
LA Times and ads - catacombs
https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/la-times-and-ads/
======
SwellJoe
I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted
to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed
my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a
bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten).

I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70
(depending on which network I'm on, I have two) to download ("unlimited" plans
actually aren't, when used as a hotspot, though T-Mobile now seems to actually
have a mostly unlimited hotspot option, I haven't tried it yet). So, not only
are ads intrusive, disrespectful of privacy, and generally of negative utility
for me as a user...they're also ridiculously costly.

So, yeah, I use an ad blocker. Oddly, I tried disabling it earlier today for
an LA Times article (because of their blocker blocker), but it didn't
correctly detect that I'd disabled it, so I closed it and went elsewhere. Now
I know I should never disable ad block for LA Times, no matter how interesting
the story seems.

~~~
excalibur
I recently (past year) bit the bullet and began ad blocking myself. My primary
concern is the recent proliferation of malicious content through the common ad
networks. Supporting websites is great, but not at the expense of your own
security.

~~~
matt4077
Maybe we need smarter ad blockers.

Publications right now have little incentive to improve their ads with regards
to security, readers' resources or quality – because if the LA Times motivates
you to install an ad blocker, the NYT is getting hit as well. The tragedy of
the commoners, so to speak.

If ad blockers would aggressively judge each publisher, ad network and/or
advertiser and rewarded good behaviour by showing the ads, I could see
publishers prioritising the user experience. I'm pretty sure the publishers
and journalists themselves look at these websites with horror, and they'll
jump at the chance to regain some quality.

The adblock+ model is tangentially similar, but charging the publishers is
simply too close to blackmail to be acceptable.

~~~
bigbugbag
In other parts of the world they would find who is making those ads and who is
in charge of those and burn their houses down or chop them with machetes.
Suddenly the number of people willing to produce ads for clients and said
clients is dramatically reduced.

I'm not suggesting this kind of extreme response, my point is there's no
punishment for putting up those ads so there's no incentive to behave
correctly and we're stuck in a spiraling vicious cycle. Breaking this cycle
and turn into a virtuous cycle requires a paradigm shift and I'm afraid this
is not going to happen by itself. Moving away from ads as a business model
means wiping out google, facebook and a few others big players so whatever
effort to emerge a new business model will be resisted by those who have the
power and can burn money for years without even noticing it.

Until then I have two solution, the first is a combination of noscript[1] and
ublock origin[2] in my browser and the the second is wallabag[3] which for the
LAT page given as example gives this:
[http://share.pho.to/AegpU](http://share.pho.to/AegpU)

[1]: [http://noscript.net/](http://noscript.net/) [2]:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) [3]:
[https://wallabag.org/en](https://wallabag.org/en) and
[https://wallabag.it/en](https://wallabag.it/en)

~~~
matt4077
Those are some pretty racist stereotypes you have of wherever you think people
are going around chopping each other with machetes.

~~~
nojvek
I don't think he singled out a specific race. I would say that it's not too
far put though. The world is a pretty ugly place in some parts.

I think we in the tech community need to work on smarter ad blocker. The
history goes that ad folks abused window.popup and then browser vendors
blocked that. Then came chrome who is supported by world's largest ad engine,
but they were nice to give us extensions. So we had adblock extensions that
gave us a ton of CSS injected in every page. Now need smart js to fool the
page thinking it has ads.

I would love to see browser support showing a big fat red icon when you're
being tracked and page is misbehaving.

------
lobster_johnson
I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole
industry. It's amazing how much crap they load.

These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium,
Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The
people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't
understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typically
I've seen a single newspaper use 3-4 different vendors for the exact same
thing, such as analytics. They don't actually use all of them; who knows why
they have multiple overlapping ones.

Scripts are often badly written, and it's common to see lots of nonsensical
errors spewed to the console. It's very annoying to debug your own stuff when
you have that crap loaded, which typically comes from a header/footer combo
provided by the customer.

~~~
zkms
The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by
scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages
and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as
possible:

[https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-
de0b...](https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b7a070a2d)

As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you
doubt me, click the above link) that make _goatse_ look like pure mindbleach,
i'll keep blocking JS and ads.

~~~
eli
It made me sad when boingboing put one of those ad boxes on the site.

I work in digital media. I get why publishers do it. But, sheesh, if you're
resorting these ads that insult your audience in exchange for pennies, I think
you need to reexamine your approach.

~~~
anigbrowl
Let's not beat around the bush: some publishers do that kind of thing because
they are scumbags.

~~~
eli
I don't really agree. I don't think that's fair.

~~~
3131s
It's presenting your audience with misinformation, false hope, and scams. It's
incredibly scummy. Those type of ads prey on people's desperation and
gullibility, and there are actually people who will fall for them and waste
time and money in the process.

------
smaili
> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the
> article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing
> should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead
> the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It
> will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14
> gigabytes a day.

It's not quite clear if 14GB/day is an extrapolation based off the author's
sample of 5 MB/30 seconds or if the author actually left the page open for all
24 hours. Regardless, that's quite a bit of data.

~~~
NelsonMinar
Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400.
Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than,
say, 10 is the problem.

~~~
greglindahl
That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate.
(Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you
change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?)

I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a
terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you
measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thing open for 24
hours would be best.

~~~
uxp
In the time since I read the linked article, I opened the LA Times site and
navigated to a story, opened my network console, and read some comments on HN
about the article.

Safari says it's been about 12 minutes. It's requested over 1000 resources (it
pegged 999+ at ~2 minutes). It's downloaded 88.4 Megabytes of data. It appears
to be continually firing pixels from a multitude of places (openX and
doubleclick are common). It's also downloading a number of different videos.
The article I opened does not have any videos related to it's content. This
article is open in an unfocused window; I have not fired any scroll, click, or
touch events natively after the few seconds I opened the link, scrolled a bit,
then came back to HN.

88.4 megabytes in a few minutes. I remember when my modem couldn't download
more than a couple megs in dozens of minutes, and I'm a shitty stupid
millennial, not some graybeard. Maybe it could hit a gig, or 14, in a day, but
the point really remains set: the LATimes site is absurd.

~~~
NelsonMinar
Your measure pencils out to 10 GB/day. Someone else here found 7 GB/day.
Perhaps it's a Safari vs Chrome thing.

(In case the sarcasm is not clear: the problem is that it's anywhere over 0.01
GB.)

~~~
asdfaoeu
I only got to 13.6mb/10mins before the page crashes. So I guess that counts as
a safeguard.

[http://i.imgur.com/PIcpEPJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/PIcpEPJ.png)

------
tedunangst
So in case you were looking for another reason to avoid the LA Times (or
probably tronc papers in general), they're very spammy. I get tons of junk
"newsletter" mail from them that I definitely didn't subscribe to, although
they inevitably claim I did, and you can unsubscribe, but then they just
invent new lists. And sell your address to others.

Sample from only a few days ago.

    
    
        From: "San Diego Union-Tribune" <promotions@e.sandiegouniontribune.com>
        Subject: We are proud to offer you Moonlighting - Hire or be hired!
        Received: from mta953.e.latimes.com (mta953.e.latimes.com [8.7.44.159]
    
        [Blah blah bullshit about their proud partner promoting a soulless gig economy.]
    
        This email was delivered because you registered for Email Membership at utsandiego.com
    

This is 100% false. I did create an account for latimes.com (who sent this
shit) but not the San Diego paper. Not even close.

~~~
bunnybender
I've used Mailhero in many places, works great!

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361)
or [https://mailhero.io/](https://mailhero.io/)

~~~
mahyarm
I want something like mailhero combined with a paid email provider like proton
mail. Everything sent to $name@$spamkey.$mydomain.$tld would act like a
mailhero address and forward to my personal address.

~~~
ssheth
Try spamgourmet.com

------
jurassic
Garbage like this is one of the many reasons I've gone back to print to a
large extent. Printed magazines are amazing things, a superior experience and
product in almost every way to reading online outlets. This whole ethical
conflict over how to deal with invasive advertising while supporting the work
goes away when you bought and paid already before you even start to read.

Daily news doesn't fit into this philosophy that well (printed papers is too
much bulk for me), but I get pretty much all the "breaking news" I need from
Twitter. Stepping away from the 24 news cycle to sit with a piece of analysis
from a weekly or monthly (or even quarterly!) magazine is a much better way
for me to stay informed and support journalism. And as a bonus I don't have
creepy ads follow me around the internet if I want to read a Socialist
magazine, or a gun rights magazine, a bridal magazine, or whatever.

~~~
symlinkk
you can buy digital subscriptions to many newspapers, including the LA Times

~~~
jurassic
I don't know about LA Times specifically but the digital product often still
includes invasive user-tracking bandwidth-intensive advertising, just toned
down to what people consider "acceptable" levels. For example, the NYT digital
sub that I pay nearly $200/year for still serves me advertising. So ponying up
the cash doesn't do much to address the concerns that are being raised all
throughout this thread.

------
drawkbox
This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of
data used on your plan.

Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband
costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth
then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.

~~~
cobookman
Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their
site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have
economic insentive not to.

Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the
industry move back to server side rendering.

~~~
tedunangst
"total data transferred: X MB ($y.zz)" should be part of a browsers standard
status bar.

~~~
vinnymac
I know we can easily get some info from chrome dev tools and chrome://net-
internals/#bandwith. It would be convenient for users if someone put together
an extension that would display this information by default, or alternatively
browsers just had a setting we could turn on.

~~~
phaed
On it

------
Mtinie
Watching the requests, there's a huge number of mixed content warnings in the
console. Attempting to hit [https://www.latimes.com](https://www.latimes.com)
to remove the reason for all of those failed requests triggers Firefox to
throw a certificate error. Could all of this be a side effect of a certificate
that has gone bad?

> www.latimes.com uses an invalid security certificate.

>

> The certificate is only valid for the following names:

> _.akamaihd.net,_.akamaihd-staging.net, _.akamaized-
> staging.net,_.akamaized.net, a248.e.akamai.net

~~~
Mtinie
Folllow-up question.

Do Doubleclick ads typically employ a cache control policy of "no-cache, must-
revalidate"?

------
mp3geek
Sites will use the disguise of "Native Ads" to make these links look like
standard web page links, and they'll do every attempt to avoid being blocked
or hidden.

Using base64 images, websocket/blob: injections, third-party scripts, natively
hosting the images on the site and using also webRTC to also inject.

Its a long fight of countering/re-countering, and until website developers
listen to its users these type of ads aren't acceptable.

/Fanboy from Easylist here

------
rinze
"An attentive eyeball! Fire at will to trigger consumption!"

------
danbruc
But how many users would actually be willing to pay for the content they
consume in order to get rid of ads and tracking and excessive data volume
consumption? And how much would they be willing to pay? It seems like they
would have to be willing to pay at least an amount comparable to the average
ad revenue per user and page view, whatever that actually is.

Just blocking ads is certainly justifiable in the current situation, but it
also certainly not sustainable if the ad blocker installation base keeps
growing. And buying subscriptions for all sites is not really an option
either. It becomes quite expensive pretty quickly, especially if you want the
see only a few articles per month on each site but do so on many sites.

~~~
anigbrowl
Lots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I read articles from maybe 100
different news sources in a typical month but realistically I don't want 100
newspaper and magazine subscriptions, or 100 different subscription offers or
website accounts.

Why isn't there something like a Netflix for News that just gives me news free
of visual cruft and takes care of distributing the revenue from what I read in
approximately accurate portions to the content providers, not to mention a
seamless interface for socially rating and categorizing news?

Newspaper/magazine subscriptions made sense when newspapers were heavily local
and magazines were periodicals. Neither condition really obtains any more and
having multiple subscriptions is not worth the overhead for even a small
number of publications. The last time I made the mistake of subscribing to a
magazine I also saw a huge increase in junk mail for several years afterwards.
GFTO of my mailbox with that shit.

~~~
danbruc
_Lots would if it weren 't so inconvenient._

I am not really sure about that. About 10 % of all Internet users are
currently using an ad blocker. So 90 % are okay with ads or don't care or
whatever. Further I would estimate that users would have to pay between $5 and
$10 per month to pay for the content they consume to provide an income for
sites comparable to that of ads. Maybe 1 % of the ad blocker users - number
pulled out of thin air - would be willing to replace their ad blocker with a
monthly payment of $10 if this would would work frictionless, if you could
magically convince the entire Internet to create some Netflix equivalent.

In the end that would be 0.1 % of the Internet users which seems not really a
huge incentive to bring such a Netflix equivalent into existence.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's exactly what people said about Netflix, so I'm gonna disagree without
bothering to support my argument further.

~~~
danbruc
I actually tend to believe that it could work but I also have some remaining
doubts. In my comments I explicitly focused on dismissive arguments and points
where I have doubts, hoping that someone would either back those doubts up or
refute them. You should definitely not draw the conclusion that I think I
could never work from the way I argued.

------
anigbrowl
_They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen.
Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading
articles._

It keeps working even when I have my ad blocker turned off. Obviously I must
have some anti-tracking extension still enabled that it dislikes, but I'm not
willing to spend that much time troubleshooting my browser. It's baffling to
me, because the LAT is one newspaper I'd consider a digital subscription to,
but as this article says the advertising/marketing people have clearly won out
over the editorial, so fuck'em until that changes.

~~~
tedunangst
I would discourage you from getting a subscription for other reasons, but will
note that subscribers don't get grief about ad blockers.

------
wjossey
I have been reflecting on this problem a lot over the past six months since I
left the ad tech industry after four and a half years. These posts always
sadden me, because I recognize the importance and value that advertising
brings to web startups and the level of innovation and growth that it has
enabled.

I have a hypothesis on how we can reduce the number of these types of ads,
while also not harming advertisers or publishers in terms of reach and
revenue.

I believe that we are in an advertising death-spiral. Sites are adding
additional impression opportunities and ad placements. This is triggering
higher numbers of impressions available to programmatic buyers. The additional
number of available impressions is devaluing the impressions (we're flooding
the market), which has led to a perpetual decrease in CPMs every year. This
leads to publishers pushing higher "engagement" ads, which users just find
terribly annoying, as well as more ad units. The cycle repeats, repeats, and
repeats, just so both sides can "stay effective" with regards to whatever
metrics they are measuring against.

My belief is that the LA times does not need N ad placements per article. They
probably only need one. We don't need to junk up quality news organizations
with taboola and the other "content" recommendation platforms. We quite
literally need a détente.

LA Times goes down to one ad placement per article. LA Times advertiser is
guaranteed viewability (high placement in the article, for example), and 100%
share of voice. The "impact" of that ad increases, with the overall decrease
in other "noise". The cost also goes up, but commiserate with the increased
value. Both sides likely end up making / paying the same amount of money, with
likely the same level of impact for the advertiser, but they reduce the pain
on the user, which they should both care about deeply.

I'd like to believe this is an opportunity from a business perspective. I
believe that someone could demonstrate this value, in some way, to both sides
of the market. The advertiser would need fewer impressions to achieve the same
level of value / impact of their ads, which also has the side benefit of
reducing additional costs around TPAT tracking, analytics costs, general
tracking costs, etc., which are often priced on a CPM basis (so, fewer CPMs
lowers their bill). The publisher would potentially see better engagement from
their users, fewer ad blocks, and a higher quality experience.

I think for the sake of newspapers and advertisers alike, some way to make
this reality makes this an idea worth solving.

~~~
jccalhoun
Fox tv tried a similar thing a few years ago. Dollhouse and Fringe had fewer
commercials.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/media/13adco.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/media/13adco.html)
After one season they went back to the same amount of commercials as other
shows. [https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/fox-
scraps...](https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/fox-scraps-
remote-free-tv/comment-page-1/)

~~~
wjossey
Thanks for the link. That's a good highlight.

The experimenter in me reads that article (and mind you it's very brief), and
I actually get encouraged. They were attempting to measure it on a pure 1:1
basis, where all their other shows, as well as all the other shows on
broadcast TV, were following the standard model. Educating advertisers is a
challenging step in this process, and so it's no surprise they couldn't get
the pricing right on the first go around.

Hopefully they decide to try again, test, iterate, and think outside the box.

------
mirimir
Well, I can read the article in Firefox with Adblock Plus _if_ I enable Reader
View before the modal box opens :)

Learned that trick here. Thanks, guys.

Edit: Automatic Reader View add-on eliminates the race.

------
intrasight
I visited the article he mentioned had had no issues. Ads and videos and
everything from third-party sites were blocked and all I had was the text of
the article. I think the author has got to tune his ad blocking tech.

Edit: uBlock Origin blocked 20 third-party domains. Totally typical of web
sites these days.

~~~
NelsonMinar
I use uBlock Origin too, and the LA Times definitely detects I'm using it and
puts a big uncloseable popup demanding I turn it off. I think it only does
this after repeated visits though, not the first.

~~~
intrasight
Do you block all third-party resources?

~~~
NelsonMinar
I don't think so. I have not extensively reconfigured uBlock Origin. What
setting are you thinking is relevant?

BTW, this custom filter rule seems to work around the LA Times blocker
blocker.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527)

~~~
intrasight
You have to enabled "advanced user". Then on the "third-party" line you can
select to block. Be forewarned that your browsing experience will default to a
mid-1990s experience as you'll likely have no JS nor CSS since those are now
often served by different domains. But for each domain you can now select
which third-party sites to enable and then persist those settings. I have
Firefox setup this way. In Chrome I have a default uBlock Origin install, so
it is not so aggressive with filtering.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-
feature...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features)

~~~
NelsonMinar
Oh I see what you mean. Yeah, that's crazy, I'm not doing that.

~~~
intrasight
Yeah, that's what my wife said too. That I go to the trouble shows how fed up
I am with all this tracking.

------
alrs
Browse with w3m or elinks, problem solved.

~~~
rinze
Now that you mention elinks, do you know if development continues? I had a
question the other day that I couldn't find answered anywhere, but it looks
like the main mailing list is entirely lost (I tried to follow these links:
[http://elinks.or.cz/community.html](http://elinks.or.cz/community.html)).

~~~
watt
Just check their git activity.
[http://repo.or.cz/elinks.git/shortlog](http://repo.or.cz/elinks.git/shortlog)

------
imgabe
I find sending LA times articles to Instapaper manages to get me a readable
copy of the article. It's a bit more of a hassle, but worthwhile if the
article looks really interesting.

------
manigandham
I work in adtech. The reason this happens is because of poor dev
knowledge/resources by most publishers (although shouldn't be a problem with
LA Times) and because the ad industry has perverse incentives combined with
absolutely no oversight or enforcement.

99% of these companies are in business by running as many
impressions/clicks/whatever "engagements" as possible regardless of user
experience so we end up with this tragedy of the commons.

------
BuffaloBagel
So glad to see others complaining about this. I am totally dismayed at the
sluggishness of LAtimes.com. It was usable with an adblocker turned on but
since being forced to turn it off recently the only computer I can use it on
is a dual xeon with 32G memory and a modern gaming card and even then it's a
struggle. I'm shocked that the this kind of botched hackery can exist at a
major newspaper. It's ugly bad.

------
donohoe
I see this all the time. No regard for mobile users that are paying for data
plans. To me the big reason to have ad-blocker is data, not just UX.

I'm focused on getting a mobile article page down from 20+ seconds on 4G with
300+ requests and page-weight of 2MB+ (mostly ads).

Right now, on CI environment it is averaging 2.1s, 350K in size, <45 requests,
and no ads in the initial view.

Sadly, Hearst doesn't own the LAT so it won't help them.

~~~
x0x0
Since you're paying them nothing at all, it's not exactly like you're a
customer, is it? I'm not sure why regard for people offering to pay them
nothing at all would be a high priority for the LA Times, but ymmv.

------
dba7dba
First, did others see this HN post?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13956807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13956807)

RJ Reynolds recruiting guideline SPECIFICALLY wanted sales (or marketing)
people with 2.8-3.1 GPA. NO wonder so many ad server tags by the
sales/marketing types are FULL or errors.

Anyhow, the very first time I experience a Mac computer crash HARD was when I
opened NYT.com. Yes NYT.com.

It was a typical Mon morning, around year 2011. I got into office, got coffee,
tapped keyboard the Mac Keyboard to wake up my iMac and proceeded to open the
website I opened every morning, nyt.com.

I noticed some flash based ad doing some fancy thing in the top banner. But
whatever.

I continue doing my thing.

Wait what? My iMac is frozen. iMac! This can't be true. I frantically pound on
keyboard but nothing works. Out of desperation, I finger it.

When it comes back up, I slowly bring things up one at a time. And I realize
it was the NYT.com's flashy flash ad that caused the crash.

When I upgraded my slightly outdated Flash plugin in my Firebox, I could view
the nyt.com homepage without my iMac freezing. I could HEAR the mechanical HD
in my iMac grinding and CPU widget showing CPU spiking when I open nyt.com
homepage.

Because of an ad on NYT.com, I'm pretty sure millions of people experienced
their computer crash on that Mon morning.

------
alistproducer2
Another reason I keep JS turned off on my phone and most news sites on
desktop. Seriously, try it.

------
leoh
I've noticed that if you are running an ad-blocker and disable JavaScript
(i.e. from the Chrome debugger), you can view the page just fine.

------
chiefalchemist
Clearly, there's got to be a better way. The question is, will we find it
before my "unlimited" data tops out?

------
kccqzy
I'm a frequent visitor of L.A. Times and I've already learnt to press Cmd+. as
soon as all the content I want has been loaded.

------
aftbit
I actually installed uMatrix just so I could disable all cookies and
Javascript on LA Times. No more ads or anti-ad-blocker.

------
bogomipz
Does anyone know if you have a paid subscription does the LA Times still
insist on sending you 14 gigs of ad data?

------
jbclements
so, as someone who keeps meaning to try it out but hasn't yet: how does Brave
do with this site?

~~~
jbclements
self-reply: just tried it. It does well. Alarmingly well. so sad to have to
choose between Brendan Eich and Mozilla. :(

~~~
BrendanEich
No need to be alarmed. I have four browsers running rn on my mbp. Could have
more but I run out of physical memory too often!

------
jankotek
Hit Esc (or Cancel) button to stop JavaScript execution. Works well since
Netscape 3.x

------
eXpl0it3r
Do they offer an RSS feed? Does adding the article to Pocket or a similar
service work?

------
inka
"Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading
articles."

Well, Adblocker in Chrome seems to be blocking the ads on the page quite well.
Some single requests are being logged after the page loads, but nothing as to
what the article mentions.

------
stvnbn
[https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/) Turn your raspberry into an ad-
blocker.

I just want to spread the word out and make the world a better place.

~~~
mp3geek
Not enough, using "host files" won't protect from websocket/blob/webrtc/base64
injections.

------
an_account
Does buying a subscription remove all these ads?

~~~
cdransf
It likely just removes the pay wall. Even subscribers would likely benefit
from using an ad blocker.

------
shams93
Why I use the Android app TextBrowser

------
good_vibes
The data points for my hypothesis just keep connecting.

edit: so I know, why does something this innocent get downvoted? I don't
understand what I did wrong.

~~~
andai
I think it's more like, you didn't do anything right! It sounds mysterious and
all, but does not really benefit anybody else.

~~~
good_vibes
In that case, HN should brighten up. Cynicism for it's own sake rarely leads
to innovation. Thinking based upon First Principles and original insight does
correlate with innovation.

This will get downvoted probably because it hurt someone's ego but it's true
if you look the history of science and technology.

~~~
andai
I mean, if your note-to-self system is leaving cryptic comments, you should
probably invest in finding something more appropriate.

I'm very happy with Notational Velocity at the moment (not sure about cross
platform solutions, but I think most systems do similar things nowadays).

------
debt
"They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen.
Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading
articles."

So their ad blocker blocker and their paywall kept you from reading the
articles for free? Why don't you just pay them?

It's just a shitty thing to do at this point. If they have high quality
articles then what would require you to pay them? Do they need to be on
Patreon or Kickstarter or something?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Why would you reward a website for using dark patterns like autoplaying video
ads, popups, 14 bloody GiB of data pushing ads and tracking and bullshit into
your browser?

~~~
lozaning
Are any of those really dark patterns? Annoying and shitty... sure. None of
the above are meant to trick you, they're just a nuisance.

~~~
anigbrowl
And that is reason enough. If I am paying for something you better not treat
me that way because I will stop paying.

