I feel like any argument that starts with the idea that blocking ads is unethical would inevitably lead to that black mirror episode where the ad pauses if you close your eyes or look away, and you must pay to skip it.
Closing your eyes is just another ad blocking measure, and the idea that that would be unethical ought to be utterly preposterous.
Rest assured that if advertisers could display ads on the inside of your eyelids and charge you a fee to open your eyes, they absolutely would not hesitate for even one single second over "ethical issues" before implementing it world-wide.
If there's an actual literal Hell, then Lucifer surely has an extra cushy corner of it set aside for advertisers, and he'll force the rest of us to march through it with our eyes open wide several times daily between our other tortures…
Somewhere amid all the layers of abstraction people have forgotten that a browser is running code on my machine. And the implication that I have a moral obligation to run whatever arbitrary code you want to throw my way in exactly the way you specify is absurd. It's not even like being mad at someone for paging past an ad in a magazine. It's like being mad at someone for driving their car along a route that doesn't have billboards on it.
No, just the idea that you can close your eyes will lead to it, because advertisers want you to look at ads for commercial reasons. Doesn't require an ethical argument.
Just as blocking them as an ethical issue fundamentally commercial: you're accessing content paid for by adverts, but you aren't contributing to that payment. The quid pro quo of the site is you pay nothing to see this, but you look at the ads that pay for the site.
I'm not sure if this adds anything. I know there's no contract. But while the system can shoulder a certain load of parasitic behaviour, if everyone does as you say then it stops working. So practically speaking it is a quid quo pro.
A better analogue for your description is something like the Guardian website, where you don't have to pay for it, but it does require a certain number of people to volunteer to subscribe for it to work.
Another different model is paywalls, which you may be correct in saying will pop up increasingly as use of ad blockers decreases ad revenue sufficiently.
One big problem is that the advertising industry has become the "parasitic behaviour" that is helping to destroy the modern Internet, and a whole huge mess of people not only don't see or understand that fact, but even actively defend their "right" to do it.
You're misunderstanding what I mean. I'm saying if a site has decided to fund itself through showing advertisements, then that model can only tolerate so many people avoiding that, because the site will generate less money.
I know there is a lot of push back against pay walls but I would rather give money to a business that I know than to have some creepy unknown entity record everything I do.
I used to feel that way, then I learned that paying (or even just signing up "for free") doesn't get you out of the spying they engage in. In fact, it makes the spying easier to do and more comprehensive.
They're going to record everything you do anyway - the choice being offered is an illusion. There is no way to opt out of surveillance capitalism (other than blocking ads and piracy,) only ways to opt in further.
Even the paywalled sites still have ads behind the paywalls, though. I bought a digital subscription to a prominent, reputable news magazine recently. I paid as much as they would let me pay. And still the text of every article was interspersed three or four times with utter crap "advertisement". I mean "eat this one fruit to clean your liver" level of banner. I'm not going to bother paying if I also still have to deal with that sludge.
> move to a different model - stop showing your stuff for free.
what if that model was a contract to the viewer, wherein the viewer agrees to see all adverts? Currently this contract is assumed, or implied, but not enforced. What if it changes in the future?
For example, youtube could require that you have a webcam, and run a trusted-computing-module DRM code which forces your webcam to be on and recording your face to view their videos?
> For example, youtube could require that you have a webcam, and run a trusted-computing-module DRM code which forces your webcam to be on and recording your face to view their videos?
I propose a mandatory integration with Alexa devices. Whenever the DRM module detects the consumer failing to fulfil the contractually required viewing quota, the Alexa device will be notified to emit loudly the message “Resume viewing!”. Furthermore, if available, it will cause the Hue lights to turn red and flash in order to amplify the gravity and importance of the message.
In addition to the mandatory Alexa integration, I believe it is paramount advertisers be allowed to enforce contractual viewing quotas in order to prevent financial losses. To that end, failure to resume viewing within 30 seconds should result in immediate freezing of bank accounts, immediate blocking of the self driving car from working and immediate locking of the house smart lock - To prevent the consumer from escaping the contractually enforced duties.
One more idea I can add is this. It is unfair for the advertisers to incur loss and costs due to non compliant consumers. In order to rectify these losses, interest in the form of viewing time should be applied to time spent not watching adverts. A standard 12.5% time interest should suffice. For example, a consumer failing to resume watching for 10 minutes should have 1 minute and 15 seconds added to the viewing quota.
> what if that model was a contract to the viewer, wherein the viewer agrees to see all adverts? Currently this contract is assumed, or implied, but not enforced. What if it changes in the future?
There is no contract; it's an open market and they are competing for my attention.
There is no contract assumed, there is no contract implied, thus there is nothing to enforce.
> but not enforced. What if it changes in the future?
You make it sound like they didn't try. All those sites that attempted to "enforce"[1] this fictional contract you are referring to are not longer in existence, because there was no contract so the "enforcement" was merely user-abuse.
[1] Lots of sites did their best to undermine adblockers, going so far as to disable the site if an adblocker was detected. Those sites no longer exist.
lots of sites that stop adblockers still exist - your sampling is probably biased if you don't see it.
> You make it sound like they didn't try.
Recently (or about a yr ago, cannot recall any more) twitch.tv stopped allowing adblockers from blocking their ad feeds in to the stream. It's an expensive method (injecting ad video stream into the livestream data - you cannot directly ignore the ad; at best you can blank it out and wait for the 30 seconds).
Youtube didn't try. Youtube probably considers adblocking a small issue atm (just my guess), and likely a lot of views come from the mobile app, which is much harder to block ads on. Twitch is trying, and is pretty successful. It wouldn't surprise me that the method twitch uses might work elsewhere too.
No, it's not. Except perhaps by ad companies, but one side assuming a contract does not a contract make.
> youtube could require that you have a webcam, and run a trusted-computing-module DRM code which forces your webcam to be on and recording your face to view their videos?
Then I wouldn't watch YouTube anymore -- that's far too much to pay for something like YouTube.
It's not assumed or implied at all. Nobody has any inherent right to my attention. If a content producer gets advertisers to pay them, good for them, but that doesn't mean I have to look at those ads.
> youtube could require that you have a webcam
That would be the end of Youtube. But I'm pretty sure someone will write a plugin to work around that piece of dystopian hell.
> "Nobody has any inherent right to my attention."
Nor to your Internet bandwidth which you pay for and which on some providers is a (artificially) limited "resource" they'll charge you extra for if you use "too much" of it (unless they're like NetZero back in the day, delivering you free Internet in trade for forced adverts)… Nor to potentially compromise the security of your network (as has happened in the past due to some "shady" advertising networks delivering malware)… Nor to interfere with paid content (as happens on some streaming services which still show ads despite you paying to view the content).
I believe Microsoft or Sony actually has a patent on this. It was the inspiration for the increasingly prescient 4chan greentext "drink a verification can".
>The quid pro quo of the site is you pay nothing to see this, but you look at the ads that pay for the site.
Maybe unrelated, but I always think of this when I pay for a ticket and go to the cinema, so I can watch fifteen minutes of trailers and commercials before the actual movie begins.
The economics of cinemas are such that they make no money on ticket sales (that money goes to the film distribution company) and they only really make money on drinks, snacks, and ads.
> you're accessing content paid for by adverts, but you aren't contributing to that payment.
If the content is paid for by adverts, then of course I am not contributing to that payment. Because I am not an advertising company, so by your own logic I didn't pay for the content. What's the problem?
You are paying for it. Just not directly. You’re paying the advertiser with your attention, who then pays the website for the privilege to do so. Whether you think that’s OK or not is a different issue, but you are paying, even if you’re not the customer.
Just because you don’t directly pay for something doesn’t mean you don’t do so indirectly. For example, Facebook makes almost all their revenue from ads, but advertisers won’t pay them if users don’t visit. So by visiting Facebook (if you do), you’re keeping them afloat.
I don't get paid for 99.9% of the ads that infest my daily life. I get no say in it at all. There is no off switch. There is no block. There is no avoiding it. The logos are everywhere. The posters. The visual and audible noise. Advertising has infested my childhood memories FFS. I can recite more goddamn jingles from when I was under 10 than I can remember my friends and classmates names. I got no say in it then and none now.
The idea that it is unethical to block when having punches thrown at you as we are is just so incredibly ridiculous it's hard to see it other than facebrick google paid propaganda that you've taken to heart somehow. Bit tobacco sponsor your nation's culture so it's unethical not to smoke a pack a day at least.
But sure google and facebook are super-duper-ethical so doing an endrun around some part of their business plan (a tiny part of what they're selling of you) is so much worse than their endrun around the GPL license by distributing access to the software but not the actual binaries. Legally fine, ethically, well they don't have a problem with it, should we?
Meanwhile those writing, creating, and having their work infested with ads aren't getting rich like Larry, Sergei & Mark, are they? Stick up for those who have made more money screwing the public and the commons than their great grandchildren can possibly ever spend because if they don't get their money it's unethical due to argument they refute with ever fiber of their being and a bajillion bucks in PR.
I tend libertarian adjacent but this stuff makes as communist sympathetic as I'm ever likely to be.
> The idea that it is unethical to block when having punches thrown at you as we are is just so incredibly ridiculous it's hard to see it other than facebrick google paid propaganda that you've taken to heart somehow.
As I say, it doesn't need to be ethical.
On your comment: of course, no one is throwing punches at you. It's just advertising. You don't have to go to the website that has it on.
Advertising is designed to make you feel shit (inadequate) and does it so effectively people kill themselves with anorexia over it to cite but one example.
It's like a prostitute saying their pimp doesn't /really/ hurt them when they get a beating.
Your other option is not to just "not go to _the_ website" because you have no choice other than to unplug and live in a cave. Defending yourself and your family as best you can from the onslaught isn't just ethical it's actually a duty to your family and fellow humans. Do it. Any way you can manage. Every way.
Then make me sign a contract that exchanges the service for my action of viewing the ads. Make it an official transaction. Right now they want it both ways where the content is "free" but I'm also stealing it by not paying.
Sure, but if there's a contract like that, then I insist that I be paid for my time and bandwidth in addition to the content I'm being interrupted/distracted from viewing. My time and bandwidth are both valuable, and can be far better used than viewing ads for products or services I guarantee I won't buy just because of some shitty advert.
I have a degree in marketing, took a vow never to work in it, and use these words to describe advertisements -
Motivated deception, manipulation, mind control, inauthentic, inorganic, insincere, a betrayal by your peers.
They're using your own mind against you with psycological techniques you're blind to. Behind every advertisement is a group of real life people working hard to find new ways to control and manipulate YOUR mind and the people you love. They'll lie to your face as long as it "increases brand awareness in our target demographic". Why on Earth wouldn't you do everything in your power to block these people?
Yes, this is how I feel about marketing in the 21st century as well. Most pointedly that lies and psychological manipulation have become the status quo. Unfortunately there are so many products and so much information available that it's difficult (impossible?) to actually discern the good products from the bad. As well as to discern the value of good products.
Lying and manipulation as marketing aren't exactly new, but it's more pervasive, to the point that it seems impossible to succeed without stretching the truth of your capabilities. Everybody else is doing it after all, and there is no penalty. By the time your customers find out you screwed them, they've already paid for your product twice and told their friends it was 5/5 would buy again.
The Century of the Self is a great introduction to this. Modern advertising literally uses techniques originally developed for wartime (WWII) propaganda. Commercial advertising is literally brainwashing applied for economic purposes rather than political (though often both, too).
p.s. if you like the Century of the Self, watch Hypernormalization as well. Amazing documentaries.
> I also like to call ads "mind control" because they are that manipulative, but it's hard to say that without sounding like a nutjob.
If they were that manipulative, they would always work. Every time you saw an ad you would immediately be compelled to buy whatever it was advertising like those mall zombies from Dawn of the Dead.
Ads are manipulative but definitely not "mind control" manipulative. You would probably be more effective convincing people of the dangers of advertising without resorting to hyperbole of that degree.
Ok, but that's still just influence, not mind control. By that rationale, literally every form of communication which has a chance of affecting someone's behavior is "mind control."
> Why on Earth wouldn't you do everything in your power to block these people?
I block ads myself, but if I didn't it'd be because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.
> it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.
To see the absurdity of this position just replace "view ads" with the following:
I would stop content creators from breaking into my home and taking money from my wallet in the middle of the night, but I don't because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.
It is not the responsibility of consumer to accept harmful practices because they're the only practices in broad use.
Yup. That's the reason I kept 2011-2021 without ad blockers. But yeah I could no longer live in that hell.
Fwiw ads have more properties than just being micro payments. Another property is that the price is a monotonic growing function of your revenues, so """every viewer contribute with how much they can"""
No. This is the marketers fever dream real life is way more dumb and ego driven. I am in advertising for over 20 years now doing international campaigns from Nike to Burger King from 100k to 80mil per pop. These things are way less elaborate, way less deceive and way less impacting as you make it out to be.
Ah yes the nerd reality distortion down votes. HN really is a shithole.
I find the idea that anyone, a single person, could consider blocking ads to be wrong to be hilarious.
I've never met such a person. I can only imagine them to be barely human. What other bizarre opinions, internal or external, would they have? I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.
> What other bizarre opinions, internal or external, would they have?
From experience: When your government spies on you and locks folks up without due process, this is good because it keeps the children safe. And a host of other convictions that are so toxic I cannot say them online without feeling dirty. These are the kind of people that say "think of the children" without irony, that view the world in purely adversarial terms and do their best to hate as many things as they can. They live to make everyone around them miserable.
I have seen this repeatedly and only from this kind of person. I am glad I don't have them around me anymore, but sad that other people might.
> I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.
It being the case that these are the purest of bad faith actors, you can at least trust them to ruin whatever they touch. It's something :)
> When your government spies on you and locks folks up without due process, this is good because it keeps the children safe. And a host of other convictions that are so toxic I cannot say them online without feeling dirty. These are the kind of people that say "think of the children" without irony, that view the world in purely adversarial terms and do their best to hate as many things as they can. They live to make everyone around them miserable.
FWIW, I am against dragnet surveillance, in favor of due process, doubt I've ever said "think of the children" without irony, don't view the world in adversarial terms, enjoy looking for the positive aspects of things other people malign, and don't want anyone to be miserable.
To be blunt, this comes across as incredibly small minded. Barely human? Really?
It's not difficult to imagine an argument against ad blockers. Ads pay for the content you consume on the Internet. If you don't like the ads, then your recourse is to leave the site and go elsewhere. You're not entitled to just block the ads and consume the content for free.
I don't personally subscribe to that theory, but I wouldn't describe it as an insane opinion to have.
I think running an ad blocker is freeloading, the same as using paywall-bypassing software. There are worse things people regularly do, but I do think it's minorly wrong and I don't run an ad blocker.
I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off. But uBlock Origin etc don't just block ads, they also pretend to the site that the ads aren't blocked.
Let’s say there’s a hamburger restaurant. Now, this hamburger restaurant has an interesting business model. They way it works is, they give out burgers for free. They do that because they get money from lettuce producers to put lettuce in their burgers. It’s a pretty good model right? People get free burgers and lettuce producers get their lettuce in the peoples mouths.
I personally don’t like lettuce. I removed it from my burgers. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my burger? Am I forced to consume lettuce?
And before you tell me to look for another burger place, let me remind you there’s no other burger place. All burger places have this business model. All burger places give burgers for free sponsored by Big Lettuce.
So let me ask you again. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my own God damned burger?
This is a pretty weird analogy, because I don't see what the lettuce producers are getting out of it. But ok, let's say that the government is strongly in favor of people eating more vegetables, and richly compensates lettuce producers for each leaf of their lettuce is eaten. The deal the burger producers have with the lettuce producers includes putting cameras in the restaurants, so money only changes hands when people actually do eat the lettuce. The government audits these logs, to ensure their subsidy is being spent effectively.
Then yes: in this contrived analogy by taking the burger but not eating the lettuce you're freeloading. The more people that do this, the less likely the restaurant is to continue being able to provide free food to anyone that wants it. And I think it would be pretty reasonable for them to have signs like "patrons who do not eat their vegetables will be asked to leave" and "strictly no takeout".
The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
I suspect there's issue with the term "freeloading". It doesn't really make sense for someone to make a business model where they give me something for free and then say I'm freeloading when I take the free thing and don't provide something (attention, time, whatever you want to call it) in return.
There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention for the free thing and, in fact, the free thing was nominally offered to me as free.
The decision to publicly provide the content for "free" with advertisements was made without my input and coordinated without my help. The worst thing my ad blocker does is expose the difficulty with executing that business model.
That's reasonable! I wouldn't say someone who blocks ads (or doesn't eat lettuce) is breaking an agreement. But I do think by doing this you undermine a business model that is letting a lot of people read things (or eat burgers) for free, and that's making the world worse.
Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?
> Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?
When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business.
As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloading, another could consider that the paywalling content provider is just trying to capture rent for data that's otherwise freely available.
I can admit that it is not necessarily rent-seeking (I've seen some cartoons from the 90s / 00s on streaming services, which were in mind when for that comment) but it still seems to me that it is a problem with the business model. It's the business owners' fault that they ran out of money and can't produce any more shows because they tried to make a broken model work especially if the reason they couldn't gather revenue is that people were simply able to bypass their attempts at doing so.
(So a restaurant is unable to gather revenue when people "simply bypass" their attempts with a dine-and-dash. Not sure how I feel about that, to be fair.)
Similarly, I don't really think people who pirated cable TV a decade or two ago were freeloading. As soon as it's being delivered directly to my living room via speed-of-light communication, and I have control over the machines that perform the delivery, the product is practically worthless. Comparing that to feature filmmakers who sell licenses to movie theaters, where I would need to physically tamper with machines I don't own in order to obtain the video data, there's a not-explicitly-for-the-sake-of-the-business reason for me to fork up money for the movie ticket. (Granted, they could give me the video data directly, but they don't.)
Reading this again, it doesn't seem obvious to me that this is justified so I'll try to explain.
Let's say every copyright owner decides tomorrow that it's not worth trying to enforce copyright and, similarly, everybody who is currently paying for streaming services just starts downloading and seeding torrents for all of the content said services have licensed. In my mind, this only exposes the lack of scarcity, and that the value that these streaming companies provide amounts to hard drive space.
Anyway, that's kinda off-topic copyright stuff. When it comes to, for example, WSJ, I dunno. I would really like it to work with some way of providing creative text without the consumers being required to contribute financially but I would not say that it's the fault of the bypassing consumer when it doesn't work.
It's especially difficult to find a "real-world" example; I can't compare it to stealing from Walmart because WSJ doesn't have to replace what was stolen. If I download a game from TPB instead of Steam, the worst thing that happens is that Steam and the developer of the game lose a sale, whereas if I go down to Best Buy and take one of the packaged discs from their shelf and take it home without paying, Best Buy loses the sale and also needs to replace what wasn't sold (granted, the game publisher still gets paid because they provide the discs and packages).
It's interesting to think about but ultimately, the line I choose to draw is at the scarcity of the product / service: if it's not natural, then it's a fundamentally flawed business, paywall- or ad-driven.
The fact that you admit to working in an industry that actively tries to take as much agency away from others as it can without (apparently) feeling bad about it is really terrible.
I don't think advertising is harmful in general, and I think an ad-funded web is likely much better than a paywall-funded web. More: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads
In theory, ads are great, I'd like to hear about products and services that can solve problems or improve my quality of life. In practice, my experience of ads on the web is to degrade the user experience of the page I came to see and to build intrusive personal profiles on what my interests are believed to be (which often seems to result in being repeatedly fed the same ads for products I've already purchased)
Anecdotally the best advertising I have engaged with and bought the most as a result of is content based, not personalised for me in any way (i.e. podcasts before dynamic ads became a thing)
- Watching a board game video, here are ways to buy the game/expansions/similar games
- Listening to a book review, here are ways to buy the book/other books by the author/art related to the book
- Listening to a tech podcast, here are tech related services that may have been discussed
I'm sure it's different for many people and perhaps personalisation helps in many cases, but for me the context of what I'm doing/looking at is most important, causing a context switch/distraction from what I'm trying to do is more likely to be irritating
First off, some of your comments have referred to ad-blocking being wrong due to conflict with existing business models.
Businesses are not entitled to the success of their business models. If a business model fails due to consumer behavior, the business was in the wrong for expecting different behavior.
> I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off.
Distracting content (most ads), color schemes with bad contrast, bright images on dark pages, etc. are accessibility hazards (particularly cognitive accessibility hazards). Restricting the use of page-alteration software (e.g. color and font alteration, disabling images, and blocking frames) is therefore a discriminatory practice.
In a sibling subthread:
> The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
The libertarian perspective is a two-way street. Nobody is forcing a person to publish content on the Web. If the "comply with the user's wishes" model of the Web is problematic to a content creator, they don't need to participate in the Web.
I think my biggest issue with paywalls is that I wouldn't mind it if they showed the search engine only what the viewer can see as well. Then the search engines can try to prioritize the content that the user actually wants to see. As it is now, though, sites will often show the search engine different content than what's revealed to the user. Which is against the terms and conditions of most search engines (known as "cloaking"). Many of the paywall-bypassing software just let the user see what they freely serve up to the search engines. It wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't know how much effort was put into not only serving different content to the spider, but also how much effort is put into trying to make sure the search engine doesn't detect that they're doing it.
Sites are usually quite careful about this because they don't want to get banned. Google's rules, for example, are quite complex, allowing the search engine to get the full content of every article but with users seeing a small number of free articles and then a paywall after that: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...
It sounds like your proposed change would have the search engine use its influence to push sites away from paywall models?
> I've never met such a person. I can only imagine them to be barely human.
Well that’s why. When you refuse to even listen/consider their argument, no one is going to argue with you. In addition, saying such a thing here gets you downvoted to oblivion. Doesn’t stop people from doing it; Just look at some of the other comments here.
A women told in a comment that after around 13 years old she would get ads on Facebook to become a cam girl. So FB with all the data they have on their user still pushed such a fucking ad to a child. I am expecting an ashole to respond and tell me that FB can\t afford to validate the ads they put in front of children and my premtive response is "Don't fucking put ads in fron of children, or at least put only the ones you validated" but Mark and his army of cool FB devs need a raise and new toys.
My conclusion, block ads, block ads on your family and friends devices, the companies will screw you and the poor bastard that payed for the ad to be placed in front of some relevant target.
I wonder if she lied about her age when signing up to FB. I know I did, and most people I know did too (back when we actually used FB). I don't believe FB ever allowed users younger than 13 due to COPPA (passed in 2000) and she clearly used it before turning 13. For context FB always asked for users' birthday during signup.
FB can determining the approximate age of the user by the content they posted
They give users tags like "rich, dumb, racist, likes watches, likes big cars".
The reason they might not tag you "possible minor" is to deny they knew in case of something bad happening.
Even if you lied that you are older then 13 years , did the Cam girls company paid FB to show that ad for ages between 13-18? Why? To prepare their minds for the future ?
I expect some other bullshit excuse, that clearly the children lied they are over 18 and as a company that buys ads on FB you should know that FB will probably show ads to those children and you will pay for it because those super genius developers are too busy with more important projects like some new framework, they don't give a shit they waste your ad money, what could you do? put your cam girl ads on the TV?
> Even if you lied that you are older then 13 years , did the Cam girls company paid FB to show that ad for ages between 13-18? Why? To prepare their minds for the future ?
> The survey found that 83% of the 11 to 15 year olds whose internet usage was monitored registered on a social media site with a false age.
> Just over 40% of the children signed in stating they were over 18 years of age, with one even claiming to be 88.
--
> company that buys ads on FB you should know that FB will probably show ads to those children and you will pay for it because those super genius developers are too busy with more important projects like some new framework
That seems like a pretty cartoonish view of FB employees. They are trying to solve the problem. People who argue like you have rarely ever actually had experience running FB ads (more cutthroat than you'd think; FB isn't omniscient despite media reporting). The #1 priority at every large company is protecting their brand (see ex App Store review chief: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJeEuxn9mug). Many people (like you) constantly condemn large corporations ("why don't they just...") due to a lack of empathy and inability to put yourself in these people's shoes. If all the people saying "why doesn't Apple put a headphone jack back in, it doesn't take that much space!" actually had to undergo the pressure of working for Apple's hardware design team, they'd understand the tradeoffs far better and spread less uninformed criticism.
> “We look at things like people wishing you a happy birthday and the age written in those messages. We also look at the age you shared with us on Facebook and apply it to our other apps where you have linked your accounts and vice versa. So if you share your birthday with us on Facebook, we’ll use the same for your linked account on Instagram,” Diwanji explained.
> The social network said that it is focused on using existing data to inform its artificial intelligence technology.
> “Where we do feel we need more information, we’re developing a menu of options for someone to prove their age. This is a work in progress and we’ll have more to share in time,” said Facebook. — IANS
I am working as a dev for many years, some problems are not hard to solve but some other stuff has more priority and is placed up int he list. So IMO FB has FB pushed this at the bottom from various reasons, one of them might be that is a problematic one so they won't touch it until they are forced too.
It's easy to paint FB employees as cravenly evil cartoon characters, but most FB ads (except ones from the biggest corporations) are "direct response", i.e. not focused on increasing brand awareness but on immediately funneling users to a sales page. FB doesn't benefit from underage kids, who have zero spending ability, from seeing direct response ads (obviously, brand awareness ads on underage people are hugely effective, however), it just messes up their ad targeting. It seems to be a hard problem to solve when you consider all factors.
That's fair, and there's certainly tons of incentives to ignore problems; office politics, liability (because if a company is "internally aware" of a problem, that's a huge liability for lawsuits and regulation), etc.
But I'd give a lot to see a reality TV show where people who constantly criticise big corporations are put in charge of the relevant team for a year (people here being put in charge of FB's ads team; people who want headphone jacks being put in charge of the iPhone hardware design team and having to deal with the tradeoffs) and see how "easy" a problem is to solve. Though them running these companies to the ground might be the goal after all.
I'll be watching some YouTube with kids, or some chill music to relax and then some trailer for a horror movie will have me scrambling for the mute button. Some basic ad standards would prevent jump scares. Especially on content for kids or relaxation...
These things are only profitable at scale which is why humans will never be part of the process. With that said- it's not our problem that it doesn't scale. As it exists it is hurting people so something obviously needs to change. Platforms have a duty to uphold and shouldn't exist if they cannot even protect children from sex worker ads.
It hurts the companies that pay for placing the ads if FB or other giant does not give a shit that they target the wrong people. Putting some toy ads would maybe make more money but when you are a giant and have no competition your developers spend their time on shitty projects that improve their CV.
On an ad-supported site, you're not the customer. The advertiser is the customer, you're the product. Making that even worse is social media, where being good on a technical level is only meaningful when we're talking about handling scale -- the rest is if people you care about are using the platform.
If you want to see how bad it gets, look at how Facebook abuses CSS in order to have sponsored posts say "Sponsored" at the top while avoiding a straightforward place in the generated html that says "Sponsored" and could be matched by adblockers. It's nightmarish.
Yes. When you use ads, you naturally tune your site to maximize profit from those ads. If that's your goal, great, but that's not the web I want to use. And maybe, thinking about it, it's not the web you want to create, either.
I've made a lot of content. It's available for free with no ads. I subsidize that work with other work.
If you offer me a way to see the content without ads, I'll go for it. I've bought a lot of content. If the choice is $5 for a movie without ads or a $0 movie with ads, I'll pay every time.
Otherwise, it's the ad blocker for you. Ads are mental poison. And they greedily use my CPU and battery. :) Want a turbo button for the web? Turn on ad blocking.
I was just thinking the other day that I'd probably tolerate black-and-white static ads on a site, like in [paper] newspapers. But these attention-sucking brainwashing CPU-hogging things... Forget them.
It's OK to block ads because it's my computer and I get to decide what it will and won't do. Period.
That said, I don't block ads. I block trackers and JS, which happens to have the side-effect of blocking almost all ads. If ads appear that don't track me or use JS, I will totally see them. I won't even mind too much.
Regarding getting their shit together, they're also some of the largest, most profitable companies in the world, so it's not like they don't have the resources to get their shit together - it's that there's not enough motivation to do it; there's no additional profit in changing their current negligent process.
The answer, failing legislative intervention from government (I don't think I'll live long enough to see that), is: more people need to block more ads to get the fucking message across.
I don't think I'll live long enough to see that either though.
Additionally, blocking ads should be added to any corporate cyber security checklist - if that happens, that may be more likely to send the message.
Agreed, in addition the amount of personal information advertising companies collect is staggering and incredibly creepy. I believe an exposed API link was posted to HN some time back that allowed you to query your data from one of the big ones, I like to think I take some care with who I give that data to, but they had almost every phone number, home/work address, email address, social media profile, etc. I'd used over the past 15 years.
Until the advertising industry cleans house and abides to some level of standards and ethics I have no qualms blocking every advert I possibly can
I guess you always pay in cash. The amount of information which banks and card issuers collect about you is just tremendous. And unlike web ads, they know your real name, your address, your age ...
Credit/debit card companies have more of some information but they know less about my psyche. They may know that I buy guns but they don't know that I like single action revolvers. They may know that I eat out but they don't know that I am allergic to shellfish. They may know that I went to the doctor but they don't know that I have some weird pimple on my butt. They may know that I watch porn but they don't know that I am into pygmy doggy style. The web trackers know all of this about me and probably some weird stuff that I am too ashamed to share.
I'm also uncomfortable with what these companies do with the data they collect, however I think there is a difference in that I directly entered into an agreement with these companies, signed a contract and have some avenues of recourse such as closing my account and moving to a competitor, complaining to a regulator or even going to court.
When it comes to ad companies hoovering up data wherever they can I have practically no options to do anything about it, even figuring out which companies have collected my data would be a sisyphean task
To me ads seem only to negatively UX more than anything. Case in point, I have began noticing a more than usual amount of ads on Twitter recently. I now get a sponsored ad after very 3 tweets compared to the one or two quick ones on every homepage load, sometimes none at all.
This has put me off the platform until they either A) Shift back to the previous acceptable amount of ads. B) Show a negligible amount of ads am willing to compromise on. C) Go out of my way to bypass the ads using a controlled client.
Only reasonable option left here would be C meaning using 3rd party clients that are limited feature-wise and give a worse UX experience than not using Twitter at all. This route in the long run hampers my Twitter experience to the extent that I would rather go back to square one and avoid using Twitter altogether.
> Besides, they say, users who block ads wouldn’t have bought the advertisers’ products anyway.
Even if you bought the product, you can still hate the ad for making you do so, e.g. by inducing FOMO and by causing more overconsumption, of which you are now a part.
There are many contrived examples here about closing eyes and refusing to eat lettuce, but why not take one directly from software? Let's say I publish code on the internet and put praise to my coding skills in the comments. A publisher publishes an article with ads. You read the article with ads removed, and take my code to use in your closed-source commercial product, ripping out the comments. So far so good.
Now let's say instead I publish my code under GPL. And the publisher puts a big disclaimer on the website that you must turn off ad-blocker to view content.
Is it still ethical to block ads and ignore the disclaimer? Note I'm saying "ethical", not "legal". How is that any different from ignoring the LICENSE file and profiting from the GPL code in a closed-source commercial product? Mental gymnastics about what is "really a contract" aside.
To be sure, I block ads, but like other such things, e.g. speeding, I recognize it's a moral compromise I make with myself.
Aside from the well written article itself, it's remarkable the thought and time put into the commentary that follows. This reminds me how much the quality of commentary has reduced on most places that use them. As well as how much effort I put in to contribute. Valuable discussion used to be scattered across various blogs and HN is in some ways the last vestiges of it.
The most basic argument for online ad blocking is that I should be in control of my own equipment. It's my phone, my computer, an internet connection I pay for. Why shouldn't I do whatever I want with it. Websites should consider themselves lucky I let them run their stupid inefficient scripts on my machine.
We should call it tracker blocking, anti targeting or something.
I don’t block ads because they are annoying (although they can be). I block ads because of privacy. Seeing an ad for something I searched for on an unrelated site is creepy and unnerving.
Serve ethical ads: use the page content as the only targeting, don’t use third party ad networks. Just show a damn banner.
Does this not pay the bills enough? Is it more work to chase sponsors instead of just linking in an andnet ad? Started a paid subscription but not enough people pay for the subscriptions and with Adblockers more and more pervasive it’s getting hard to keep the lights on?
Then here is my advice: don’t keep the lights on. Your site doesn’t seem needed if the only way to sustain it was using tracking ads.
I have a friend that intentionally disables Adblock on YouTube in order to support the creators that he likes. He feels that, if he disables Adblock, the creators will get less money.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m very curious to hear other opinions.
A long term consequence of using an ad blocker is that ad networks only show ads to people who don't use ad blockers, who generally speaking are less tech savvy. The ad networks respond by tailoring to them, and writers who are funded by ads shift their writing towards that audience.
I’m just grateful we don’t yet live in a world, where to proceed incrementally with content, I not only have to watch ads, but have to endure some sort of interaction on my part to make sure I understood what I just watched.
It is okay because website creators tolerate it. Once all website owners stop tolerating it, everybody would have to watch ads.
Just like if at the grocery store, you could choose to pay or not pay. It would be totally okay not to pay. But if the number of non-paying customers grew too much, the owners would make it mandatory to pay. This did not happen to the web yet.
So much of the economy of the web is built upon advertising, a tedious way of paying that becomes more costly as your time becomes more valuable. It's so tedious and costly that there are legions of people building products to bypass this payment and giving it away for free. Does this sound like a healthy economy?
Not only is the foundation weak, but the advertisers themselves are really, really poor at actually delivering relevant advertising. If 25% of every ad that I saw led me to a product that made my life genuinely easier and/or more enjoyable, I wouldn't mind seeing them, would I? Instead I most prominently see ads for a product or service that I've just paid for, or their competition. Too late? With all the money being spent on marketing I'm disappointed they can't do better.
And worse still, there are people (and machines) flooding what was once a useful internet full of knowledge with worse copies of that knowledge, sometimes algorithmically scrambled and riddled with affiliate links. Too much information! Some good and some very bad. We're in a bad state, and advertising has a lot to do with it, in my opinion.
> Once all website owners stop tolerating it, everybody would have to watch ads.
Or everybody would stop visiting corporate websites and we'd go back to the user-generated web of old, where people created stuff out of love, instead of to get views and sell ads.
> "Or everybody would stop visiting corporate websites and we'd go back to the user-generated web of old, where people created stuff out of love, instead of to get views and sell ads."
Oh how I miss those days. Back then, the advertising industry literally scoffed at the idea of advertising on the "It's just a passing fad" early web [1], and most of the people online at that time were "content creators" of one kind or another, just looking to share what they were passionate about with others around the world.
[1] Source: I used to run a small printing business back in the day, and tried for years to convince advertisers of the value of advertising on the Internet and was literally laughed at…
I said IF you could choose not to pay (if it was legal, the owner did not mind it), it WOULD make more sense not to pay (as you would save your money). That is how it is with websites today, the owners let you do it, even though they could prevent you from accessing their content.
I don’t block ads. If I hate the ads more than I like the site, I stop going to that site. It’s not that hard of a choice for me.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to the But-My-HTTP-Requests defense and understand that ads and tracking are the trade I make for reading/watching/enjoying content without getting my wallet out.
I also personally enjoy learning about new products and buying things I might like. Why do I earn money if not to buy things?
To create a safety net for yourself (and perhaps your family)? So that if you were to incur unexpected catastrophic expenses, or lose your job, you would still be able to sustain yourself?
That’s a fair point, but the amount of money needed for those things isn’t insanely high for me. I don’t have kids, don’t own a car, and have pretty low living expenses.
There’s always another job to get. I can always spend less. If something’s truly catastrophic (like healthcare), I just wouldn’t pay the bill. I rent (not interested in owning property) so my exposure there is pretty limited.
I have a pretty big stack of credit cards and would just use those if I absolutely had to. I don’t carry a balance on them now so that’s a lot of freedom in a truly worse-case-scenario.
Plus, I have a chronic illness so I tend to not be too worried about long-long-term. How long do I really want/need to sustain myself for?
Same. Spam, page loads, and aesthetics aside: I'll never click an ad out of principal. So why load it?
I wish there was some kind of Netflix for site supporting. I admittedly don't donate because of how awful some payment systems are. I'd rather log into a site and tick a few boxes to pay.
Micro-payments never really came to pass is the sad thing - except where they just increased in size enough to become "payments".
Though I suspect the answer is closer to the ugly truth: whatever you think you're worth, you're not really worth it unless it's through ads. If people had to think about how they allocate resources, then they'd inevitably decide they can do without in most cases.
If enough of us used ad blockers, it could help force a systemic shift away from the attention economy altogether
It's worth putting serious thought into whether this would actually be a better web; I think it would likely be worse. Most sites today are supported by ads, and if that weren't an option we'd see some combination of paywalls, sponsored content, and sites shutting down.
I really like the solution put forth by Brave. Basically reify the attention economy and make it explicit so that you, as the producer of your attention get a say and a monetary stake in it.
If you think the attention economy is legitimate, a browser that removes the ads publishers have put on their sites and instead serves different ads to the users is pretty shady.
Content providers would push back pretty hard on the idea that a second on every site is worth the same. A high quality news article and a listicle cost very different amounts to produce, and we don't want even more of a race to the bottom here.
Paywalls are annoying because it forces you onto the few websites you pay for.
Maybe we need a platform where you pay some fixed amount of money per month and get access to many websites. At the end of the month you can decide how to split your money among the websites you used, defaulting to proportional to the amount of time you spent on the site.
The platform should be open so that anyone can add their website.
Lots of people have played around with ideas like this, but nothing especially successful. One problem you'll run into is that people have vastly different amounts of money. While I might be content paying $50/month for unlimited internet, someone less well off might balk at $5/month. So either you set your price high enough that many people can't afford it, or you miss out on the ability to draw more money from people who can afford it.
Additionally, different sites will have different views, often correctly, on how valuable their content is. An NYT article is much more expensive to produce than a Buzzfeed one, but your system compensates them the same (while the NYT is able to charge a premium for advertising today, plus runs their own paywall).
Your proposal is also pretty exploitable: submit your own website and set the platform to always send 100% of your money to your own site.
That doesn't have to be bad at all. Most sites may be supported by ads, but most sites are also crap. This might clean a lot of low-quality distraction from the web and get us back to websites that are about stuff that people love or care about, which is already what the best websites are.
> It's worth putting serious thought into whether this would actually be a better web; I think it would likely be worse. Most sites today are supported by ads
I think it would be better. Most ad-supported sites today are pretty much garbage, in large part because they're ad-supported.
I feel anyone who drives enough traffic to get consistent and valuable ad paychecks could just as well make exclusive paywalled content through Patreon and whatnot. If you can convince 0.1% of your viewership to fork over 1$/mo, wouldn't that match or exceed what you'd get from ads anyway? Of course this system doesn't benefit the many websites that rely on clickbait and quantity>quality content (since they are direct consequences of how the ad market works), but would anyone miss those?
