Ads suck. I block them universally. I understand the desire to “get back at the man”, and I don’t begrudge anyone for doing so. But we have to ask ourselves, what’s the real path forward, away from ads?
If a different model existed where users could pay for sites, I’m confident some would use it. I’m also confident many more would not use it. I expect a lot of users unwittingly want to be able to browse the web ad-free, for free, subsidized by the tech-illiterate and those too lazy to block ads.
We desperately need a better model for funding the internet. I’m aware of the work Brave did, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the internet being funded by ads. It instead brings users into the loop. Donations might work, and the “ad-free” subscription tier products seem sustainable. However, at scale, paying to waive ads on an individual site-by-site basis seems absurd.
Public funding for a noncommercial web. Websites that sell things have no problem paying for themselves. The noncommercial web would be a place for people to socialize, share media from their lives, and enjoy their hobbies.
Amateur radio is noncommercial. We should be able to have a similar regime on the web. It shouldn’t even really be that expensive to host. With peer to peer protocols there should be no need for paid hosting companies. Government could mandate that ISPs facilitate self hosting. With IPv6 every device should have static, publicly-routable IPs.
I personally view all forms of advertisement as a parasite or cancer on our eyes and ears. People disregard it as not that important, but I feel like it's way more impactful than most people think. It's constantly invading our spaces of work, casual enjoyment, transit, etc. It's a mental tax we're constantly paying.
I'd love to see a web standard for small donations via the browser. Whenever I see an article that helped me with a problem or was entertaining to read, I'd like to donate a small amount for it.
At the moment I only have the following options:
- clicking on ads on that page, to hopefully intirectly generate income for the author (but more likely will cause some profiling AI to wreak havoc on my reputation)
- having a paid account upfront, which is usually connected with the entire site and not this specific article
- create accounts for numerous payment and donation systems (patreon, paypal, buymeacoffee, ...)
- manually reach out to the author and ask them for their bank connection.
For me the perfect solution would be a browser-plugin, where I click on "Donate for this Article", enter an amount and maybe an optional comment and click "ok".
When ads are relevant and contextual enough, they become as good as or better than content. The problem isn't advertising. The problem is bad, mediocre, even malicious ads and ad formats.
The proliferation of terrible ads and ad formats fueled the rise of adblock. Adblock is how users fight back.
Adblock companies could collectively start to influence what ads are allowed through, but most attempts at this have been corrupted in the usual and predictable ways.
I used to think this way too, back in like 2009, but the years since then have changed my mind back around to completely hating all advertising. when was the last time you saw a relevant, useful, unobnoxious, unobtrusive, just really great ad? I can't remember the last time I saw one.
I worked at an ad search company for local businesses. This question was raised at all hands: what if we provided a paid ad-free experience?
The answer was simply: we earn $35/mo per user from ads. Do you think people pay that much for an ad-free experience? Our most valuable users might can afford that fee, but we earn way more from them.
Plus, how many ad companies are there? How many different people would we have to pay to browse without ads?
How many companies, once the ad revenue dries up, would charge for content? How many would charge for content AND heavily lace their websites with ads?
How expensive would the internet be if we had to directly pay for every website we wanted to use?
Personally, I think the internet is worth the cost of access. I don't think sites are worth an additional premium on top of that.
I have a different idea. I think ads can still exist, but in the form of more personalized sponsorships. For example, a company can send a person a product to try and then they can review it. That type of word of mouth is a bit less impersonal than a random ad and maybe we can even have models of trust so that the content creator is known for being objective. An example is Julian Krause on YouTube, who reviews audio gear. His reviews are so good and I feel he is very trustworthy based on what he says.
In my mind, if companies get a few of their products out there and get people to talk about them, it's better than random advertising in several ways. The only downside to companies is that it doesn't rake in as much profit, but I think they can still be profitable, just not as much as they are.
But then again, it'd be much better if we had a society where people bought things only if they really needed them, not if they are assaulted with ads left right and center. In my opinion, such a model is more along the lines of people buying things that really improve their life, rather than accumulating stuff because it seems in vogue.
One consequence is that advertising companies like Google and Facebook will be vastly less profitable, and that's okay. Too much wealth is concentrated to them anyway, and their employees are vastly overpaid in comparison to the value they actually deliver to society.
If a different model existed where users could pay for sites...
The devil is in the details.
"If a different model existed where users could pay for tv shows..." and then Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, etc. came.
I subscribed a bunch, the cancelled. Why? Different reasons, but in general: I wasn't able to really vote with my wallet. Shows that I liked very much got cancelled or, more often, degenerated horribly in subsequent seasons.
So any kind of fine-grained payment would be greatly appreciated. Not only for web content, but also for any kind of media.
I guess it would come with its own set of problems, trying too hard to content the public. But I feel that's better than the current situation, more on the top-down educating the unwashed masses.
I imagine a scheme that would socialize the burden of hosting and create a revenue stream for content creators. The revenue would come from those who paid up front for access and then didn't pull their weight re: hosting.
---
0. content-addressed data (e.g. IPFS) and a web of trust where trust means "not a bot, not a malicious human"
1. participants have a team number (0-255)
2. either participants are running a node, or they have a provider running one on their behalf.
3. every time your node requests data from another node by CID, it hashes the data twice (to get something other than the CID) and divides by 256. If the remainder is your team number, your node pins that data for a month. Otherwise it pins the data for 24h.
4. randomly, the nodes check to see if their neighbors are actually pinning the data they're supposed to, and make a naughty/nice list.
5. at the beginning of the month, participants put $10 into a smart contract, unless they have money left over from last month
6. at the end of the month, your node directs the contract to split $5 among the top 50% best citizens (re: pinning), paying nothing to the bottom 50%
7. your node also has kept track of which content you've requested. If you haven't +'d or -'d any content it just splits the other $5 evenly among the users who created the content that you requested. Otherwise it splits it according to your +'s and -'s.
---
You can make money if your node is reliably helpful to its neighbors, or if you're a content creator. On the other hand, if you don't care to run a node, the contract ends up at $0 for you at the end of the month and you can just pay $10 again next month if you want access to the content. If you run a node but your internet connection is unreliable (or your node is offline), maybe you end up paying $8 per month because for 80% of your neighbors you were in the bottom 50% on the naughty/nice list
Probably there's also reward money for people who sniff out bad actors and cause them to be excluded from the web of trust on the next go-around.
In summary: reciprocity, with a little $ on the line to keep people honest. And since power corrupts, so it can't be managed by a corporate entity since the corruption would kick in before it got big enough to be "the" go-to place for content on the web--it's got to be a protocol without privileged roles.
You can pump money into the system by buying adspace and just putting up pictures of cats or whatever. Either target them very carefully to always be shown to you, or better yet have them go out far and wide while you keep blocking ads on your devices guilt free.
Been using this for a while, and I forget about it just as much as I did when using ublock (which is what this uses under the hood). I think I've had it installed for 2 months, and my ad spend is calculated to be about $400. Not bad.
It feels like the nuclear option, but the absolute lack of respect that advertisers seem to have for me has gone entirely too far, and it's nice to be able to punch back in my own small little way.
no marketer optimizes for clicks, they optimize for conversions.
so unless this bot is going to go onto the advertisers site and purchase something, which can then be attributed back to the viewed impression, then this will just be ignored by ad tech like any other bot click
That's exactly why the extension works. Imagine paying for advertisements thousands of dollars just so that people keep autoclicking to cost you a few cents out of spite. The advertiser loses money but doesn't get conversions, Google gets the advertisers money but loses them as a customer in the long term. If everyone did this then the model would become unsustainable and we would be finally forced to find an alternative.
Whether that's the right to solve the issue or not is another matter altogether, but the fundamentals of this extension are sound.
You're missing that ad networks can detect and exclude these spammy clicks. And on many networks advertisers can choose to be charged on a per-conversion basis.
Same, so many "root@localhost" or "admin@atlassian.com" sign-ups purely because I've seen automated marketing systems get setup and understand how easy it is to flag a flow as "Oh yeah they're about to buy something, give the source $" before confirming an action.
I've been using the extension on Firefox for years. Their browser context menu for blocking individual HTML elements has been really handy for the more aggressive AD-heavy sites, though I sometimes miss uMatrix's fine-grained controls.
On the plus side, I can't recall the last time I needed to disable the extension to get a site to work; I'm wondering if it's due to the ad networks still being able to ping back despite the element remaining hidden?
It sends bogus search requests in the background. And it seems like it works as intended, as the extension is banned entirely from Google's Chrome store.
Readit News
If a different model existed where users could pay for sites, I’m confident some would use it. I’m also confident many more would not use it. I expect a lot of users unwittingly want to be able to browse the web ad-free, for free, subsidized by the tech-illiterate and those too lazy to block ads.
We desperately need a better model for funding the internet. I’m aware of the work Brave did, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the internet being funded by ads. It instead brings users into the loop. Donations might work, and the “ad-free” subscription tier products seem sustainable. However, at scale, paying to waive ads on an individual site-by-site basis seems absurd.
Does anyone have any other ideas?
Public funding for a noncommercial web. Websites that sell things have no problem paying for themselves. The noncommercial web would be a place for people to socialize, share media from their lives, and enjoy their hobbies.
Amateur radio is noncommercial. We should be able to have a similar regime on the web. It shouldn’t even really be that expensive to host. With peer to peer protocols there should be no need for paid hosting companies. Government could mandate that ISPs facilitate self hosting. With IPv6 every device should have static, publicly-routable IPs.
I personally view all forms of advertisement as a parasite or cancer on our eyes and ears. People disregard it as not that important, but I feel like it's way more impactful than most people think. It's constantly invading our spaces of work, casual enjoyment, transit, etc. It's a mental tax we're constantly paying.
At the moment I only have the following options:
- clicking on ads on that page, to hopefully intirectly generate income for the author (but more likely will cause some profiling AI to wreak havoc on my reputation)
- having a paid account upfront, which is usually connected with the entire site and not this specific article
- create accounts for numerous payment and donation systems (patreon, paypal, buymeacoffee, ...)
- manually reach out to the author and ask them for their bank connection.
For me the perfect solution would be a browser-plugin, where I click on "Donate for this Article", enter an amount and maybe an optional comment and click "ok".
The proliferation of terrible ads and ad formats fueled the rise of adblock. Adblock is how users fight back.
Adblock companies could collectively start to influence what ads are allowed through, but most attempts at this have been corrupted in the usual and predictable ways.
The answer was simply: we earn $35/mo per user from ads. Do you think people pay that much for an ad-free experience? Our most valuable users might can afford that fee, but we earn way more from them.
How many companies, once the ad revenue dries up, would charge for content? How many would charge for content AND heavily lace their websites with ads?
How expensive would the internet be if we had to directly pay for every website we wanted to use?
Personally, I think the internet is worth the cost of access. I don't think sites are worth an additional premium on top of that.
A website placing a well intended ad and being respectful of your experience and attention is fine.
Dark patterns and Casual evil are not.
In my mind, if companies get a few of their products out there and get people to talk about them, it's better than random advertising in several ways. The only downside to companies is that it doesn't rake in as much profit, but I think they can still be profitable, just not as much as they are.
But then again, it'd be much better if we had a society where people bought things only if they really needed them, not if they are assaulted with ads left right and center. In my opinion, such a model is more along the lines of people buying things that really improve their life, rather than accumulating stuff because it seems in vogue.
One consequence is that advertising companies like Google and Facebook will be vastly less profitable, and that's okay. Too much wealth is concentrated to them anyway, and their employees are vastly overpaid in comparison to the value they actually deliver to society.
The devil is in the details.
"If a different model existed where users could pay for tv shows..." and then Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, etc. came.
I subscribed a bunch, the cancelled. Why? Different reasons, but in general: I wasn't able to really vote with my wallet. Shows that I liked very much got cancelled or, more often, degenerated horribly in subsequent seasons.
So any kind of fine-grained payment would be greatly appreciated. Not only for web content, but also for any kind of media.
I guess it would come with its own set of problems, trying too hard to content the public. But I feel that's better than the current situation, more on the top-down educating the unwashed masses.
---
0. content-addressed data (e.g. IPFS) and a web of trust where trust means "not a bot, not a malicious human"
1. participants have a team number (0-255)
2. either participants are running a node, or they have a provider running one on their behalf.
3. every time your node requests data from another node by CID, it hashes the data twice (to get something other than the CID) and divides by 256. If the remainder is your team number, your node pins that data for a month. Otherwise it pins the data for 24h.
4. randomly, the nodes check to see if their neighbors are actually pinning the data they're supposed to, and make a naughty/nice list.
5. at the beginning of the month, participants put $10 into a smart contract, unless they have money left over from last month
6. at the end of the month, your node directs the contract to split $5 among the top 50% best citizens (re: pinning), paying nothing to the bottom 50%
7. your node also has kept track of which content you've requested. If you haven't +'d or -'d any content it just splits the other $5 evenly among the users who created the content that you requested. Otherwise it splits it according to your +'s and -'s.
---
You can make money if your node is reliably helpful to its neighbors, or if you're a content creator. On the other hand, if you don't care to run a node, the contract ends up at $0 for you at the end of the month and you can just pay $10 again next month if you want access to the content. If you run a node but your internet connection is unreliable (or your node is offline), maybe you end up paying $8 per month because for 80% of your neighbors you were in the bottom 50% on the naughty/nice list
Probably there's also reward money for people who sniff out bad actors and cause them to be excluded from the web of trust on the next go-around.
In summary: reciprocity, with a little $ on the line to keep people honest. And since power corrupts, so it can't be managed by a corporate entity since the corruption would kick in before it got big enough to be "the" go-to place for content on the web--it's got to be a protocol without privileged roles.
AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25043165 - Nov 2020 (11 comments)
AdNauseam: Browser extension to fight back against tracking by ad networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20048216 - May 2019 (63 comments)
AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278936 - March 2019 (164 comments)
Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524 - Aug 2017 (246 comments)
AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251 - Aug 2017 (174 comments)
AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 - Jan 2017 (329 comments)
AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 - Dec 2016 (276 comments)
AdNauseam Browser Extension: Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594 - Nov 2015 (72 comments)
Ad blocker that clicks on the ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515398 - Oct 2014 (238 comments)
> AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent
But here I go.
Edit: It would seem that brave blocks ads in a way that prevents adnauseum from clicking them first, bummer. (followed instructions here: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...)
Edit: hmm, I can't seem to get the number to go above 0 for brave or chrome.
It feels like the nuclear option, but the absolute lack of respect that advertisers seem to have for me has gone entirely too far, and it's nice to be able to punch back in my own small little way.
so unless this bot is going to go onto the advertisers site and purchase something, which can then be attributed back to the viewed impression, then this will just be ignored by ad tech like any other bot click
Whether that's the right to solve the issue or not is another matter altogether, but the fundamentals of this extension are sound.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action
On the plus side, I can't recall the last time I needed to disable the extension to get a site to work; I'm wondering if it's due to the ad networks still being able to ping back despite the element remaining hidden?
It sends bogus search requests in the background. And it seems like it works as intended, as the extension is banned entirely from Google's Chrome store.