Firefox needs to take its recommended extensions program more seriously. They have been recommending a copy-cat extension for over two years now, despite the reports of users and major developers (including gorhill himself).
It looks like it is just a repackaged a AdGuard in a way that complies with the GPLv3 license of the original project.
Sure, morally, it is questionable at best. But it looks like it is legal, does exactly what it says, and doesn't harm users in any way. Furthermore, it is highly rated with a lot of downloads.
While I admit I'd rather not be supporting a ripoff, I don't think it is Mozilla's job to check the morals of developers unless there is a direct risk for users.
Mozilla shouldn’t recommend an old and unmaintained fork (Adblocker ultimate) when they could recommend the actual, up-to-date extension (AdGuard).
The rip-off extension only has a lot of downloads (more than the real extension, in fact) because it’s recommended by Mozilla. It’s not illegal, just unethical.
Ethics is not the major problem here. The problem is the recommendation actually is harmful - it influences the users the way they install an outdated and less-supported version of an extension instead of a more relevant one. The top recommendations must be curated by humans with reason to actually offer the best extensions and not spam like that.
It’s not unethical, Mozilla has no responsibility to promote any particular extension. If it were ripped off closed source code, then sure. But a fork of an open source project is part of the deal with open source.
Just because you are allowed to do something does not mean that it is ethical. Same with the law. Slavery was once allowed. Many people find that unethical nonetheless.
The opposite is also true: just because something is outlawed does not mean it is unethical. Many things deemed good now became lawful after people did them.
Ethics is not defined by laws, contracts and licenses. It is defined by your moral compass and different people under a same law may have different world views.
I have seen Mozilla recommend closed source addons. They have all the rights to do that (thanksfully), however I was not too happy with this, especially from an organization that promotes open source and an open web.
I see no point in promoting an outdated fork when you can recommend the better, fresher, original extension.
Wow, thanks for the refresher that ethics != laws. I had accidentally completely forgotten that.
Now, back to the point. Nobody has made an ethical argument that Mozilla shouldn’t be pushing an extension that is a fork with a license preferable to them.
Well, these points were made in this thread and elsewhere, but in this case, pushing this extension instead of the original one prevents users to find the better version, and these users might even donate to the fork in the hope it will improve or to thank for the work, instead of donating to the original one, that really did the work and will be able to improve it.
Of course, this does not apply to every situation where there is a fork. In many situations, there is real work done in the fork, sometimes this work is even upstreamed.
> a fork with a license preferable to them
Both extensions have the same license (GPLv3), except the fork removed the original copyright notices from the original source code. This is probably not even allowed, let alone ethical.
No one's claiming that it's malicious or illegal. It's just that a recommendation engine that recommends an old, unmaintained, copy-cat extension which wasn't exactly great back when it was new and maintained is not very trustworthy -- it's either very bad, or vulnerable to rigging.
It's like a movie recommendation engine that preeminently features Howard the Duck or something. It's not malicious or illegal but its recommendations are probably useless.
> I don't think it is Mozilla's job to check the morals of developers unless there is a direct risk for users.
Personally, I'm entirely OK with Mozilla exercising some editorial judgment here. In many ways, Mozilla only exists because of moral judgment about technology. And thank goodness. Without them, we might all still be stuck on IE: https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/
The Addons policy apparently has this to say about forks:
> If the add-on is a fork of another add-on, the name must clearly distinguish it from the original and provide a significant difference in functionality and/or code.
If anyone considers the addon to be in violation of this policy, they can use the “report for abuse” link halfway down the AMO page. Be sure to cite the policy paragraph and to politely explain why it violates the policy. The AMO review team may or may not agree, but at the very least they’ll consider it.
It's not Mozilla's job to adjudicate license infringement, but the GPL doesn't give permission to lie about who owns the copyright as that extension apparently does. Regardless, Mozilla probably should hold "recommended" extensions to a higher standard if deceptive copycats are able to make the list.
Question for HN: What will happen to the web when uBlock Origin becomes prevelent enough? Currently the vast majority of the internet is completely (or mostly) ad funded: Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, Reddit, YouTube, etc etc. Adblockers like uBlock Origin hurt these sites by deriving them of revenue. Currently, there hasn't been too much of an effect because the adblock usage rate is low enough that adblocking free riders don't cause enough harm.
However, this calculus changes quite a bit when adblock penetration reaches high enough levels. Once 80-90% of users use adblock I don't see how these sites will survive. And that adblock penetration rate increases year over year due to efforts like this.
The real question is what will happen next. Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal? Will websites engage in sophisticated technical anti-adblock measures? Will companies like Google and Twitter give up on advertising and shutter their existing businesses? All I can say is that the current situation doesn't seem sustainable.
Honestly the web was a thing before money took over, if the bussiness model collapses it collapses. If you cant make money on the internet without pissing off your userbase to such an extent they resort to specialized programs to modify your content to be not annoying, then you dont deserve to make money (yes, yes tragedy of commons, individual advertisers dont just affect themselves)
But i somewhat imagine for at least pay per click ads the audience is separate from people with ad blockers, because when was the last time you ever intentionally clicked on a banner ad?
Totally agreed. We ended up funding the web with an attention/gullibility tax not because of an careful planning, but because the technology wasn't there for anything else.
For quite a while I've been very conscious about paying for things I like, things I think are good in the world. Subscriptions for sure. Patreon to support individuals. And I just signed up for Scroll, which sends money every month to the sites I browse: https://scroll.com/
If ads die (which I'm 100% in favor of), then people will figure out how to support the things they really like and care about. And the rest will die off.
> Totally agreed. We ended up funding the web with an attention/gullibility tax not because of an careful planning, but because the technology wasn't there for anything else.
That implies it was even needed. It wasn't the same people either, the online ad industry is a bunch of greedy fucks with dollars in their eyes, they came to the web like a swarm of locusts.
The marginal cost of rendering another web page is zero, so economically there's no reason for them to pay anything.
Further, the attention of a perfectly broke version has a value of zero. Since advertisers are still paying for it, you could argue those hypothetical people are harming a website by viewing it: they bring the yield of ads down, encouraging advertisers to only support things for rich people.
> The marginal cost of rendering another web page is zero, so economically there's no reason for them to pay anything.
Tragedy of the commons. The marginal cost to render another page is zero, but if 100% of pages pay nothing, the server is run at a loss. As a result, only pages that can get "stuck in" alongside revenue-positive content (or pages on a whole server operating at a loss with revenue generated via some other source) can survive (i.e. a patronage model).
> Further, the attention of a perfectly broke [person] has a value of zero
In addition to direct encouragement for consumers to buy something (what is called "conversion"), advertising is also used to shape public perception and garner general interest. Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value, because their product becomes the thing that person will ask for if someone offers them a free beverage of their choice, and it becomes the thing they'll generally recognize as "a soda" over alternatives when the topic comes up at all. The Ad Council's products are generally not about getting a broke person to spend money, but to shape their behavior ("this is your brain on drugs," "#DanceLikeaDad," etc.).
Possibly, but not necessarily. The tragedy of the commons applies when there's a non-zero marginal cost. But with zero marginal cost, you have have to find some way to cover your expenses, and then you can give away the rest as a public good. E.g., the NYT can happily give away a ton of pageviews to non-subscribers as long as they keep their subscriber base up. Public radio, another medium with zero marginal cost, has been giving away their content for decades.
> Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value
[citation needed]
I highly doubt Coke thinks that way. There is approximately nobody who sees their ads that is so permanently destitute that they will never have the opportunity to buy a soda. Indeed, at least in the US, the poor are better customers than the well off. About 2/3rds of people below $30k in income drink soda, while only about half of people over $75k do. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163997/regular-soda-popular-you...
It's unclear to me if we are disagreeing on anything or merely stating the same things slightly differently.
> The tragedy of the commons applies when there's a non-zero marginal cost. But with zero marginal cost, you have have to find some way to cover your expenses, and then you can give away the rest as a public good
So a web page isn't zero marginal cost, it's nearly-zero. Servers require occasional maintenance and continuously consume electricity (to say nothing of the rent / peering arrangement that is usually part of gaining access to someone else's network). Even though a server can host a million individual pages at near-zero marginal cost for each, the original point still stands that if nobody is paying for that server and nobody finds "some way to cover your expenses," the electricity will stop flowing or it will break down and nobody will repair it. So everyone hosting on that server is doing so at the mercy and pleasure of the org or individual paying for the server's continued existence (i.e. a patronage arrangement). Your specific examples (NYT giving some content away and public broadcasting giving all of it away) are examples of patronage models in action (NYT non-subscribers are patrons of NYT, and public broadcasting itself is a patron of its sponsor base).
> [citation needed]
I believe you gave a fair explanation of why Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value immediately after that request for citation, so I will cite your logic. In addition to your observations, the points about brand stickiness (that "when someone offers you a soda, they want you to ask for Coke" bit) and behavior shaping still apply (source: I worked in advertising, this is common knowledge in the industry, but if you want concrete sources I can hit the Google and try to dig up a primer on the industry philosophy; it's so bedrock-knowledge that I can't remember precisely where I learned it). But you're right; even absent those effects, Coke assumes that people who are broke right this moment aren't broke tomorrow and still want you thinking about buying their beverage. "Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value."
As to marginal cost, I don't think you quite understand the term. Web servers are fixed costs. Hardware, setting up pages, electricity: all of that is considered a fixed cost. The marginal cost is the additional cost of producing one more unit of product. In this case, the actual cost difference between serving page 1,000,000 and 1,000,001. So, say 0.0007¢ in bandwidth for a modern, too-heavy page. Too cheap to meter.
It's true that the fixed costs have to get paid for, but there are plenty of ways to do that. And once that's covered, there is no tragedy of the commons. As long as the NYT has enough subscribers to pay their fixed costs and produce a reasonable ROI for their investors, they're golden.
Agreed, but "And once that's covered" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that story. And if those pages that cost $0.000007 to run are contributing $0 to that cost, they are at the mercy of their patron and in no way in control of their own fate.
It's a tragedy of the commons if 100% of those pages think someone else is going to foot the bill and one day the system that is actually footing the bill for those pages changes.
> In addition to direct encouragement for consumers to buy something (what is called "conversion"), advertising is also used to shape public perception and garner general interest. Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value, because their (..)
Except that it's completely utterly wrong to milk broke people like that.
Oh it happens, but advertising trying to influence you to have thoughts that you would otherwise not have, is actually something that most people disapprove of.
It's not really a good argument to say "just because you don't have money to buy our stuff, doesn't mean we can't control your brain in other ways".
THINK for one moment: If you have nothing to give, or nothing you WANT to give, what on EARTH gives them the right to take something else from you anyway?!!?!
It's a transaction. If you don't want to be influenced by website advertising, feel free to avoid the website. If you hate online advertising as a whole, feel free to go to the library.
... where you'll only be advertised at to READ and told about local community events. "Advertising" is really just the structural term for "People communicating things at each other." It's pretty inimical to human interaction in any common human space since we developed the capacity to communicate, and it's pretty unavoidable. We have some laws constraining the sorts of things we can advertise at each other, but advertising itself is extremely core to the experience of living in a human society.
I'm not sure where one draws the line between a Coke ad and a blacksmith's shingle, or between brand-recognition ads and towns putting up hisotrical markers indicating why the town is special. It's all on a common spectrum of information exchange.
I agree; that's a structural problem I'd like to see improved. Google used to have a Contributor program where you could pay directly to not see ads, but it was shut down at some point it seems. Some websites offer you the opportunity to pay a subscription fee to avoid ads, but it's very ad-hoc (no pun intended).
A general solution for that where people could avoid ads by direct-paying publishers would be nice to have. As it stands, we're left with not-so-great options for the consumer where we either just deal with the annoyance of ads, choose to consume advertising-free content at a premium (that differs from the ad-supported content), or try to cheat the system by getting ad-supported content without ads.
Sure. Which means we'll end up with some sort of system where that's not necessary. Remember, the marginal cost of production for a web site visit is zero.
It's also important to remember that the vast majority of journalists and would-be journalists currently can't afford to do journalism. We need to solve both the consumer and producer problems.
uBlock Origin seems to block all advertising on Youtube for me, including pre-roll and intermission ads in the videos. The only advertising I see on youtube these days is the sponsored sections inserted by the video creators.
I don't really watch that much youtube but now that my son watches some cartoons on it I've subscribed to premium so he doesn't see any ads. I think it's ok to pay for youtube as it arguably provides a useful service. I also know that I'm in a privileged position to be able to pay for youtube premium, so my comment is not about whether ads are inherently bad or not, just that you can watch youtube without ads if you pay for it.
if you think the future is asking people from Rwanda to pay 5 bucks a month to read a single online newspaper, or get access to Reddit then I guess you're in for a rude awakening.
"In a world without ads, people will just pay their own way" is elitist thinking. Most people online have nothing of value to exchange except their attention.
I can't wait for the big actors to leave room for a more decentralized network where power is dilluted across many smaller actors with saner business strategies / founding schemes. Please keep blocking ads, we don't need this pervasive power-hungry privacy-unfriendly manipulation. We need it to vanish. Emails can already be provided by small companies, ISPs and non profits, and would actually work even better without the big actors... because we would have to make it work, no choice! No more outlook.com deciding that your mail will end up in your recipients' spam folder because they think you are too small for them to give a shit about you... everybody would be small.
I want chat, video calls and thought sharing with social circles to work the same way. We don't need one Facebook to rule all the social concerns of the whole human species (the part that uses internet anyway) as it sees fit. I would not worry too much for such services. It will work. Same for YouTube. I run a PeerTube instance on a cheap VPS for a small association. Granted, we don't have a lot of traffic, but if we had, the peer to peer feature would help, right? :-)
As for newspapers... I don't have a definitive answer that would be privacy-friendly, sadly. Nor for search engines (including for videos in a more decentralized world....).
I worry that adblocking ultimately hurts only the little sites. Google and Facebook have first party ads which could be made significantly more tricky to block. Or Google could use Chrome’s dominance to slowly switch over to a variation of Encrypted Media Extensions, which is impossible to interfere with.
Small sites can put in the effort to make deals with individual advertisers and bake it right into the page.
Usually when I or others bring this up someone says: but then you are leaving behind the value of serving customized ads for each user.
To to which I counter:
- ads baked into the page would probably slip by my ad blocker, and more importantly, as long as they are relevant and not annoying I'd probably not even care to try to get rid of them. There exist a subset of ads that are absolutely ok with me and I'd be happy to leave them visible to support smaller sites, and another subset of ads that I just don't care strongly about.
- I strongly believe that the value of customized ads has been overhyped. And with that I mean to the ad buyer, not to Google: I've only seen relevant ads from Google once or twice a year for the last 10 years or so.
- there should be a value in knowing that your ads don't end up next to a "hit the monkey scam" or next to another dubious ad. A good seller or sales organization can make this obvious to ad buyers.
- for a number of sites I would not only be OK with but also happy to pay for individual news items (think smaller newspapers from Nowhere that gets linked in social media etc), as long as they don't insist on selling me a subscription instead of access to this single page.
> Small sites can put in the effort to make deals with individual advertisers and bake it right into the page.
Say I run a blog, by myself or maybe with one other person. Even putting aside questions of my own limited time, are big companies going to deal with me? Is it practical for them to deal with me and a thousand other, individual small blogs?
If you run a blog now, how much money do you realistically expect to make?
I have a site that gets about 30k pageviews per month; I threw ads on it just to see what would happen. It makes something like $12/month. Even at minimum wage here, after hosting costs I could afford to spend approximately zero time on it.
So I think for small sites, the answer is effectively the same with algorithmic ads or directly sold ads: you won't make enough to matter either way.
> In Q1 2018, [AdWords] advertisers paid $2.8 dollars per thousand impressions
So for a site with 30K monthly page-views, I'd expect something closer to $84 per month with one ad per page. Place an ad on both the top and bottom of each page, and now it's $168 per month. Still not a ton by any stretch, but an extra 2K in income each year is nothing to sneeze at.
Ad rates are continually dropping, so I'm sure the current figure is lower. And you're assuming a random blogger would get the same kind of yield as the mostly professional participants in the ad network there.
And even if you're right, an extra $2k in income would only be nothing to sneeze at if the ROI is decent. But competition for eyeballs is fierce. There's a reason that even professional writers are having a hard time making ends meet.
... and it makes a world of difference for some people.
Ad clearinghouses are a flattening and democratizing force on the Internet that I don't think people recognize as such. They let people who otherwise couldn't really afford to pay for server space put up their content.
You could instead look at tailoring your ads to your page. Early website advertising was mostly tailored to the content at hand.
If you wrote a blog about leatherworking and wanted some ad money, you could go to a leatherworking tool company and say "I have this much traffic and its 100% people interested in your product because why else would they be on my website reading about this niche leatherworking technique that only you and I and my audience care about, lets make a deal." I bet that pitch would land a handshake.
With streamers/influencers being an entire industry these days, there are probably a lot of boutique agencies who do all this legwork of connecting company with highly specific products to your interested niche audience for you. And if the model changed where this would be how advertising is now done, you would see a lot more of these advertising agents at every economic spectra making these deals on behalf of any sized company or website.
If you wrote a blog about leatherworking and wanted some
ad money, you could go to a leatherworking tool company
and say "I have this much traffic and its 100% people
interested in your product becaus
I used to run a website with a "bespoke" approach to ads like this.
It does not work.
For this approach to work, you need somebody who...
1. Is good with the actual subject matter (leatherworking or whatever)
2. Is a strong writer/communicator
3. Has the "salesperson" personality to go and promote their blog to potential companies
4. Has the TIME to promote their blog to potential companies, deliver metrics so they know what kind of exposure they're buying, etc
5. Has the appropriate technical chops to run/publish a blog, handle ads, set up analytics, etc.
Those are disparate skillsets. You are going to exclude an AWFUL lot of good leatherworkers who'd otherwise be good at this. Sure, the occasional unicorns who combine these skillsets exist.
Just like there are a certain number of people in the world who are competitive skateboarders and... are also taekwondo masters or world-class violinists or something.
And if you're lucky maybe 0.1% of that remaining 0.1% will actually have the time to pursue something like the venture you describe, which tends to rule out folks who are already working 40+ hour weeks and have kids and such.
In reality, we're talking about an operation involving several full-time people with a breadth of skillsets to make this kind of operation a sustainable business.
A lot of podcasts and streamers do kinda make this work, but are generally part of networks and in the end are still beholden to advertisers whose businesses are an odd fit with the subject matter at hand anyway -- like all the tech and true-crime podcasts who sell ads to Stamps.com. It's not really the smoothly-integrated seamless bespoke ad paradise you want.
Just look at how long ring doorbells has supported this week in * podcasts (Leo Laporte) before the acquisition by Amazon.com. Ithink if you're influential enough,the advertisers come to you.
Also now they've effectively censored you about the dangers of paying to have a spy camera in your house that collects all footage and sends it to law enforcement (and anyone else with access).
Even for slightly larger organizations, I'd wager the extra work required to procure you're own agreements is a significant expense. Local newspapers (for example) often run on razor thin margins.
While it's true that print newspapers also had to obtain their own ad agreements, they had a lot of other revenue sources back then too. Classifieds were a huge one; another was that issues weren't free for users. Hence how they're struggling.
Podcasts are another medium that require bespoke advertising agreements. And smaller creators have found a solution—combine to form larger "podcast networks" that collectively handle advertising agreements.
This seems to be working, but it also runs counter to your goal of a more decentralized internet. As I see it, the logical end-game in the podcast space is for networks to keep combining with each other in order to take advantage of economies of scale. Eventually, the entire Podcasting space will be dominated by a handful of major networks—or, Spotify will just take over everything, and any semblance of podcasting as an open platform will disappear.
> While it's true that print newspapers also had to obtain their own ad agreements, they had a lot of other revenue sources back then too. Classifieds were a huge one; another was that issues weren't free for users.
Good points, and interesting.
Hopefully an equally interesting counterpoint:
Publishing and distribution today is a fraction of the cost of paper based media.
> - I strongly believe that the value of customized ads has been overhyped. And with that I mean to the ad buyer, not to Google: I've only seen relevant ads from Google once or twice a year for the last 10 years or so.
Its not customized ads to YOU, but its customized ads to a particular audience, which may or may not include you. That audience might include a bunch of people who are extremely likely to buy things, and it definitely moves the scales for those companies.
Google and Facebook work diligently and at great expense to make sure that not too many people are "turned off" by ads - an example is even recently how Google rolled back its search results ad UX change after the outcry started to pick up stream. It would be an existential threat for them if everyone started moving towards ad blocking. So they simply keep people from getting to that threshold.
If they work diligently and at great expense, then maybe they are just missing a signal here? I have an idea for an interesting one:
Maybe if they would look at the feedback they got on the ads (yep, people taking the effort to click on that tiny tiny x in the top right corner of the ad) where people said that the ad were irrelevant or even offensive. Maybe if they started with the assumption that these people knew what they were doing and hadn't managed to hit that specific combination by random chance and especially not three times or more in a row. And maybe if they had removed these users from the group that got said ads then that could be a good starting point for further work.
I'm no machine learning expert by any means but taking into account the current situation there should be some room for improvement.
If anyone missed it: I'm sarcastic. I believe ads targeting are either out of control, or Google as a company aren't as smart as they think they are or they have a really deep disregard for users.
I don't think Google did roll back their main change, hiding/masking the result URLs. What they said was "We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons." Sure enough, for me the icons are gone, but that's not what I care about. I mainly use DDG, which has icons that are often useful, and which has proper result URLs that are IMO essential.
Besides, Google etc. turned me off ads years ago, so they didn't work diligently enough.
Google already does the latter on mobile. Every single one of their apps defaults to forcing a Chrome tab open instead of your preferred browser. Chrome on mobile doesn't offer extensions like Firefox does. I only recently discovered there is an option to turn off this behavior but its only a matter of time until they remove that option.
I am not sure whether that is true. I don't have Chrome on my android and firefox is my default browser. So all apps load firefox in app Page when they are navigating to an outside url.
Most apps respect your preferences. The tab action to keep you in the app will typically give you a tab of your default web browser if your preferred browser has implemented it.
Gmail and Google search specifically open a powered by chrome tab when you click on links unless you look around deep in the settings to turn off this user hostile feature.
I didn't look too deep, but the demo peer isn't convincing. It took 10 seconds to complete the search, and yilded 0 results when startpage has several pages of results.
Web browsers are now a relic of the past used by a small cult of nerds and promoted by fanatics at EFF. Now world runs on SuperApps by Google, Facebook and Amazon. These are "Open" platforms which provide content authoring and hosting platform, ad networks, micropayment and discovery services for a small fees of 30%. The content is easily sharable across except for a recent glitch in Amazon and Google platforms causing them to be unable to interlink. Content of these is only searchable on Bing and Google.
Some Evil countries like Russia, China and Iran block access to these and run on copied platforms developed by Yandex, Baidu and Alibaba.
With a notable reduction in junk sites, better performance and security the Internet was never a better place.
I think your "dystopian picture", while very interesting, is an extrapolation the current mobile landscape, where internet usage is already mostly done through social media apps rather than browsers. This, of course, gives free rein to advertisement.
However, the main reason these apps gained all this traction is that the Web is simply not made for small devices with touchscreens. It's the discomfort of using web browsers on mobile that created the tipping incentive to adopt these streamlined apps. As long as people keep using more comfortable devices (eg. laptops) that can easily browse the Web, this segment will not have that "discomfort" incentive to move away from the Web and onto more restricted platforms.
Yes, there could be other incentives - you mention junk sites and security issues - but these aren't strong enough to outweigh the main advantage of browsers, which is the breadth and momentum of the Web, something that users still value. I hope I'm right.
The fault lies in web design more than hardware. When the iPhone came out, suddenly mobile sites had to be created because the device was not powerful enough to run the sort of web design paradigms that were in vogue in 2007.
However, if the iPhone came out in 1997 when websites were mostly static html pages, provided the browser could wrap text, it would be an excellent experience. An iPhone's screen is about the size of a few paragraphs from a newspaper column; it's not tiny, in fact its perfectly sized for ergonomic reading. The most praised reading apps on mobile these days are just a plain background and a block of text consuming the whole screen, with the rest of the ui getting out of your way.
Mobile web browsers existed long before the iPhone. At the time mobile web browsing meant using regular GSM with EDGE if you were lucky. Remember people were browsing the web on feature phones and PDAs like the Treo and Windows Mobile stuff.
> the Web is simply not made for small devices with touchscreens
I think that you are 100% incorrect: the Web (i.e., HTML) is perfect for small devices with touchscreens. As asdff notes, late-90s websites would work perfectly on a mobile device. It's all the cruft we have spent the past twenty years polluting the Web and our browsers with that doesn't work so well in a mobile context.
A mobile phone is perfectly capable of displaying images and text. HTML is perfectly capable of displaying images and text in a device-independent fashion: that was its raison d'etre, as I recall.
I think where we went wrong was assuming that browser windows would be maximised on a desktop screen. That, and JavaScript.
True is current scenario, but if tomorrow stack overflow removes the website and is available only from a Browser2.0, millions of techies will install it. Youtube / NYTimes /... are even more impactful.
The idea is not to disable ability to run browser and millions of website will continue to exist, but Top 1000 web properties and 99.9% of traffic and money will move out.
In current scenario, you can still run a BBS and share some really interesting content, but it will be a niche of nerds and fanatics.
Haha, you've described today, only those big app-platforms run on the web. I'd prefer them to be native apps. That would be more CPU efficient and devices in turn would be cheaper and effectively more powerful. Can you comfortably run a few of these at the same time on a 10 year old netbook? Not currently.
I'm in favor of retiring the web. Not that it will happen any time soon. How many reasons do we need? Private information leakage alone should not be tolerated. Accessibility? Attack surface? Resource efficiency?
Obviously I'm missing the point, because none of this explains why internet is what it is. I sure wish it were simpler.
I think that in such vision we'd be also slowly marching towards controlled, approved by vaguely described but tolerated by everyone "standards" (political and cultural), DRM-ed safe content from those SuperApps providers. It wouldn't happen fast but that'd be the direction. The remaining classic pages would be forced to transfer themselves into new reality or completely cease to exist. The "alternative private Internet projects" would be outlawed by hands of politicians who'd be open lobbyists of big corporations.
Realistically speaking, we're already one foot, or hell, leg inside the world and times where the Internet belongs to few corporations who are giving us software, services and content and it's nothing surprising that some countries are trying to fight these namely american monopolies with own solutions at the same time blocking by legal means access to what majority of world is using.
The US will be copying Asia in this case. China already has super apps like this and Grab & GoJek already expressed their interest in following their lead. US is way behind.
I believe GP's statement on international apps was sarcastic and subtly pointed out that this technological siloization would foster narrow worldviews.
Language silos our world view more than tech could. If you read a news article about Greece that isn't in Greek, chances are you are reading a cherry picked one off story that the newspaper thought might be of general interest to English speaking audiences, leaving behind an entire reality that is invisible to your world view, having never uttered Greek to steep yourself in the most thorough relevant information, or even been to Greece to see it all for yourself. The Greece you've constructed in your head doesn't even exist.
Yes. Western people really can't understand this. Western media can publish only negative facts about some country and this creates completely distorted world view. They don't even have to publish fake news (although they were pioneers in this also).
Centralised platforms like Google also contribute to this because they can (and in case of Google they do it indeed) lift up negative articles and bury positive.
The world is already siloed and narrow minded and always was. E.g. OP writes "evil countries like Russia, China, Iran". It's a very narrow view that is very far from truth. It is formed exclusively by western media and nothing else where another evil country - US - tries to defile every other country in order to loot it using direct (invasion) or indirect (sanctions and neo-colonial politics) measures.
> Adblockers like uBlock Origin hurt these sites by deriving them of revenue.
Even if that's true, consider that perhaps the proliferation of adblockers like uBlock Origin might also help many many other people and businesses who currently have trouble competing for attention against the gigantic internet companies and their business model of "get clicks by any means necessary because clicks = ads = money."
Major parts of the web can and have worked just fine without advertising.
The forums and hobby websites I spend most of my time on don't advertise, and easily survive on voluntary donations. We even have built in hosting for user uploaded pictures and videos, so we're not relying on any external services at all. I've met a lot of close friends through these sites, and have done a lot of collaboration. And even more goofing off ;)
For the non-WWW real time stuff, I also use a lot of IRC, which has always managed to be free for the end user and ad-free. And more recently Discord does the same thing without ads (I pay for Nitro, but regular users don't have to).
I also use Reddit and Facebook a lot, not because I think those sites offer anything particularly valuable to me, but because of network effects. I don't think these offer anything particularly compelling that couldn't be offered by non-ad supported services.
The "big one" in my mind is video sites such as Youtube, I don't know how they could survive if a very high percentage of their users were blocking their ads. I pay for their premium ad-free service, but am among a small minority willing or able to do that. Can their business model work purely on premium subscriptions that offer extra perks? It seems like it only barely balances out right now, and I don't think the cost of hosting all these videos will become dirt cheap anytime soon.
Even if Mozilla were to bundle ublock into the standard Firefox install, it probably wouldn't matter. As much as I love using it, its marketshare has been on a slow spiral for a while, down to 4-8% right now. I'm willing to bet a decent proportion of those users already use some form of adblock due to the frequency of obscure Firefox only issues I've seen, which tend to push away non tech folk. I've never met a non technical person who prefers Firefox. Because every now and again, you'll run into a website that renders wrong or shows you a scary popup for having a non Google user agent. Or you'll run into issues with proprietary drm solutions that were only tested under Chrome. Or you'll get lots of the obnoxious "click on all the sidewalks" captchas, which won't happen on Chrome unless you use a sketchy VPN service.
> I've never met a non technical person who prefers Firefox.
I know plenty of non technical people here who like and use Firefox as their main/only browser by choice. The Firefox UI is fine.
Your concerns about compatibility are valid though. I've not run into such issues myself and people around me neither (except for Jitsi Meet, which works on Firefox but not optimally. They are going to fix this though.) but I know they exist.
The current situation is sustained by a small minority of users generating the majority of the clicks. That was true before adblock became a thing too. As long as adblock is not pre-installed with any major browser, it won't reach 90% penetration, and these people will by and large continue generating clicks.
So, the effects might be less dramatic than we'd expect. The industry will adapt one way or another, not the first time a technological shift like this happens. Who knows, maybe we'll even get functional micropayments out of this. One thing that will definitely happen that you didn't mention is disguising advertisements as organic content. It's already happening with instagram influencers and even newspapers publishing sponsored content.
This is a really good question! If ad blockers were at 80-90% I'd expect two main outcomes:
1. Publishers would shift to apps. Apps won't support ad blockers, and are in a much stronger position to detect them and refuse to operate until the block is removed. I'm not sure how much of this would be the "one big app" model where you use Facebook/Amazon/Reddit/Google for everything vs a "lots of little apps" model, but I'm guessing more likely the former?
2. The ad blocking arms race would accelerate dramatically. Sites would CNAME to their ad network, which would then be responsible for proxying the site and inserting ads directly into the pages. The ad network would try to change its serving approach faster than the blockers could keep up. This would look a lot like how Facebook runs ads on their site, with obfuscation to confuse blockers.
Fundamentally, publishers are offering a trade: we're willing to show you our pages if you'll view our ads. Users with ad blockers are rejecting half of the offer and taking the other half. Publishers can't force users to see the ads, but they probably will be able to use technical means to keep users from getting the content without the ads.
(Disclosure: I work for Google on ads, speaking only for myself.)
The problem's showing up as 'Ad blockers', but the reality is that it's increasingly becoming understood to be a problem of tracking, targeting, fingerprinting and generally being bombarded by underhanded, gold-toothed, second-hand car salesmen crying out, "Trust Me!"
No thanks. Not ever.
There are application level firewalls (such as Little Snitch on macOS) that can cater to applications trying to do adware: allow the content, reject the ads. On Android you can install AFWall+ or NetGuard. On iOS you have Lockdown.
There's also pi-hole which will get more traction outside IT as this ad war continues.
The problem is a circular, chicken and egg issue. Ad companies think of news ways to track, fingerprint, monitor and inject ads, and the market will respond with new blocking techniques.
The only unique position the goog has in all of this is the 'value add' that its non-revenue products bring to the table. However, more people are looking at alternatives to those as well.
Personally, I look forward to the day that I can pi-hole google.com... and I know that your company will fight to abuse this right every day (typically with recaptcha).
Just like it's not personal to your company to try and vacuum up every single bit of data about me, it's not personal to me that I look forward to the day the goog/Big Brother dies. What was a beautiful thing: the original google search, has long passed, imho.
If a publisher wants to have ads... No worries, but if it reports back to ANY entity other than themselves AND I can trust them to not on-sell that data, then yes, sure: I'll ignore the ads that I'd never click on anyway. So for me, the only sure fire way I'd find ads acceptable these days, if those ads were text-based, used no javascript or other css/url sniffing tricks.
Until ad companies drop the idea that each person MUST be shown an ad, then there's some hope of progress. Truth be told, of all the ads I notice these days, it's the old paper billboards on the road side.
> The ad blocking arms race would accelerate dramatically
Interesting take. Why do you think that, vs publishers trying to sell their content?
A world without ads may be impossible but if it were, it would probably be more fair, as we would get to see and estimate the value of content/services.
I would not pay to use Twitter, I would simply stop using it. But I would pay to use Google Search because I find it's still the best.
> What will happen to the web when uBlock Origin becomes prevelent enough?
If history is any indication, the ad companies will show up on the doorsteps of the uBlock Origin developers with a big old sack of money. And then the uBlock Origin developers will start talking about how what users really want are built-in, uneditable whitelists to make sure that "ethical ads" (e.g. ads from the people who showed up with the sack of money) get through unmolested.
And then some user will get frustrated and fork uBlock Origin off into uBlock Origin+++, with the first commit to the fork taking out the ad whitelisting. And the whole cycle will start over from the beginning again.
> And then some user will get frustrated and fork uBlock Origin off into uBlock Origin+++, with the first commit to the fork taking out the ad whitelisting. And the whole cycle will start over from the beginning again.
Even if this happens (and gorhill has shown no signs of being susceptible to pressure so far), the beauty of the open source system is that as long as there's one technically competent person who's more interested in developing an ad blocker than the potential industry payout, we're going to have ad blockers. There are a whole lot of people with the ability to continue the development of uBlock. It's simply not feasible for the industry to have everyone on their payroll.
Honestly I'm not really OK with either. Of the two I'm less OK with tracking, but I also don't want to live in a future like Minority Report (https://youtu.be/oBaiKsYUdvg) with giant ad-walls in your face wherever you (virtually or physically) go.
Or even a "future" like the '90s, if I'm being entirely honest.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams! Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ballgames, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
True, print newspapers look(ed) basically like news websites do now if you turn off your adblocker. 3/4 of a page of ads for a quarter page of content.
I don't like tracking but I don't really care; yet I'm strongly opposed to ads in any form. Forcefully showing me content I didn't ask for is an act of violence against my mind / against me.
From what I've seen so far, tracking doesn't deliver superior results. Ad companies (Google, FB and Co) want to make us believe that. But using all targeting mechanisms that Google and Facebook offer still delivers worse Conversions than a direct deal with a website you know has approx. your target audience.
Advertisements, indeed marketing in general, has always been a zero-sum game. The more you spend on ads, the more I have to in order to keep up. The more you track, the more I have to track.
It's hard to see how we'll ever get that genie back in the bottle.
To a certain extent. But let's not be overly cynic: ads also inform people about products and services available. And eg Google's early money making was built on showing more relevant and less intrusive ads. So there's non-zero sum progress possible.
Don't hyper-correct though: the zero-sum nature of most ad spending is important.
And yet they're effective. Many people like looking at ads. I also don't mind ads, I just mind that on many pages they slow down my computer, let content jump all over the place and make it hard to use the website at all.
"What will happen to the web when uBlock Origin becomes prevelent enough?"
We already know the answer to this because we saw it in the days of the early web: advertisements on web pages will be pictures and/or text served from the exact same FQDN as the website itself.
The problem has never been how to serve ads - it's trivially easy to insert an <img src> and perhaps size it randomly, etc. Or you can just put in a text block.
The hard part is the ad networks and the user tracking and the analytics. These are the parts that are difficult to self-host or self-provide. Their absence will cause ads to be relatively less valuable and less user-hostile.
> Currently the vast majority of the internet is completely (or mostly) ad funded: Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, Reddit, YouTube, etc etc.
All of these sites already have native advertising in the form of paid content. Ad-blockers don't block them. Ad-blockers don't block first party advertising, either.
> Ad-blockers don't block first party advertising, either.
This isn't necessarily true. Some ad-blockers can be trained with CSS selectors that remove any visual element on the page.
Of course, like all ad-blocking, it's an arms race. Facebook already randomizes and obfuscates the names and IDs (and I think even the structure!) of their pages to prevent ad-blocking.
This is already playing out with Safari’s Reader Mode. Sites adapt and update their content so that Reader Mode doesn’t work and ads do.
I don’t think the gov’t can make adblocking illegal, nor do I think they will even try, but yes websites will (and already are starting to) use anti-block measures. It’s not even hard technically, if ads are served as content from the visited site’s domain, rather than iframes from other domains.
Will companies give up on advertising? I predict: Never.
> I don’t think the gov’t can make adblocking illegal, nor do I think they will even try,
I agree with the first part of this sentence, but the second part seems wildly optimistic, at least in the US, where lack of technical knowledge or ability is no hindrance to passing ridiculous tech laws.
In that scenario much of the web industry will die and they will deserve it. It didn't self regulate, it fought government regulation and pushed people too far.
The big boys like google have been hedging their bets in multiple ways already though, they can (and do) track people in chrome, they can track people with CDN's and they can (and do) track people in android. Others can deploy sites as webASM that make tools like uBlock much harder/less effective. They might even go with an in house "box model" to serve ads from sites indistinguishable from the content. There's a lot of options to fight back against ad-blockers but the haven't been deemed worthwhile yet.
I wouldn't regret if Twitter and Facebook disappear one day. Web was much better before they appeared.
I run my site (personal blog) paying for it from my pocket and not running any ads or analytics. It is much simpler and cheaper then it was 20 years ago.
The web will become only better if more people would do this.
It's really amazing how many people relish the thought of ad blocking killing the internet we know today. That there's no viable replacement doesn't matter: I don't think these people have seriously thought about what happens after they win. They're following the ancestral urge to to tear down, to wreck, to fight the system, to start over --- no matter the consequences. It's always dangerous to give power to people who advocate destruction of the supposedly evil old ways without proposing viable new ways.
It's not just adblock that's the threat: overzealous bans against tracking cookies have the potential to do much the same thing. Either way, ad revenue collapses, sites either die or switch to paywalls, and the internet becomes a much smaller, higher-friction, and lower-utility place. It'll be sad.
In a decade or two, the same people who today decry ads and tracking today will be the ones who pine for the open internet of their youth.
I like and respect your work for Emacs but I wonder if this is how you justify working for companies that have ruined the Internet and are now in the position to ruin us all.
I know I would certainly develop some defense mechanisms to justify working for a scourge like Google or Facebook, and they would probably assume a similar form to your argumentation here.
To anyone that grew up on the Internet in the 90s (I believe you are old enough to be in that group, correct me if wrong), the striking degradation of what was then a high SnR knowledge repository and a medium for rapid information exchange, should be more than obvious. The rise of surveillance capitalism can not be defended with appeals to highly-polarised what-ifs. The Internet is a platform for decentralized expression and emergence of new ideas. Your alternative futures don't seem to take that into account. I suggest a shift and widening of your thinking into what is possible rather than regurgitating the same old narrowing perspectives that your corporate masters try to enforce on us all.
There's a difference between first-party ad-blocking and third-party ad-blocking. The latter is where there's a dragnet run by Google, Facebook et al to milk every possible ad-dollar at the cost of gross privacy violations to which most users aren't even privvy to.
Many web properties run first-party ads. Sport blogs and news websites are examples of web properties that show PR-driven ads.
Sponsorship is another viable model as TV has shown. Round the calendar sporting events like the Grand Slams, the NBA, the NFL, the Champions League (to name a few) make ad-money like it's nobody's business.
There's nothing that suggests ad-money would dry up if ever Google and Facebook go down-under tomorrow. And so, I feel, web's demise in the face of more user-control is over exaggerated and a dicotomy that simply doesn't exist except for in the tech circles that have a lot to gain if the status-quo persists, imo.
I'm not convinced this scenario will ever happen, but we're already seeing many websites, mostly news publications, go to a subscription model. If sites can't get enough money through ads, they'll go subscription, or maybe we'll finally see a workable micropayments system that will let us (for example) pay a few cents per article read.
> I'm not convinced this scenario will ever happen, but we're already seeing many websites, mostly news publications, go to a subscription model.
Which doesn't mean no ads, unfortunately. (NYTimes is the example that springs to mind. At least in the crossword, which is how I mainly use my subscription, they still show ads—err, try to, except UBlock Origin has other things to say.)
> Question for HN: What will happen to the web when uBlock Origin becomes prevelent enough? Currently the vast majority of the internet is completely (or mostly) ad funded
Maybe clickbait will die out. Which is what the ads are paying for, supporting the shittiest side of the internet. I say, good riddance.
If they can stop tracking me that would be great, I am already not blocking image links, which is what an advertisement should be, so the door is in fact wide open and the ball is in their court. Newspapers could have just continued their old ad model, but nooooo they had to buy into the spammy tracking 5MB javascript bullshit, what a shame because that shit gets blocked.
I feel absolutely zero responsibility to the parties that shit all over the web, and those who went into business with them. They just took whatever they wanted and shoved tracking and ads in my face, as if it somehow paid for what was clearly already there, there was no agreement, no consent for exchanging X for my privacy and attention, nothing. Just pure greed and pollution.
So yeah, I really do hope that it's going to be incredibly difficult for anybody who thinks it's okay to make money off of people this way. Which also includes all those people who complain it's too much work to use something slightly more ethical than Google Analytics, they can drown in their own mess.
Nobody asked "what will happen to the web when we shit ads and trackers all over it".
It will turn into an arms race. Or maybe a switch to a paid subscription based model.
Unfortunately, I think that either way, it will benefit big actors like Google and Facebook.
Google as a first party can seamlessly integrate ads, making them indistinguishable from content, they don't need specialized trackers to track you on their websites. Smaller websites have to rely on third parties, and these are easier to block.
Same thing for subscriptions. Big players can provide attractive paid subscriptions. For example there is enough content on YouTube for $10/month, but independent actors can't do that and they need another model.
>Once 80-90% of users use adblock I don't see how these sites will survive.
Chrome dominates 2/3 of the mobile browsers market, and it's still growing. Just because HN celebrates a new Fenix update, it doesn't mean it's realistic to expect that this is indicative of any wider trend.
Probably an arms race where the losers are smaller players who lack the resources to compete.
Twitter, Facebook, et. al. have the engineering resources to get creative and devise solutions (such as inlining advertising in such a way to make it computationally difficult to divorce it from desired content---YouTube, for example, has control of the video source and if necessary could start splicing ads directly into the video vended to users in a way indistinguishable from the content itself). The firms that can't afford to do that are small newspapers, individual developers, etc. They'll either pay their own way to put content up, GoFundMe a support base for their content, or give up and do something else.
The result will probably be a more centralized and perhaps less diverse world wide web. Content-agnostic advertising made a lot of room for "little ideas" to find footing. Without a similar model to that, web content defaults to a patronage model for every piece of content that isn't immediately monetizable. This is how the web worked before content-agnostic advertising (i.e. you only put up content if you were in the government, military, university, or paid someone with access to the backbone) and we could go back to that model, but it'd be a smaller web for it.
Definitely an arms race. There's already a solution for if YouTube injects ads directly into the videos -- https://sponsor.ajay.app/ it works for skipping ads inserted by the creators, at least.
And currently YT et. al. inject the ads by swapping video streams because it's more technically convenient than re-rendering a video on their servers.
If video ad blockers take off enough to impact that technological solution, they'll shift to embedding ads directly by modifying the video content itself, because after the up-front cost it becomes win-win for them; the ad blockers will turn a tech like that into a "moat" that YT et. al. can use to keep competing video services at bay. Then the ad blockers will iterate to do their own crowd-source digital fingerprinting of ad content and time-skip around in the video, so the ad companies will iterate to make ads hard to fingerprint or onerous to successfully time skip, etc.
Each step in this arms race creates another technological moat to make YT more ad-revenue-viable than possible competitors, who will have to operate on some other revenue stream (and what that revenue stream could be is unclear---subscription model, so only those with disposable income can view videos? Creator-supported model, so only those with disposable income can upload?).
The majority of people on HN are dependant on advertising for the most part too. Their employers use it, their investors use it, the platforms they use are dependant on it. Most YC companies need to advertise. It's not just running ads on the site, it's needing advertising as part of marketing.
I'd expect to see most users here realise this dependence and start to defend their livelihood. However most people here (myself included) hate ads, and use blockers wherever possible.
users are not against ads. users are against invasive, troublesome ads. if say hn, had a jpeg banner that said 'sponsored by stripe'. no user, would be bothered and most would be happy. just like when old fashioned 'toilet-paper' had ads, I mean newspapers. we were happy to see them. since you knew once you flip over the page, it was mostly material. and a little pic | text of an ad. so yeah in general ads ain't bad. but ads in their current reincarnation are bad.
> Adblockers like uBlock Origin hurt these sites by deriving them of revenue.
And these sites hurt us with their surveillance capitalism and deceitful marketing nobody asked for. They have only themselves to blame for abusing our trust and good will.
If they don't like the fact we haven't paid for their content, all they need to do is return HTTP 402 Payment Required. If they try to make us pay through ads, we'll just delete them. Nobody is obligated to look at or click on this stuff for the sake of some site's revenue. When we buy a magazine, we can rip out the advertising pages and throw them in the trash.
> I don't see how these sites will survive
Maybe they shouldn't survive if they can't come up with a business model that doesn't involve shipping 10 megabytes of ads and tracking people's every move.
> Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal?
Governments barely manage to keep copyright infringement under control despite the lobbying of multi-billion dollar industries. Surely they have better things to do than police what browser extensions people use.
> Will websites engage in sophisticated technical anti-adblock measures?
It would be great if adblocking kills those sites. And they will.
It will force new business models, perhaps ones that doesn't just rely on eye-ball/attention seeking for the sake of ad impressions. And once a few pay-sites/subscriptions etc paves the way, it'll be easier to create services online that you can charge for. And now you can focus on making quality, valuable content.
People gladly pay $10 for a beer, but paying the same for some type of quality information service is a ridiculous proposition. The expectation of "free" created by the ad model plays a big part in that.
All pro users adblock. Which means it's slowly but surely on the way to the mainstream.
There are already plenty of sites trying other revenue models without tracking.
The Register prompts to allow an alternative form of advertising that's audience appropriate, Ars has a subscription model, and sites like Vox are partnering with Scroll.
I doubt it is. I've used those direct deals and while they more work to set up, banner ads on a page with your target audience are often much more profitable than the targeting Google or Facebook uses.
My opinion is that websites should be supported entirely by donations. Websites that provide something useful and worthwhile to users will survive, and websites that only try to drive clicks will die.
This is much like the current BAT model on Brave. Although it is also as based as a way for users to gain revenue. Problem is what would entice a large enough population to donate? Aside from charitable causes and tier systems.
facebook has taken to in-lining the ads to the feed so i assume making the ads part of the content without any visual/semantic differentiation that an adblocker can use.
> Question for HN: What will happen to the web when uBlock Origin becomes prevelent enough?
We've been there before.
When Webwasher was popular in the beginnings of the popular internet time, it was a wide spread program in Germany. PC magazines recommended it, everybody was talking about it.
German Internetz survived. Nothing of value was lost.
Let's wait first if Firefox itself will be able to become prevalent enough.
In the current operational model where many services are provided perceptionly free of charge to the prosumer (which becomes the product in itself) the ad-free web will be a web pay as you go.
With goobal steering maybe flat-rate based.
And while we are at it, can be start funding the many open source hackers who altruistically keep the internet surfing afloat?
Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal?
In other words, make obligatory "force-feeding" of content? As in, people won't be allowed to close their eyes or cover their ears? Good luck with that...
On a less serious note: "If you outlaw those who block ads, only outlaws will block ads."
> In other words, make obligatory "force-feeding" of content? As in, people won't be allowed to close their eyes or cover their ears? Good luck with that...
I mean there are already rules in place that disallow modifying software, circumventing DRM, etc.
It wouldn't be a stretch to see them disallow modifying a website's contents.
The way this would probably work is make EULAs carry significantly more legal weight. Such that visiting a website with adblock on becomes a crime if the EULA for that website explicitly doesn't allow adblockers (with some sort of very explicit notice like those cookie buttons).
uBO mainly blocks tracking, not ads. If ads were not that privacy-invading, there would be no problem. If uBO was prevalent, ads would still be there but probably less tracking would be involved.
That is not correct. Here's a more complete quote:
> uBlock Origin is NOT an "ad blocker": it is a wide-spectrum blocker -- which happens to be able to function as a mere "ad blocker". The default behavior of uBlock Origin when newly installed is to block ads, trackers and malware sites
There is nothing here indicating that uBO "mainly" blocks trackers. It blocks malicious content which includes ads. The quote even suggests that it does primarily block ads as that's what people care about and install uBO for.
Are the number of users that use adblock actually increasing? I feel like we are already at a saturation point where anyone who would use an adblocker already does. Adblocking has been around longer than these big sites that use ads as a main revenue source yet they managed to become big in spite of adblocking.
> Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal?
Absolutely not, serving ads is not a protected activity, you can't force someone to consume something they don't want to.
> Will websites engage in sophisticated technical anti-adblock measures?
Already been tried, see anti-adblock and its counterpart, anti-anti-adblock. The solution to adblock is product placement and sponsorship, which has already extremely prevalent.
I wonder if the web won't become lighter then. Most of the cost is because webpages are ridiculously heavy (multiple MB, if not dozens), are ridden with analytics and other data collectors that require a lot of computing power to run in the datacenter. If there are no eyeballs looking at ads, you don't need a lot of that machinery anymore, and costs would go down drastically (who needs a data lake when you aren't analyzing what clickbait sells the most, because you don't make money from clicks anymore?)
Websites will have to charge their users upfront, instead of secretly with their data.
Some websites will earn their keep. I'm not shy about throwing money to my favorite streamers, the newspapers I enjoy when they have reasonable subscription prices, and supporting the game servers and hobbyist websites I care about.
Some websites won't earn their keep. The bazillion listacle (Top 10 ways to naturally cure cancer!) websites probably won't survive. I'm ok with this.
I think websites will just go old school: static images and banners. Move it around the website and the blocker isn't going to be able to create a decent rule that isn't going to end up blocking legitimate content. Tracking and fingerprinting can die in a fire, it isn't needed to sell advertising.
That being said, it's not going to ever be prevalent with chrome being like 80% of the browser market, a product of an advertising company.
That includes advertising company profits which you may not have to keep. Also advertising hosting infrastructure and platform engineering (all that deep learning and profiling salaries don't come cheap I think, processing micropayment might be simpler.
When ad blocking becomes prevalent and successful enough, it is the hope that ad funded sites evolve or die. Large parts of the web becoming barren is an opportunity, not a problem. Unless you are invested (personally or financially), but I'm not going to help defend your investments. If Facebook or other big player went bankrupt it would be a gold rush (which isn't going to happen; they would evolve). If we end up with something worse, we repeat the procedure until we end up with an Internet we want rather than one we merely suffer.
I can't really see technical solutions working. It is throwing money after people who have chosen not to be customers. Paywalls just mean we go elsewhere. If I have reached the point of installing an ad blocker and I notice the ads on your site, I go elsewhere. And the more people going Elsewhere, the more profitable it is to be that Elsewhere. Or maybe elsewhere is run by enthusiasts or interested parties or some non-profit model.
It is interesting how the vast majority of the Internet is assumed to be ad funded. Do we want or need this part of the Internet? Company web sites, the banks, the universities, non-profits, the politicians, the individuals, online shopping, would all still be there without ads. Lots of existing paid services would still be there, and possibly become huge as the cost of their competition stops being 'free'. Ads stopped funding blogs long ago, replaced by subscriptions and Patreon.
While I clamor for privacy and advocate against ads whenever I can, most users would not not appreciate having to pay for dozens of different services every month.
Just imagine: 5 bucks a month for Facebook, 3 for Reddit, 10 for Google Search, 4 for Gmail, 15 for Youtube, 5-20 each for 5 different newspapers, ...
But there are practical realities that make a significant increase in ad block usage unlikely:
* A lot of browsing has shifted to mobile. Mobile browsers don't have extensions, except for FF and a few Chromium derivatives, which almost no-one uses. That's a big chunk of impressions right there.
* Google is probably not happy about losing a double digit percentage of impressions on desktop. They are trying to hamstring ad blocking in Chrome by removing request interception APIs.
* A lot of websites have mobile web versions, but aggressively push you towards using the app instead, where ads can't be blocked and profiling is much easier. (FB, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, ...)
* Plenty of sites are using adblock detectors. Probably only those that really need the revenue to survive.
>Mobile browsers don't have extensions, except for FF, which almost no-one uses.
I use FF on mobile and love it.
I find mobile web pages with ads unbearable. I intentionally disable Chrome on my Android phone as some apps disregard my default browser preference (Google news).
I generally prefer web pages (on mobile) rather than apps so I can turn off ads. I don't really see the attraction of apps, especially when they have ads as well.
I too use FF on mobile, with uBlock, and I love it too. I don't understand how people put up with a browser without adblocking, on the tiny mobile screen. It's insane.
> some apps disregard my default browser preference
And how about all the apps that use a built-in webview every time you click a link (Gmail, Hangouts, rif, etc. etc.) rather than even calling a full browser. At least they typically have an "open in browser" option but that gets tedious, and they sometimes have a setting (buried deep) to always do so.
For me, this behavior is controlled through the browser. Firefox calls it "Custom Tabs" on the General settings page. Firefox preview calls it "Open links in apps".
If that's on, you get the mini-browser in the app, otherwise links go immediately to the full browser. (Just tested with Gmail, YMMV)
Oh wow, I just changed my default browser (on Android) from Chrome to Firefox and, with no further effort, Gmail (etc.) opens links in Firefox instead of the mini-browser thing. I always imagined the mini-browser as a part of the app that loaded irrespective of the default browser, but no. Cool!
If this happens, it would open the market up to the Wikipedia model of hosting for social media, and to federation. I would welcome that. I wish more of the web was run by individuals and organizations that host content, develop software and create content for the love of a topic, or for the sheer act of doing so, and not just profit.
If people won't pay for things like Facebook, maybe they're not good? And therefore it's fine that they'll go away.
However, for the smaller sites, something like Scroll would work fine. You pay them a fixed amount, which they distribute based on your usage: https://scroll.com/
Why would anyone pay for Facebook? I'm using facebook but I believe it has negative value. It's a bad habit like smoking. You understand that it is bad but it's not easy to quit.
If they start charging money for fb access it will make it very easy to drop this bad habit and quit Facebook.
Cigarettes are becoming more expensive with every year and it made lots of people quit smoking.
I don't have the willpower to stop browsing facebook and instagram from time to time. But next second they announce paid access, I'll stop using it.
Although even without this, I find myself browsing Facebook and Instagram less frequently with every passing month. At this rate it would be rather painless to quit it altogether by the end of the year.
> They are trying to hamstring ad blocking in Chrome by removing request interception APIs.
This one is bullshit. I don't run an adblocker today because I think it is insane to grant extensions the ability to observe and modify all of the content your browser ever renders.
Chrome changing to a rule based system is both the only sane option (I might finally decide to use an adblocker that uses the new system), and it also is in line with how Safari enables extensions.
You're already trusting an entire browser, with all its transitive dependencies, a large portion of your OS, and probably also every single program you run with the same uid as your browser.
But an extension requiring explicit permission to observe and modify all of the content your browser ever renders is unacceptable.
It's sort of a separation of concerns. There's no fine-grained way to say "intercept this list of URLs and deny some of them" without allowing it to also view and modify the entire content of every web page.
The next step will naturally be a major increase in the prevalence and sophistication of anti-adblocking techniques. We're already starting to see the first stages of this on some of the more brazen sites, but reputable companies still tend to value user goodwill more than they value the lost revenue from ad blocking, at least for now. If adblocking ever starts to become an existential threat to medium to large sized businesses though, that situation is going to change real quick. A ton of money is going to start being thrown at countering the threat of ad blocking.
The companies which do the best job of preventing ad blocking while minimizing disruption to users will survive. Those which ignore the problem and allow ad blocking or those which are too aggressive and annoy users with their countermeasures will die. Companies which don't rely on ad revenue will stand to gain. The extent of this gain will depend on how far the war escalates and how much worse of a user experience ad-supported sites become as a result.
The resulting war will slowly escalate, with ad-supported sites becoming a bigger and bigger pain to use until one of several things happens. Either:
A. Enough sites are successful in forcing users to disable their ad blockers that running an ad blocker becomes a bigger pain than it's worth, and as a result adblocking usage declines enough that the old status quo is restored (except that running an adblocker will be a much bigger pain than before for those who choose to continue using one).
B. Governments pass laws restricting the use of ad blockers, and those laws are sufficiently effective to reduce ad blocking usage to a level where the old status quo is restored (except running an ad blocker will be more difficult and/or legally dubious than before).
C. Governments pass laws banning the use of anti-ad-blocking technology. Millions of ad supported companies which are affected by these laws go out of business. (See other comments in this thread for assessments of how that might turn out.) Sites which are unaffected by the laws (or which can get away with breaking them) continue the war. Repeat.
D. Anti-ad-blocking tech reaches a level of sophistication where companies start deploying full-fledged DRM to protect their content from users who use ad blockers. Circumventing DRM is illegal under existing law. See option B for the result.
E. Ad-blocking tech becomes so sophisticated that any and all technically viable countermeasures are either so expensive to develop or so annoying to users (even users who don't use adblockers) that most ad supported businesses are no longer economically viable. See other answers in this thread for the result.
Unfortunately, a vast majority of people seem to cynically welcome the death of professional journalism, while being optimistic enough to be believe some bloggers will fill the void. It's somewhat schizophrenic, really.
See this threat for examples of pure enjoyment of others' failure, justified by the darwinistic logic that anything that dies must deserve it for being insufficiently smart or flexible.
While that logic is rooted somewhere in capitalism, they do seem to miss the fundamental idea that this business, like any other, was two-sided: any transaction generated profit not only for the content creator, but also the consumer. If your favourite shop had to close because some local gang found an unstoppable method to steal from it, you and your neighbours would have to switch to what was previously your second choice, which by definition is worse according to your preferences on price/distance/quality/etc.
It seems like the big institutions such as Times will survive. But local politics will function about as well as any regulatory system missing one leg of the feedback cycle; imagine air conditioning with a missing temperature sensor.
I'm holding out hope for some people to recognise this. It is just as true that the advertising industry went too far in some ways. Maybe an ad blocker takes pride in a sense of taste and moderation could find an opening, blocking the worst ads but considering the ad/ad network/advertiser/site with a willingness to allow some. Or it goes the other way, with ad targeting getting anywhere near what it has been promising, and people getting fewer ads of such quality they consider them interesting more than annoying.
If a magazine i sometimes read because its free closes shop because they raise prices and nobody wants to pay for it...
I probably feel nothing because i was only reading it because it was free, and if the price is no longer worth it that's that.
People always bemoan how x is going to die on the internet because of changing trends in advertising. Fact is many of these sites provide ok at best content, and are dying because the value they provide doesnt equal the cost they want to charge.
What's the industry doing to save themselves? Some have gone to the paywall model but they can't even commit to that because they want the benefits of the open web driving traffic to them. Then if you pay you still get bombarded with ads and two dozen trackers.
The journalism industry can't seem to accept that most of them were in the distribution business of moving around physical bits of paper and that without that they have no revenue stream. And without the limits of their old distribution model the world needs far less journalists than it once did.
There's also more to professional journalism than online newspapers. There's still local news on TV. In most countries there's still state funded organizations providing way better quality than their commercial counterparts ever did. So journalism will survive, they just need to accept that we need less journalists than decades ago and their old business model probably won't survive.
Just a few days ago I visited a site that was begging me to turn off my adblock. I naively tried it and... the site became literally unusable. Things like the download button were hijacked to a random ad site. The text of the site was replaced by an ad that wanted me to fill in a survey.
It makes me wonder how people without an adblocker can even browse the web.
I would like a thing separate from an adblocker, that doesn't block ads per se, but instead disables most of the APIs that the tab can use to interact with the browser, e.g. opening new windows, modifying history, disabling right-click, navigating to a different domain from a whole-page click handler, etc. Javascript could still run, but it'd pretty much be limited to just modifying the loaded document's DOM.
Better yet, make it so that, when I "turn off" my adblocker, it's turning on this restricted-browser-API sandbox instead. Then, if the page still doesn't work, I could turn on a "compatibility mode" that would load the page with full API permissions.
You forgot "messing with clipboard to add `See more at {URL}`" when you ctrl+C stuff.
Listen, if a webpage deserves attention, I'll make attribution manually, but if you try to force it via clipboard, I'll make sure to remove it, again, manually
Does this point of view have or need a name? Something which conveys both the mental model and the possibility?
At first thought it might be something like "sandbox javascript to the DOM".
Relatedly, I don't know if there is a common name for the part of a tabbed browser which implements policy and defaults above the level of individual tabs. In some sense it is a kind of shell and sandboxer (?). Do we need a more shell-agnostic approach??
I would add some CSS limitations as well. All sticky headers scroll out of the way as soon as you scroll down. No obnoxious full screen stickies, especially those appearing after a timeout or detecting that my mouse goes up. Proper contrast, font size and line width. So basically extended reader mode.
To implement this, you would have to prevent JavaScript from reading how far down you’ve scrolled or which element your mouse is hovering over, or else JavaScript could repeatedly insert absolutely-positioned elements over the part of the page you’re looking at.
Yeah. I only started using an ad blocker about 3 years ago, despite knowing blockers existed for much longer. Before then I was able to tolerate ads. But the situation with them have gotten worse over time.
You mean you weren't tormented by the swat-the-audible-buzzing-fly Flash ads in the days of MySpace and the like? That was the absolute catalyst for me.
I tried running without an adblocker at work a few years ago. That lasted about six months until the day I got redirected to a porn site by some innocuous looking page.
I have never had any virus despite not running antivirus, occasional visits to the seedy underbelly of the web, and often having ad block disabled or not even installed. Nor do I remember anyone I know being infected without being tricked into installing something.
When was the last time a browser vulnerability was actively exploited at any significant scale?
So I can't shake the feeling this is really more of a post-hoc rationalisation for people not entirely comfortable to screw over creators in the rather selfish pursuit of personal comfort.
A couple of years ago, a fairly well known Norwegian news outlet's ad network was hacked, and visitors were served malicious code. If the user had Java installed the code would use a 0-day exploit to _silently and without any user intervention_ install a trojan which would activate when the user later visited the online bank of by far the most common bank here in Norway.
It would then redirect money by modifying the target bank account when the user paid bills or whatnot. The web page looked entirely as it should, it would just modify the request before it got sent.
Now, the user had to have Java installed you might say, so not a big deal. Well, big deal, because the same bank, the most popular one, _required_ Java for signing in to their online bank.
Fortunately the breach was noticed fairly quickly and the harm was limited. But after that I decided no more ads.
It's not uncommon for compromised computers to be used as nodes in DDOS-for-hire networks, (though compromised IoT devices seem to be in vogue at the moment) proxies for ne'er-do-wells, sending spam, and other activities that might not be apparent to the user of the computer in the slightest, but still have effects that reach out to the world at large.
I take it upon myself to install uBlock Origin in every computer I get my hands on. After letting the owner know, of course, but I practically force it on them. And I don't feel any shame in doing this.
To this day I have not found am AdBlocker that is blacklist only by default and has just one simple button "Block ads on this site" (but not on others)
It can be done using uBlock but it's cumbersome and I always forget which buttons to press.
Is be willing to let ads enabled on most sites but I'd like to block the worst offenders (video autoplay, overlays etc.)
I wonder if this would be effective? If a site is obnoxious enough to warrant explicit blacklisting it's probably obnoxious enough to give you a PLEASE DISABLE YOUR ADBLOCKER.
I hate almost all ads, but if it's not intrusive, it's just not worth the effort to add a blocking rule for it. In 2019, I think the only "ad" I blocked was "Hot network questions" on SO, because it had very negative impact on my productivity.
Remember this discussion 7 month ago on the release of Firefox 68 [1], in which many people were worried about Fenix not getting support for extensions?
The tweet says that addon support has been merged in Firefox Preview, which I understand as the ability to install addons in general. Then it follows with a reply showing how uBlock Origin can be installed easily.
The title of this post could be clearer, lest people (like me) get confused and think of it as uBlock Origin being merged into Firefox Preview.
After tests I found that only uBlock Origin could be installed for now, since it's the only "Recommended Addon". So the HN title is in fact, clearer than the tweet.
Edit : I clarified by saying that uBlock Origin can now be installed.
> We are currently building support for an initial selection of Recommended Extensions for Firefox Preview. These extensions are expected to be officially supported for Firefox Preview during the first half of 2020.
Oh, shit, I am the only person browsing news.yc who doesn't know about uBlock Origin, and I am so fscking excited!! I've installed this and have no idea how to use it so I'm about to dip into uBlock Matrix instead wish me luck~
uBlock I run with near-zero configuration tweaks, only enabling a few additional lists.
uMatrix I run in a much more restrictive mode (block all 3rd party, along with first party scripts and XHRs). Then I selectively unblock to unbreak sites.
In this way, uMatrix is my primary line of defense, and uBlock is a backup, in case I accidentally unblock an ad/malware domain when trying to unbreak a site. It also allows me to temporarily allow all with uMatrix if I just want a site to work, without enabling ads, etc.
> uMatrix I run in a much more restrictive mode (block all 3rd party, along with first party scripts and XHRs). Then I selectively unblock to unbreak sites.
That's exactly what I do too. You get better at knowing the likely candidates for what you need to unblock, but payment on a new site (or a modified since you last used it site) can be annoying.
Incidentally it has also led to me being both undercharged (client-side upping of the price wrt quantity) and double charged ('failed' transaction, unblock something, try again, turned out they actually both went through).
I use uMatrix to demonstrate what is happening on the Web to non-technical people. The redlining is an excellent visual cue. People are shocked at the dozens and dozens of tracking and analytics beacons that are loaded on any major site.
Firefox preview is really great. Performance is much, much better than the regular Firefox for Android. Now that it supports the most important extensions, there's really no reason not to switch.
Fenix (Firefox Preview) is not currently free software, as it contains proprietary Google libraries like com.google.android.gms and com.google.firebase. F-Droid currently maintain the Google-free fork of Firefox that is available on F-Droid, but they have said they lack the resources to do the same for Fenix as well. Until this is resolved, there is an excellent reason not to switch.
Because a) it's uneccesary and b) the proprietary libraries are in the app, unlike Direct3D where you could theoretically run the program without the proprietary libs (eg in Wine).
Unless you're also okay with Google having root (!) on your phone, it also practically means there's no official package managed source for the binaries. Yes, I can probably grab an apk from some Mozilla domain somewhere (if I can even find it! all their links browseable from mozilla.org simply go to Google Play. The irony of needing to use Google to avoid Google), or I can maybe add an unofficial third-party repo to F-Droid (dangerous! bad!), but if I care at all about sensible concepts like security and regular updates there's no practical way for me to manage it. Even if Mozilla hosted their own official F-Droid repo, that would be better than nothing - but they do not.
Besides, F-Droid is a canary - if you can't get your app into F-Droid, in any capacity, then it's not free software. If you won't do what it takes to get it into F-Droid, you've also staked your colors in the ground - that you don't care about that value system, or about users who have that value system. The message is clear: "Digital serfs only - digital yeomans need not apply".
Some people use LineageOS and others, and don't install platform libraries that are proprietary, so this information is more relevant to them and not so much to you.
There was a post a while ago about Firefox being the browser that calls home the most. I am unsure if Mozilla cared about privacy in a long time really.
Agreed, it is very very good. I haven't used it as my default yet, but regularly switch to it especially when I need to read an article with reader view. It's kind of crazy how a lot of writing on the web is made so unreadable due to ads and poor design choices.
Personally, I've found the browser engine performance to be barely faster (within the margin of error, certainly), but more importantly the browser chrome is now horribly slow. Opening menus and stuff like that seems to take much longer than before.
And as is the nature with such rewrites, it is still missing quite a few little (or sometimes not so little) features that the current Firefox gained over the years...
I've been using Firefox Preview as my daily driver for a couple months now. I have the strict privacy settings all turned on and find that it does a pretty good job of blocking ads to the point that I haven't really missed uBlock origin. I even get the occasional 'please disable your adblocker' message even without any additional extensions.
Mozilla is rewriting Firefox for Android from scratch. The new version is released as Firefox Preview until it is feature-complete enough to replace Firefox for Android.
Does anyone else have big problems with Firefox preview? It used to work absolutely fine for me then a couple of months ago it just started crashing every time I tried to open a website. This includes sites and pages that had previously loaded with no problem at all. It has become pretty much unusable for me. And this is on two different devices by completely different manufacturers :-(
It crashes for me too. I can deal with that. I find it much more annoying when it loses my tabs that I keep open to read later.
After the last update the "undo" notification at the bottom sometimes doesn't disappear, which is annoyingly placed over the address bar and menu button. There's also no way to manually dismiss the "undo" notification.
Despite all this it has by far the nicest user experience of an Android browser so I stick with it in the hopes one day it won't be super buggy. I'm sure that day will come.
Have you tried raising a bug on their issue tracker? I had the opposite experience. It was a bit unstable about 3-4 months ago where some websites would make it crash but I haven't faced any crashes in the last few months and it looks close to being a finished product.
It crashes sometimes (about twice a week for me), but it's Preview Nightly what I use. I would suggest you uninstall and reinstall (from Google Play). Maybe it helps.
My build (just downloaded as a fresh install) is #20351804. Add-ons are a menu option now, with UBlock Origin as the only recommended one. Actually, it might be the only one available at the moment?
Judging by the previous topics about Firefox Preview, uBlock is by far the most requested one.
Worth pointing out that Firefox Preview is set to replace current Firefox within the next 5 months, add-on support will probably arrive a version or two after that.
"Full add-on support will be available in late 2020." "The Firefox for Android Beta and general release migrations will follow and the final migration will occur in Spring 2020."
Mozilla were cagey about this for a while, but this doesn't come as a surprise to any of the many people who predicted they would do this.
I'm not able to use it yet either, but a later tweet in the thread indicates it should be coming soon: "It's still very early, not even in a nightly yet, but should reach the next one"[1]
iOS doesn't allow an app store-within-an-app, which would presumably include this. Hopefully the antitrust agitating could lead to Apple rethinking this policy, because the lack of extensions/addons on iOS is really bad for accessibility (among other things).
It's seriously not ok to harangue someone like this on HN, regardless of how strongly you dislike the company they work for.
For most people, their work is the thing they know most about. If a person shows up here to discuss that and is met with harassment, it disincentivizes them—and probably others—to contribute about what they know. That makes HN strictly worse.
It's also deeply against the spirit of respect that we want people to treat each other with here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
> Ad tech is like privacy and brain rape [1]. Nobody asked for it.
Ads are what fund the open web. If you want to start a new site, you can put ads on it and start making money. You don't need to convince people to pay you (very hard to do when you're as big as the NYT, let alone when you're small and new), you just sign up to have part of the space on your page used to advertise things.
If you are not ok with ads, use an ad blocker. As I wrote above, sites are offering a trade: you can see our content if you also view our ads. I think ad blockers are fine as a way of saying "I reject your offer", but then the site should be free to say "then I won't send my content".
(Ad blockers today also try to fool the site and work around anti-adblock, which I think isn't fair to the sites.)
> Why do you work for them?
They pay me, it's interesting work, I don't think the work is harmful.
> Do you have an ad blocker on your personal machine?
No. Ads are sometimes annoying, but they don't bother me very much.
> Do your parents?
No, though of course that's not up to me and if my dad decided to install one I wouldn't give him a hard time.
> Do you think about the negative externalities of being paid to fool people into parting with their money?
I have thought about the effect of my job a bunch, but I don't think "fool people into parting with their money" is a major effect of advertising. I've written more about this:
> Do you believe in the products that you let advertise on your platform?
There are an enormous number of products that advertise through the Google Publisher Tag. Some of them I would buy, some of them aren't right for me but are right for others, and others aren't a good choice for anyone. This is the same thing I'd say about a grocery store.
> How do you justify it?
I don't think I'm doing something harmful that needs "justifying".
If I thought my job was harmful I would quit and do something else.
>> Do you have an ad blocker on your personal machine?
> No. Ads are sometimes annoying, but they don't bother me very much.
I strongly encourage you to install ad blockers on all your browsers (Firefox on Android has uBlock Origin) and browse with ads disabled for 90 days, then disable the ad blockers and see what you think.
Ads on the Internet are a cancer. They are neck-and-neck with the clickbait race to the bottom[0] for the worst thing about the Internet. I think once you have them turned off for a bit you will realise that they have been a constant, oppressive presence that you were just used to.
0: Seriously, CNN doesn't even try to be a news network anymore. It's sad.
> Ad blockers today also try to fool the site and work around anti-adblock, which I think isn't fair to the sites.
You're right, it's not fair, but there is no fair in war, and make no mistake, this is what it is, a war for humanities freedom and dignity and you're on the wrong side of it. My country spend decades and a significant amount of its resources building a giant surveillance network meant to oppress and terrorize it's people but because it was 20th century tech, it was orders of magnitude less powerful than what you do(it relied on human informants, usually extorted into cooperating because somebody informed on them). We dismantled that machine because it was extremely dangerous to the free society we decided to build and we will eventually dismantle your bigger badder machine as well. Make sure you save enough for retirement.
Wikipedia, a more useful website than Google (speaking only in terms of my values), gets along just fine without ads. As does Internet Archive, Hacker News, many of the blogs that I read, and all of my personal websites.
> open web
It's funny you call it that. It sounds like a dystopian line directly from Zuckerberg. You don't need to call it "open" as that's what it is (or was) by default. Using this term makes it seem like the web is under attack or at risk of facing a non-open alternative. Maybe it is.
I personally think AMP and Chrome are doing a lot to embrace and extend the web. I don't think it's simply about building a bigger moat around search. If Google had the power to snap their fingers and make all websites have to run on its servers and platform, they would.
I suppose we'll just have to disagree. I'm having a hard time grasping your position.
Thanks for taking the effort to respond. Even though we don't see eye to eye, I appreciate it.
> I work for Google on ads, speaking only for myself
> Ads are what fund the open web.
"Open web" is one of the Orwellian terms used by Google (and their controlled opposition - Mozilla), so it seems you aren't speaking only for yourself, eh?
https://mobile.twitter.com/Pythux/status/1154403982342852609