
Show HN: Let's encourage ad blocking - k1m
https://blockads.fivefilters.org
======
terryf
For me the simple truth is: I don't care. Let me explain. I use ad-blocker
(ghostery) on all the sites with everything blocked, because it makes my
browsing experience better and faster. "But! But! How will the authors
survive?". The answer is: I don't care.

Forbes stopped letting me read their site with ghostery enabled? I don't care.
There are a million other free sites to read. So I go there.

But.. But Google wouldn't exist without ads??! I don't care - there would be
some other search engine that works without ads.

Really, I got other things to worry about than some random company/person on
the internet making money off of me.

~~~
godshatter
I remember the web before ads became so prolific, and before it became so
commercial. There was still content, people still cared about topics and put
up web pages devoted to them. Without ads, it would still make sense for an
individual to write a blog or a company to put up a page that allows others to
search or purchase their products. IMDB started as a place to put information
related to a usenet group (rec.arts.movies?), iirc.

Without ads, there would be a lot less "get rich quick" schemes and search
engine fiddling. Websites that exist only to point to information scraped from
other websites and wrap them in ads would disappear. If a web site created by
some lone coder started to explode in audience size and bandwidth costs, they
could go the donation route. I already donate to some sites that provide
content I like. I think we would end up with quality over quantity when it
came to finding information, and that's probably a good thing.

So I'm right there with you. I don't care how someone's business model is
going for them. I block ads because they've been out of control since before
the "punch the monkey" stage came around years ago.

~~~
seanp2k2
This. I still generally find that the really excellent deep content on the
Internet is written by people doing it out of passion, not out of trying to
make a living from it. Are there exceptions? Of course! Stuff like Rock Paper
Shotgun exists and I really enjoy reading that, or TopGear magazine on iOS
gets my digital subscription e-dollars, but most of the articles that I really
spend time on are small personal hobby blogs or forums.

Content that exists to make profit for the authors is rarely worth the cost of
ads IMO. Let them die.

------
Ensorceled
I've been a hold out on ad blocking. It always seemed a grey area between the
evils of psychological manipulation, tracking and increasing cognitive load
and the good of paying for content delivery.

As it becomes increasingly impossible to live in modern society without the
internet and the ad networks become more intrusive and the negative
consequences increase, it becomes more and more difficult to full justify the
pro-ad stance.

This week I got a cold. I'm not sure which social network I mentioned it on or
what search I made, but the ads I see everywhere now are for NyQuil.

That first NyQuil ad was a real dousing in cold water. This isn't the ad
network knowing I'm actively searching the web for a web monitoring product
and showing me pingdom ads. The ad network knows I'm sick and what my illness
is.

I'm actively investigating ad blocking now, enemy mine.

~~~
soared
Well its the same thing. You have an unfulfilled need and did something online
to try and solve it, so a company targeted you and are displaying their
solution in ads. Illness or any other product, the process doesn't change.

~~~
Ensorceled
Yes, that's actually the point. What I'm saying is that seemed well and good
when it was actually helping me find a product I was looking for. It seems
less well and good now that I know it's tracking when I have an illness and
selling ads based upon that "demographic".

Think about the repercussions if I googling for cancer treatments or HIV
infection symptoms and not just cold cures.

~~~
seanp2k2
Your eyeballs are being programmatically sold to the highest bidder, and
cancer treatments can be very expensive.

------
agopaul
I don't get it. A big part of the web is paid by ads. Lots of websites rely on
(non-invasive) ads to sustain themselves and provide content to anyone for
free. It's safe to say that the whole web sustains on ads (think about google,
FB).

I know that sometimes there are too many ads on certain web pages, but that is
no excuse to ban them all.

Yes, ads are also used to distribute malware but, come on, it's 2016 and you
should have uninstalled both Flash and the Java plugin in your browser a while
ago.

~~~
morsch
Ads pay for some web sites. People pay for ads because they want the attention
of the sites' readers to get them to buy their products. People buy their
products, which pays for the ads, which pay the websites.

I prefer to be able to steer my own attention, and not have it be steered by
those who win the bids for it. I don't like paying a surcharge on every
product to enable this practice. It seems like an inefficient way to finance
the web.

~~~
mseebach
> I prefer to be able to steer my own attention, and not have it be steered by
> those who win the bids for it.

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Very few people are going to create
content for you for free. If you don't want your attention steered, prepare to
pay the piper.

> I don't like paying a surcharge on every product to enable this practice.

The theory that advertising is a "surcharge on every product" assumes that the
dynamics of sales and competition wouldn't be hurt in the absence of ads, that
honest, unbiased, uncommercial content would pick up the information slack
from ads. These assumptions does not stand up to basic scrutiny:

a: Ads support the entrance of new products into the market. For new products
to be successful, they need to drive either new value, higher efficiency,
better status-signalling or lower prices.

b: There is nothing to keep uncommercial content from recommending alternative
equal-quality non-advertising products, which we would then expect to be
cheaper, as they don't incur the surcharge. Certainly, there are examples of
such products (eg. consumables that have a store-brand alternative), but if
the theory were true, those alternatives would be widely available throughout
the market. Consumer Reports routinely recommend products from brands with
expensive ad campaigns.

c: Status-signalling is a thing, it really is, and while certainly exploited
and supported by the ad industry, it wasn't invented by it, and won't go away
if the ad industry does.

> It seems like an inefficient way to finance the web.

Perhaps so, but in a century and a half(?) of ad-supported mass media, not a
lot of viable alternatives have appeared. Subscriptions (newspapers,
magazines, still contains ads), donations (NPR), tax support (BBC and the
like). It's not obvious to me either model would support the almost absurdly
rich pluralism of content the web has with ad-finance.

EDIT: spelling, cleaned up ambiguous language.

~~~
morsch
No, the the fact that ads entail a surcharge on most products is fairly self-
evident (companies pay for it, and price it in), and does not rely on those
assumptions.

My take on your argument is that despite the fact that products get cheaper
when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get
more inefficient, and hence the price would increase (or products would be
worse, which is basically the same thing). Which is a fair point. But if that
were true, it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact.

However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve
the same function as ads in terms of market transparency. You don't even have
to be very creative about it, since they already exist (e.g. consumer reports
are a thing, and vaguely 10% of the Internet seems to be dedicated to discuss
the dos and don'ts of buying shit). Ads are already one of the worst ways to
get information about products, particularly in non-niche markets.

~~~
mseebach
> (companies pay for it, and price it in) ... when you remove the "ad portion"
> of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the
> price would increase

Yes, that is what I meant. I guess "net surcharge" is a better term.

> it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact

I believe it is, which is essentially what my argument is about. If the net
surcharge is non-trivial and positive, then where are the people (trying to)
capture it for profit? They can even piggy-back for free on certain kinds of
competitors advertising (your competitors spend on ads explaining why
everybody _must_ have a dishwasher, you can just show up a sell a dishwasher).

> However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve
> the same function as ads in terms of market transparency

In theory correct, but in empirical practice this doesn't happen. Where is the
car/dishwasher/whatever brand that is cheaper because it doesn't advertise,
but consistently come out top in Consumer Reports? Even store brand
consumables doesn't consistently test as better or equally good, just as good
enough, and cheaper.

This is not one of those things where an obvious inefficiency shows up and
everybody is falling over themselves because the market takes a few years or
ten to smooth things out -- ads have been a fixture of the market, well, since
the 60s, going by Mad Men.

This is the bit where I speculate wildly, but I think some of the fallacy is
thinking about product, ad and consumer in an abstract isolation. Effects are
probably much more diffused and harder to quantify. Broader status-
confirmation than that of being seen carrying a can of Coke rather than
Walmart Quality Cola is probably one: it feels good to be buying Tide, even is
nobody ever sees the bottle, it's a confirmation to yourself that you've made
it, and when you and I can shrug that off and get the cheap alternative, it
partly because we can derive status confirmation from our work in a way that
frankly isn't available to everybody. Also, positive branding (as supported by
ads) is pretty important for employee morale which rubs off on product
quality. This is way out in the margins, but an employee at the white-label
detergent factory probably isn't going to feel the same pride the Tide
employee is, and even a little compounds over time.

------
Kiro
The "Why?" text didn't convince me at all, so... why? I'm serious. I don't
mind ads and I don't mind being tracked. On the contrary I've found
interesting products on banners, mostly due to retargeting.

Since this site's purpose is to encourage people not using adblock to use it I
don't think "don't use it then" is sufficient here.

~~~
dan1234
I found blocking ads significantly sped up some sites (especially on mobile)
and prevented page layouts jumping about as more ads loaded after the initial
page.

The web is just much faster without ads.

~~~
Kiro
Thanks. That's a good argument.

------
ethana
Do you really have to load jquery for a couple of lines that could be done in
pure js? I run a local proxy to redirect hosted libraries like jquery. Google
could and probably tracks where everyone's been on the web when loading their
hosted libraries. Pretty much bypass adblockers altogether.

~~~
skoczymroczny
How come? Shouldn't the browser cache the jquery library and very rarely do a
connection to Google CDN?

~~~
dspillett
It isn't just the network load. If you are on a small device the RAM use is
not entirely insignificant.

The CPU load too, though I think the use of animation/video in adverts is more
of a problem in that respect than the overhead of using jQuery instead of
modern DOM APIs directly.

Even just considering network load, you need to be careful about the cache
control headers that you send to ensure that all common browsers will cache
content (see [http://blog.httpwatch.com/2011/01/28/top-7-myths-about-
https...](http://blog.httpwatch.com/2011/01/28/top-7-myths-about-https/)
amongst other references) and you have to be careful not to accidentally
indicate that it is OK to cache something sensitive (which is why some servers
send blanked "don't cache" headers for HTTPS responses unless explicitly
ordered otherwise, it is the safest default).

------
Coding_Cat
I visited it on Firefox mobile and it correctly detected that I didn't have
adblock (as I tend to only read HN and technical blogs on my phone), but the
link send me to uBlock Origin's Github page. While uBlock is a nice blocker,
if the goal is to encourage adblocking I think it would be better to directly
link to the extension for whichever browser is being used as I do not think
there is much overlap between "Knows how to use Github" and "Doesn't know what
an adblocker is".

~~~
k1m
Absolutely. Just wanted to get some feedback on this in its current state.
Agree that it should detect user's browser/device and suggest an appropriate
blocker.

I wish uBlock Origin had a nice install page I could point to that would do
that kind of detection itself. All I could find at this point was the Github
page.

~~~
a_imho
>> it should detect user's browser/device

For me it would just take away from the service, if you want to detect what
I'm running, you are only a little better than advertisers. I understand, it
is for the 'greater good' from your pov, but this way the means impairs the
cause.

~~~
k1m
Are you serious? Basic browser/device detection to suggest a suitable ad
blocker is not really the same as the tracking carried out by big ad networks.
I don't see the similarity to be honest.

~~~
a_imho
I'm very serious [1]. It is not at all basic for me.

I can't find the discussion from a couple of days earlier, but afair it
basically said wsj let the google crawler indexing their articles, while
simultaneously blocking users by detecting their device.

[http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-
crime-r...](http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-crime-right-
now.html)

~~~
Coding_Cat
That blog, to me, only shows the problems of selective enforcement I fail to
see how it is relevant?

Regarding the WSJ: it's a technologically unsophisticated (but probably
effective) way of having indexing work with a pay-wall (which requires more
tracking in and of itself anyway). But selective access does not violate your
privacy, only your freedom to view their content. And as much as I oppose the
"companies are people too" movement I do think they have a right to
selectively serve their content as much as you have a right to decide what you
want to do with the bytes they (try) to send you (e.g. adblock them).

~~~
a_imho
Not a lawyer, and not even a native speaker, my interpretation might be false.
I take away there is a very fine line what is authorized access and it can be
bent depending what size of a fish you are. And if I violate CFAA when
accessing systems someone not cared to secure (not that I do), they sure as
well when running scripts in my browser that track me or try to detect my
system.

I think it derails the conversation, but do you have the right to pretend to
be the google crawler then?

------
anexprogrammer
Hmm. I'm conflicted.

I am very much against tracking, and ads that track retarget and abuse me, so
am very restrictive in terms of what I let near my browser.

I'd also be very happy to see ads on many sites (eg Stackoverflow style -
respectful ads) if I could trust them not to track, retarget or drop malware.
That implies either an ad network that's restricted to static pngs (and that
they've developed trust), or going back to publisher hosting.

I think, there's the germ of a great idea here. But, rather than pushing
people at uBlock (which is my preferred blocker) I'd try and educate on
tracking and ad network abuse, then link out to several newbie friendly, zero
effort options (that probably implies adblock and others). Why not uBlock?
It's a LONG way from newbie friendly, but chances are that's your audience
because they don't have a blocker already.

Educate to get some pushback against tracking and crapware ads, like was done
to kill ie6 long ago.

If I gave uBlock to my mum's generation (generalisation) or neighbour I'd be
fielding quite a lot more tech support calls. :p

~~~
k1m
Thanks for the feedback. Do you really think uBlock Origin is so different
from other blockers in terms of usability? I don't see how. It relies on
essentially the same set of filter lists that others like Adblock Plus use,
but without selling out to big ad networks. I love that they don't give in to
acceptable ads - I think that's a very murky area for ad blockers to be
involved in.

~~~
anexprogrammer
The icons are non-obvious apart from on/off, settings icon is hard to find,
and when in settings there's no easy mode wizard to keep you away from the
list of 50 filters and just recommend easylist or fanboy's + a couple of other
recommended defaults.

If I gave it to some of the folks I know they'd end up utterly baffled if they
ever opened the interface (probably unlikely to be fair :D)

EFF's Privacy Badger does a brilliant job of first run wizard and UI for non
techies. Adblock first run is 4 or 5 steps and steers away from the techie
guts. uBlock just dumps you at the settings that are programmer friendly (far
as I remember there's no first run anything).

For me and reasonably IT literate folks, uBlock is perfect. It's by far and
away the best blocker I'm aware of right now though.

~~~
k1m
To be honest, I think when it comes to usability, most users of ad blockers
aren't going to change settings. And having just checked it against Adblock
Plus, I'm not so convinced that Adblock Plus is easier.

If we assume that most users will install an ad blocker and expect it to just
work, then uBlock Origin and the filters it enables by default gives users
much better protection than Adblock Plus. I think that's far more important
than how usable the settings page is.

------
andrewaylett
One thing about this, is that I don't particularly want an ad-blocker per se:
I want a malicious-or-annoying-stuff blocker.

So I primarily use Privacy Badger, which dynamically blocks sites that try to
track me (and gives me an excuse to rail against sites that tell me I'm
running an ad-blocker, because I'm _not_ running an ad-blocker!) and self-
destructing cookies to stop first-party tracking on sites I don't trust.

The down-side of self-destructing cookies being the EU cookie regulation,
which relies on sites setting a cookie to tell me that I have to agree to set
cookies, when I've actually configured my browser to do what I want with the
cookies anyway. So then I need an ad-blocker set up specifically to block the
cookie panels (with [https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-
list](https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list)) which requires
me to have an ad-blocker installed after all, even if it's not set to block
ads...

------
ricardolopes
I'm simply using Ghostery to block any ad trackers and other scripts. Which
this site tells me it's apparently not enough.

~~~
k1m
Thanks. We'll test Ghostery and try to fix this.

~~~
clort
Perhaps the same here - ghostery, noscript and adblockplus installed, and the
page says no ad blocking detected! Actually, I'm hoping that this is a success
rather than a failure because the next phase of anti-ad blocking is them
needing to detect that I'm blocking ads. I, however, don't really want them to
be able to detect that..

~~~
k1m
Hmmm, are you by any chance using a filter list other than Easy List in
adblockplus?

~~~
clort
Yes, I don't have EasyList ticked

------
t176
Are you objecting to advertising in principle? I don't have anything against
advertising as a means of improving sales. We just need to stop talking about
'advertising' and start focusing on 'annoying' and 'tracking'. I object to
anything that tracks me and to ads that annoy me while I'm trying to read an
article. To be fair, it's not just ads. I hate any form of animation while I'm
trying to read. It makes it harder to concentrate. I wish all bloggers (and
news sites) would avoid using GIFs and ensure their content rendered fully
without JavaScript (vain hope). As far as I'm concerned if adverts are
unobtrusive, don't track and have a light download, I'm OK with them. Mostly
I'll ignore them (just like I do with TV ads) but at least they provide
revenue for bloggers.

------
a2tech
I caved to forbes.com demand that I turn off my adblocker yesterday. As soon
as the page loaded my browser slowed to a crawl and the content was covered by
ads. Chrome was going unresponsive from the page. Needless to say I couldn't
close the tab fast enough, and forbes went back on my adblock list.

------
kardos
Blocking all adverts is short sighted. It works at present because the ads are
delivered in a pretty obvious manner and it's easy enough to drop the
scripts/elements. Blocking everything will become a much harder game once the
content producers figure out how to bake ads directly into the content. How
are you going to distinguish between an image that's part of the article and
an advertising image when they are both served from the content producer's
host?

Installing an adblocker is a reaction to an overwhelming onslaught of ads. The
solution is some sort of compromise between "full on malvertising shitshow"
and "eliminate all ad-funded business models".

~~~
furyferret
EasyList[1] already contains various per-site adblocking based on CSS
selectors, with several packages for different languages and site type. I
think the community is big enough and motivated enough to manually lists any
ads on most websites.

Also first-party advertising is complicated because it prevents the
advertising company from publishing the ads it wants, since the ad would be
delivered by the site itself. While this is the business model of Google and
Facebook, most sites don't have the analytics power to publish the most
relevant ads to their users.

[1]
[https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/](https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/)

~~~
kardos
Re easylist, that is what I meant by 'pretty obvious'.

Re first party advertising, the scorched earth blocking approach is going to
push the advertising industry to take over first party advertising. Your site
runs httpd and advertd, where advertd receives ads from the industry to inject
into the pages, and returns tracking data to the industry. If this doesn't
exist yet, it's definitely under construction.

------
accommodavid
I'm using Dan Pollock's hosts file method[1] which is detected by Wired and
Forbes, but not this site.

[1]: [http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

~~~
k1m
Thank you. You're right, pure host-based blocking is not currently detected by
the site. We'll try to include that too.

At the moment we're relying on a rule in Easy List -
[https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/](https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/)
\- it's used by Adblock Plus, uBlock, AdGuard and a probably others. But we
need to take into account other methods/blockers that don't rely on this list.

~~~
majewsky
My two layers of blocking are also not detected.

Layer 1: Similar to what @accommodavid has, my router uses several lists of
ad-server domains to block requests to them. The list URLs are at
[https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-
hole/blob/963eacfe0537a7abddf3...](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-
hole/blob/963eacfe0537a7abddf30441c754c67ca1e40965/gravity.sh#L9-L16)

Layer 2: My browser has uMatrix. It is set up to only allow a) first-party
requests of any kind, and b) third-party requests for images and CSS. (So on
your site, the JS from ajax.googleapis.com is blocked.)

------
Raed667
An ad-free-web would mean a inevitable sponsored-content-web. The first was
easy to manage. We need to start thinking about Add-ons that can detect
sponsored-content.

~~~
k1m
There's AdDetector: [http://www.ianww.com/ad-
detector/](http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/)

~~~
Raed667
If I understand well this reads if the page says "sponsored by", I fear the
future where this tag is not available.

------
drdaeman
Checked Firefox and Chrome, with uMatrix in a typical configuration that
blocks all but first-party requests and external images and CSS by default and
a default set of common AD and tracking hostnames blacklisted. "No ad blocking
detected"

Allowed site do to third-party requests to fetch jQuery. Still says "no ad
blocking detected".

I guess just testing that /css/ads.css (a first-party resource) fails to load
isn't a good measure.

~~~
k1m
Thank you for the report. Yes, we'll include other measures soon.

For anyone interested, in our tests with uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus and
AdGuard for Android - the default installation (which we assume most people
use) - all included the rule which blocks ads.css, even if it's same origin.

------
rahimnathwani
I visited the site from an iOS device with Purify installed and enabled for
'Ads and Tracking'. The site told me It didn't detect an ad blocker.

~~~
k1m
Thanks for the report. I can't find the filter list for Purify, but I think
it's the same developer who took over uBlock (not Origin).

We're relying on a rule in the Easy List filter set which blocks loading of
anything called ads.css. Perhaps this rule does not exist in Purify. I'll make
a note to test. If anyone knows the filters Purify uses, I'd love to take a
look.

We also test for 'acceptable' ads getting through based on a rule in Adblock
Plus, and warn against it.

------
tobltobs
Let's encourage the monopolisation of the internet.

------
NetHuntCRM
Whenever I encounter an intrusive add that basically overlays the whole page
and send me to some shady site, it goes to the black list. Mistakes happen, so
I occasionally review this list, because I care for the revenue of the sites I
like. Anyway, today Ad blindness works as good as any ad blocker.

------
SCAQTony
Ad blocking is a rhetorical misnomer. It's not ad blocking, it's malware
blocking. I have no problem with ads and would allow to be subjected to them
if cookies, trackers, beacons, and privacy invaders were not inserted into my
personal property.

------
jakeogh
I like to start on the DNS level
[https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate](https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate)

------
MindTooth
Any approved blocker for iOS yet?

------
psynapse
Doesn't appear to detect the use of Privacy Badger on Firefox.

~~~
k1m
Thank you. We'll take a look.

------
bobby_9x
I've never seen a group so ready and willing to destroy their chances at
future success.

Ads are pretty much the only way to make a living when you are bootstrapping.
These blocks, like all of the other silly things in this community meant to
hurt the big, bad, corporations, do nothing but strengthen them.

It's an automated way to remove competition. The people with resources and
money will survive (as always) and the rest will suffer the consequences of
their short-sighted actions.

It happened with the music industry over the last two decades (1 million plays
on spotify nets you $1000, if you are lucky).

I’m glad I have resources: I can get a good deal on labor when these sorts of
movements decimate an indusry.

------
nicerobot
If the authors are opposing advertising, why are they advertising their
opinions here? These naive opinions are more intrusive to me than many
targeted advertisements. To be clear, i'm not opposed to ad blockers. I'm also
not opposed to some advertising. I am averse to hypocrisy.

~~~
orbitur
Your argument falls apart when you consider HN is explicitly a place to
advertise either ideas or products. And you can show your disdain via the
downvote button or you can offer criticism in the form of comments. This is a
platform for advertising, whether there's money to be gained or not.

------
a_imho
Similar discussion from a day ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11215801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11215801)

Encouraging adblocking is harmful and discriminating against advertisers. A
more appropriate term is content blocking. Indeed, why not to see some static
ads and just disable tracking?

~~~
lentil_soup
I don't get the "harmful and discriminating against advertisers" part.

Advertisers are forcing me to pay attention to something I don't want or need
to pay attention to, why do I have to cater for them?

~~~
a_imho
I feel you have to be politically correct about these things, because there
might be ground for a lawsuit based on the loss of advertisers. It might sound
stupid, but that is definitely something I could imagine they come up with.

~~~
majewsky
Good thing I'm not in the US. :)

------
IvanK_net
There are no good adblockers today. Most of current "adblockers" remove DIV
element just because it has id="ad", without analyzing if there is any
advertisement inside it. Simply stupid.

And since many "adblockers" are not open-source, you never know what it is
doing. Software may perform censorship of the world wide web, depending on
what investors tell the programmers to do.

Imagine the investor is Apple. They can make adblocker remove the the results
containing "android" from your google search. I think such scenario is quite
possible in the future, if users blindly trust "adblockers".

~~~
k1m
Does happen, but not such a big problem for me. I'd argue that
developers/designers should be testing with ad blockers enabled.

~~~
Jgrubb
Unless you work for a site that's ad supported, then it's the other way around
unfortunately.

