already the case for a huge number of popular search results). Spreading tools like these kills free content like snaps fingers loudly that. I'm indifferent. Users might not be.
  • pjc50 12y ago
    Frictionless billing is harder than it sounds, because it opens the door to frictionless fraud. If I can automatically bill you for a thousanth of a dollar I can automatically do that hundreds of thousands of times. If it's with bitcoin I can obfuscate the destination of the money.
    • hagbardgroup 12y ago
      Agreed. Question is whether it's harder or easier than restricting traffic fraud, and if you can comply with know your customer laws and still protect privacy.
  • greyman 12y ago
    > I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. I see it exactly the opposite way. The web IS free, it works that way (unless someone erect a paywall, which I find perfectly acceptable), and no entity is entitled that the web should "provide" it a profitable business avenue. If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.
• serve_yay 12y ago
  Buy, I sure wonder what made you think that wouldn't be popular here.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  • forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
    Well, if you go to a restaurant, you're agreeing to pay for the food. There isn't any agreement between me and any websites that I view ads.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • Nursie 12y ago
    Not really. I have no intention of viewing your ads. I'd be happy to state that in an http header. Or you could detect it. Then you could serve me or not, as you wish.
  • wpietri 12y ago
    Says a guy whose job is selling your attention to advertisers. As Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The analogy is, of course, false, in that restaurants have a substantial marginal cost of production per meal consumed. Publishers today don't. A better analogy would be walking by and enjoying the smells coming from the kitchen, or looking in and appreciating their decor. A still-better analogy would be borrowing a friend's book to read, or reading something at the public library. Or, horror of horrors, listening to NPR without donating.
• a3_nm 12y ago
  > There is no moral imperative for me to view ads since I've paid to access the Interwebs I am not sure I agree with the implication, but I agree with the conclusion, for a different reason. If I send an HTTP request to a server, and that server replies with content, this does not imply that the creators or publishers of that content have the right to dictate how I should enjoy that content on my own machine, or that I have any moral imperative to follow their wishes. I may be using an ad-blocker, I may be blocking images, I may be using lynx, I may be just saving it to view it offline later. It's my choice. If you do not agree, do not provide your content for free to anyone who asks. There may be a moral imperative to support the creators and publishers of content you enjoy. This does not imply that it must be done via the convoluted route of viewing the content in a certain way so that a certain third party believes that a human mind has registered a certain message and pays the publisher for this.
• tombrossman 12y ago
  When you say you disallow CSS history, how are you accomplishing this? Is it a side effect of disallowing scripts?
  • forca 12y ago
    Sites love to view user history. It helps them build up a profile to sell to marketers. You want to deny sites access to this info if you can, In FF, you can do this by toggling to "false" layout.css.visited_links_enabled under about:config
    • correcthorse 12y ago
      Is there a similar option for the referrer? And while I'm at it, is there a way to prevent a website from rewriting a url when I click on it? sites like Google and DuckDuckGo show the actual url in the href, but when you click it (or right click and copy it) it becomes something like http://example.com/something?url=encoded_real_url http://example.com/something?url=encoded_real_url and I detest that.
      • tombrossman 12y ago
        Blocking the referrer in Firefox is easy, just go to about:config and search for the string 'network.http.sendRefererHeader' then modify it from the default 2 to a 0 (zero). For the search links, I use this Add-on and it works perfectly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-link-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
        • correcthorse 12y ago
          I see the extension also works with duckduckgo. Thank you very much.
        • coniptor 12y ago
          This breaks some sites. None I use. I've read it is a problem for last.fm users because of some social chat thing they use I forget the name of. Anyway. I do this too, kind of. I use either refcontrol or smart referrer. I let sites have referrer on their domain but no 3rd parties by default and can add an exception if I want. You can test this at http://ip-check.info http://ip-check.info regardless if you're using Tor or not. I haven't found the time to do it my self yet but will if someone doesn't beat me to porting Window Name Eraser to firefox from chrome. window.name is great for the site your visiting to use on their site. They have absolutely no business using it crossdomain, period. Not even if they own the other domain. There are legitimate ways to do that but they are too lazy, dumb, or opposed to using encryption. I will allow a fucking cookie if I want to login or allow them to store or gather anything! No supercookies, no flash cookies, no evercookies. I use cookie monster, cookie culler, cookie self-destruct, and Cookie Controller that applies my regular cookie rules/disposition to DOM storage cookies as well. Browsers, all of them, should behave and act the way they do after I make them go all green on ip-check.info. In addition to that they have no fucking business knowing what the monitor resolution is. They ONLY need the canvas/inner window of the browser to render their damn site right. I will pull down videos and watch them offline without flash phoning home or to anyone else to give them anything to fingerprint my devices with. They aren't entitled to this information and I'm against them having it. If I were like Carrie or the Twilight Zone kid who sends people into the Corn field and does other "fun" stuff they would have very good reason to be worried. >=/