Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice.
Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).
Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.
The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?
> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).
How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.
I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.
I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.
It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...
I'm not much worried right now. I'm worried about where we are going, especially with machine learning. Take a look at the story of Target identifying when a girl was pregnant before her own father knew. Then apply this to any area where you have any reason at all to keep a secret. Maybe you are gay with parents who will rather you be homeless than living in their home. Maybe you have a mental illness but rather the rest of the world not know about it. Maybe you like democracy in a country where you aren't allowed to. Eventually they will find ways to tease this information out with all the data they have tracked about us.
Are you doing peer reviewed reproductible research, with both open source code and data and tyying to disprobe your hypothesis? </s>
Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0].
I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes.
Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Attrib. Richard Feynman (|p| < 0.05)
The fact that "[you] can't see how it would influence [you] much" is one of the features of biases.
I used to go to the library for this sort of thing.
My mom works in a library and they are in the process of throwing all the books away, and creating 'social spaces'.
As much as the Internet has made information easy to get, there are a lot of high quality publications that I can no longer access eg research papers, art and design books.
In the US, sure. But there are lots and lots of various forms of payment to handle things like subscriptions. See Boletos[0] in Brazil for example. Many other countries around the world have ways of paying for things online without credit cards.
I think there's a distinction to be made between advertising and marketing, at least the way I define them.
Advertising is about making consumers aware of a product or service that they may use if they were aware of it. This seems reasonable and generally beneficial.
Marketing is about using psychological techniques to manipulate consumers preferences such that they want to consume products and services that they otherwise wouldn't.
Unfortunately this segment of the industry had grown rapidly over the past few decades and techniques to exploit our cognitive deficiencies have improved tremendously.
Yeah, it's just too bad you're the only person in the world to define advertising and marketing that way, I guess? At least among people who know what they're talking about.
The issue with subscriptions is that they get very expensive if you want to subscribe to all the blogs you're reading.
Maybe micropayments are a better alternative, but the current implementations all rise the barrier of entry in a way that makes them undesirable.
I have tried to think of a better system and I have written it down as a free "micropayment standard". You can find it here, I am looking forward to any comments.
"Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists" all manipulate the thoughts you have.
We don't live in a bubble; we're a product of our surroundings. No aspect of the world is benign.
The fact that ads may "change you" is not an argument against advertising, because it doesn't distinguish advertising from anything else, at all.
It seems to me there is a moral judgement happening here. But, what is the appropriate way to distinguish moral manipulation from immoral manipulation?
Communication – even honest communication – is designed to influence other people. I'm trying to "change you" with this message. Should this message be blocked?
There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation.
Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question.
One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content".
If the internet was meant to be a medium for paid content, then why has so much content been shared through it "for free" beginning in the late 80's/early 90's and continuing even today?
I certainly do not know. What I remember is that only a minority of the population were avid www users when the public www first appeared in 1993.
So, in 1993, why upload "free content" that would otherwise be under paid subscription?
For the novelty of it?
To jumpstart the www?
To entice people to use the www?
Regardless of the reason, the end result is that the genie is out of the bottle.
The sharing of content "for free" started early on and continued unabated, even as www usage grew.
Today, if an internet subscriber seeks "content" she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone, except her access provider.
Greeting users with a deluge of advertising is not going to change the facts: users are continually presented with free content that they once would have had to pay for. The deluge of ads is not a "cost" of the content. It's just a new source of revenue for those who want to play www middleman (who should be very thankful for all the money they have made without ever having had to create any real content). At the same time, as a result the signal to noise ratio has become a serious problem for many www users.
(Users are also presented with enormous amounts of fake, garbage "content". That only highlights how open and inexpensive content distribution has become.)
It is undeniable that users can block the ads and other garbage and keep the content. The content is not going away. And the www will still keep growing.
With the barriers to distribution so low, it is no surprise that users should have to filter out some garbage.
The only surprise is how long it's taken them to start doing it.
What's nice is that filtering can be automated, in the same way the generation of ads and fake content have been automated.
There was time in the history of email before the ubiquitous use of spam filters. And there is a time in the history of the www before the ubiquitous use of ad blockers. That time is coming to a close.
"Today, if an internet subscriber seeks 'content' she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone."
If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s.
Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here:
That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.
There are many other ways to advertise other than showing a commercial. I also try to protect myself by avoiding ads, but other tactics like product placements in tv shows and movies is making it hard to avoid everything..
Online advertising is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons, where that commons is the general public's attention. Any individual publisher or advertiser can do a little bit better by surpassing what the general public finds acceptable, but when enough of them do this some of the general public resorts to ad blockers - causing overall ad revenues to decline, which causes more publishers and advertisers to push the boundaries in search of higher revenue, which causes more people to install ad blockers...
No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.
At the end of the day, we all agree that shining shit is their job.
Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined to try.
Let's add a third: security. You can't let a 3rd party advertiser send arbitrary web content to your customers, and then just wash your hands of it and say "It wasn't us, it was the ad network" when it eventually gets used to deliver malware to your customers.
It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."
I don't know about that. I'm a consumer. I use the internet to search for things I'm considering for purchase. Tires for my automobile, landscaping services, holiday trips. After searching (and prior to adblock sw), I'd see ads related to my searches. They were relevant.
Many (most?) ads are horsepucky and annoying. Some are not.
I am not defending ad-based models for dissemination of information and news as the one true way. Just disagreeing with your extreme statement.
That's actually an exceptionally useful way to think about this. The more intrusive are the ads you sell, the more valuable they are (to brands) - while the more intrusive they are, the more people will block them.
Of course, unless you are Google or Facebook, you have very little ability to lower the 'global' shittiness of ads, but you have a lot of ability to make your own ads more lucrative and targeted.
Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content.
Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.
One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place.
I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer.
The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for.
Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue.
But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.
Sometimes I do go for the content. Oftentimes this is only to be unable to access it because all the ads bring my browser to its knees, or even crash it.
Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem.
Instead I use an adblocker. And I try to be choosy about which ads I block, so that it's only the really obnoxious ones that kill my battery life or are a thinly veiled vehicle for digging through my kitchen wastebin for fingernail clippings to collect. I feel no sense of guilt about this.
If they don't want me accessing their site over this, and curating their ads to be less corrosive is not an option for whatever reason, then perhaps they can set up a special clickthrough agreement asking me to consent to abusive treatment before I view the content. Perhaps that will make it easier for us to negotiate a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.
I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.
The New York Times exists first as a print publication.
Wikipedia has never shown commercial ads.
HN doesn't show normal blockable ads.
Reddit is replaceable.
Xkcd doesn't show ads.
Really, I think those work better as examples of how little value advertising actually brings to the Internet.
The most of the content and value of sites like Wikipedia, Hacker News, and Reddit is generated by the users. I'd be interested to know the relationship between contributors and ad block use. If it turns out that a high percentage of contributing users make use of an ad blocker, then isn't that fair enough? Why should a contributor "pay" twice?
If the NYT online ads were as benign as their print ads with respect to tracking and profiling me, I wouldn't block them.
I also wonder why they treat the front page of their online site so different than the front page of the paper. Today I opened nytimes.com and 1/2 the window was filled with a Hilton ad. Have they ever filled have the front page (or even just the half above the fold) of the paper version with an ad?
So I'm not a fundamentalist that thinks advertising is evil. I probably am a fundamentalist when it comes to the ad-tech that watches what I do to opaquely build a profile around me.
> Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.
Why are you there then? The fact that you spend your time there, that you spend both your bandwidth, your cpu time, etc.. and theirs, means there's something "valuable", it's probably way less than a cent, but it's value.
That's the beauty of ads, even though the value isn't much, it's still enough. I don't want to pay 0.1 cent, but that ads does it for me.
> But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
That's freak, stop going there if you wish for their death!
If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market.
Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.
Things started to go downhill, and they consider themselves too big to die, too important for the current infrastructure. Any business will have this inertia - gripping their shaky hands on the past, and showing the fangs at the present and the grim future - it's like the will to survive of animals.
I agree. Their website is just a bitstream sent down the tube. How it's rendered is totally not their business. If I wanted to use Lynx to render everything in text or use that's my prerogative.
- 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads.
- Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords.
- Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading.
- Video ads that start playing automatically.
- The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch.
- Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it.
- Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer.
Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.
Most people probably would not install add blockers except that ad volume and lack of quality have reached the point where they make it difficult to browse the web. Installing an ad blocker is a necessary act of self defense.
In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion.
I don't see this as an issue. I've been blocking ads on the web for over a dozen years and now somehow it's an issue? No, it's not. The publishers who can't make it in a world where people increasingly use ad blockers won't and the ones who figure out how to make it will. Economics 101. I've been waiting for this play to start for awhile--it's amusing--but I'm not really interested in reading about idiots who see this as a moral issue. The advertising industry has had a good dozen years to reign unchecked. They've gotten used to having nice things that shouldn't have been theirs. Now, either adapt or die. Truthfully, no one outside of the advertising industry cares either one way or another.
It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to start ...
I agree with the parts that are visible. However, your data is being sold behind the scenes eg Verizon tracking you through a service you have paid for.
I take huge issue with that. I pay for cell phone service. I should not be used to derive additional revenue for another channel. It's single use not multi.
"It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life."
Sure, if you live in a cave. TV and movies are saturated with product placements. Grocers receive fees to give products better placement in the store. And it's amazing how many placements happen in health care--drug company sales reps are just the start of it.
Ad blockers are going to be like applying pesticides to insects. Those that don't die are just going to breed offspring that are that much harder to kill.
You can't afford to be too complacent because ad agencies know this too and will come at you sideways - 2nd hand advertising is going to become a recognised thing. Advertisers reaching you and me through celebrities we respect, through hijacking friends or just through corrupting children.
Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer"
Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials' advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)"
There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it.
So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
> the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them.
Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.
Readit News
Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).
Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.
The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?
How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.
I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.
I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...
I'm not much worried right now. I'm worried about where we are going, especially with machine learning. Take a look at the story of Target identifying when a girl was pregnant before her own father knew. Then apply this to any area where you have any reason at all to keep a secret. Maybe you are gay with parents who will rather you be homeless than living in their home. Maybe you have a mental illness but rather the rest of the world not know about it. Maybe you like democracy in a country where you aren't allowed to. Eventually they will find ways to tease this information out with all the data they have tracked about us.
If it is unconsciously influencing you how would you know if it is only doing so "a tiny amount"?
Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0].
I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes.
Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter:
The fact that "[you] can't see how it would influence [you] much" is one of the features of biases.Regards
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29
My mom works in a library and they are in the process of throwing all the books away, and creating 'social spaces'.
As much as the Internet has made information easy to get, there are a lot of high quality publications that I can no longer access eg research papers, art and design books.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boleto
Advertising is about making consumers aware of a product or service that they may use if they were aware of it. This seems reasonable and generally beneficial.
Marketing is about using psychological techniques to manipulate consumers preferences such that they want to consume products and services that they otherwise wouldn't.
Unfortunately this segment of the industry had grown rapidly over the past few decades and techniques to exploit our cognitive deficiencies have improved tremendously.
Though I've never heard "advertising" and "marketing" used to describe information content vs. persuasion, it would be a great shorthand.
Deleted Comment
Maybe micropayments are a better alternative, but the current implementations all rise the barrier of entry in a way that makes them undesirable.
I have tried to think of a better system and I have written it down as a free "micropayment standard". You can find it here, I am looking forward to any comments.
https://konstantinschubert.github.io/pennytoken-spec/
I am also working on a reference implementation over here: http://micropayment-service.boosted.science/
I'd be happy about some feedback.
We don't live in a bubble; we're a product of our surroundings. No aspect of the world is benign.
The fact that ads may "change you" is not an argument against advertising, because it doesn't distinguish advertising from anything else, at all.
It seems to me there is a moral judgement happening here. But, what is the appropriate way to distinguish moral manipulation from immoral manipulation?
Communication – even honest communication – is designed to influence other people. I'm trying to "change you" with this message. Should this message be blocked?
Yes/no?
What is the difference?
There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation.
Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question.
One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content".
If the internet was meant to be a medium for paid content, then why has so much content been shared through it "for free" beginning in the late 80's/early 90's and continuing even today?
I certainly do not know. What I remember is that only a minority of the population were avid www users when the public www first appeared in 1993.
So, in 1993, why upload "free content" that would otherwise be under paid subscription?
For the novelty of it?
To jumpstart the www?
To entice people to use the www?
Regardless of the reason, the end result is that the genie is out of the bottle.
The sharing of content "for free" started early on and continued unabated, even as www usage grew.
Today, if an internet subscriber seeks "content" she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone, except her access provider.
Greeting users with a deluge of advertising is not going to change the facts: users are continually presented with free content that they once would have had to pay for. The deluge of ads is not a "cost" of the content. It's just a new source of revenue for those who want to play www middleman (who should be very thankful for all the money they have made without ever having had to create any real content). At the same time, as a result the signal to noise ratio has become a serious problem for many www users.
(Users are also presented with enormous amounts of fake, garbage "content". That only highlights how open and inexpensive content distribution has become.)
It is undeniable that users can block the ads and other garbage and keep the content. The content is not going away. And the www will still keep growing.
With the barriers to distribution so low, it is no surprise that users should have to filter out some garbage.
The only surprise is how long it's taken them to start doing it.
What's nice is that filtering can be automated, in the same way the generation of ads and fake content have been automated.
There was time in the history of email before the ubiquitous use of spam filters. And there is a time in the history of the www before the ubiquitous use of ad blockers. That time is coming to a close.
If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s.
Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...
That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.
No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.
Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined to try.
It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."
I don't know about that. I'm a consumer. I use the internet to search for things I'm considering for purchase. Tires for my automobile, landscaping services, holiday trips. After searching (and prior to adblock sw), I'd see ads related to my searches. They were relevant.
Many (most?) ads are horsepucky and annoying. Some are not.
I am not defending ad-based models for dissemination of information and news as the one true way. Just disagreeing with your extreme statement.
Of course, unless you are Google or Facebook, you have very little ability to lower the 'global' shittiness of ads, but you have a lot of ability to make your own ads more lucrative and targeted.
Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.
One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place.
I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer.
The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for.
Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue.
But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.
Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem.
Instead I use an adblocker. And I try to be choosy about which ads I block, so that it's only the really obnoxious ones that kill my battery life or are a thinly veiled vehicle for digging through my kitchen wastebin for fingernail clippings to collect. I feel no sense of guilt about this.
If they don't want me accessing their site over this, and curating their ads to be less corrosive is not an option for whatever reason, then perhaps they can set up a special clickthrough agreement asking me to consent to abusive treatment before I view the content. Perhaps that will make it easier for us to negotiate a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.
Really, I think those work better as examples of how little value advertising actually brings to the Internet.
That's a strange leap of logic.
>Wikipedia
Asks for donations, it doesn't show ads.
There are many other websites that are internally funded in other ways that exclude direct ads.
I also wonder why they treat the front page of their online site so different than the front page of the paper. Today I opened nytimes.com and 1/2 the window was filled with a Hilton ad. Have they ever filled have the front page (or even just the half above the fold) of the paper version with an ad?
So I'm not a fundamentalist that thinks advertising is evil. I probably am a fundamentalist when it comes to the ad-tech that watches what I do to opaquely build a profile around me.
Why are you there then? The fact that you spend your time there, that you spend both your bandwidth, your cpu time, etc.. and theirs, means there's something "valuable", it's probably way less than a cent, but it's value.
That's the beauty of ads, even though the value isn't much, it's still enough. I don't want to pay 0.1 cent, but that ads does it for me.
> But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
That's freak, stop going there if you wish for their death!
Deleted Comment
If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market.
Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.
- 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads.
- Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords.
- Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading.
- Video ads that start playing automatically.
- The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch.
- Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it.
- Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer.
Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.
In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion.
At some point enough is enough.
It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to start ...
I take huge issue with that. I pay for cell phone service. I should not be used to derive additional revenue for another channel. It's single use not multi.
Sure, if you live in a cave. TV and movies are saturated with product placements. Grocers receive fees to give products better placement in the store. And it's amazing how many placements happen in health care--drug company sales reps are just the start of it.
Ad blockers are going to be like applying pesticides to insects. Those that don't die are just going to breed offspring that are that much harder to kill.
Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?"
Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple. Apple."
Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer"
Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials' advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)"
This is not a war I want to keep escalating.
So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them.
Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.