I helped a friend try to figure out why he couldn't click a tab (team) on a fantasy football management site. Everything worked fine for me. I asked him if he had an ad blocking plug in and if so try disabling it. He said he didn't have one. Finally we setup a remote session so i could see his actual screen. Turns out he was using an older computer and monitor, his resolution was lower than I would ever care for but it turned out that a banner ad just above the tabs was causing the problem. I discovered it was that because after I installed uBlock and ads were blocked everything worked as it should. The Ad broke the site usability.
And now, it gets worse. My phone screen is so small compared to desktop - a lot of ads render sites unusable (blocking full screen without possibility to close). Thats why I love my Firefox on Android. Having the possibility of running uBlock on my phone makes surfing so fast and painless. Even if chrome performs and renders better in general, having an adblocker makes that void.
This is really bad on Blackberry where the screen is square and your limited real estate is totally taken up by a website's floating menu bar at the top and their ad at the bottom.
Happens all the time to me - fullscreen ads that require me to click on something to dismiss them. I won't click on an ad for any reason, so I have to close the page and go somewhere else. Ads are completely out of hand.
Ah yes, fullscreen horribad adverts that takeover your mobile screen. The entire page goes dark and some overlay ad has appeared on the news site you want to look at either trying to get you to log in, buy something or download their app (full of ads) but you can't scroll around to find where the actual ad is to close the popup as the overlay is so far out of resolution it doesn't fit your device, so you just give up on the blacked out content.
The only solution I could come up with for Android/iOS was to run a remote digital ocean firewall to block all ads at the network level, and connect to it with a VPN. Everything else I've tried or implemented on the devices themselves ate up too much resouces or had to be dangerously elevated in privilege (NDK) just to stop the damn ads. A bonus of this method is you can also experiment with filtering known Android bugs before they reach your device if for whatever reason you can't update your system.img
Thats why publishers and ad networks deserve whats coming. You reap what you sow.
Mobile ads are the worst. They hijack the whole screen, float around make it impossible to view content, are a pain to dismiss, and they hijack scrolling.
They are also highly likely to be a carrier for malware. Good riddance to such rubbish
I run a VM with pf firewall (example book) https://www.nostarch.com/pf3 which wholesale blocks known ad server IPs from adblock/ublock origin filter lists, other sources http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ The firewall also prevents data leaks from misconfigured software phoning home or crash reports being sent, IPs being leaked over WebRTC, ect. You can also run your own DNS and email/backup server with the VM too.
Now you can install Ublock Origin on your phone browser and most of the work it has to do is already done saving memory and bandwidth. Here you can experiment with custom rulesets for how pages get displayed, whitelist certain objects you may wish to look at and not blindly block. To further go down the rabbit hole you can build your own mobile version of FF on your VM, ripping out all these harmful things: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...
You can also set up a script on the VM to update Android on AWS. If say there's a new web views critical bug, and a patch is released your VM script (Ansible/Chef) can start an AWS instance, get the latest patch(s) and completely build a new system.img automatically. This can all be done with a custom app you write with the backend hosted on your VM, or with Termux or KBOX, and automate/abstract away all the ssh key logins and tasks with a script. Open your app see all available new Android patches, then click "Build" to automate your new system.img with your own signatures.
Of course you don't have to use any of these tools, you could learn about their innards then roll your own software. If you are a javascript developer have the pf firewall dump it into your custom interpreter on the VM, that can look for unusual behaviour and just pass scrubbed js to your browser on the phone.
This is what I have in my "Kill Element" bookmarklet. (SECURITY NOTE: You should never blindly copy and paste javascript like this and run it in your browser.)
Your comment makes this page have a long horizontal scroll, and a total pain in the ass to read now. Perhaps you can edit that and put in spaces so it wraps? Thanks.
In fairness, this is HN's fault - not allowing posts to mess up the whole page is basic fit-for-purposeness for forum software and the whole reason HTML is not allowed in the first place. Your workaround, on the other hand, breaks the content as bookmarklets are always one-liners. Evidently (according to a sibling comment) the solution is to prepend 4 spaces, which isn't exactly standard.
As for the bookmarklet, smashing stuff. I'm always deleting irritating stuff on pages using the inspector.
And if it's a site I visit more than once, creating a 'display: none' CSS override. Same for the floating headers that break paging, and similar annoyances. (I use the Stylish browser extension.)
That works well until you get to sites that randomize the id/class/whatever of the element or automatically reinsert it once you kill it. At that point i usually look for a different site. Urgh. I wouldn't mind ads if the weren't that fucking annoying.
This is actually typically against the ad networks' terms of use. In all AdChoices ads, you'll see a small "X" in the corner. If you click it, one of the first options is to report the ad obscuring the content of the page. I'll admit I don't know what the result ends up being, but I'd hope that they get in touch with the implementor to tell them to fix their ad.
Can someone explain to me why this whole ad blocking fiasco has blown up in the past 3 days?
Why was iOS's inclusion of ad blocking capabilities the turning point in what seemed to be an already-unstoppable movement towards a return to sanity for the web?
Why is everyone so scared of ad shops/website owners having to change their business models? I don't understand the hype.
The quick answer: American tech journalists. Their audiences are the most likely to run iOS and know how to use an ad blocker.
They're terrified, they write a bunch of articles, and it spreads around a little. I'd be really interested to see some data over the next few weeks, so we can determine whether their fears were justified.
Its more general than that. Media production in general, and the tech press included, seem to be married to Apple as their tech supplier. So when Apple do something it is suddenly new, even though it has been going on for years or even decades in the larger tech sphere.
Never mind that as the western world has been in a slump for nearly a decade, companies has started to reevaluate their spending. And in the process has come to question the impact web ads have.
After reading your response it occurs to me that they're streisand effecting themselves. If they'd have just shut up, most people wouldn't even be aware of the adblocking capabilities in iOS 9. Each article they write brings more attention to the thing they're afraid is going to bury them.
Think about Flash. There have been Flash-blocking technologies on the desktop forever, but they never made much of a dent on the industry. Then came the iPhone, with Flash blocked by fiat. At first, the industry laughed, and said that Apple would be forced to cave and implement Flash support or lose sales to phones that support Flash.
Meanwhile, Apple was trying to sell hardware, and Flash makes hardware suck. It runs hot, it sucks up battery, and consumers blame the hardware, not Flash.
Who says, “Flash has terrible battery life?” Nobody. They say, “My iPhone barely lasts an afternoon before I need to charge it again.” Flash freeloads on the hardware, because nobody blames it for their bad mobile experience. In hindsight, it’s obvious why Apple refused to support Flash: It degrades the iPhone experience.
So Apple “blocked” Flash, and iPhone grew anyways, and it was Flash that got killed by iPhone, not iPhone killed by Flash.
Now Apple is making it easy to kill ads. And it’s for the same reason: iPhone owners would rather read certain web sites on their desktop browsers, because the experience of reading on the iPhone is terrible, thanks to ads. They suck up battery and hog the limited viewport.
If this had happened five years ago, people would laugh and say Apple was shooting itself in the foot, and that web sites would simply block Apple users that use ad blockers. But having seen what happened to Flash, they realize that there’s a reasonable chance that Apple users blocking ads will take ads to the same place Flash went: The trash can.
The web sites that figure out a different business model will beat those that block iOS user who block ads. The newspapers that play along with iAds will beat those who try to serve ads through HTML. And that means the industry could be about to receive a major disruption, one that didn’t happen on the desktop.
Just as Flash wasn’t killed by Flash blocking on the desktop, but by Apple refusing to support it on iOS.
The public discourse on this sort of thing is controlled by media companies, most of whom make the majority of their money from ad revenue.
The other player in this game are technologists making ad-blockers. Up to this point, these technologists have been only moderately successful in permeating the market.
Ads are so terrible, and ad blockers so effective, that it's a risk for media companies to even talk about ads and ad blockers. It's bad PR for media companies, and an argument against ad-blockers is more likely to simply make more unaware people aware of ad-blockers than it is to persuade ad-blocker users to stop blocking ads. Ad blockers are a problem for media companies, but not a big enough problem to warrant taking the risk of talking about ads.
All that changed when Apple decided to include ad blocking in IOS9. Now ad-blocking will permeate a very large portion of the market, and since Apple is a trendsetter in the mobile market, it's likely that other mobile manufacturers will follow suit. Obviously Google is not going to support ad-blocking in Android, but they'll have a hard time preventing Samsung/Motorola/etc. from shipping with their own ad-blocking software.
Now it's worth the risk for media companies to talk about ads and ad blockers, because if they don't, their entire business model is going to die anyway. So they're trying to persuade consumers that ads are actually in their best interest so that there will be consumer pressure on Android phone manufacturers to allow ads.
I don't think it will work. Consumer pressure only happens when consumers feel pain, and there's no ad-supported media so great that losing it is more painful than ads. The only people who are actually feeling pain from this are people whose businesses are ad-supported, and frankly, I'm quite happy about that: people who tie their business to an immoral, unethical business model should be punished. It's rare that the bad guys actually get what's coming to them.
Anyone who is worried that this is going to hurt technologists: it's only going to hurt the ones who deserve it. I've been programming professionally for 10 years and I've never worked for a company whose business model involved advertising because it disgusts me. This doesn't affect me at all. If you decided to hitch your wagon to the advertising horse, that's your fault; you did a bad thing and I don't feel sorry for you.
It's a shame the ads have to either be totally horrible or totally gone. There is nothing wrong with a bit of advertising, but those who do it these days make it so in-your-face and disruptive, that they have dug their own graves. They should have gone a more subtle route, and maybe no one would think ads were such a big problem, and they could still be there. Since moving to Holland, I've actually enjoyed the ads I see on TV and Youtube; compared to American or Asian standards, where I've previously lived, here they are little short films of creative art that always make me laugh with their wit. If all ads had something positive to offer other than "buy me right now", and they could tactfully get out of your face, everybody could be happy. But that's not what happened.
I have such a hate of adverts that I don't have a television. I grew up watching and listening to the BBC, it was a culture shock moving to Holland.
The last time I was on holiday in the US it seemed like the TV shows were just interludes between adverts for expensive brands of anti-depressants and weird painkillers (which turn out to be Paracetamol but for $10 per pack instead of E1).
The movie "Fight Club" has an interesting line just after the narrator moves away from his "normal life" and into the derelict house:
By the end of the first month, I didn't miss TV.
I suspect most people don't understand how subtly addictive TV can be, as it takes at lest that month to break the habit. While I'm not sure if it's part of the same effect, there seems to be something similar for advertising: you don't realize the huge cognitive load it puts on you until you've been away from it for a significant amount of time. Running a firewall isn't free, yet the costs associated with recognizing that something is an ad which should be ignored are often assumed to be trivial.
Agreed. I grew up in a European country where advertising is regulated, you can only have one interruption per movie or TV-show. Breaks are therefore slightly longer (something like 5 minutes), but it means that you can watch a 2 hour movie with only one 5 minute break for ads, and a 5 minute break means that you can actually walk away and do something useful in the mean time.
Moving to the US was such a shock, I can't believe people here just put up with this shit, it is impossible to focus on what you're watching when it's interrupted literally every 5 minutes.
I thought the Adblock Plus approach to this was interesting, where unobtrusive (or "acceptable") ads were whitelisted by default, and they were quite clear about the criteria for this as well.[0]
But the tech community lost their collective shit and threw around loaded terms like "extortion", "mafia" and "protection scheme" (I'm not exaggerating, search for those terms on this domain), which made any nuance impossible.
I don't understand the total allergy to advertising expressed above.
I personally don't like commercial television (I hate interruptions in the middle of a show), or pop-ups that get in the way of me reading a page, or pages that are so plastered with ads that it's hard to find the content.
But when I search on Google for a particular kind of product, and it shows me ads for a new instance of that product (that doesn't yet have the organic PageRank), I'm happy to click on the ad to find out about it.
"A bit of advertising" that's well enough targeted and tastefully presented is absolutely a good thing. Every show in a TV series or movie is an advertisement for the next show or installment. Every book is an advertisement for its sequel. Every blog post is an advertisement for the next blog post. Every blog post, Facebook comment, video, or friend telling you about a product is an advertisement for that product. Many of those aren't paid advertisements, but many secretly are.
Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is the same as saying "learning about new things is wrong." Because how could you find out about something new if it weren't advertised somehow? What exactly are you protesting?
> "A bit of advertising" that's well enough targeted and tastefully presented is absolutely a good thing. Every show in a TV series or movie is an advertisement for the next show or installment. Every book is an advertisement for its sequel. Every blog post is an advertisement for the next blog post. Every blog post, Facebook comment, video, or friend telling you about a product is an advertisement for that product. Many of those aren't paid advertisements, but many secretly are.
If you want to include those things in your definition of advertising, fine, but let's be clear here: that's not what most people here are talking about. Ad-blockers don't block those things.
That's certainly not the definition of "advertisement" I use, either. I have no problem with individuals asking me to check out their thing. It's entirely a different thing for someone to tie this request in with a piece of content in a way that isn't easily separable, using psychologically studied manipulation techniques to invade the very chemistry of my brain, and decrease the quality of my overall experience while doing so, invading my space with their noise and light, telling me my girlfriend isn't hot enough, my clothes aren't nice enough, my penis isn't large enough, I don't make enough money. Fuck those people. There's no way that this is subtle enough that I'm going to be okay with it.
You're saying that you define "advertisements" as the things you don't like.
Google ads sometimes miss the mark, but often are for exactly what I'm searching for. Why would I condemn them along with penis enlargement ads?
And ad blockers absolutely block those things -- Google ads in particular. I just saw, in another thread, how one ad blocker would pull out an ad embedded in the page that was tasteful and relevant, just based on its css class. And the ad block developer was proud of doing this, to the point of mocking the web site creator in the same thread.
My point is that advertising is a spectrum, and you can't just "block all ads" without throwing out the good as well. And a related point is that some advertising is good.
What I was responding to was the allegation that all advertising is bad. And until you're willing to pay for the content you create, that advertising is necessary to pay for it.
I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime to avoid commercials.
> You're saying that you define "advertisements" as the things you don't like.
No, I'm saying that talking about the definition of "advertisements" as if you're too dense to understand what people mean when they say "advertisements" in this context is a distraction.
I'm not arguing for any definition of "advertisement". I don't believe words have inherent meanings. I believe that people should try to understand what people are saying instead of being pedantic.
> Google ads sometimes miss the mark, but often are for exactly what I'm searching for. Why would I condemn them along with penis enlargement ads?
Because they're a failure of Google to provide a good service. If they're exactly what you're searching for, they should be the top search result. And if I come to Google's page looking for good search results, I definitely don't want to see an ad where I would expect to see the top search result.
> My point is that advertising is a spectrum, and you can't just "block all ads" without throwing out the good as well. And a related point is that some advertising is good.
I disagree. There is no situation where I want to be manipulated into buying a service or product I didn't specifically come to a page for. There are no good ads.
> What I was responding to was the allegation that all advertising is bad. And until you're willing to pay for the content you create, that advertising is necessary to pay for it.
All advertising is bad. I'm willing to pay for the content I consume (and I do in many cases where it's possible to do so).
>There is no situation where I want to be manipulated into buying a service or product I didn't specifically come to a page for.
Counterexamples:
* Paid placement on Google Search pages for exactly the thing you're searching for.
* Affiliate link ads for products on pages that review the product.
* Paid reviews of games, or products on Amazon: Many reviews posted on Amazon, and some professional YouTube reviewers, are paid reviews. If I'm in the review section of a web site, I am there to see a review. If I'm searching for a game review on YouTube, I want to see a review. I expect to be told that they got a product for free to do the review, but it's also the primary content. But it's also a paid ad.
Advertising is not just psychological manipulation to prefer Pepsi to Coke. It's also communication of the existence of a product to a potential audience that wants that product.
>There are no good ads.
You're using that term again, and I don't think you know what it means.
If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that I don't want," then the statement is tautological.
If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that is paid content," then that would exclude anything that is relevant but that had been paid to be included on that page. I've seen that happen many times -- that some new product is bootstrapped into organic search results via paid advertising.
What is your definition, if not the above?
And how do you expect a new product to be promoted if not through advertising? You don't just grow organic search results by magic, and waiting for word of mouth to be enough to promote a product is a pretty sure way to kill a company. Even advertising by getting a product placement on blogs tends to be practically worthless in terms of conversion numbers. Are you just saying "no new products are necessary, I'm fine with what I have"?
> Paid placement on Google Search pages for exactly the thing you're searching for.
That's a perfect example of confirmation bias. You're ignoring all the times that fails to justify the times it succeeds. This doesn't change the fact that the heuristic is broken: I don't want the content that the creators paid to be the top result, I want the top result to be what I searched for. If those happen to be the same, that doesn't justify the crappy heuristic. And if the ad produces better results than Google, that's a major fail on Google's part: it still doesn't prove that "whoever paid for the space and vaguely resembles what I want" is the heuristic I want used to produce the top of my Google search results.
> Affiliate link ads for products on pages that review the product.
There are so many things wrong with this. This sort of advertising manipulates reviews and makes them untrustworthy, and it means that only products which can pay for affiliate links get reviewed.
> Paid reviews of games, or products on Amazon: Many reviews posted on Amazon, and some professional YouTube reviewers, are paid reviews. If I'm in the review section of a web site, I am there to see a review. If I'm searching for a game review on YouTube, I want to see a review. I expect to be told that they got a product for free to do the review, but it's also the primary content. But it's also a paid ad.
Paid bias is exactly not what I want when I am looking for a review.
> Advertising is not just psychological manipulation to prefer Pepsi to Coke. It's also communication of the existence of a product to a potential audience that wants that product.
What you're not understanding here is that ads don't add to my knowledge. Just because I don't see ads for 10 products doesn't mean I'm not going to find 10 products I like. It just means I'm going to find different products. And since I'll be finding products using my own toolset rather than whatever crap advertisers smear in my face, I'll get better results. Ads don't make it easier to find products, they add noise to the signal and make it harder to find products.
In short: there's no shortage of information. Ads are just crappy information.
>> There are no good ads.
> You're using that term again, and I don't think you know what it means.
You're being intentionally dense. I'm talking about "stuff that ad blockers can block". If you want to hand-wave and argue about the definition of words as if they have an inherent meaning and as if you aren't intelligent enough to get what I'm saying from context, you're going to be talking to yourself; I'm not going to have a pedantic argument.
> And how do you expect a new product to be promoted if not through advertising? You don't just grow organic search results by magic, and waiting for word of mouth to be enough to promote a product is a pretty sure way to kill a company. Even advertising by getting a product placement on blogs tends to be practically worthless in terms of conversion numbers. Are you just saying "no new products are necessary, I'm fine with what I have"?
This is true now, but it wouldn't be true if we could get rid of advertisers completely and only have word of mouth and organic search results. The reason these very good tools don't work is because advertisers have broken them.
OF COURSE I want new products. But I want ones that become popular because they're good, not because someone paid to shove them in my face when I was looking for something else. Not only do ads not provide that, they make it harder for me to find the good stuff because they clutter up the information stream with crap.
>OF COURSE I want new products. But I want ones that become popular because they're good, not because someone paid to shove them in my face when I was looking for something else.
You want new products, and you want organic search results, but you don't want ads to promote a product.
You just want heuristics that can determine what's a good product (or other search result) and show it to you even when no one has ever seen or evaluated the product before. (If everyone blocked all ads and all spam, how would you bootstrap a new product? Spamming bloggers?)
That's called a nondeterministic algorithm. An algorithm that magically "does the right thing."
>This is true now, but it wouldn't be true if we could get rid of advertisers completely and only have word of mouth and organic search results.
Because no one will ever be able to exploit those magical heuristics you're positing above.
Waiting for word of mouth to promote a product is equally magical thinking, unless you have unlimited money to burn. If someone has put up the investment to create a new product, they don't have time to wait for potentially years for the product to end up popular. You need to fail or succeed quickly.
Just developing a product sometimes needs enough eyes to get the feedback you need to improve your product to be useful, to tune the product to be what people need.
You want the awesome new products, but only after other people have vetted them for you. Other people who have looked at and evaluated product they've found through ads. Which you don't want to look at. Read about Kant's Categorical Imperative to understand my opinion of that behavior.
Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm currently involved with.
At best, a even a "tasteful" ad requires you to
0. Interrupt whatever you were doing.
1. Parse text or recognize the basic features of an image.
2. Run whatever heuristics you use to decide if the parsed data is an ad.
3. Try to skip past the ad, either temporally or spatially.
4. *Continue* to monitor the ad until you recognize that it no longer
impedes the thing you interrupted in #0.
These are complex behaviors that have non-trivial costs. The only reason you don't see those costs some of the time is because you've invested a lot of time and effort learning these skills. If you abstain from all advertising for a few months, the parsing costs will become much more obvious.
> every
If your definition of "advert" is so broad it includes everything, it's not a particularly useful definition. Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.
>Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm currently involved with.
No, it doesn't.
A good Google ad will be about the exact thing you're searching for. And yet ad blockers will aggressively attempt to block every such ad.
>Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.
They block Google ads, and so are blocking content that can be useful to the user.
Google ads are often actively malicious to the user.
For example it was the case for a very long time that if you searched for 'firefox' on Google the ad at the top of the results would take you to a site offering downloads of firefox that came bundled with malware[1].
So it's quite possible for Google ads to claim to be "the exact thing you're searching for", but to actually be tricking you. Thus the user needs to think carefully before clicking any Google ad. This is true of search results too of course, but it's vastly harder to game the search results to get your malware into the top spot for a term like firefox, compared to just buying up the adwords inventory, so the chance of getting scammed is much lower.
Google ads are not just text ads of course. Their display ads include many of those big fake download buttons that you find on any software download site. Yet another minefield for users that makes a simple task into a battle of wits and requires constant vigilance. The biggest illustration I had of that was using a fresh Windows VM last year to download some Windows software, and falling for one of those fake download button adsense ads. The reason being that I normally use an ad blocker and I wasn't mentally prepared for the challenge of finding the download link on the page that wasn't a landmine.
Given that Google were happy to serve up ads for malware for years, despite being told about it frequently, I have absolutely no sympathy for them, and I would recommend that everybody I know uses an ad blocker to block ads on Google search results pages.
Who cares? I don't want sites that "bootstrap popularity", I want sites with quality content.
To quote XKCD[1]: "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." If you're more worried about getting your content onto the front page of Google than about having content that's good enough to end up on the front page of Google, you're never going to produce anything I care about.
EDIT: The question "How exactly do you bootstrap popularity?" is the most repugnant, repulsive thing on this thread. I can at least empathize with people who are trying to create content and now have to find a different way to fund it. But you're literally just trying to achieve popularity without doing anything that deserves to be popular. It's people like you that I'm trying to avoid when I use an ad blocker. Your goals are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't want anything to do with whatever crap you want to shove in my face. I want the internet to be a place for people to share art and information that helps push humanity forward, and you want to add noise to the signal. Your small-minded profiteering is literally holding humanity back, and I can't wait for you to go out of business.
I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out.
Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
How do you demonstrate your ability for a decent chance at ranking well? Door knock to get early customers and then rely on word of mouth or reviews? That's advertising with a shotgun approach and could intrude on people when they're at home with their family. Letter box drop? Advertising.
AdWords and decent contextual advertising not an unreasonable option at getting in front of people already interested in your service.
> I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out.
The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. They're changing the rules in a bad way, and I don't much care about their intent: they're screwing up the internet and it's repugnant even if they don't intend it to be.
> Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete, but the only reason they need to manipulate their rankings is because their competition is manipulating their rankings. I'm saying I would rather remove manipulation from the system and let people compete on their actual merits. Ads are the problem, not the solution.
>The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits.
The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality.
>So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
I call BS. You've obviously no real experience promoting a product or service from scratch.
You could have 30 years of experience as a plumber and go out on your own as an independent contractor and you'd be starting from ZERO. Not from experience. You can't just take your former employer's customers; that's unethical and typically against your employment contract. So you have to find new customers under a new brand.
And it's arguably worse for promoting other products or services today. I had 20 years of experience when I struck out and started my own company again; that experience opened doors when I made personal connections to work with people, but it meant crap for my indie game release. Most popular games would fail without being propped up by advertising (and some would be less valuable to their players if they weren't as popular -- I'm thinking of games where you play against others, and so the more people who play, the more valuable the game is to everyone. Standard network effect).
>You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete
Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
> The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality.
And many aren't. The question is: what heuristic better matches the average person's definition of "actual quality".
Let's look at this as if you were approaching this as a fresh, new problem: you're trying to design a heuristic that finds products that most closely match what people want. You'd have to be an idiot to think that "products that paid me to rank them higher" is a good heuristic. Even very naive heuristics would be better.
Paid advertising serves advertisers and people creating crappy products who can artificially inflate their image. It doesn't serve consumers or people creating quality products.
> Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
No, I'm saying that advertising breaks popularity as a good metric. If it weren't for ads, organic popularity would be a good metric of quality. But advertising allows people to manipulate popularity in their favor without actually providing quality.
> How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
I don't. I think that creating something good takes time. Why do you think people are entitled to a get-rich-quick scheme?
Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction.
Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
> Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction.
There are two sides to this coin. You could argue that they have a hard time gaining traction because they aren't advertising. But I'm arguing that they are having a hard time gaining traction because other people are advertising.
> Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
Often your model of advertising does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more buying ads.
Just because Google also fails doesn't mean that ads are a successful way to find information. Ads and Google's search can both be bad heuristics.
Do you honestly think Google's rankings for "plumber in cityx" are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on the net than under a sink?
Or maybe which ones got online back when SEO was trivial. (I once ranked #2 in my country for "make money" with a 5-minute site almost completely devoid of useful info.) Or when keyphrase domains dominated.
For many industries, AdWords is just another layer in the arms race completely detached from the actual product/service.
> Do you honestly think Google's rankings for "plumber in cityx" are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on the net than under a sink?
Do you honestly think ads are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on advertising than under a sink?
At least when I search, Google is trying to provide me quality search results. I'm not arguing it's perfect: it's obviously not. But ads aren't even trying to serve my interests, they're trying to serve the interests of advertisers.
Well, I don't have a magic machine that allows me to suss out the intent of someone when they make a recommendation.
However, if the recommendation is not truly heartfelt or organic, if the purveyor of the recommendation is a specialist not in the domain of the product but in the domain of making recommendations, it's an "advertisement" and not just a casual recommendation.
And I would prefer a life of haphazard discovery and missing out on a few good products, than a life of having to battle salesmen trying to butt into every aspect of my experience.
Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is saying that becoming an expert on selling things regardless of what the things actually are is wrong. It may be a bit of an old-fashioned idea in our age of professional specialization and whatnot, but I stand by it.
Great point. People need to define which ads they are talking about during these sorts of arguments, as "ads" can be thought of as any sort of content that spreads information about a new product or idea as you point out.
I don't think it's a great point, I think it's a point that shows no understanding of context. This thread is about ad blockers. Ad blockers don't block blog posts, books, or any of the things he brought up. If you know what "ads" means here, it's not because people need to define what ads they are talking about, it's because you're not paying attention.
> The public discourse on this sort of thing is controlled by media companies, most of whom make the majority of their money from ad revenue.
Almost anyone who produces content and puts it on the internet makes money from ads. It's not just limited to "big media companies".
People can't seem to accept the fact that ad blockers are hurting the entire internet, not just "big media". All that free content you consume every day? Yeah, it's subsidized by ads.
> Almost anyone who produces content and puts it on the internet makes money from ads. It's not just limited to "big media companies".
Yes, but small content producers don't control the public discourse on this. You're attacking something that has nothing to do with what I said.
But if you want to bring it up: I don't care. Small content producers who rely on advertising for revenue are just as bad as large content producers who rely on advertising for revenue. Just because you're a small business doesn't give you an excuse to rely on a bad business model.
> People can't seem to accept the fact that ad blockers are hurting the entire internet, not just "big media". All that free content you consume every day? Yeah, it's subsidized by ads.
Which content is that? Do you mean all that crap I have to sift through to get to stuff I care about? Or do you mean the stuff I care about that I would rather pay for than have to click around an ad?
Ad blockers are not hurting the internet, ads are hurting the internet.
> Ad blockers are not hurting the internet, ads are hurting the internet.
The internet wouldn't exist without ads, kiddo. At the very least, it wouldn't be recognizable. It wouldn't be something that is ubiquitous to our daily lives.
I didn't say it was "Destroying" the internet, I said 'hurting'. You can be hurt and still "chug" along just fine, forever. Being hurt just keeps you from reaching your full potential.
Because most of the people who read and post on new.ycombinator are making money from advertising one way or another. And even if they aren't many of their/our customers are.
It's a giant secular shift in the industry and we'll all be affected by it. Business models that looked sound a year ago look shaky now; some investment hypotheses will be thoroughly invalidated and others will be proving out.
If you're on the bottom looking up, or the outside looking in; it's going to be awesome. We have the possibility of overturning orthodoxies, the freedom to try new things; etc.
But it's not going to be easy. Display ads have actually been pretty crucial to the ecosystem of capitalism so far. They are the primary means by which potential customers are informed of the existence and desirability of products and services.
I should add that if you had control over the software you use (similar to the classic idea of a human programming a machine), then this debate would not exist. Those willing to use adblockers would install or create them, and nobody would have to wait on Apple to be excited about using them.
Apple hasn't included ad blocking - they have merely provided APIs for ad blocking software to run on iOS devices. You still have to go to the app store and download one. But these APIs didn't exist before so ad blocking was impossible on iOS.
Impossible without a jailbreak or e.g. the willingness to set up Privoxy on your home net and configure it to proxy your wifi traffic. There are ways, but this will be a million times easier.
> Why was iOS's inclusion of ad blocking capabilities the turning point in what seemed to be an already-unstoppable movement towards a return to sanity for the web?
Because iOS was the last major platform on which true adblocking was (AFAIK) completely impossible until this week.
Desktop browsers have had adblocking for ages, and even non-rooted Android devices can block ads in webpages (root is required only to block ads in native apps).
It wasn't impossible. There were basically two solution up until now: use an alternative browser with ad blocking included (e.g. iCab), or a VPN that filters ads for you.
Really depends, it's worked quite well for me on most sites. Granted, I use it with an iPad where this is probably less of an issue than on the much smaller iPhones.
My thought is that it's because a big company is behind it and we would see the same thing if Microsoft did it for IE or (in bizarro land) if Google did this with Chrome.
I'd rather have a buggy site with a terrible ad that I can avoid than have to pay for all the content I consume. Now that adblock is on iOS everyone is worried that will become the case.
While that is a fair opinion, mine is on the contrary. Some things are simply more important than money. I'd gladly pay a little bit for quality ad-free experiences rather than endure the frustration of this OP in the linked article, every day, which is my and many's default. Life is short, and it's not always about money but rather quality of life.
anything really small that happens in SF gets blow out of proportion here and in the circles we belong.
and since IOS is a driving revenue source for start ups aiming for fame in SF in the hopes to get funding/exit, then anything apple do will drive people crazy here.
it's mostly irrelevant anywhere else, we just happen to drive the ephemeral tech press
Because numbers seem to point to iOS being the dominant device web browser (Android appears to be installed on many more devices, but people browse the web on their iPhones and iPads). The brouhaha is because the default browser now allows ad blocking. The FUD is about reach.
For the record as a guy who uses ad blockers religiously and has also worked in the web ad industry, I think it's completely overblown and not much will change.
It is not just ironic, it's silly. The entire discussion about ad blocking is silly. Why should it be immoral to render a horrible way of monetization useless? Ad blockers are doing the world a favour by sending a strong signal "this far and no further". There are many ways to cleanly embed plain images into websites in a non-obstructive way. Appropriate images. The ad industry has to learn or die, this is evolution and its result is improvement.
The only problem with this is that ad blocking is kind of indiscriminate. There are obviously obnoxious ads out there, those that use popups, use audio, video, or dialog boxes that block out the main content.
But on the other hand, there are non-intrusive ads that are text or simple image based ones. Those ads get hit in the cross-fire of ad-blocking.
Most of the sites that are producing content charge nothing from the user except for in the form of advertising. That's not a big ask most of the time.
It's like Google providing this amazing service, of cataloging and indexing THE ENTIRE INTERNET and providing relevant and fast search results to everyone, and all they ask is that users are displayed simple text ads. It's not a big ask for the service they provide.
I realize you can whitelist sites with ad-block. BUT, if you are going to a webpage to read and ingest content, I would argue that morally the transaction is to disable ad-block to view the content.
So far the ad blocking experience on iOS has been a little rocky.
1) Several of them that I have tested break basic functionality - videos not playing etc.
2) Adblock Plus, the leader in this space, decided to get greedy and not launch a blocker, but rather an entire browser, which I suspect most people will not embrace. I certainly won't, but I'd love ABP on my iOS Safari.
3) Peace, the most popular of the ad blockers, was removed after the author had an attack of conscience [1].
4) The ABP folks have decided to offer to pay those rolling out iOS adblockers for using their "acceptable ads" list. Sort of like a reverse adsense - basically extortion revenue sharing [2] .
There is a "read mode" on Firefox for desktop and Android that does this? You can set the font face and size and then every time you open an article, just click the "read mode" button and it will display the article all nice and clean. Safari does this too on desktop and iPhone.
Thank You, I've been looking for a barebones reading mode app for years, but they all want you to sign up for an account and add it to your reading list and yadda yadda. This is just what I needed.
The author makes an assumption that the cause of the bad scroll was the ad at the top of the page. I have seen many pages on mobile and tablet that have broken scrolling like this, and many have nothing to do with ads. I have also seen reflow and scroll problems related to how custom web fonts are loaded, or to social sharing widgets.
It's also possible (and quite likely) the the faulty ad wouldn't cause exactly the same problems on other websites, due to the way in which it'll interact with the page, the size of the viewport of the browser, etc.etc.
That's true, but the video and related article doesn't confirm this. All we know is that the guy couldn't scroll down on the page. There's no indication right now that the ad is actually at fault.
We do know for certain that the ad is at fault. We can see that the ad is what is flickering into blocking the text. We also know that the NYT doesn't have a flickering block on every page.
For what it's worth, I've had this same issue on NYT site. I also assumed it was an ad causing the problem because refreshing the page to allow a different ad to load fixed it. (I don't block ads on NYT.)
You make an assumption that the author didn't confirm that the cause of the bad scroll was the ad at the top of the page. It's not extremely difficult to discover what piece of script is scrolljacking; frequently all you have to do is Ctrl+F for scroll events.
Instead of blocking ads, what if browsers "tamed" ads by making only displaying the first frame of animated GIF ads? I don't think people mind ads as much as the crazy annoying ads (which seem to have gotten a lot worse in the last couple months).
While i have noscript installed for general streamlining of my browsing experience, I long since dug up a gif control extension for Firefox because i got tired of the "joke" gifs that was floating around.
No idea why this is always portrayed as "ad-blocking". I just see it as an API for blocking all kinds of crazy, annoying stuff websites now do. Frontend rockstars have no one but themselves to blame for requiring people to strictly regulate content on websites to make them show actual content in an agreeable fashion.
Recently, I had a website pop up a fullscreen "Rotate your device" banner. There are no words to express the anger and hatred that consumed me in an instant.
Not this much, because journalists were still stuck on paper, techies weren't attention-seeking altruists, popup windows were more annoying, and extensions were more niche (IE was still big).
Many people were. Don't forget about all the brouhaha over doubleclick and its efforts to track you. I remember people (techy) being concerned about it.
Personally, I remember running proxmitron to block ads and tracking junk, and adding functionality to websites back in the day.
I read the linked article, watched the video, then followed the link to the New York Times article. For some reason, the CSS and/or JavaScript didn't load, so not only did I not get any ads, I got completely unstyled content. That was somewhat ironic too.
How many people on this thread make their living (directly or indirectly) and feel the cognitive dissonance to their experience as users/consumers of free content?
Always interesting reading these ad (blocking) threads. As someone who's worked in the industry for a while and now working on change, some thoughts:
1) Content costs money to produce. No way around that. Only option is pay directly or indirectly (via ads). What we need is better facilitators of both.
2) Ads are not going anywhere. The industry is not "in trouble" or imploding. There are dozens of ways around adblock and much of adtech is actually run behind the scenes server-to-server. It's not impossible to bring it 100% server-side and serve the final page as a mix of content + ads. This is effectively what happens with native apps already and there's an increasing amount of sponsored content. Content consumption is way up with billions of ad clicks, video plays and articles read everyday. The ad industry is stronger than ever.
3) Blame for the current situation is shared by all. Publishers should have better standards. Ad networks should use better formats and engineering. Advertisers should buy better stuff and know where/what is actually running. Just follow the money - buyers > networks > pubs with about a dozen layers in the middle, everyone trying to make the people who pay them happy. Users are not in this chain unfortunately.
4) Payments are not a magical solution. Most people do not want to pay, even if you might and the web is too granular for site-specific subscriptions which requires a scalable 3rd party. This is VERY hard to do considering the mechanics of the internet but there are things in the works like Google's Contributor program. Sadly results have NOT been great because any amount of money adds friction and most editorial/news content does not provide replay value like a music track would, but there is promise with network scale, bundling and the option to choose the level of ads/payment involved as your browse.
5) Browsing via ads is far more anonymous than payments, which involve credit cards which means name, address, birthdays, purchase history, credit history, etc. Contrary to lot of FUD, ad networks usually rely on 3rd party companies for data and they mostly focus on wide demographics and interests. If you're worried about privacy, then look at Google and Facebook who are both the de facto leaders in adtech primarily because of all the data users willing give them. Those are the companies that know who you really are on every device.
6) Finally I just want to say that the industry is not stupid or clueless, it's just massive (150B+) with lots of politics and back-room deals. Any industry this size usually takes years or decades to adapt and there's still a lot to figure out so change will be slow but ultimately the old guard will be retired and better stuff will come along. It's accelerating now so that's a good sign. I know everyone thinks they can do better with some brilliant idea and flip things around instantly but it's just not that simple. Please remember there are plenty of smart, talented, hard-working people (just like you!) that are working on this. I promise we will figure it out.
Appreciate the comment. I always try to give an honest state of the ad industry and its machinations but any comment that doesn't align with "advertising is evil" seems to get downvoted.
I think we are witnessing an industry being phased out. Ads to power your free mobile app or websites? Ads that slowly overtime have become more aggressive, in your face because advertisers 'dont know why ppl wont click on my poker site ad'.
uBlock is such a sweet sweet slap in the face of such advertisers. I'd love to see small text ads that are relevant to my search or content. Giant banner with flash and won't disappear? Forget about it.
I think the real irony is Apple blocking ads in the web browser when most apps in the App Store are a non stop barrage do ads Apple profits from. I use ad blockers, but something about Apple building this in strikes me as unethical and anti competitive.
nitpick: Apple is not blocking ads, nor did they build an ad blocker into the browser. They gave users the ability to add them (which brings iOS Safari closer to feature parity with desktop browsers, incidentally).
I have no idea what this "non stop barrage of ads in the App Store" is you referred to.
Exactly. I don't have a problem with Apple letting users block ads, but in fairness then the same should go for the App Store. Of course that won't happen since Apple profits from those ads.
Actually they do, and their html5 player is BROKEN in my browser. There is no way to seek, even touching slider resets video position to the beginning.
I think Apple deliberately cripples the browser on ipad. It really has the worst browsing experience. My android phone displays pages better. I think they want to drive people towards making an app for every website.
For eg, how many of you use an app to browse hn? Even though the website is so lean and fast, it is horrible to use on an ipad.
I use hn.premii.com, as well as hckrnews.com with a bookmarklet that turns all the links into hn.premii.com links.
I generally prefer the reading experience on my iPad because of this, actually. The only reason I go back to the normal site on my mac is if I want to comment, or if I want to make use of the 'new comments since last visit' feature (via a chrome plugin).
If the hn.premii.com developer is reading this: any chance you could add a visual indicator for new comments? would make my experience perfect.
Scrolling has a lot of issues. The behavior seen in the video is common on many websites. And then there are some pages which simply won't load. I do not have examples offhand, though.
Facebook is a really laggy and glitchy affair, even though the screen size is enough to display the full website.
That doesn’t happen to me on my iPad Air running iOS 7. A big part of that might be because I have the iPad connect to a proxy server which blocks a huge swath of ad servers though.
That's not why. HN's design is very old and table based so it's not easy to make it responsive / mobile friendly. It's also not easy to change the design because the HTML is integrated into the code rather than being separate templates.
They're working on improving it but it's an ongoing process.
