I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.
That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.
Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker.
Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum.
The problem is it’s not in Google or Microsoft’s interest to implement this. This has to come from legislation at US gov level. So it’ll never happen.
I do this on my iOS device. It's a bit of a pain to not have JS enabled in safari, but I can always share a page from Safari --> Duckduckgo's browser which i have installed for just such occasions.
Another possibility would be to create ad blockers that do that, i.e. block third party javascript but not pure text or images. Then you get the same result, simple ads get through but ad scripts don't, so the people who use ads without scripts are the only ones who make money from them.
> Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum.
How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)
That would imply ethical (actual) use of this tag. I cannot thing that any advertiser would ad this, just as they ignore the "Do not track". I fear that we will never we able to rely on the ad-makers honesty, as the hunt for the bottom-line never ends. It looks like this will be a war we will continue fighting with AdB+, NoScript, uBlock(s), hosts, and other tools.
It has been a cat and mouse game. The tech changes, but the game goes on.
>forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware
The more worrying ones I've seen don't rely on JS but are just links to bad sites. Downloading software can be a bit ridiculous these days with alongside the main download button about five ads saying "Download Now" linking to god knows what iffy software.
good idea! your ad tag is exactly the type of compromise we’ve been asking for since the web (and online ads) became a thing: first-party-served ads with only basic first-party analytics and clear delineation of the ads. unfortunately competition happens around targeting, segmentation, and conversion, which pushes us way past that.
One issue I’ve run into with blocking JS at the browser level is that it also ends up blocking extensions that use JS from working. I would block JS on websites much more if my extensions that use JS could still run.
I don’t suppose there’s a config setting in Chrome that discriminates between the website’s JS and the JS from my extensions?
Agreed. I would go so far as to vote for a representative who wanted to pass a law restricting what is legal advertisement.
I believe undisclosed ads should be illegal, I would ban music in ads, I would ban color in ads, I would ban sexuality in advertisement, I would ban appeals to emotions in ads.
If a product truly makes the life of the purchaser better, then no gimmicks are needed to sell it.
I have no issue with static, contextual ads (I had this conversation on here the other day in fact).
Imagine reading something about, say, a particular lawnmower and the article has a link to that lawnmower at the top as an ad from Flymo with a discount. No tracking just a link to buy it with a tracking Id in the URL or something.
Can someone answer me this: Are there studies, not funded by those who benefit from mass-tracking, that show the benefit of all this data-gathering to show ads? Or that show it doesn't work perhaps?
My gut tells me the difference in success rate is minimal and couldn't possibly justify the data collection but I'd love to be proven wrong.
At this time, I believe the whole scheme to be a con. (there, I said it!)
The online ad industry is super shady and is getting much worse since google and facebook have started eating their lunch. But it would be very hard to pull data collection out of this business model. If company a puts the lawnmower ad up and only reports clicks and company b reports the percentage of men aged 35-40 company b will eventually put company a out of business. Content providers have to run what ads will actually make them money so they’re going to go with networks where companies actually buy ads. The only way this cycle is going to get stopped is with serious pushback either from consumers, technology or laws.
I agree with your sentiment, but there is far too much money in ad tracking for it to be ineffective. Internet advertising is a very metrics-driven enterprise
> I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.
That's a completely different discussion though. Personally I'm not offended by seeing a brand placement if it helps the content creator and is transparent (meaning I know it's an ad, and it's not collecting data about me).
Bringing it to a physical example, if I walk into a store and see a product placement or physical sign advertisement, I'm not that offended by it. But if they started fingerprinting me and taking my picture under the premise of selling me more stuff... I'm offended by that.
Contextual ads is fine. An ad for a gadget when I searched for the gadget is fine. An ad for the same gadget next to an article about similar gadgets is fine. An ad for the gadget on Facebook because I searched for that earlier is not acceptable.
Anything that remembers anything about me or my behavior is distinctly off limits. I don’t care if your site or business depends on it. If you use a an ad network that uses tracking cookies to show ads, you’d business model is flawed and your business should die.
By "we" do you mean only people who agree with you? Or do you accept that in a democratic society there can be ads? Personally, I don't block ads on principle. I simply don't visit websites that feature blaring over the top ads or otherwise feature annoyances. When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website. I prefer to not send that signal.
This describes AdSense in general - the original point was some text ads.
But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us.
The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond subscriptions or the perpetual cat and mouse game of blockers, blocker-blockers, blocker-blocker-blockers and so on.
In an industry full of innovation the monetization aspect is stuck in the newspaper model created 150 years ago.
The one place I thought ads were relevant was on google search. After all, I was searching for the product they are advertising.
But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator.
For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads.
I actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... I don't want to see it. I'd rather people stop whoring me out and start standing up for what they believe in.
Not to mention the extra resources being eaten by all this JS. When I leave a typical website with lots of ads and tracking open, I can see the energy usage averaging much higher in Activity Monitor on my Mac, even in Safari and with some basic ad blocking on.
I imagine folks serving up the JS have figured out ways around whatever simple blocking tech I have. If their JS wouldn’t eat up so much battery, I’d mind a lot less, since I leave tons of tabs open.
Domain-specific auctions was nice when it was done by Project Wonderful, but there is too much convenience in being able to push advertisements for the entire internet.
Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.
I decided a few years ago to disable ad blocking for awhile. The result was frankly, a parade of shit. Google was probably best at showing the occasional relevant ad, mostly in GMail.
Beyond that, the automated crap that does the targeting tends to hit the lowest common denominator topic. What I actually do online barely registered, but if my kid used my laptop, it would immediately take over the ad experience.
Absolutely. If the content creator and the advertiser dont trust each other enough to have the ad be delivered from the same server as the content, then why would I trust them to run whatever code they want.
Small ads on the web are still more targeted than newspaper ads, since web ads appear on specific websites which are of interest to the user. If I visit a motorcycling forum, I should get motorcycling ads, and they can be effective even if they're small.
What pisses me off is the intrusiveness of the ads. Auto playing video or audio. The amount of malware attacking browser zero days. Until that goes away, I'm going to run a layer of adblockers. That's a problem the ad networks introduced and allowed. It's not on me, as an end user, to fix. You serve me auto playing audio, video, and malware? I'm going continue to block you until you fix that.
Yes, agreed. Ads are a great way to finance things where there is value in being accessible by everybody - I'm not happy about seeing podcast episodes locked behind Patreon walls, for example. While it's great these creators are gaining an additional revenue stream, it still means I or others are priced out of accessing their content. I don't have any natural right to access it, of course, but I prefer the open access ad-driven model over a marketplace where I have to pay every single podcast I listen to $5 a month. And hell, podcast ads weren't tracking and profiling me.
I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.
Podcasts are a great example. They've had to do advertising the old fashion way, by market research and trying to figure out which ad campaigns are more effective without mass surveillance.
Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.
If it makes you feel any better, we're only collecting GPU info so we can identify you when you've "forgotten" to accept cookies. It's only like we're lifting your finger prints from discarded coffee cups, no biggie.
(adtech developer)
>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
I would be more than happy to accept that and I do see it from time to time. But I still won't be disabling my adblocker - allowing ads served from DoubleClick et el is just far too dangerous from both a security and privacy perspective. Even if they're not responsible for the actual ad content they're at the very least complicit in all of it.
This sounds like such a rational comment, but it is based on the naive idea that ads can be effectively targeted simply based on content. You're never going to have ads that people are willing to pay for (i.e. a certain threshold click-through rate) without some sort of direct targeting. For example, you can't tell if your article on basic car maintenance is being read by a 30 year old male who might be interested in a beer ad or a 30 year old female with two kids who might be more interested in a new iphone cover.
When I turned 25 I started getting nothing but hard soda ads from YouTube. I don't drink.
I went and disabled personalized advertising, and for the first time in years I started seeing ads that tempted me to click through, ads from tech companies about tech. Why the difference? Because YouTube started showing me ads related to the content I'm actually watching rather than based on their faulty neural network profile of me.
Obviously this is just one anecdote, but it's illustrative of the point: don't try to advertise either beer or iPhone covers on a car maintenance site. If I'm on a car maintenance site, you know all you need to know about where my interests are at that exact moment. Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic?
Direct targeting basic car maintenance alone covers a lot of ground doesn’t it? cars, spares and consumables, accessories, tools, car shows, workshop equipment, vacuum cleaners, mechanical things in general and diy... it’s endless.
Edit: ok endless is hyperbole, but content targeting is hardly useless.
Seems to be working for the New York Times – “The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result“ (source: https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...)
I didn't want to block ads either; originally I just used policeman / uMatrix. Unfortunately Google analytics broke pages (because some pages required all scripts to load before rendering anything), so I had to switch to uBlock Origin with its extra Google analytics shim.
>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
For years I allowed google text ads because of non invasion and distracting they were. However the of amount tracking taking place forced me to also disable them.
If you are fine with ads so that content creators make money, where do you draw the line? How much money should they make?
Having more data about you allows them to pick out 'better' ads and make more money. Wether this money goes to ad networks or content creators depends on how much leverage one has over the other.
It's not a question of how much money they make, but how they make it. An advertisement should be a one-way channel from the publisher to the audience. If information is flowing in the other direction (particularly if without the audience member's express permission) then it's become something more than an advertisement and that's a good place to draw the line.
We need to abolish user agents. At the most, a universal web versioning or a "release timestamp" would be sufficient.
This is the first step to reducing fingerprinting, remove distinctions between different browsers and only have the level of web version or timestamp they can support.
Except those little unobtrusive ads are easy to ignore and hardly anyone clicks on them so no one will pay anything for them. Also there’s no way to verify the clicks that do happen are genuine.
Exactly this is why I block, and I also would not object to your "less intrusive" ad. I would still block, but I wouldn't mind at all seeing such a static, self-served ad.
For many many years I resisted installing an ad-blocker. As someone who worked at a website that made the bulk of it's revenue from ads, it felt hypocritical, and also, I wanted to make sure that the experience of our website was bearable without ad blocking, by forcing myself to experience it every day.
I gave up about two years ago. The web just go so bad I had to install ad-block. My computer would spin like a jet plane at least once an hour due to insane advertising on a website consuming all the CPU.
I literally installed ad-block to save my computer hardware.
The ads don't even bother me that much. I used to always say, "my brain is my ad-block". It was the slow loading, CPU heavy ads that got me to turn.
If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. But how about not melting my computer in the process?
> If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money.
I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.
This seems exceedingly hyperbolic. With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge.
Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc all provide tremendous value to their users while being ostensibly free. Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.
Yeah, for many years I figured "Let the website owners make money, I get to use their service for free anyway, and I can always mentally tune the ads out."
And then sometime around 2015 or 2016, I started noticing ads that would lock up my CPU, or get my laptop's fan running, or prevent the page from loading entirely, or increase page loading time by 10x. And then I decided enough was enough, and installed an adblocker.
It's not the general concept of advertising that I object to. It's when the advertising makes the content that I initially came to see unusable. Fix your goddamn Javascript and maybe I won't block you, although at this point I'm kinda enjoying the ad-free experience.
Hey I like this idea. This is something that needs to happen. Every website starts with aggressive CPU throttling, and then they can ask for permission to be unthrottled. "Our web page requires lots of CPU to deliver text, for some reason we would prefer you not think about, can you please unthrottle us?". This seems like an action browsers could take to significantly improve the web.
Same boat. I actually don't mind most ads. Then the slow page loading, CPU melting became annoying. And on mobile, even reputable sites were having ads hijack the browser. I'm done, I only use Opera or Brave now. I feel like I was a target demographic to advertise to, and they abused me instead.
I used to not use ad blockers as I'm not bothered by ads. But it's getting increasingly difficult not to because the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs. It has got to the point that ads and analytics are being added so mindlessly (I saw it first hand as random CPU hogging battery killing trackers were pushed onto my single-page web app by product managers) that browsing without an ad blocker isn't viable anymore performance-wise.
> the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs
Where are you going for that to happen? Not only does a tab crashing is extremely rare for me, even on my low 8 GB of RAM which I got 8 years ago. It seems a bit crazy that it happens quite often for you.
Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.
(Of course, if you measure the success of an economy by the GDP, then it might seem that ads have a positive influence, but that seems a bit like a broken-window fallacy to me).
IMO the first place to start implementing ad bans is in public spaces, which I hear is common in Europe. I don't have to watch TV so I don't see TV ads. I don't listen to the radio much so I don't listen to radio ads. I can use an ad blocker on the web, yet for some reason the public spaces I inhabit (and help pay for) are full of ads.
It is not. I have seen a ramp-up in the amount of advertisement everywhere. Maybe poorer countries like Romania - I have been just to Bucharest - are not so affected. But, Sweden, or Spain, - the countries that I spend more time - are just installing more and more advertisements everywhere.
Gambling advertisements are quite common in Stockholm. I remember specially one telling people to buy lottery tickets because they live sucks and the only lottery can save them from their horrible lives. It was disgusting.
Not saying you are wrong, but which European states is this common in? I’ve never noticed this, and many public spaces in Europe have a great deal of poster/bill board style advertisements.
I remember reading Paris tried this, but that’s a long way from “common in Europe”.
Correct. It's awful here in Sydney. The local government a long time ago decided that it couldn't be bothered to put up and maintain infrastructure like bus shelters and the like, so they got JC Decaux to do it (a French company, whose maintenance trucks amusingly use an Australian flag as their major design motif) in exchange for plastering the whole city with ads.
Advertising has also been proven to be bad for your sense of life satisfaction, which is an externality not paid for by advertisers.
"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed."
Even disregarding the many questionable aspects of consumerism, think about how many developers you know that have dedicated their entire ability to creating better advertising. The amount of brain power that has been spent on marketing (largely) unnecessary products to consumers is staggering. I hesitate to suppose where we could be if those abilities had been directed elsewhere, but I expect the world might be a much better place.
>'Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.'
Interesting idea. I just read that over £20bn is spent a year on advertising in the UK. The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
Netflix is an interesting example of a new model of entertainment that generates revenues through subscriptions instead of advertisements. Lots of newspapers have also shifted to a subscription-based model, though only The Guardian has done so without placing their website behind a paywall. Another alternative is public service broadcasting, like the BBC.
>The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
I think calling journalism "socially valuable" is debatable.
There was a paper on the psychological effects, i.e. net negative effects on happiness not too long ago [1], I think it was posted on HN a while back. Haven't read it though so I can't comment on the specific findings and the quality.
If anyone has any literature on the other effects mentioned by the parent, I'd be highly interested as well.
There are countries that ban ads, but they also ban a lot of other things.
My presumption is that if advertising was banned, and you were still dealing with a relatively free society, that many more resources would go in to PR and marketing. At least an ad you know is an ad.
A good exercise is to go back and look through magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, especially Playboy. The advertising seems much more transparent in its shallow promises and we actually know what the long term outcomes were from following them -- e.g. alcohol, tobacco, and cars no one gives a shit about anymore. The editorial bridges between advertising and content glaringly stick out. These things aren't necessarily no longer true, but the obviousness of time shines a bright light on it.
To me the biggest story in ads isn't ad blockers or Google, it is Facebook getting consumers to spend gargantuan amounts of money creating content for free and then making tens of billions of dollars from it. Youtube/Google at least has revenue sharing.
Barely. It's not like a person can create an account, upload an original video which becomes extremely popular, and receive a single penny in compensation.
True. In some countries, mixing content and ads (see social media influencers) is already forbidden, especially when targeting children. I suppose the law could be extended here.
I worked briefly in a marketing department as programmer. Learned the following there.
The benefit of advertising is to inform the consumer of products they may not be aware of.
"Messa thinks Messa might have Mesothelioma!"
Most of the time advertising is a waste of time, and there certainly are better ways of learning about products. However, the function of informing consumers of products they may not be aware of is of mild benefit.
A better question than what benefit is advertising might be, "How can advertising be made more beneficial to the viewers"
To a minimalist advertising could almost be construed as a form of psychic attack on ones value system.
Imagine firing off hundreds of ads at a vegan about how eating meat is good. That's essentially what all the "buy this shit" ads are doing to someone who explicitly buys as little as they can to get by.
Another way of looking at it: What are better alternatives for helping people learn about available products? Or better yet, good ways of solving different problems in life, which may not always involve buying a product.
There is an inherent problem with advertising in that the incentives are somewhat misaligned. Company X doesn't want me to learn about the best way to solve problem Y. They want me to learn about _their_ solution to problem Y.
Or even worse... Company X wants me to believe that Y is a problem for me — when in fact it may not be, or at least not how they claim — and that only they can solve it.
I'm currently reading the book the book, "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman. I consider myself fairly intelligent, but of course knowledgeable in just a few domains, but he brought up something that I'm ashamed to not have realized for myself.
Simon Kuznets, a Russian emigre to the US, developed the concept of the GDP in 1934, and according to Bregman, tracking the GDP was a significant factor in the US's ability to harness its manufacturing capability during the war effort; most countries had a significantly inferior understanding of their own production dynamics.
As useful was it was for the war effort, Kuznets warned that the GDP should be redefined after the war, as the country's needs had changed. Instead, military spending is part of the GDP. No party wants to significantly cut back on military spending because it would affect the GDP. So not only does the GDP encourage increased military spending, it doesn't reward so many things that would be beneficial to society, and thus little effort is spent optimizing for those things.
TL;DR: if the GDP doesn't measure it, there is no political will to address it, and if the GDP does measure it, it is a political necessity to boost spending in that area. Thus, needless military spending, rent seeking money shuffling on wall street, and advertising are richly rewarded as they are included in the GDP.
Thanks for sharing that. I've had this feeling in my gut for a while, and I think it touches on a similar notion.
The feeling has to do with the fact that where I live, nearly every software engineer you meet works for a defense contractor, an issuance company, or a finance company. These jobs, and the dollars that come from them, seem somehow hollow to me. I'd accept a significant pay cut if my code were somehow contributing to something like growing food.
> It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need;
My SO opened an escape room a year ago. I though similarly as you before that (not that it make people consume more, but that they'll buy the inferior product), but then after a few weekend without any reservation... it made me realize how things aren't just found.
You need to be reminded that something exist to even consider it. It's not even a question of whether that's the best thing for you.
She always ask people what they think once they done and recently she got as a comment "but you aren't visible enough". We pay for ads, a few thousands, we are probably not too far from having spend 5 digits in ads. I couldn't imagine how people could be aware of our existence without ads at all.
> and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
We are paying for it, sure, but at least we are paying, aren't we? I like that I can get any ads on a channel. I love DIY channels, I seriously hate how almost all of them hide that all their tools were given. They say it from time to time, but on most videos, they'll just keep using the one from the past videos without mentionning getting them for free. That's an ads by the way, they may even directly get paid for using theses tools. With adsense though, the ads I get aren't necessarily related to the video, I'm AWARE they are ads, they are made FOR ME (thus more profitable for the channel, because I may need tool, but I may be more likely to buy a new computer for example).
Are ads really that effective? I'd love for my internet ads to show me stuff I could buy at nice prices. What I get is I bought a mechanical keyboard once and now for two months all ads will be bombarding me with mechanical keyboard offers. Why would I want one if I already got one?
Advertising exists to increase consumption, because capitalism requires constant growth. On order for it to sustain itself, we need to buy more and more, consume more and more.
When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.
And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.
"Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt?"
I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way.
Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are loathe to do investigative journalism or negative reporting on the companies that provide their bread and butter and because they also want to run stories that don't offend or antagonize their advertisers -- stories from that point of view that capitalism is bad or advertising is bad, for instance, are off limits to many outlets partially because of this.
Advertisers also routinely lie about the products they're selling, so people are being deceived about the products they're buying, sometimes with very serious negative consequences (such as advertising of cigarettes or medical products that are actually harmful).
The problem is, like me, you can be relatively unintelligent, work forty hour weeks, and make around a quarter million dollars a year peddling ads. That's tough to give up when nobody's dropping dead because of it.
This line of thought is complete nonsense. When you get a product in a transaction, you get something from the other party and you give them something in exchange. When you buy an iPhone, what you're giving is $700. In the case of non-paywalled online content, what you're giving is an ad impression. It would be ludicrous to say after an iPhone purchase "I didn't get anything out of the part of the transaction where I paid $700? The government should ban it".
I'm not dismissing the possibility of conversations about whether advertising for services is a type of transaction that's difficult to reason about, and that users need to be protected from themselves by regulation. But looking at only the outflow half of a transaction and asking "I don't benefit from this part, we should ban it" is utter gibberish.
"Did anyone ever investigate what benefits payment systems have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, since payment systems cost money to operate and in the end all they do is reduce the amount of money a user has. While payment systems may allow you to 'buy' services, we are still paying for these systems directly and indirectly
Why then, doesn't the government bring currency and bank accounts and credit cards to a halt?"
Remember that the formal name for a web browser is a User Agent.
This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.
This - so far I have a title, 'The death of User Agent' of an article about how browsers turned from user (my) agents, who represent my best interests on the internet, into corporate agents (which act in best interests of their makers - on my own computer!)
Regrettably, nobody bothers to mention that JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this. If unnecessary use of JavaScript earned the same sort of derision that "best viewed in IE 6" banners did, we wouldn't be where we are today.
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.
> JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this
Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations.
Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more complicated than you're making it seem. I don't need Javascript to put a tracking pixel in your email.
Aside from CSS and redirect links, all of these features are fairly straightforward. The consequences of disabling the Referer header, for example, are pretty small and easy to understand: you'll stop sending sites information about what links you used to get to them, but some very picky websites that check the header (e.g. image hosts that try to prevent hotlinking) might not work. This means browsers can provide options to let the user choose their preferred balance of privacy, functionality, performance, and "helping us improve your experience".
With JavaScript, on the other hand, it is very difficult for end-users to tell what a given website is doing. Are those hundred kilobytes of minified code a tracking/fingerprinting script, a crypto-miner, or a Hello World app in the UI framework du jour? It's hard for even an experienced developer to know for sure, and it's basically impossible for browsers. Your options are (1) allow everything, (2) use really crummy heuristics like "what domain is this file being served from", or (3) disable JavaScript and give up on using half the websites on the Internet.
JavaScript enables functionality in the same way that cars enable transportation. They aren't the only solution. And there would be far less injury, death, and pollution if we all just didn't use automobiles. The world would be a safer, cleaner place. And a small fraction of people would be happy with it.
JavaScript is the same. We'd have a cleaner, safer web without it. And only a small fraction of people would be happy with that.
If JavaScript is an automobile, HTML/CSS is an electric bike. You can get pretty much wherever you want on an ebike, they're safer than cars, more intuitive, and lighter on natural resources. Nearly everyone knows how to ride one, and there's very few surprises, unlike automobiles which are repackaged in all sorts of odd ways (gas on the left or right, or maybe it's electric, car vs truck vs bus). And all that complexity comes at a cost to both the driver (who knows if the car is spying on you) and the manufacturer (need to keep up with the current trends because reasons).
Sometimes you need a car, but usually an ebike will be more than sufficient. Going on a road trip or doing a large Costco run? You probably want a car. Just picking up some eggs from the grocery store or making a visit to the library? An ebike is probably the best option, and is also likely faster (closer parking, can ride on roads, sidewalks, bike trails, etc).
I use a static site generator for my blog and personal web site, and there's absolutely no JavaScript involved. I use JavaScript with a web framework for webapps because otherwise we would need to build a desktop app, which would limit our reach to those platforms we have the resources to support.
I'm of the opinion that you should use the simplest technology that will get the job done. It's far easier to make a static site secure than a dynamic one. It's far easier for a customer to vet your server-rendered site than your pile of JavaScript (nothing runs locally, so they just vet form actions and HTTP headers).
If only using JavaScript required a license to operate and came with a set of rules enforced by fines and jail time :)
If every browser had done the sane thing from day 1 (no third-party scripts and no cross-domain communication) we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. Sites could still use all the power that comes with scripting, ad networks just wouldn't be feasible.
> The world would be a safer, cleaner place. And a small fraction of people would be happy with it.
You might be missing how expectations change after the introduction of a technology. I wouldn’t guess that people would be unhappy about not having cars before the car was even invented.
JavaScript isn't from nature. It could have been designed so that it didn't enable those things, but it wasn't. It's probably more accurate to say the ability browsers grant JavaScript is to blame, but that's just splitting atoms.
Agree.
I no longer use an ad-blocker, and haven't for some time. Especially so since CSS took over.
Originally I used NoScript (and Firefox 'View>Page Style>No Style'), now I just tend to use uMatrix, with appropriate media types disabled.
It makes for a faster, and easier to read web, where I still see the occasional ad, but once configured, usually not.
I'd guess that use with Javascript disabled seems to be accepted in part due to Safari on iOS supporing it - possibly it was the default (I can't remember).
It's crazy Steve Gibson (of all people) calls this too impractical to use.
If you're a total tech-novice, sure, but as a power user it's fine. I'm blocking ycombinator.com right now. I can still submit this. If something doesn't work, just click the icon and trust its domain. If pictures don't show, trust a CDN. Amazon, Paypal, 99% of sites work with an initial adjustment of trust settings.
You're being downvoted of course, BUT whilst JavaScript wasn't created for all this, and itself isn't to blame, the fact that big corporations have pushed the technology forward I think is telling. At the end of the day what do Google (and others) really want? What do they have to gain with all the technology they are using, enhancing, improving?
Something like the unholy child of RSS Feeds / Podcasts / NNTP / Email / Pub-Sub / Gopher / Google Reader
A new language (or two complementary languages) separating content and presentation, limited, possibly not Turing-complete but expressive. Specifically less powerful than modern web browsers.
But you can't build a pop-up if you don't have access to create new windows, yet you can still be turing complete. For example, WASM is Turing complete, but it can't create popup windows because it has no access to the DOM.
I think JavaScript should have to request access to use browser APIs, and you should be able to disable access to any of all of them. For example, I should be about to disable:
I've been blocking ads ever since I learned that I could stop seeing DoubleClick ads by blocking their domain in /etc/hosts.
I won't ever apologize for doing so. As far as I'm concerned, any advertisement that depends on JavaScript is malware, and I think that my right to protect myself online outweighs the need of publishers to turn a profit.
IMO, profits are like respect. They must be earned, and if the only way you can turn a profit is by spying on people then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place. If the only way you can get me to use your product is by giving it away and selling my data, then maybe your product shouldn't exist?
As far as I'm concerned, the data I generate by using a search engine should be treated with the same care as my medical records. It should not be mined or traded. It should not be kept longer than 30 days.
And if that breaks the internet, so be it. You brought this on yourselves.
Adguard on desktop and Android. Globally blocks all ads across browsers and apps (except embedded ads like IG and Twitter). Truly magical and worth every penny.
The great thing about getting older for me is realising that nothing is indispensable. Everything eventually ends, we move on with our lives and do something else.
So sure: maybe someday un-adblockable content will be a thing. Do I care about that content? Turns out maybe I'll just walk away entirely. The internet has a lot of utterly ad-ridden services with far too high an opinion of how important they really are.
There is so much content. Great content, too. The miracle of over 100 years of mass media recording tech. And, you know, 4000ish years of written word records and storytelling. Ad-supported web trash is mostly just a distraction from better things that can be had used for just a little money, or checked out from a library. My life'd probably improve if it all went away (Web would have a better wheat/chaff ratio, I'd be less distracted by junk).
So sure, make your sites, services, and content so annoying that I stop using them, and close copying loopholes, somehow. Or ban spyvertising and let it all go down in the flames of the prophesied ad-pocalypse. I really don't care a bit either way.
I absolutely agree. Every now and then I open up a link that and me too disable my adblocker and if I can't bypass it in <5s I just close the tab and move on.
There is very little on the internet that is completely unique and of interest to me. If you try to put up a barrier to your content I will go somewhere else almost every time.
Readit News
But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.
That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.
Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum.
The problem is it’s not in Google or Microsoft’s interest to implement this. This has to come from legislation at US gov level. So it’ll never happen.
I’ll continue ad blocking.
I do this on my iOS device. It's a bit of a pain to not have JS enabled in safari, but I can always share a page from Safari --> Duckduckgo's browser which i have installed for just such occasions.
Settings > Safari > Advanced > Javascript off
How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)
It has been a cat and mouse game. The tech changes, but the game goes on.
The more worrying ones I've seen don't rely on JS but are just links to bad sites. Downloading software can be a bit ridiculous these days with alongside the main download button about five ads saying "Download Now" linking to god knows what iffy software.
I don’t suppose there’s a config setting in Chrome that discriminates between the website’s JS and the JS from my extensions?
If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that blocked out billboards and other kinds of non-digital advertising, I would do so in a heartbeat.
I believe undisclosed ads should be illegal, I would ban music in ads, I would ban color in ads, I would ban sexuality in advertisement, I would ban appeals to emotions in ads.
If a product truly makes the life of the purchaser better, then no gimmicks are needed to sell it.
It's maddening that advertisers can be allowed to destroy culture like that.
Imagine reading something about, say, a particular lawnmower and the article has a link to that lawnmower at the top as an ad from Flymo with a discount. No tracking just a link to buy it with a tracking Id in the URL or something.
Can someone answer me this: Are there studies, not funded by those who benefit from mass-tracking, that show the benefit of all this data-gathering to show ads? Or that show it doesn't work perhaps?
My gut tells me the difference in success rate is minimal and couldn't possibly justify the data collection but I'd love to be proven wrong.
At this time, I believe the whole scheme to be a con. (there, I said it!)
Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.
Bringing it to a physical example, if I walk into a store and see a product placement or physical sign advertisement, I'm not that offended by it. But if they started fingerprinting me and taking my picture under the premise of selling me more stuff... I'm offended by that.
Anything that remembers anything about me or my behavior is distinctly off limits. I don’t care if your site or business depends on it. If you use a an ad network that uses tracking cookies to show ads, you’d business model is flawed and your business should die.
But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us.
The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond subscriptions or the perpetual cat and mouse game of blockers, blocker-blockers, blocker-blocker-blockers and so on.
In an industry full of innovation the monetization aspect is stuck in the newspaper model created 150 years ago.
But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator.
For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads.
[1]: https://github.com/ibudiallo/gadlight
And now I have the tools to do so.
I imagine folks serving up the JS have figured out ways around whatever simple blocking tech I have. If their JS wouldn’t eat up so much battery, I’d mind a lot less, since I leave tons of tabs open.
All it takes is one of these tech giants pulling a Equifax and who knows how much data spills over.
Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.
I decided a few years ago to disable ad blocking for awhile. The result was frankly, a parade of shit. Google was probably best at showing the occasional relevant ad, mostly in GMail.
Beyond that, the automated crap that does the targeting tends to hit the lowest common denominator topic. What I actually do online barely registered, but if my kid used my laptop, it would immediately take over the ad experience.
Heh, do you really think that static ads would be a small portion of the page?
Look at small local newspapers for what a business driven by revenue from non-targetable ads looks like. The ads take up more than half the page!
https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/media/unfetter/press06.htm
https://jimmycsays.com/2017/01/13/is-the-daily-newspaper-thi...
I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.
Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.
Deleted Comment
I would be more than happy to accept that and I do see it from time to time. But I still won't be disabling my adblocker - allowing ads served from DoubleClick et el is just far too dangerous from both a security and privacy perspective. Even if they're not responsible for the actual ad content they're at the very least complicit in all of it.
I went and disabled personalized advertising, and for the first time in years I started seeing ads that tempted me to click through, ads from tech companies about tech. Why the difference? Because YouTube started showing me ads related to the content I'm actually watching rather than based on their faulty neural network profile of me.
Obviously this is just one anecdote, but it's illustrative of the point: don't try to advertise either beer or iPhone covers on a car maintenance site. If I'm on a car maintenance site, you know all you need to know about where my interests are at that exact moment. Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic?
Edit: ok endless is hyperbole, but content targeting is hardly useless.
Deleted Comment
For years I allowed google text ads because of non invasion and distracting they were. However the of amount tracking taking place forced me to also disable them.
That's what I've been harping on. I'm not blocking ads, I'm trying to protect my privacy and keep ad companies from effectively DoSing my browser.
Nothing about 'ad blockers' prevent advertisers from showing ordinary magazine style ads.
Having more data about you allows them to pick out 'better' ads and make more money. Wether this money goes to ad networks or content creators depends on how much leverage one has over the other.
This is the first step to reducing fingerprinting, remove distinctions between different browsers and only have the level of web version or timestamp they can support.
I gave up about two years ago. The web just go so bad I had to install ad-block. My computer would spin like a jet plane at least once an hour due to insane advertising on a website consuming all the CPU.
I literally installed ad-block to save my computer hardware.
The ads don't even bother me that much. I used to always say, "my brain is my ad-block". It was the slow loading, CPU heavy ads that got me to turn.
If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. But how about not melting my computer in the process?
I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.
This seems exceedingly hyperbolic. With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge.
Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc all provide tremendous value to their users while being ostensibly free. Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.
And then sometime around 2015 or 2016, I started noticing ads that would lock up my CPU, or get my laptop's fan running, or prevent the page from loading entirely, or increase page loading time by 10x. And then I decided enough was enough, and installed an adblocker.
It's not the general concept of advertising that I object to. It's when the advertising makes the content that I initially came to see unusable. Fix your goddamn Javascript and maybe I won't block you, although at this point I'm kinda enjoying the ad-free experience.
I a specific instance there was no way to use the site, every link would redirect directly without opening the correct page at all.
I literally needed an ad-blocker to be able to use the website.
For web apps that need it, it could be an explicit permission, like webcam or location access.
Where are you going for that to happen? Not only does a tab crashing is extremely rare for me, even on my low 8 GB of RAM which I got 8 years ago. It seems a bit crazy that it happens quite often for you.
Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.
(Of course, if you measure the success of an economy by the GDP, then it might seem that ads have a positive influence, but that seems a bit like a broken-window fallacy to me).
It is not. I have seen a ramp-up in the amount of advertisement everywhere. Maybe poorer countries like Romania - I have been just to Bucharest - are not so affected. But, Sweden, or Spain, - the countries that I spend more time - are just installing more and more advertisements everywhere.
Gambling advertisements are quite common in Stockholm. I remember specially one telling people to buy lottery tickets because they live sucks and the only lottery can save them from their horrible lives. It was disgusting.
Cities have a high amount of cognitive pollution.
I remember reading Paris tried this, but that’s a long way from “common in Europe”.
"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed."
https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dis...
I assure if you the industry disappeared tomorrow, I would certainly find some other way to continue making the world a much worse place.
Interesting idea. I just read that over £20bn is spent a year on advertising in the UK. The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
Netflix is an interesting example of a new model of entertainment that generates revenues through subscriptions instead of advertisements. Lots of newspapers have also shifted to a subscription-based model, though only The Guardian has done so without placing their website behind a paywall. Another alternative is public service broadcasting, like the BBC.
I think calling journalism "socially valuable" is debatable.
If anyone has any literature on the other effects mentioned by the parent, I'd be highly interested as well.
1. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cag...
My presumption is that if advertising was banned, and you were still dealing with a relatively free society, that many more resources would go in to PR and marketing. At least an ad you know is an ad.
A good exercise is to go back and look through magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, especially Playboy. The advertising seems much more transparent in its shallow promises and we actually know what the long term outcomes were from following them -- e.g. alcohol, tobacco, and cars no one gives a shit about anymore. The editorial bridges between advertising and content glaringly stick out. These things aren't necessarily no longer true, but the obviousness of time shines a bright light on it.
To me the biggest story in ads isn't ad blockers or Google, it is Facebook getting consumers to spend gargantuan amounts of money creating content for free and then making tens of billions of dollars from it. Youtube/Google at least has revenue sharing.
Barely. It's not like a person can create an account, upload an original video which becomes extremely popular, and receive a single penny in compensation.
True. In some countries, mixing content and ads (see social media influencers) is already forbidden, especially when targeting children. I suppose the law could be extended here.
A better question than what benefit is advertising might be, "How can advertising be made more beneficial to the viewers"
Imagine firing off hundreds of ads at a vegan about how eating meat is good. That's essentially what all the "buy this shit" ads are doing to someone who explicitly buys as little as they can to get by.
There is an inherent problem with advertising in that the incentives are somewhat misaligned. Company X doesn't want me to learn about the best way to solve problem Y. They want me to learn about _their_ solution to problem Y.
Or even worse... Company X wants me to believe that Y is a problem for me — when in fact it may not be, or at least not how they claim — and that only they can solve it.
Deleted Comment
Simon Kuznets, a Russian emigre to the US, developed the concept of the GDP in 1934, and according to Bregman, tracking the GDP was a significant factor in the US's ability to harness its manufacturing capability during the war effort; most countries had a significantly inferior understanding of their own production dynamics.
As useful was it was for the war effort, Kuznets warned that the GDP should be redefined after the war, as the country's needs had changed. Instead, military spending is part of the GDP. No party wants to significantly cut back on military spending because it would affect the GDP. So not only does the GDP encourage increased military spending, it doesn't reward so many things that would be beneficial to society, and thus little effort is spent optimizing for those things.
TL;DR: if the GDP doesn't measure it, there is no political will to address it, and if the GDP does measure it, it is a political necessity to boost spending in that area. Thus, needless military spending, rent seeking money shuffling on wall street, and advertising are richly rewarded as they are included in the GDP.
The feeling has to do with the fact that where I live, nearly every software engineer you meet works for a defense contractor, an issuance company, or a finance company. These jobs, and the dollars that come from them, seem somehow hollow to me. I'd accept a significant pay cut if my code were somehow contributing to something like growing food.
My SO opened an escape room a year ago. I though similarly as you before that (not that it make people consume more, but that they'll buy the inferior product), but then after a few weekend without any reservation... it made me realize how things aren't just found.
You need to be reminded that something exist to even consider it. It's not even a question of whether that's the best thing for you.
She always ask people what they think once they done and recently she got as a comment "but you aren't visible enough". We pay for ads, a few thousands, we are probably not too far from having spend 5 digits in ads. I couldn't imagine how people could be aware of our existence without ads at all.
> and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
We are paying for it, sure, but at least we are paying, aren't we? I like that I can get any ads on a channel. I love DIY channels, I seriously hate how almost all of them hide that all their tools were given. They say it from time to time, but on most videos, they'll just keep using the one from the past videos without mentionning getting them for free. That's an ads by the way, they may even directly get paid for using theses tools. With adsense though, the ads I get aren't necessarily related to the video, I'm AWARE they are ads, they are made FOR ME (thus more profitable for the channel, because I may need tool, but I may be more likely to buy a new computer for example).
Not necessarily. An ad for a restaurant doesn’t necessarily make you eat more. An ad for a hotel doesn’t make you go on more trips.
When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.
And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.
I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way.
Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are loathe to do investigative journalism or negative reporting on the companies that provide their bread and butter and because they also want to run stories that don't offend or antagonize their advertisers -- stories from that point of view that capitalism is bad or advertising is bad, for instance, are off limits to many outlets partially because of this.
Advertisers also routinely lie about the products they're selling, so people are being deceived about the products they're buying, sometimes with very serious negative consequences (such as advertising of cigarettes or medical products that are actually harmful).
I'm not dismissing the possibility of conversations about whether advertising for services is a type of transaction that's difficult to reason about, and that users need to be protected from themselves by regulation. But looking at only the outflow half of a transaction and asking "I don't benefit from this part, we should ban it" is utter gibberish.
"Did anyone ever investigate what benefits payment systems have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, since payment systems cost money to operate and in the end all they do is reduce the amount of money a user has. While payment systems may allow you to 'buy' services, we are still paying for these systems directly and indirectly
Why then, doesn't the government bring currency and bank accounts and credit cards to a halt?"
This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.
"To Serve Man."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.
Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations.
Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more complicated than you're making it seem. I don't need Javascript to put a tracking pixel in your email.
Aside from CSS and redirect links, all of these features are fairly straightforward. The consequences of disabling the Referer header, for example, are pretty small and easy to understand: you'll stop sending sites information about what links you used to get to them, but some very picky websites that check the header (e.g. image hosts that try to prevent hotlinking) might not work. This means browsers can provide options to let the user choose their preferred balance of privacy, functionality, performance, and "helping us improve your experience".
With JavaScript, on the other hand, it is very difficult for end-users to tell what a given website is doing. Are those hundred kilobytes of minified code a tracking/fingerprinting script, a crypto-miner, or a Hello World app in the UI framework du jour? It's hard for even an experienced developer to know for sure, and it's basically impossible for browsers. Your options are (1) allow everything, (2) use really crummy heuristics like "what domain is this file being served from", or (3) disable JavaScript and give up on using half the websites on the Internet.
JavaScript is the same. We'd have a cleaner, safer web without it. And only a small fraction of people would be happy with that.
Sometimes you need a car, but usually an ebike will be more than sufficient. Going on a road trip or doing a large Costco run? You probably want a car. Just picking up some eggs from the grocery store or making a visit to the library? An ebike is probably the best option, and is also likely faster (closer parking, can ride on roads, sidewalks, bike trails, etc).
I use a static site generator for my blog and personal web site, and there's absolutely no JavaScript involved. I use JavaScript with a web framework for webapps because otherwise we would need to build a desktop app, which would limit our reach to those platforms we have the resources to support.
I'm of the opinion that you should use the simplest technology that will get the job done. It's far easier to make a static site secure than a dynamic one. It's far easier for a customer to vet your server-rendered site than your pile of JavaScript (nothing runs locally, so they just vet form actions and HTTP headers).
If every browser had done the sane thing from day 1 (no third-party scripts and no cross-domain communication) we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. Sites could still use all the power that comes with scripting, ad networks just wouldn't be feasible.
You might be missing how expectations change after the introduction of a technology. I wouldn’t guess that people would be unhappy about not having cars before the car was even invented.
Isn’t this like saying atoms are to blame for nuclear warfare? Atoms enabled nuclear weapons?
Originally I used NoScript (and Firefox 'View>Page Style>No Style'), now I just tend to use uMatrix, with appropriate media types disabled.
It makes for a faster, and easier to read web, where I still see the occasional ad, but once configured, usually not.
I'd guess that use with Javascript disabled seems to be accepted in part due to Safari on iOS supporing it - possibly it was the default (I can't remember).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript
If you're a total tech-novice, sure, but as a power user it's fine. I'm blocking ycombinator.com right now. I can still submit this. If something doesn't work, just click the icon and trust its domain. If pictures don't show, trust a CDN. Amazon, Paypal, 99% of sites work with an initial adjustment of trust settings.
Something like the unholy child of RSS Feeds / Podcasts / NNTP / Email / Pub-Sub / Gopher / Google Reader
A new language (or two complementary languages) separating content and presentation, limited, possibly not Turing-complete but expressive. Specifically less powerful than modern web browsers.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...
I think JavaScript should have to request access to use browser APIs, and you should be able to disable access to any of all of them. For example, I should be about to disable:
- network access (disables adding script tags, XMLHttpRequest, fetch) - 2d canvas access - 3d canvas access - WASM
And so on, just like mobile apps, but perhaps more granular. The app should also be able to put a note as to why it needs each specific feature.
I won't ever apologize for doing so. As far as I'm concerned, any advertisement that depends on JavaScript is malware, and I think that my right to protect myself online outweighs the need of publishers to turn a profit.
IMO, profits are like respect. They must be earned, and if the only way you can turn a profit is by spying on people then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place. If the only way you can get me to use your product is by giving it away and selling my data, then maybe your product shouldn't exist?
As far as I'm concerned, the data I generate by using a search engine should be treated with the same care as my medical records. It should not be mined or traded. It should not be kept longer than 30 days.
And if that breaks the internet, so be it. You brought this on yourselves.
Why Dnscloak: doesn't route your traffic through a third party with dubious motivations.
On the whole network: pi-hole
So sure: maybe someday un-adblockable content will be a thing. Do I care about that content? Turns out maybe I'll just walk away entirely. The internet has a lot of utterly ad-ridden services with far too high an opinion of how important they really are.
So sure, make your sites, services, and content so annoying that I stop using them, and close copying loopholes, somehow. Or ban spyvertising and let it all go down in the flames of the prophesied ad-pocalypse. I really don't care a bit either way.
There is very little on the internet that is completely unique and of interest to me. If you try to put up a barrier to your content I will go somewhere else almost every time.