Whenever I'm sitting in front of a computer that isn't using ad blockers, I'm shocked to see how polluted websites are, practically yelling at me, vying for my attention. How can folks concentrate on an article without ad blockers?
Then there are those ads in YouTube videos and blog articles purporting to offer the reader something valuable when, in fact, they're packed with falsehoods ("xyz changed my life, and if you want to check it out, please click on this affiliate link").
While I can't block ads on the radio, on the internet, I make a point of blocking every ad I can.
There are other ways to reward an author or a website. For instance, I block ads on sites like Haaretz, but I do subscribe to them because I believe quality content deserves compensation.
I don't think I have ADHD but trying to read a news website without an ad blocker actually triggers me a little. The content keeps moving around as the ads are pumped in, and then a video (often unrelated to the article) begins to play, and it's often impossible to close it.
I'm unable to concentrate on the article. And then the ads change and a new batch is rotated in. Some of them try their best to obscure the content, they are all demanding my attention like screeching birds in the nest.
Firefox has an absolutely fantastic reader view (f9) which turns the page into something resembling an ebook with the ability to resize the font and adjust the pagination. All the distracting fluff is gone. Bliss.
Do you use a reader app like Readwise Reader or Pocket? I have ADHD and they help a ton, both because saving the article strips the ads and because I can return to them later when I inevitably get distracted.
I have ADHD and the only way it works for me is to use adblocker, disable all video, save the article to zotero if I want to read it in first pass.
I have a set designated time period to read news and never use internet for information outside that period. I disable internet and read only my saved zotero articles one after another until I'm done.
Rules are essential to not let this attention economy businesses ruin your life if you have ADHD.
Yeah if I click on an interesting article title and the first thing it pops up is some stupid "do you agree to cookies" and "do you want to subscribe to the newsletter" at the same time on top of each other I usually just click out. I'm lazy. If they aren't watching their bounce rates, their loss.
I use blockers too, but they don't catch all of them, especially the stupid cookie popups.
I doubt you're completely "blind" to them, I strongly suspect that on some level you're still processing those images despite being unaware of them. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about things I've seen on billboards and other advertisements, despite consciously filtering those images out. It's quite invasive, really.
I wonder what impact they have on people's mental health.
When you hear something when you're sleeping, it gets memorized and analyzed for you. That's the basis of hypnosis and also the idea around which scientology started long ago. It can be used to program an individual, bypassing his critical thinking. Advertisements use the same trick to prime buyers to favor certain brands. If you doubt it, do a simple experiment: record yourself saying something and make the recording play back at night, when you're sleeping.
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't think to check back on this :)
A couple reasons:
Back when I did use them, I got really bothered by sites breaking, and I'd rather have the ads than dealing with "is this broken because of my ad blocker or is the site broken". Now, I've just gotten to the point where I don't really mind.
The other part is there's enough content I consume that is supported by ads that I would like to continue supporting, without having to consciously opt into it (e.g. news sites; I don't want to pay a subscription for every newspaper but am happy to contribute to what little money they get from ads)
Not OP but I do something similar, because I know each ad I see costs someone $$$. This leads to odd behavior like making sure I let youtube ads play for their full duration and I'll usually click on sponsor links + their pages enough to trigger the first flag of a sales pipeline, ensuring the company responsible for the ad pays as much as possible for it.
I sometimes browse my Google Discover feed on my phone, which I've set up to open articles in Firefox (on which I have an adblocker installed), and sometimes I browse my Google News Feed, which opens articles in its internal Chrome browser.
The difference in experience is striking. Random auto-playing videos that are stuck in the corner of your browser. Horizontally it takes up like half of my screen. It has an X button that either doesn't work, OR its hit box is just so tiny that you have to tap it multiple times to get it to actually close. Not to mention cookie banners that take up 20% of my vertical real estate.
Maybe you can get used to that shitty experience, but I certainly can't. I almost always just immediately open Google News articles in Firefox now.
There is certainly a difference in reaction though. There are people that cannot resist if you slap a percentage on something. It doesn't matter if they need it or the price is even good. There is something to save here and it is all that matters...
And it even affects people that should be adapt at math too.
Actually, I don't think I'm immune; I'm definitely affected by ads. But I definitely get used to seeing them and don't think about them actively. Sometimes I miss that they're even on a page.
Mobile news sites are so bad I have a hard time believing that it was done on purpose. The actual content of the article is actually hard to find among (or beneath!) the mess of advertisements and clickbait.
Speak for yourself. I don't own a TV precisely because the ads got too much. I haven't owned a TV in well over a decade. I have a cinema system I just hook up to my laptop whenever I want to watch a movie or series from some streaming service. I doubt I'm rare in this regard.
I have a 16yo TV just because I don't know what to put in its place. And I have cable TV just because cable TV + 500mbps internet was cheaper than 300mbps internet by itself. It's a crazy world we live in.
Haven't turned it on since the FIFA world cup last year, though.
> [Some] people [are able to] ignore them, just like TV ads.
FTFY. I am definitely not one of them. If I'm hanging out at a TV-heavy friend's place they all chat happily over the obnoxious ads while I try+fail to ignore them.
Am I the only person who thought that list was a poem? :) Here is how my mind read it:
I block ads in the browser, I block their DNS
I block beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs
I block analytics, reporting, and diagnostic logging
I block programmatic pleas to disable ad-blocking
I strip query strings from UTM campaign tags
I unshorten URLs to avoid tracking hacks
I stop autoplay for the videos on my feed
I block all the cookies that your websites don't strictly need
I block the visibility API on your page
I block prompts to install your app in a fit of rage
I block hidden pixels that track my email
Which surely gets masked but to no avail
As I unsubscribe from your mailing list, dork
And block your address if that doesn't work
I block and report SMS that have ads
Phone calls get ignored if not from my contacts
I pay a company to wrangle data brokers for the win
And trust me, junk mail goes straight into the bin
As I unsubscribe from it all when I can
I block ads, and you should block too, my dear friend
(Written organically, without ChatGPT or the like)
I took your text and asked chatgpt to turn it into a fun poem:
I surf the web with playful glee,
Blocking ads, just watch and see!
In my browser, they won't appear,
DNS blocked, they shed a tear.
Beacons and pings, they can't track me,
URLs confused, they cannot be.
Analytics and logs, no data they'll find,
Programmatic pleas, they're left behind.
Campaign tags, I strip them bare,
UTM queries, I won't share.
Unshorten URLs, a clever trick,
Tracking hacks, they're in a fix.
Autoplay videos, I make them stop,
No more interruptions, no more flop.
Cookies, beware! I block you all,
Only the necessary ones may crawl.
Visibility API, you can't spy,
No prompts to install, no need to try.
Hidden pixels, stay out of sight,
My email's safe, try as you might.
Unsubscribe, I'll show you the door,
No more emails, I'll take no more.
Block your address, a final resort,
No more junk in my digital fort.
SMS ads, they come my way,
But I block and report, come what may.
Phone calls, ignored if not my friend,
Only contacts, let the ringing send.
Data brokers, they won't win,
I pay a company to wrangle them in.
Junk mail, it's a thing of the past,
Straight into the bin, it's gone at last.
So join me, my dear friend so true,
Block those ads, they're not for you!
Let's surf the web with joyful cheer,
No ads, no tracking, have no fear!
While I would agree the vast majority of the time, ads are also used heavily by small businesses and independent developers to gauge interest and even just to keep the lights on sometimes. Mostly referring to online ads, billboards and TV ads are much more expensive and are far more risky for small businesses.
I don't like this argument. As if an indie shoemaker should be grateful to have the privilege to get in a bidding war against Nike for who can give Facebook more money to get noticed.
Just want to point out I think there's a big difference between using tracking to "gauge interest" and using ads. You can do one without the other. In fact, there are even privacy-respecting alternatives for businesses to track online traffic.
I tend to agree, even though the line can be blurry. I was more anti this kind of stuff until I used Google Analytics for the first time and saw how you could fiddle with just a few things on a page and decrease bounce rate or increase how long people stayed on page (reading the article, one hopes). I always assumed it'd involve more quality compromise or something but it's often just changing a headline and showing more before the fold. Seems like it benefits everyone to enable those kinds of iterations.
I haven't used these and would use Google Analytics if it were indeed just too much better than everything else out there. But if another service gives me everything Google Analytics provides and more, why continue using Google Analytics?
I wouldn't know though since I've never tried using these. I just know about them.
There is also Wide Angle Analytics, Simple Analytics, and few other options.
As you said. There is little reason to expose yourself to an extra risk.
From CNIls ruling (not a quote, but a summary):
> The CNIL ordered each website operator to comply with the GDPR—for example, by not using Google Analytics or “using a tool that does not involve a transfer outside the EU”.
I occasionally tear down ads in public spaces. I'm sure many will disagree with me, but I do think we should be able to move through public spaces without the incessant assault on one's attention and head space. I haven't been caught yet, though I'm sure I someday will, at which point I'll pay the fine and keep doing it anyway.
I find highway billboards and store signage to be a particularly awful display, and I'd be overjoyed for them to be banned entirely. I have often thought about cutting down highway billboards, although I'm not quite intense enough for that.
Also, here in the US, gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump. I cannot stress how angry I am about this. One of the last places where I could just day-dream has now been deemed "up for grabs" by the lowest form of shit-peddler in the modern world.
Pause for a second to consider the absurdity of being blasted with advertisements while paying for a product. Talk about double-dipping...
So when I was a child, laser tag became a thing you could buy. Little kits that came with 2 or 4 sets of vests and guns that tried to simulate experiences like Q-Zar laser tag, but at home for kids.
We had a couple of sets, and one of the frustrating aspects was that firing the guns made a lot of noise - they had little speakers built in that played really, genuinely awful laser noises for about 5 seconds every time you pulled the trigger.
But... as curious kids, we found out that slipping a butter knife between the plastic grill over the speaker on the gun and giving the speaker membrane a good slashing solves the problem real quick. The speaker might vibrate, but without a membrane, no real noise is going to be made.
So I guess what I'm saying is that it would be a real shame if folks just slipped a pocket knife through the grill on those gas station pump speakers every now and then.
Buy an electric vehicle. No kidding, avoiding the pump (and paying the petroleum industry tax) was my #1 goal (not saving money - I live in CA where kWh prices are very high).
And I can't express how much I love not feeling anxious every time I drive by a gas station to worry "do I need to fill up now"?
Filling up at home every single day is much more serene. We also have a 2nd vehicle that's non-EV for trips.
The stickers are a good idea. I also wonder if there's a discrete way of permanently damaging a speaker, e.g. with a magnet or something that could fit discretely in the palm of one's hand.
gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump
Just one more of the many reasons to drive electric. It's when I make the rare drive to a gas station in the ol' fossil burner that I'm reminded of what shit holes some gas stations have become. Half the pumps don't work, the card readers are full of skimmers, but by golly the video and audio work!
> Just one more of the many reasons to drive electric
Oh yeah, just wait until your charging station installs ads. Then you're stuck watching an ad while your vehicle charges. That, of course, takes longer than inserting fuel into a tank. So more advertisements and more money for the charger!
I don't know how that's going to work given that the charging station in my garage doesn't even connect to a network.
Beside, if you're talking about public charging stations, it's already been done (can't remember the name at the moment). The difference between those chargers and a gas station is, you charge for free (Level 2, though). It's odd, too, because the ones I've seen are at grocery stores. So, plug in, go into the store...when am I supposed to see the ads?
Don’t worry, I’m sure Elon will find a way to integrate those charging networks with the screens inside his cars to show you ads there too. What’s better than showing ads on a small screen at a gas station? Showing ads on a big screen inside an electric car that charges for 5x as long!
I think either MA must have some laws limiting the density of billboards and their content? We definitely haven’t gotten rid of them enough, but it is not as bad as the stuff you get outside of New England.
Many cities and counties have already rolled something out, which would be where you start. Once there's not that many billboards in total, a state-wide ban becomes more acceptable.
I was walking my dog in my local forest and came across a newly installed bench for sitting. On it was a shiny brass plaque: “This bench is sponsored by [insurance company]”, along with a phone number. I went straight home and returned with a screwdriver. I posted the plaque to the insurance company.
I totally agree with you and I do the same. High five! Recently I've learned that most posters being hung in public space are illegal anyway (at least in Poland). I've heard it from... An outdoor advertising company employee.
I agree with you aesthetically, though if it was a privately-owned, publicly-accessible space, I wouldn't go as far as to commit vandalism, as bad as it may look. (If it was placed by a member of the public without consent of the owner I'd agree with taking it down.)
That said, I've been waiting for a good set of widely popular AR glasses to come out so I can write a real-life ad blocker for them.
>I agree with you aesthetically, though if the ad was placed by the owner of the space I wouldn't go as far as to commit vandalism. (If it was placed by a member of the public without consent of the owner I'd agree with taking it down
I get what you're saying, but I'm sort of beyond this now. The invasion of personal space has reached a point where I'm prepared to fight dirty, too.
Here's a novel idea: advertisers might put a modicum of care into selecting the time, place, and manner in which to present products to the world.
> Here's a novel idea: advertisers might put a modicum of care into selecting the time, place, and manner in which to present products to the world.
Yeah I totally agree. Bombarding peoples' senses isn't even effective advertising, IMO. They can do better.
Here's another novel idea: How about make products actually good, and let third parties review them? Most of the time I choose products based on reviews, not ads. If I'm in the market for something I probably will watch reviews about the various choices.
That could be really interesting. Layer some art over it?
I wonder how hard it would be to distinguish between various things while driving. Billboards are mostly useless. Traffic signs of course can’t be covered up. Then in between we have cases like signs for gas stations and fast food (which are technically ads I guess but they are actually useful).
Traffic signs and signs for gas stations and fast food are largely standard (color/fonts/symbols/etc.), they can be easily recognized as such by a neural net and whitelisted.
That said, when I'm a pedestrian, I wouldn't mind traffic signs being covered up as well. They completely destroy the look of the surrounding architecture and flora, but I understand they are a necessity for the cars. As a pedestrian I don't really care what the speed limit is.
I 100% agree, and I'd welcome regulation to tone it down. Most of the time it's just obnoxious, and the worst of it is that it's effective - which is why the market won't solve it.
"No communication with me without my consent," is something I want in society, and that is violated by virtually all advertising, everywhere. I wish this was the social norm. The compromise is what the OP did, reactive, only-really-available-to-tech-folk measures. This is unfortunate.
Personally, I would not consent to any communication that was paid for. In that case it's money talking, not the person, and this is quite confusing for people including me.
That's not practically possible unless you choose to live alone in a controlled box. Even the infrastructure you're forced to interact with is a form of communication that manipulates you into certain behaviors.
But then, maybe that's where we're headed as a society with the explosion of one person households, remote work, and delivery services. It's increasingly possible for the majority of people to actually live a completely solitary life, controlling their information input by restricting it only to a screen.
>That's not practically possible unless you choose to live alone in a controlled box.
You omit a wide variety of possibilities, and claim there is only one possible approach, and so construct a straw-man. Options range from introducing a protocol, to adding paid-speech disclosure.
People looking for signatures show the way: "Can I talk to you about X?" is perfectly workable offline. You can say "No" and be on your way. "Would you like to hear a presentation on a fantastic time-share investment?" again, you say no and be on your way.
One simple thing we can do is require disclosure for paid-for speech. Maybe wear a lapel pin or something on TV, and a hashtag on twitter. The details can be worked out, but "living alone in a box" is not a real or desirable possibility.
The tradeoff to extricating yourself from being influenced without your consent, is that you lose the ability to you yourself influence how society and civilization progresses.
That's an interesting and important point. I suppose if everyone takes this attitude then society would fall apart, unless people are spontaneously feeling the need to connect with each other. But I'm skeptical that you need to acquiesce to the increasingly corporate communications vying for your attention, just to stay available for real human connection.
The internet is a medium that facilitates asynchronous communications with like minds. You can leave a comment on a website, or link to your blog post, as a beacon to anyone who's opted into a similar filter bubble. They can find it and contact you. Yes, it will be unsolicited, but not in the same way as a marketing email or billing notice is unsolicited. Nobody is communicating without consent when publishers and readers are participating in a shared community.
If I publish a blog post on my hobby, and someone I've never met emails me about partnering on a project for the hobby, then although it's unsolicited, I would still appreciate the email and follow up. It might take me a while to notice it since I only check my email every few days, but I will almost certainly reply. A personal connection is a welcome respite from a noisy onslaught of automated communications.
Short simple and to the point (unlike my comment, but alas).
I recently tried a little experiment, where I would use the internet without adblocker (or similar like DNS filtering, extensions to remove annoyances, etc). I thought to myself I was in my little sheltered bubble a bit too long having access to these things that make browsing seamless, even enjoyable. I wasn't shocked by what I found, but I was disturbed by how universally unusable it has become. No wonder people stick to their containment zones on Reddit or Instagram.
You search something up, you get a bunch of ads to scroll through. Fine for me, I know what link to look for, but most don't. Huge issue.
You visit the website, you're bombarded with a video ad in the corner, banner ads on the side, a notification banner up top, a chat bubble in the other corner, and a cookie banner in the middle with garbage defaults. You get through all of that miraculously on your phone, but the article disappears to show a giant ad as a background, before reappearing again if you keep scrolling. Again, I know these horrible patterns I can navigate through them, but how does somebody's grandma?
The internet is so frustrating because so much of it has been horribly tainted by the ad industry. Every single aspect, every single feature, gets misused by the ad industry. You thought deeper GPU access would mean fully fledged games in the browser? Nah we're just using it to profile you better. We're spending billions of dollars on developing a new social app, oh but it's not to improve communication, no we just want you to get hooked on it to see more ads.
Block all the ads and annoyances you want. Until we get thorough data privacy laws, it's your duty to block them. Go on, I know how it impacts me directly/indirectly, as I'm a web developer who spends far too much time persuading clients not to load up their sites with this BS. You should still block them.
As someone who has worked in marketing … I think adtech created stances like this.
If advertising worked like it did before about 1994 or so, I think we’d see fewer complaints of this nature. Adtech overplayed its hand for a quarter-century.
The thing that sucks about this, IMHO, is that it makes no room for above-board players. Doesn’t matter that it supports millions of jobs. Doesn’t matter that there are lots of well-intentioned people out there who just happen to work in advertising.
This guy is 100% within his right. And honestly, the sector deserves it. Bad actors destroyed a lot of goodwill in the name of performance and better numbers.
For me, specifically, Forbes destroyed the line between bad actors and above board players.
Back when sites started to detect ad-blockers, Forbes asked users to disable their blockers, for the usual reasons. Trusting them, beings respectable breed source, I and others whitelisted Forbes, and promptly got hit by malware distributed by ads on their site.
Because Forbes could not be bothered to screen the ads on their site, I now relentlessly block ads just like the author of the article.
I should note that Forbes is probably the traditional media outlet that has been most willing to mix advertising and editorial in questionable ways. It has gotten better about its approach in recent years, but it is certainly not perfect.
Advertising is so completely intertwined with everyday life, it’s impossible to block them. The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR. The ultimate brainwash. Most of HN and Reddit content is advertisement whether you realize or not. Front page CNN, outside of weather events and sports, it’s closing in on 100%.
Legislation can be surprisingly efficient, even if not 100% efficient.
There's a borough in my city that decided to ban big billboards. Everyone hated them, they were ugly and everywhere. The advertising lobby sued, it went all the way to the supreme court of Canada, and the city won: advertising was declared a form of visual pollution and therefore banning them was an acceptable infringement to free speech (https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/sum-som-eng.aspx?ca...).
Another example is forcing influencers to disclose when content is sponsored (and apply local advertising laws). If influencers receive money, they are therefore freelancers (in most jurisdictions) and subject to many laws. I have seen them enforced in my jurisdiction.
You can also sidestep 90% of the advertising problem without infringing on actual speech by doing something like saying that "billboard-like things on a property can only be erected by the property owner, and cannot receive remuneration for said erection".
Then the local guy can print "SHERIFF JOE SUCKS" on his fence without repercussions but large billboards are mostly banned.
You still have the gas station sign issue, but that's separate.
I find product placement and 'organic' ads annoying, but I don't think they are as effective as regular old advertisements. If they were, the fraction of the advertising budget would be heavily shifted towards 'product placement' and away from '30 second pre-roll ads' and banner ads.
Advertisers are addicted to what they can measure, you can measure 30 second pre-roll ads and you can measure click-throughs, but you can't really measure how many Nikes sold because Forrest Gump wore them.
What do you mean by “HN and Reddit content?” I think most of the people here are real (not ad bots) and most of the comments are just their opinions. I mean you can sometimes see folks who are clearly either super-fans or actual paid shills, but if they were the majority, I think people would give up on the sites.
Some of the HN content is explicitly advertising (the posts you see you can't comment on) but some percentage of the "native/organic" content posts are just advertising - which may not be bad mind you, I'd much rather have company X put $Yk dollars into well written posts that are actually useful than have them buy a stadium.
But other are pretty thinly veiled, and some commenters are pretty obviously pushing something. It gets cleaned up decently well.
It's wild how often I click the comments on a reddit post and there's a link to buy something within the first full screen display of comments. Most recently it was some random dish towel in the background of a staged couples-prank video.
This is the business model of Business Insider, CNBC, MIT Tech Review, etc. There are many more we could list. Then there's the obvious manufacturing-consent style truthmaking like you see in The Economist, Financial Times, NYT, WaPo, etc.
I've found immense value in studying media criticism to improve my literacy of what is "genuine" journalism (of course still colored by someone's ideology, just maybe not one so hamfistedly handed down from above) and advertising dressed up as "news" or conveniently shaped and styled narratives that mislead the public into believing something that will only be true if enough people believe in it.
If HN front page is mostly advertisement then that happens to be the only kind of advertisement I'm interested in. Otherwise I'm served well by uBlock origin, uMatrix and privacy badger - zero "regular" ads.
> The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR.
I live out in the country. I don’t do TV, radio, newspaper¹ (including even general news websites—anything that’s important, I’ll probably hear about from siblings or parents). I don’t use any software with anything like banner ads. As for things like billboards, I know of one pair of billboards on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop in a town 40km away (Stawell)², one traffic safety billboard in a town 45km away (Avoca), a few in Ballarat, around 110km away, and finally loads in the big city 200–260+ km away, Melbourne.
Occasionally (increasingly rarely) I go down to Melbourne, where I grew up until I moved away six years ago. I hate it more and more each time I go down there, partly for things like traffic³, but much more for things trying to steal my attention, billboards, animated billboards, bright billboards, bright lights, flashing lights, &c. And this stuff has certainly got significantly worse in the last decade (I’ve written details a couple of other times here on HN).
Very rarely (like, once every year or two) I get exposed to a television in any form. I don’t know how people can tolerate them, the advertisements are just awful. If you forced me to sit down and look at them, I expect I would feel sick within a few minutes. And apart from a probable degree of autism⁴, there’s nothing particularly abnormal about me physiologically, save that I have become unaccustomed to these assaults upon the senses.
Very occasionally, I observe people using the web without an ad blocker, or use some mobile app (e.g. YouTube) and get exposed to ads thereby. Ugh. Very unpleasant stuff.
So your organic-looking paid articles and such, I don’t experience very much of them; just a few here on HN, and occasionally when I look at a mainstream news site for some weird reason, and a few sponsored articles from CSS-Tricks or Smashing Magazine which I’ll almost certainly immediately skip in my feed reader. But from the exposure I do get, I know that I hate billboards and their digital equivalents far, far more.
—⁂—
¹ The local paper is called The Weekly Advertiser. I’ve measured it a few times, and it’s consistently been about 75% ads by surface area.
² I confess I’ve been tempted to go in and ask why and how they started doing it, and how much money they make out of it, out of sheer curiosity.
³ If I drive the 40km to Stawell, I might encounter fewer than a dozen vehicles.
⁴ Note that I’m here using present definitions of autism, which have shifted pretty extremely from what the word meant fifty years ago, when it strongly suggested low function (that is, that you really were disabled by it). In my experience, someone under the age of, say, thirty, will probably be willing to accept the word roughly how it’s used diagnostically now, while people over fifty will probably understand it in the older, more extreme, more probably debilitating sense. Nowadays, most of my family could probably get a formal diagnosis without too much difficulty, but none of us see anything to be gained by the endeavour. Funny fact, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever used the word “autism” online.
> ¹ The local paper is called The Weekly Advertiser. I’ve measured it a few times, and it’s consistently been about 75% ads by surface area.
I mean it's what it says on the tin. We have a local "paper" but it's not a paper, it's just an advertising flyer, and sometimes it is useful if I want to look up something local.
Advertising based 'free' things cost you far more than a subscription ever would. This is because Advertising Works and it works on you too. You are being manipulated into buying things you wouldn't buy, manipulated into making poor decisions you wouldn't otherwise make. Generations of people lost decades with relatives from smoking and drinking that would not have happened but for advertising. Advertising makes people poorer by leading them to allocate their funds in a worse way.
I'm not saying we should outlaw advertising, there is no realistic way to do so that respects rights. However, you should absolutely refuse to consume advertising whenever possible. Block it, mute it, and refuse to consume content or use services where avoiding advertising is not possible!
>Advertising based 'free' things cost you far more than a subscription ever would.
Let's say someone watches 1 YouTube video per month. Is it worth it to buy YouTube premium at $12/month? What if that person makes minimum wage in the US? What if that person makes the global median wage: $227/month? Free advertising-supported things provide web resources that the poor wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.
I do pay for Youtube Premium (previously Youtube Red). It comes with Youtube Music bundled and is still cheaper than spotify.
YouTube creators get maybe $0.018 per view. Lets say an average video is 15 minutes long (not a crazy thought) and I watched YouTube 5 hours a day. In a 30 day month, this would mean creators are paid 30 * 5 * 60 / 15 * .018 == $10.80. Realistically, lets say I watch for 2 hours, 5 days a week. Then it's 21 * 2 * 60 / 15 * .018 == $3.02. I suspect creators making content for an Indian or Kenyan audiences get paid much less per view, so you can charge users in countries that consume that content significantly less and still make the same payments to creators. Of course the cost would be slightly higher because Youtube wants to make a profit, but advertising doesn't pay creators very well.
Compare this to a cable TV subscription which might cost someone $80 to $200 a month and still has far more advertising than YouTube (almost 1/3 of the view time) and is quite reasonable that people might pay $6 for ad-free youtube. My original point was that even if I paid $20/month just to avoid youtube advertising, I would probably save money net because I would avoid being influenced into buying things I don't need.
I see what you are saying, but you are not correct on any of these points.
'depends on cost': It can't actually depend, on average. Advertisers keep spending money because they make more back overall than they spend on advertising. Only a small fraction of that increase in income is paid in fees to the platform that is funded by the advertising. To make the same amount of money, the platform would only have to charge you a small fraction of what advertisers are making off of those same users.
Advertising isn't a battle of wills, it is leveraging psychology to manipulate you in ways you aren't even aware of. It works on you just as well as it works on everyone else, if you don't think so it probably works better than average.
Ehh, the ad networks want advertiser to believe that but they also do sketchy things like intercepting (and taking credit for) customers who already had an intent to purchase. There was a big story about Uber cutting lots of ad spending with little impact a while ago: https://thehustle.co/01072021-uber-ad-spend/
I mean you can find specific examples where ads are done poorly or there isn't ROI, but Coke isn't like the #1 drink in every restaurant based on taste.
I don't think it gets me to buy things I wouldn't otherwise, but it directs me to certain brands subconsciously (more ad time, more trustworthy (...not saying that's necessarily accurate...)).
Advertising does things like making people familiar to a brand, and to associate certain feelings, imagery, values and words (which would be "branding"). It's far from just making people buy things directly. Rather it's literally making people think about things otherwise they wouldn't think about.
Me too. In addition I physically look away if I'm confronted with ads in real life. For example, when watching Youtube at a friends house or something. I purposely talk loudly over ads in the cinema etc. I am annoyed by ads I can't block such as billboards and the like.
Unless I ask you, I do not want your product. I am happy. I do not want whatever you want me to want. Kindly fuck off. Thanks.
I don't block adds, I only block tracking cookies, and yet I am told repeatedly by websites that I am blocking ads on a daily basis, and that they will go out of business if I don't disable my "ad blocker."
Meanwhile I am quite content with pages that show me full-width banner ads without tracking me.
How do you block tracking but not ads? As in, do you let adsense ads show up, which track you? If not, why do you think the site wouldn't think you are blocking ads?
Blocking cookies. As in, the cookie gets ignored instead of being stored. No cookie returned to the server on future requests. Of course there’s also “use the cookies for this session and delete them later.”
In any case, “blocking” cookies is not the same as blocking ads.
Blocking just cookies isn't necessarily achieving the goal of blocking tracking, though, since the idea is that ad networks commonly fingerprint you and combine any of those signals with your IP address to enable cookie-less tracking and ad targeting.
Sure. But you responded with a question that didn’t acknowledge what the commenter said. They said they block tracking cookies, but didn’t claim to block tracking. Actual blocking tracking is indeed a whole other conversation.
This is a complaint that virtually every single ad out there is actually spyware that tracks you, with the "ad" part being almost like an afterthought.
There’s a lot of ad hate in this thread — and on HN in general — that sometimes feels a bit naive.
In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own.
So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far, so I eventually— and begrudgingly — added ads. I was very intentional about keeping them as unobtrusive as possible: just some banner ads at the top and bottom of each thread and forum, and a square next to the first unread comment. I hated pop-ups (the kind that opened in a new window — very common at that time), and I didn’t have them on any other page on the site (just forums).
This gained me about 10x the revenue I got from donations alone, and was able to scale the site’s hardware, allowing me to keep the site up and running for nearly 20 years, and provided some modest passive income for a time. (I just recently sold it to someone else, but it’s still up and running.)
My point is, that wouldn’t have been possible without ads.
I agree with most of you: sites today have a ridiculous number of ads and are very intrusive. But for sites that don’t go overboard, or for small independent YouTube channels, I don’t mind allowing the ads, because I know they probably wouldn’t make it otherwise.
Yes, I hear the comments saying “maybe they shouldn’t exist if they can’t monetize without ads”, but I’m not sure I agree. There are many that just wouldn’t survive with donations alone, and a subscription model may not make sense.
There are just some cases where ads make sense for them, and I’m ok with that (with the caveat they don’t go overboard), and because I’ve been on the other side, I don’t block ads.
I think that the balance has swung so far due to how obnoxious and callous the adtech industry has become, that right now many people (including me) would consider it acceptable "collateral damage" if a bunch of decent sites would become unviable and shut down. In many areas is an over-abundandance of content with scarce attention, so even if majority of the providers shut down, there would still be "enough".
And also IMHO the business has changed over the 20 years you mention - back then, sufficient compute power and bandwidth to run a site were meaningful and more users directly required more expenses; but right now the hosting costs are trivial (e.g. I'm involved in a non-monetized project with a few million views/month / 100k MAU running off of a single small VM that can get hosted for free) and the primary expense is your time - so if you want to make some content and spend time on that, you don't need to monetize it; if you're willing to spend an evening or two, then paying a few dollars for a domain name won't be an obstacle; and if in some community there is no one who wants to put in their time if there's no money in it, well, then there's no big loss if that community doesn't have that site, as apparently no one cares.
I get that ads bring in money, but I think that every other unethical thing does as well, like underpaying people for their labor. I'm sure that there are a myriad of grey cases, where yes, the worker are exploited, but somehow the good is greater than that - and I do honestly mean this, I don't think the world is black and white. I detest ads however, and if I could wish them out of existence, they would already be gone. And I honestly feel that I don't mind anything that goes with it - things existed before, and will so after.
For an individual, an informational website like that has little value which is why donations or payments do not work. But some communities are so large that the total value that the sites provide is significant. Ads are the best tool to capture this value.
Without ads, there'd be much fewer sites for gaming communities because hosting and maintaining them for free is too expensive.
> Yes, I hear the comments saying “maybe they shouldn’t exist if they can’t monetize without ads”, but I’m not sure I agree. There are many that just wouldn’t survive with donations alone, and a subscription model may not make sense.
Selfishly, it could be seen as good for those of us who block ads, that they exist. Let other folks “pay” for the services I enjoy.
And I do think there’s a real gap below what I’ll actually get the credit card out for, and the services I use. Some things are just nice to have but not really worth performing a transaction over. Various one-off informational sites, video game wikis especially. Dark souls would have been kind of a pain without fextralife!
But, ads came pretty early on the internet. And one of the annoying things about them is that the non-ad-funded didn’t fully form. Who knows what business model would be available if ads hadn’t sucked up all the oxygen?
Maybe it is impossible that an ecosystem to pay for your Animal Crossing site could have grown. But we’ll probably never know.
Suppose web ads were banned tomorrow. How would sites adapt?
Many sites will shut down. A few sites would probably go Wikipedia style and ask for donations, run by the generosity of a few.
But I think the vast majority of remaining sites will become paid walled gardens, kind of like what we have with TV these days. I don't think this is a better web.
Any dramatic change like banning ads in a day is destined to cause waves. I’m more interested in whether we’d end up in a better place a couple years out.
> In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own.
> So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far
A site that has to rely on ads to survive doesn't have a viable business model, or in your case interesting enough/in demand enough content.
I was stuck at an airport. I downloaded a free backgammon app on my iPhone, to kill some time.
It showed me ads between every game.
The ads were mostly for other apps. Most of those apps were games. Games that involved implied incestuous rape, non-consensual voyeurism, and other highly repulsive things.
I just wanted to play backgammon. I uninstalled the app (thankfully, that's an easy thing to do on iOS, for now...).
My main reason for blocking ads at this point, is because the ads that get served on what should be otherwise inoffensive websites, contain vile imagery or otherwise offensive content. Seriously, I get that they put one ad for toe fungus next to the ad they really want you to click on because the toe fungus draws your eye in, but I don't need this shit in my life.
Paying doesn't actually solve the problem. Some time ago I bought "Angry Birds classic" app on iOS - it's a paid app that promised to bring back the "old" Angry Birds before it turned to crap.
On first launch I was met with a mandatory "privacy" policy I couldn't decline that was asking me to consent to being spied upon. I ended up getting a refund through Apple.
Sure it does, there are definitely exceptions and Angry Birds is among them. And your example is probably from a while back, since you can disable tracking on iOS from 2019 or so.
I intentionally find products where I can pay. I like YouTube, and I gladly pay for it to not see ads. It's a simple transaction, they provide a service - I pay for it. Sure, you can complain about sponsored content and other crap, but overall YouTube premium experience is great. Whenever I want something to play on my phone - I find a cheap game and just spend 2-5 dollars. In some of the free games, I intentionally spend money on cosmetics to support developers. Without this relationship, you are just a non-paying user who brings no value, and you have misaligned incentives with the app developers.
So I don't understand the mental gymnastics of well paid people (given the audience of hackernews) for why they don't want to pay a few dollars. This way you would support people who provide value to you and dictate how the industry should evolve. Instead, we have a Guac-A-Mole game with advertisers and complain every other day on forums.
I didn't mind seeing ads. I knew I was signing up for some kind of advertising.
But why does every other ad have to be not only pornographic, but offensively so? Why is it okay for them to hide a little "x" for dismissing their offensiveness?
I have the same problem with blogs and news sites at this point. I wouldn't mind leaving the ads enabled, except that they are very often not only distracting, but offensive. Someone emails me a link to a work-relevant new story, I click the link, and the page is loaded with pictures of women in bikinis, toe fungus, or other gross things. Why? This perfectly safe for work news story is now a case study in hostile work environment.
Trying to maximize for the highest cpm bidder, rather than trying to maximize for actually showing the most ads, is why the publishing industry is having to deal with ad blockers. It's the same as when napster became a challenge to exploitative pricing for CDs by music publishers. iTunes broke that mold by resetting the pricing on the supply side to actually match the demand side, and sucked a lot of the wind out of the demand for piracy. Streaming only took that further.
Content publishers could find ways to make ads less offensive, less intrusive, and safer for consumers (even the FBI is now recommending ad blockers because of the risks of ad networks run amok), and they would take much of the wind out of the demand for ad-blockers. Won't eliminate it, but would certainly dial things down.
Instead, they just keep adding more layers. More ads, more interruptions, more distractions, more offensive content. And then they complain? Come on.
Because again, that's their incentive. They use whatever ads they get paid more for. Worst case, they are going to lose frustrated users like you, and make much more on others. Products that want to bring a better user experience, just can't survive, because even well paid users can't justify a couple of dollars for their service. For games there's Apple Arcade, for news - Apple News. They have some decent alternatives. Support great products that you like.
If you ever heard your friends complaining about the amount of ads they get on their phones and computers, gladly spend a while to help them install something like Ublock Origin. Let the less techy public know there is a way out.
Yep (and be pragmatic/emphatic, a lot of this stuff can seem obscure to non-techies).
My partner/wife is a long-time iPhone fan. I never tried to convert her, but she is on the point of switching to Android because she can't use Firefox on iOS.
It's completely absurd too - to discard a perfectly fine device otherwise, just because it cannot block ads, or at least, cannot run uBlock Origin (for blocking cookie-banners, social annoyances, etc).
What are the features missing then? The main one I can see is edit PDFs directly[0], but I'd bet money that Mozilla wouldn't implement that on iOS anyways.
FF can largely do exactly the same thing they do on Desktop to attract people: create a privacy-focused browser (if that's even what they're doing) and things like syncing your bookmarks, passwords, using Firefox VPN, and blocking ads.
I'm almost afraid that if the userbase of effective ad blocking gets big enough, large firms like google will put even more resources into the anti-ad blocking like what is happening with Chrome's new plugin api.
I feel like letting people enjoy the ads if they don't know any better is a little smoke screen for people who do know better.
Or they could boycott sites and services with the most intrusive ads. Ad blocking just encourages escalation, whereas a boycott of the hosting site sends a stronger and more ethical signal.
Recently setup a W11 VFIO VM, even on its own MITM'd vNIC with DPI and custom heurestics to cut most out the naughty MSFT traffic: it was still a dizzying assault of ads and noiseware; being transported from serene LTSC W10 to the cyberpunk advertisment plaza of W11 was like my brain segfaulting.
I won't lie: I could barely think with all the attention-grabbing, adtech bloat. Scary!
Is there a way we can help people who don't know they're being exploited like this?
There isn’t really a way to take away ad blockers. Of course, a site can be made to not work with ad blockers, but then that’s their decision I guess. I’m happy to not use a service in that case.
"Pausing playback of a video or other processing in a background tab is useful to save energy. So only enable this add-on if you can afford it.
There are other ways to detect if a webpage is visible, e.g. onblur/onfocus. This add-on does not disable any of those other ways. So do not assume that this add-on will enhance your privacy."
I didn’t check, so they may have already accommodated me, but I’d really love a detailed write up of how the person that wrote this blog post solved each listed problem.
Even though large tracts of the 'net and many old and famous sites have fallen or may fall into the grip of the ad industry and all the odious apparatus of ad tech, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the web, we shall fight on the browsers and apps, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the routers, we shall defend our privacy and sanity, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on our phones, we shall fight on PCs, we shall fight in the OS space and in the repositories, we shall fight in the internet of things; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this project or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our users beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the power of free software, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new decentralised 'net, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
I'm about to reach this peak of enlightenment. I'm almost there. And yes, many family friends (non-technical and even a tad technical ones) are super happy with me setting up some form of ad-blocking, at least in their browsers. The internet has become a scary place.
Always have been. Online ads were obnoxious since the existence of them. And in the before times, there were no ad blockers, and there were popups, then pop-unders, I had no idea WTF was going on. And the first ad blockers made browsing noticeably slower too.
Yes, ads suck. However, here's my take on advertising:
Modern economic markets are a decentralized process via which we decide how to best allocate resources. For this to work, we need a mechanism that allows information to be broadcasted through the system to ensure local decisions make sense. (In fact, information asymmetry is one of the main failure modes of modern markets).
So, yeah, advertising sucks, but 1. it's an important part of our market economy and 2. it therefore adds a lot of value to the world.
I actually have a hard time reconciling the reasoning above with how icky, insidious and unpleasant marketing feels when I get subjected to it.
Relevant, non-obtrusive ads are kinda sort of fine, or at best bearable. What sucks is inability to opt out of specific ads due to inappropriateness or irrelevance. I need to to tell YouTube every couple of weeks that I don't want to see betting company ads just because I watch NBA and soccer videos. No matter how much I say this is "Not Appropriate" or "Not Relevant", every two weeks, there is Emmanuel Adebayor telling me to use some betting app (it's always the same ad). I finally caved and installed Smarttube on my Android TV.
People say that we won’t have any of the stuff we have on the new internet if we block ads and “don’t pay for it somehow” but I liked the old internet better, so this is win/win.
Something you can block too, but isn't mentioned in the article are sponsored content ads in videos, use SponsorBlock for that.
That said I'm far from this radical, even though it's mostly because I hate the troubleshooting when a site breaks and I'm trying to find what caused it.
I used to avoid blocking ads on principle -- a sort of "social contract" thing since I'm consuming ad-supported content. Then one day I found my kids' PC had its homepage changed to some scamware site.
Now I block ads on all my family machines. They broke the social contract.
You know, I don't even want to deprive people of money; as a yuppie who has money nowadays I am not opposed to paying for things I use if I could avoid the tracking and propaganda of ads.
YouTube Premium, for example, is pretty solid for the most part, and I'm happy to spend some money to support the creators I like, but they kind of fucked that up because now I have to deal with the endless ads for RayCon or ExpressVPN or SkillShare. It's a bit frustrating because I though I paid for "no ads", when in reality I paid for "we're hiding the ads you could have easily blocked for free".
Sure, but what I'm kind of getting at is that I would like to pay money for the ad to not be there in the first place. What annoys me is that YouTube Premium only gets you halfway.
Yeah it is a difficult place for YouTube as they would need to enforce rules that say the video maker cannot have sponsored content/ads within the video and I can't see that going down well as I highly doubt YouTube would be in the position to pay similar to cover the ad placement loss.
From what I have heard, sponsorships are well worth for the creators. Usually bringing in at least the amount that YT otherwise gave them, and often more.
You have to understand where the ad is coming from. With Premium, you play YouTube to not interject extra ads. They can't really do anything with the content itself.
They are however in power to make a rule that prohibits third-party advertising in videos, delete any videos that break the rule and ban repeat offenders. Every forum back in the day explicitly prohibited any kind of commercial content - I'm actually surprised every social network is allowing all kinds of commercial promotion, even more so considering they are themselves in the business of advertising (thus unofficial ads are actually eating into their bottom-line).
I use ublock origin with Firefox on Android and desktop plus a pihole. On my phone I have setup wireguard to VPN back to my house so I have pihole everywhere I go.
I wonder why so many people feel the urge to justify blocking ads? Did we have the same reaction over a decade ago for installing antivirus software and depriving the poor malware makers of their revenue, or email server admins blocking spam and depriving the spammers of their revenue?
There is no difference between ads and malware - both are code that uses your machine to make it do something undesirable, and often stalk you (modern adtech is often way more powerful than the spyware of the old days) in addition. It is your absolute right to block all malicious code.
Operating systems mostly wisened up to their earlier vulnerabilities and patched most of the avenues malicious code could load itself on your machine. Browsers countered the early abuses of the pop-up window feature by blocking them and nobody complained. Operating systems and browsers should include ad- and spyware-blocking by default just like they block conventional binary viruses.
The only reason the above is no longer possible (despite it being technically - like pop-up window blockers were implemented almost 2 decades ago) is that ad- and spyware-tech has now consumed browsers and operating systems. The business model of IT is no longer to provide valuable functionality to the user in exchange for payment, it's to provide first-party spyware and spam platform, with "functionality" being merely a necessary evil to keep the user coming back (which they'd rather remove if they had another way of convincing you to keep looking at the screen).
Nearly all of the things in this list can be blocked by simply disabling JavaScript, or selectively enabling it for certain origins. NoScript is a fantastic extension for this. I don't even have any other ad blockers installed. Just blocking JS and I don't get any of this.
UTM tracking is probably the least of your concerns - all it does is aid in campaign analytics for the website you're visiting, it would do nothing to the third-party behavior and activity trackers that you're likely trying to avoid.
UTM tags in that sense are collected on the client side by tag manager or google analytics, which would be blocked by an ad-blocking extension anyways. UTM tags can/often are collected by the website themselves to do first-party near-100% confidence campaign analytics.
So what you're saying is that there is plenty of other spyware (some of it server-side) that freeloads off those UTM query params? Sounds like another good reason to strip them?
That may be the case for blog sites, but big companies just directly ingest it into their application or internal analytics platform for a dashboard of which sources were the biggest contributors.
For example - a company sends out a newsletter with a link to a blog post goes out to 20k subscribers with UTM params, but those UTM params end up getting 100k clicks, 80k with a referer of "news.ycombinator.com". This means that someone posted it on HN with those UTM params, which indicates that they should continue to prioritize that newsletter, since the audience is likely to cause a snowball effect of traffic and thus growth.
Is that a bad thing? Knowing that traffic came from x source so that they can properly route future resources to the those high-impact sources?
Surprised to encounter someone more vehemently against ads than me. But I appreciate the sentiment, and bookmarked the site so I can try some of those things myself.
I pay for what I want to look at, not with my time and attention, but money, the way God intended it.
As much as I hate ads, as a thought experiment I wonder how much less or more the world would have progressed without that form of information dissemination (paid advertising specifically).
The adblocker settings can also be used to block various distracting content recommendation sections of sites you frequently use, if you want to just see the content you explicitly wanted without having your attention hijacked/tempted with clickbait from the same site. On some sites you can configure it in some options, but for others a simple filter can do it.
For example, for me the youtube shorts section, or the stackoverflow 'hot network questions' section are things like that; they are "almost ads" in some sense.
I pay for AdGuard (not an ad, I promise!) for Android. Other than that unlock Origin like you said, plus SponsorBlock on mobile and PC. ReVanced patch of Twitter and YouTube on mobile to block ads there (though I also pay for YouTube Plus), and "Orange TV Ad Free" for Twitch.
I'll look at throwing together a repository in the model of the `awesome-<tool>` set that's more comprehensive than my specific use case and open it up to contribution for tools I'm not familiar with.
You could wear glasses with polarized lenses outside. If its rotation aligns with the LCD, you won't see the advertisement on the screen, only a black square in place of it.
Surprisingly enough this is not the case, at least in Europe. I sign up for the majority of websites/apps using my primary email but make an effort to go to the account settings and immediately opt-out of any BS emails/notifications.
Every once in a while something slips through (which I make sure to email their DPO as per the GDPR and ask what's going on, and they make up an excuse on how a misconfiguration/etc resulted in me getting spammed, but at least it puts downwards pressure on this behavior), but it's manageable - my inbox is clean and averaged over a few years I get a spam maybe once a month.
Targeted Advertising serves a valuable role in free markets by giving exposure to innovative and novel products that improve people's lives. Without advertising, there would be no playing field for new products to challenge incumbents. Everybody would end up sticking to products they know without ever knowing about superior alternatives like in some kind of communist dystopia. Food for thought.
I fully on agree on all the points and I try to protect my home (network), but I feel that’s a lost cause both from technical (e.g. dns on http/3) and psychological (more subtle and mixed with the actual content) aspects. My only hope is to try to digitally vaccinate my kids that they become more self aware on what they are exposed to.
I think there will be almost no posters here to defend ads, which is really something, given that this is a tech site and a whole lot of the sector is ad-driven.
Hopefully this indicates that there will be room for something better soon.
Or maybe it just indicates that the ad guys have so throughly beat us that they don’t even feel the need to come argue anymore.
Different topics suit different venues. HN, like any similar forum, is not suited to objective debate on all topics. On any forum, there are some topics where a broad consensus is held and maintained by participants. Advertising is one of those topics on HN.
Then there are those ads in YouTube videos and blog articles purporting to offer the reader something valuable when, in fact, they're packed with falsehoods ("xyz changed my life, and if you want to check it out, please click on this affiliate link").
While I can't block ads on the radio, on the internet, I make a point of blocking every ad I can.
There are other ways to reward an author or a website. For instance, I block ads on sites like Haaretz, but I do subscribe to them because I believe quality content deserves compensation.