Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

This is the place to discuss issues with the acceptable ads list like a website no longer complying with the criteria.
lewisje
Posts: 2743
Joined: Mon Jun 14, 2010 12:07 pm

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by lewisje »

Silico wrote:
lewisje wrote:Let's keep the free ad-supported Web, where the only major charges are for access and (maybe) data, not each pageview or something...
This is only feasible if most people's shopping habits are highly influenced by ads in online media, especially for high-value high-margin purchases. Do you fall into this category, or are you relying on remaining a minority exception?
Ironically I, like most fervent ABP users, am in the minority, else the future you either desire or merely regard inevitable would have already come.
There's a buzzin' in my brain I really can't explain; I think about it before they make me go to bed.
Silico
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:31 am

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Silico »

lewisje wrote:Ironically I, like most fervent ABP users, am in the minority, else the future you either desire or merely regard inevitable would have already come.
Yes, users of adblockers are still a (growing) minority. But there's a bigger (and growing) proportion who don't block online ads but simply ignore or don't click them, except on search engines. Together they've been enough to throw newspapers into crisis, testing paywall options. Change is happening, incrementally.
Guest

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Guest »

Yes, like the rest of ad blocking enthusiasts, I (personally) benefit from an ad-supported Internet with ads I never see.

I, and those I know, completely purge our online lives of ads. I've even purged the ads from ad-supported mobile apps on the phones of friends and family. We aren't annoyed, our time isn't wasted, our resources aren't squandered, and our decision making process isn't poisoned by advertising.

We're free riders in every sense of the word. We get every benefit of the free web without having to endure the visual diarrhea which contaminates most browsers. Even though we aren't the types to respond to advertising or the lies of advertisers, we still aren't seeing the ads which most users put up with. (I've never understood this argument - some people who hate ads and don't respond to ads insist that everybody else see them too, as if one person being kicked in the balls is a reason for why it must happen to everybody else)

So, just because the status quo is in the interest of my corner of the world, doesn't make it a policy which scales. If we're forced to choose between quality content competing for subscription dollars and garbage and quality content alike being monetized by an intrusive and dishonest social ill, I'll take the micropayments.

For those who say that micropayments are intrusive of privacy: advertising is far worse.

The chicken littles are forgetting one thing: not every site exists as a commercial enterprise. Combining FOSS with shared hosting is fast and cheap and becoming faster and cheaper every year. Some of the best sites on the Internet aren't commercial enterprises. This was one of them (prior to the "acceptable ads" sellout). There are models and purposes out there revolving around mutual sharing and discussion, as opposed to treating every visitor as a monetized consumer.
Silico
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:31 am

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Silico »

"Guest", I agree with your sentiments that advertising is intrinsically bad because it doesn't tell the whole truth.

But I believe that it's only the intrusive forms that need to be wiped out. I don't have a major problem with ads that people can seek out, or when ads which the recipient is likely to be interested in are pushed in ways that they can peruse at their convenience (e.g. targeted direct mail).

This is as long as people stay wary of the tricks that ads use. Preferably there's also a healthy parallel ecosystem of independent information and advice from professionals and friends, including organic results on search engines (that are smart enough to ignore SEO fakery).

If I have organic results, it's not often I want to look at results ordered solely by how much the search engine earns from a click. It does however provide one summary of vendors keen for my business. I'd prefer this list of ads to only display when I choose. This is an option that ABP should consider adding. There are some circumstances when I'd click a "show ads" item in the ABP button's drop-down menu.

If search engines displayed a "view all relevant ads" link, ABP shouldn't block either the link or the page it goes to.
The chicken littles are forgetting one thing: not every site exists as a commercial enterprise. Combining FOSS with shared hosting is fast and cheap and becoming faster and cheaper every year. Some of the best sites on the Internet aren't commercial enterprises.
There are few ad-free and charge-free online sources of advice of any size. Sites with professional original content, and large sites with user-generated content, both need funds to operate, while owners of less popular fourms and blogs usually can't resist adding the magic ad markup that gives them income at the expense of their users.
lewisje
Posts: 2743
Joined: Mon Jun 14, 2010 12:07 pm

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by lewisje »

Silico wrote:There are some circumstances when I'd click a "show ads" item in the ABP button's drop-down menu.
Such a thing already exists: It's called "disable on this site" or "disable on this page" (for the Firefox extension), and the Chrome extension has an "Enabled for this site" checkbox; after changing the settings, all you need to do is reload the page.
There's a buzzin' in my brain I really can't explain; I think about it before they make me go to bed.
Silico
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:31 am

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Silico »

lewisje wrote:
Silico wrote:There are some circumstances when I'd click a "show ads" item in the ABP button's drop-down menu.
Such a thing already exists: It's called "disable on this site" or "disable on this page" (for the Firefox extension), and the Chrome extension has an "Enabled for this site" checkbox; after changing the settings, all you need to do is reload the page.
Aren't the page and site disable options sticky? I want a single button that does a one-off allow and refresh.
lewisje
Posts: 2743
Joined: Mon Jun 14, 2010 12:07 pm

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by lewisje »

Silico wrote:Aren't the page and site disable options sticky? I want a single button that does a one-off allow and refresh.
I'm not sure Palant would want another button associated with ABP, and I don't think that's even an option in the Chrome extension, but it would be nice to have a sort of "temp enable" option that goes into effect immediately and goes away when you leave the page (alternatively, when you close the tab); something like this is already implemented in ScriptNo.
There's a buzzin' in my brain I really can't explain; I think about it before they make me go to bed.
Silico
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:31 am

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Silico »

lewisje wrote:
Silico wrote:Aren't the page and site disable options sticky? I want a single button that does a one-off allow and refresh.
I'm not sure Palant would want another button associated with ABP
Sorry, when I said button I meant an item in the drop-down menu from the main ABP button.
Guest

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Guest »

Silico wrote:"Guest", I agree with your sentiments that advertising is intrinsically bad because it doesn't tell the whole truth.

But I believe that it's only the intrusive forms that need to be wiped out. I don't have a major problem with ads that people can seek out, or when ads which the recipient is likely to be interested in are pushed in ways that they can peruse at their convenience (e.g. targeted direct mail).[./quote]

Classified advertising or requested promotional materials are another matter entirely. Classified advertising is a misnomer for a facilitated marketplace, and promotional materials are fine as long as people are requesting them and understanding the inherent bias. If somebody likes getting catalogs from a merchant, then they should be opting in to those catalogs.

Direct mail is also intrinsically bad: All direct mail:

1. Is an unsolicited, consent-free incursion into private property. If you threw an unwanted soda can onto somebody's property, you would be cited for littering. When a marketer does it, it's business as usual.
2. Forces the recipient to spend time sorting through it.
3. Occasionally causes wanted mail to be thrown out in a heap of newsprint circulars.
4. Is a manipulative poke, by definition.

Targeted direct mail is even worse.

Advertising can't be targeted without marketing creeps compiling and selling huge volumes of information about all of us. The largest spying operations in the world are not run by repressive governments, but rather, by intrusive marketers who have no concept of consent and no respect for human dignity.

I receive maybe two or three wanted pieces of mail a year. The rest is a never-ending stream of trash I am forced to check in the rare event I get sent a jury duty summons or a notice from the DMV. If there were a way to redirect official mail to another channel I would never check my mailbox. The SnR of a postal mailbox by someone living an electronic lifestyle is as bad or worse as a heavily spammed email inbox, and unlike spam, daily sorting through postal junk consumes a lot of time.

I have found a solution to that trash. When I receive it, I stamp it "refused" in accordance with postal regulations, and deposit it into the community outbox. Hypocritical postal employees have asked me why I am using the community outbox as a trash can - and understandably so, because they have to sort through it. I then ask them why they use my mailbox as a trashcan, and let them know that I am upset that I have to sort through it. I suspect that the irony of the postal service being one large trash conduit is lost on them.
Silico wrote:This is as long as people stay wary of the tricks that ads use. Preferably there's also a healthy parallel ecosystem of independent information and advice from professionals and friends, including organic results on search engines (that are smart enough to ignore SEO fakery).

If I have organic results, it's not often I want to look at results ordered solely by how much the search engine earns from a click. It does however provide one summary of vendors keen for my business. I'd prefer this list of ads to only display when I choose. This is an option that ABP should consider adding. There are some circumstances when I'd click a "show ads" item in the ABP button's drop-down menu.
All the search engines have been polluted through the SEO arms race.

If I want a search result free from the effects of marketing then I have to ask it a math question.
Silico wrote:If search engines displayed a "view all relevant ads" link, ABP shouldn't block either the link or the page it goes to.
Why wouldn't an ad blocker block an ad? The history of this project goes back to geeks who hated ads and wanted them gone. That is why it is AdBlock. Leaving the link in place forces advertising on people who don't want any threshold of exposure to advertising. Anyone who does want to expose themselves can use the whitelisting features.
Silico wrote:There are few ad-free and charge-free online sources of advice of any size. Sites with professional original content, and large sites with user-generated content, both need funds to operate, while owners of less popular fourms and blogs usually can't resist adding the magic ad markup that gives them income at the expense of their users.
What about a site like Youtube? Youtube is full of people sharing quality information because they want to share quality information. When I had to do an electrical project last weekend, I found several electricians explaining exactly what I needed in good detail. They did it because they apparently like making videos and helping people. The videos from the howto farming studios might have had better production quality, but the information content was terrible.

I've heard there are ads on Youtube. I've never seen one. Individual contributors don't need advertising to share relevant advice. You might say that Youtube needs it to cover bandwidth, but in the absence of advertising, where a real need existed, it wouldn't be a problem to establish a community-based site to serve as a replacement conduit for meaningful information (YT is mostly dreck and nonsense). As for bandwidth, that is easy - it would take a couple of us a couple weeks to build browser plugins for loading swarm-hosted media. The P2P networks don't seem to have a problem serving up multiple-gigabyte MKVs to everyone who hits them.

How is it that so many torrent sites are both free and free of advertising, despite handling traffic volumes measured in petabytes?
korleonis

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by korleonis »

Jax2 wrote:First, I'm interested in whether or not the mods here will leave this post up. I'm hoping they do, but not counting on it. .............
Understand the way you feel. But when one website shuts down another will take it's place and perform the same service. Sorry my friend you are going to lose this one.
xanodyne
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat Jul 24, 2010 11:20 pm

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by xanodyne »

People have been claiming that ad blocking will kill the internet for at least the six years that I've been blocking ads, yet there's more content than ever, more ad revenue than ever[1], and it's projected to increase a lot over the next few years.

We are far away from having too little content on the internet. In fact, we have the opposite problem. Advertising enables a lot of low quality content through content farms, which makes it increasingly difficult to find relevant content, and Google has had to make significant changes to their search algorithms over the years to address this.

OP, if it really bothers you, please provide a list of your web sites and I'll make sure never to visit them.

[1] http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/o ... ril2012jpg
Silico
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:31 am

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Silico »

Guest wrote: Direct mail is also intrinsically bad: All direct mail:

1. Is an unsolicited, consent-free incursion into private property. If you threw an unwanted soda can onto somebody's property, you would be cited for littering. When a marketer does it, it's business as usual.
2. Forces the recipient to spend time sorting through it.
3. Occasionally causes wanted mail to be thrown out in a heap of newsprint circulars.
4. Is a manipulative poke, by definition.

Targeted direct mail is even worse.

Yes direct mail is a wasteful, pushed, and hard to opt-out way of selling you things. Ideally everyone should only receive the information they've requested or bought. But we live in societies and economies where "build it and they will come" doesn't work very well, and the meek go broke. Pushing stuff works, so the aim should be to first reduce the most intrusive ways: door-to-door, telemarketing, animated billboards, and ads that interrupt media.

With direct mail I can look at it when I want, and deal with it in no more than a few seconds. Sure targeting has privacy concerns, but the more carefully a piece of direct mail is targeted, the less likely it will waste both my time and the planet's resources. I agree there needs to be better ways of opting-out and penalizing transgressors.

There's no environmental concern when marketing material is sent through email. Unfortunately spammers destroyed this marketing channel, though some start-ups are currently trying to revive it through electronic mailboxes that charge for a stamp. It'll be interesting to see whether this will succeed, or whether it will fail because no-one will be interested in checking their inboxes, instead preferring the opt-in communications of Facebook and Twitter posts.

How does the organization who pays your salary market itself?
Guest wrote:
Silico wrote:If search engines displayed a "view all relevant ads" link, ABP shouldn't block either the link or the page it goes to.
Why wouldn't an ad blocker block an ad? The history of this project goes back to geeks who hated ads and wanted them gone. That is why it is AdBlock. Leaving the link in place forces advertising on people who don't want any threshold of exposure to advertising. Anyone who does want to expose themselves can use the whitelisting features.
A separate "relevant ads" page and link is just like a newspaper's classifieds section and its listing in the page index. If these ad-only pages are excluded from search engine indexing, and are only accessible from clearly described links, I see no problem with ABP whitelisting them by default, because the viewing is already opt-in. As you said:
Guest wrote: Classified advertising or requested promotional materials are another matter entirely. Classified advertising is a misnomer for a facilitated marketplace, and promotional materials are fine as long as people are requesting them and understanding the inherent bias. If somebody likes getting catalogs from a merchant, then they should be opting in to those catalogs.
Guest wrote:
Silico wrote:There are few ad-free and charge-free online sources of advice of any size. Sites with professional original content, and large sites with user-generated content, both need funds to operate, while owners of less popular fourms and blogs usually can't resist adding the magic ad markup that gives them income at the expense of their users.
What about a site like Youtube? Youtube is full of people sharing quality information because they want to share quality information. When I had to do an electrical project last weekend, I found several electricians explaining exactly what I needed in good detail. They did it because they apparently like making videos and helping people. The videos from the howto farming studios might have had better production quality, but the information content was terrible.
I'd say the creators of almost all of those videos would have turned on YouTube's monetization option, which causes ads to be displayed on their videos, from which they get a revenue share. People like to be rewarded for their efforts, and few would have concerns about imposing ads on their viewers, even if they block them themselves ("those who don't block ads must find them useful, so I may as well get my cut").

I really don't think altruism takes us far in providing services of any complexity or quality.
Guest wrote: How is it that so many torrent sites are both free and free of advertising, despite handling traffic volumes measured in petabytes?
Are there really a lot of ad-free torrent sites? And do torrent sites really transfer a large amount of data when the media files, and often the torrent files themselves, are hosted off-site. Most just provide a search index.
Silico
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:31 am

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by Silico »

xanodyne wrote: We are far away from having too little content on the internet. In fact, we have the opposite problem. Advertising enables a lot of low quality content through content farms, which makes it increasingly difficult to find relevant content, and Google has had to make significant changes to their search algorithms over the years to address this.
I believe that unless workable monetization methods are found, we're going to run short of quality content.

Monetitzation of quality material via advertising is not only a problem because people inexplicably show interest in the content over the ads, but because it corrupts the quality of that content:
  • Over-pagination,
  • Encourages variations of the same content to be republished over and over to provide space for ads,
  • Provides an incentive to hold back on editorial coverage to force companies to tell their stories through ad-buys,
  • Causes a preference for video and audio over text because in-stream ads are harder to ignore than display ads,
  • Often requires media companies to sell directly to the companies they write about.
lewisje
Posts: 2743
Joined: Mon Jun 14, 2010 12:07 pm

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by lewisje »

Guest wrote:I've heard there are ads on Youtube. I've never seen one.
Try browsing without blocking ads; you'll find some inside the videos and others just above the right sidebar. Not all videos have ads, but not all that do are monetized at the request of the uploader (some are monetized for the benefit for a purported copyright holder of some content, as determined by a Content-ID match, if that holder has decided to monetize "infringing" videos rather than blocking them outright).
There's a buzzin' in my brain I really can't explain; I think about it before they make me go to bed.
jokerz

Re: Adblock, and others like it will ruin the internet for all.

Post by jokerz »

OP will definitely lose this one

what has destroyed the internet is the fact that so many people have been suckered in by third party ad servers that use javascript to serve ads. There lies the internets entire downfall.

these damn javascript ads are what is responsible for the easy spreading of viruses and malware, not to mention it allows all these behemoth corporations to spy on your every move and track you across the web. And people wander why we want them gone and out of our lives!?

our world, economy, and internet wouldnt be so f%%^%%^d up if people didnt willingly put some third party script from some arrogant spying corporation on their websites.

go and visit any given site on the web and what do you see now? Third party running scripts serving ads and analytics. Basically SPYWARE.

what is stopping the OP here from serving THEIR OWN static html link ads and banner ads? NOTHING except laziness - you would rather take the easy way out and throw some corporate spyware on your site to earn a few dollars, when if you put in a little extra effort you can get your own advertisers and serve your own ads not running on javascript :D

see how simple it is for webmasters to take back the internet if properly educated? :)

STOP serving javascript ads from third party companies! This is what has destroyed the ENTIRE INTERNET AND CAUSES US TO LOSE OUR RIGHTS DAILY
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