
‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list - ilamont
https://digiday.com/media/just-four-dudes-inside-easylist-community-run-adblocking-list-disrupting-internet/
======
luma
This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of
EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so
toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.

~~~
ziddoap
Indeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I
supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I _think_ they want us to be
angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry
that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure.

My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion
requests in a timely manner.

~~~
x0x0
I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article
kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person
editing each page in textmate.

~~~
randomstring
Maybe Autotrader has hundreds of thousands of template, CSS, and JS files with
those paths hardcoded. Imagine the hell it would be to work on that website.

Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.

~~~
dilutedh2o
I would love to see an example of something like this.

Please.

~~~
therealx
I've seen backends that were that horrible. Updates were often done via
regex's.

~~~
dilutedh2o
That's basically half of my day to day at the moment, that's why I'm wondering

------
patd
I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist
forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work
anymore.

I started working on [http://blockedby.com](http://blockedby.com) , a
monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website.

But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I
couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussions with
publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to
give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to
abandon ad blockers.

~~~
GordonS
I had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter
and Facebook pages were being blocked.

I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself
for years, but why block "legitimate" content?

I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen
anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I
don't know how long the issue was there before I realised it :/

~~~
Kalium
Depending on how they're implemented, buttons linking to your Twitter and
Facebook pages can double as trackers for Twitter and Facebook.

Anyway. People rarely intend to block legitimate content. At the same time,
it's not always easy to tell what is and isn't legitimate when you're writing
fairly general rules.

~~~
GordonS
These were just:

`<a href="our_twitter_page"><img src="/img/locally_hosted_image.png"></a>`

------
Raed667
This is basically a hit piece on Easylist.

My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not
exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka
adman)

~~~
Joking_Phantom
Not just basically - it is a hit piece. It's a website run by and for
advertisers, publishers, and media, aiming to monetize content as much as
possible. They are supported by advertisers masquerading as ad blockers
(uBlock trying to pretend to be uBlock Origin) and sites that literally just
advertise.

Just another day of unsavory corporations and the assholes that run them
trying to mislead the average consumer.

------
targonca
>But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or
like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.

They were elected by people voluntarily installing EasyList. We had enough of
you experts™, thanks.

~~~
danShumway
Seriously -- every Adblocker will allow you to subscribe to custom lists,
there's no vendor lock-in, there's no network effect, there aren't significant
regulatory or commercial barriers to entry. This isn't like Facebook.

Blockers like Ublock Origin also don't benefit from legitimate sites breaking;
if they're turning on EasyList by default it's because they think it's
currently the best balance available for their users.

If anyone can make a better list than Easylist, then they should just go do
it. In fact, companies _already_ tried to make an alternative with the
Acceptable Ads initiative -- and if their list is better, people will switch
to it. The only barrier of entry to displacing EasyList here is quality over
time.

------
gen3
> UBlock, another Adblock-owned blocking extension

TIL According to Wikipedia: "In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by
AdBlock"[1]

This is not uBlock Origin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin)

~~~
Operyl
Correct. More information from the source:

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-
comp...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-completely-
unrelated-to-the-web-site-ublock.org)

~~~
gen3
I knew it was owned by someone else, I didn't expect it to have been sold to
Adblock Plus though! I wish they would just hand the domain over to gorhill.
It feels shady that they squat on it for the name recognition.

~~~
papln
Aljoudi hijacked the "uBlock" name from gorhill (apparently because gorhill
was more concernted about building a good tool than maintaining trademark
protection, and I guess no one volunteered to donate (para)legal work), so
handing it back would be a "wish" indeed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock)

------
whatshisface
> _But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization_

Yeah they are, the balance they're targeting is zero ads.

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "In the past six months, EasyList changes have broken the buy buttons
on commerce site The Inventory, the video player on Animal Planet, disrupted
site navigation on Fandom, and disrupted the style and CSS loading process on
job search site Indeed."

Good, very good. Break them all. Learn to go back to basics, use TABLE, not
gazzilion of nested DIV's for what should be a single BUTTON element instead.
I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to
clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up. Your shitty site has the
same merchandise like many others and if your "buy" button is broke I'll just
go to the next site...and while on this, how come Amazon "buy" button is not
broke? Almost feels like Amazon devs actually test with ad-blockers their
content before allowing it on the wild.

~~~
lioeters
> I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to
> clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up.

Yes! I'm doing this too, as a kind of community service. If sites get broken
because their privacy-invading "like" button doesn't work, that's on them.
People will just move on.

------
blattimwind
"Inside EasyList", yet the author presents precisely _zero_ inside information
/ information from EasyList insiders.

------
orliesaurus
I don't get the title - Just four dudes. What if it was four dudettes/chicks?
Maybe it's because they started the project and they have the right to be in
charge? Also, you don't have to use EasyList if you don't like it..

FYI those four dudes are whats keeping me from disabling javascript and images
from every website on the face of the earth.

Thank you EasyList maintainers!

~~~
henry_flower
I suspect that the editor didn't actually read the text but nevertheless chose
the most obnoxious title possible (as they often do)

------
hnaccy
>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz,
the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock
Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any
malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing
publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.”

Why would you ever want your adblocking list run by "experts in balancing
publisher monetization"?

~~~
papln
Because moral fiber includes _some_ notion of acceptable ads, even if current
models tend to bad.

However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form
of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts
accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.

~~~
luke0016
> Because moral fiber includes _some_ notion of acceptable ads, even if
> current models tend to bad.

Maybe _your_ moral fiber. Definitely not mine.

~~~
hinkley
Kinda had the same reaction, but if you went to your friend's house every week
and drank all his beer an never gave anything back, eventually that would make
you feel bad.

If I'm getting something that required skill and labor, 'moral fiber' suggests
some quid pro quo. How are you going to reciprocate?

At some point someone observed "we can profit off of audiences" so that answer
was "by being an audience member." But now it's kind of a mess, and either we
haven't found a better model or inertia and collusion have prevented it from
arriving.

~~~
luke0016
I'm not sure I really agree with the analogy, but there are other approaches
that don't involve assaulting my senses. For instance, they could just flat
out charge money for it.

On a tangentially related note, I think there's a special place in hell for
the engineers that created gas pumps that display ads while fueling. Those
things are pure, unadulterated evil.

~~~
hinkley
It would be better if your friend insisted you bring beer instead of launching
into a sermon or his MLM pitch, sure.

But we’re talking about moral fiber. For some people “they hit me first” is
not ethically sound. There’s some ambiguity here about who hit first, but
rather than a fair exchange we are getting what is rapidly approaching
brinksmanship. Nobody is really in the right here.

But we also can’t seem to just go back to a paid model for high production
values. We are satisfied with amateur work and underpaid professionals slowly
burning a nest egg and hoping something changes. The advertisers are the only
ones with a hand out, so they get to set the agenda.

I had hopes Brave was going to alter this trajectory but there seems to be
some regulatory capture there. i kind of wonder if they hired some ad people
and charisma won over the origin story.

------
pavel_lishin
> _But there are occasions when those changes are hard to make. In Autotrader
> UK’s case, for example, the change would have involved fixing hundreds of
> thousands of pages._

I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask about why exactly that's a big
task.

------
paulcarroty
These dudes doing great job, just imagine how much energy consumed google
analytics and tons of any kind of social network scripts.

------
hartator
It always amazes me that journalists still have no clue how open source work.

And also they should talk about uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock Plus or UBlock.

~~~
grive
This is not journalism. This is a hit-piece on EasyList, with a clickbait and
false title.

It seems even plausible, reading it, that the author knows about uBlock origin
but avoids naming it, instead listing the two sellouts that are morally shady.

~~~
sus_007
I got similar vibes going through the article and after finding out that they
are actually a Ad-centric company, I am almost sure you're right.

------
Causality1
I fear that with adblocking nearing 25% market penetration we're going to see
fundamental changes in the way ads are delivered in response. Maybe a
transition from third party ad servers to locally hosted ads that have to be
added to block lists individually. Maybe YouTube will start inserting
unblockable ads directly into the video stream.

Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder
if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90
percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them
effortlessly as a sort of golden age.

~~~
yepguy
If that happens, projects like Adblock Radio will hopefully step in to make
"unblockable" ads more tolerable, by automatically turning the volume down for
example.

[https://www.adblockradio.com/en/](https://www.adblockradio.com/en/)

~~~
papln
Isn't that a Browser feature that was/is fixed in 2019?

Unrequested audio is flat-out absurd behavior in a browser.

~~~
yepguy
I was responding to the possibility of YouTube just embedding ads directly
into the video to thwart current ad-blocking techniques. If that happens the
audio would already be playing before an advertisement started. Something like
Adblock Radio is a more sophisticated approach that could still detect ads
like that.

------
specialist
At some point, for popular sites, the strategy will flip from filtering to
scrapping.

We'll need some clever strategies to counter the arms race.

Image side-by-side visual diffing. Some process renders pages with and without
ads. Ads are progressively identified and removed until it renders like the
"print" or "reader" view.

Temporal diffing. Snap shot popular websites over time. The meat (content)
will likely remain the same. Everything else is chrome or ads.

My other ad detecting notions are even more harebrained, so I'll stop there.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Doesn't seem like that effort is worth it now that content these days are
basically ads. And you can't block them with a simple DOM/URL filter trick.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/)

------
hartator
I remember [https://serpapi.com](https://serpapi.com) breaking with EasyList
because we use Prism.js for code syntax coloration. And Prism.js is also the
name of a tracker. Opened a ticket with them. However it has been easier to
just rename `prism.js` to `pri-secure-sm.js`. Not sure why author is so upset
about that. It's not like they are trying to break websites on purpose.

~~~
wccrawford
Because they're breaking things without much regard to it.

We discovered a few years ago that our list of advertisers (in a digital
magazine) was being blocked by ad blockers. It was coming over the wire with
the word "advertisers" in the URL. These aren't ads that pop up and display on
the pages, but simply a list of advertisers in the issue.

Rather than try to get adblockers not to block it, we simply used another word
in our URL and went on with things. We shouldn't have _had_ to. Those are lazy
adblock rules and are incredibly likely to get false positives and break
sites.

But we're realists and knew that even if we fixed the existing adblockers,
another would come along and do the same lazy thing.

~~~
CivBase
> Because they're breaking things without much regard to it.

This claim comes accross as disingenuous. These guys are trying to block ads
accross the whole internet without ruining the user's core experience.
Maintaining a hard-coded black/whitelist of URLs and elements simply wont cut
it. Sometimes there will be false positives.

If this impacts enough of your users, then it's your responsibility as a web
developer to test your site on environments that reflect your users' and make
something that works on _their_ environment. You can always choose not to
support those users, but that's _your_ problem.

------
perlgeek
Many (even pretty well-known) Open Source projects would be happy to have four
regularly active maintainers.

"Just four dudes" sounds dismissive, but everyone starts out as "just one
dude" (or dudette, or whatever the proper female form of dude is), and
sometimes, more join. Often that's not the case, and the project's health
hinges on just one maintainer.

------
tomc1985
This piece is a hit job in favor of the not-really-ad-blocking "monetizing"
adblockers

------
nvk
Nice try at spinning blame here, if publisher's didn't use such scamy Ad
platforms and tracking we would be here.

------
CivBase
> the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages

Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that
scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like
it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using <insert your favorite
text editor>.

EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an
unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for the project.
Both of these impacts are small, but they can't afford to accommodate for
every website like that.

If they want their users to use their site, they should make it work on their
user's environments. I doubt they would demand Google or Mozilla accommodate
for them like that.

~~~
eswat
Several years ago I worked on a monolithic website that used static files with
no templating engine. The problem is they had so many contractors working on
changes for specific ranges of content that there were a variety of ways that
even a mundane meta tag with the same content value was written (is the tag
self-closing, is the value placed before the property, are certain characters
in the value encoded, etc.). Find & Replace can quickly end up becoming a
bigger game of Trial & Error especially if there are no standards in place.

------
hendersoon
“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz,
the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock
Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any
malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing
publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.”

Reading the article, "balancing publisher monetization" provoked an immediate
visceral vocal response from me. Truly hilarious.

------
kamyarg
Useless article is useless, there is no point in emphasising the maintainers
are men. No one is preventing 4 women or LGBTQ+ from starting a list with a
better end user experience. But I guess their end goal is "balancing publisher
monetization" which is too optimistic, no one would want to see slower pages
with crap wherever they go.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
Is it that onerous for folks to maintain their own whitelists? Chances are,
most people spend 80% of their browser usage in 20% of sites visited.

They couldn't be widely shared, but they're less whack-a-mole in practice and
from a security perspective, a more superior solution.

------
kaza
Okay the ads are no ads anymore are web experiences. Seriusly i barely can
understand the level of corporatism this days, this is not an article is
esencialy a weapon against adblock in particular probably paid by the same
anti-adblocking groups.

------
onyva
Considering Brave has a non existing market share, quite surprised how often
it’s been mentioned.

