Raymond's proven so far he won't be shady, and has made a tool that's incredibly resilient to anything the server side can do. The adblocker wars cannot be won by the serving side. There will always be a way to browse the Web without ads, or there will simply be fewer people using the Web; they will move onto other protocols where they can avoid ads.. at least until the marketers catch on.
Our culture needs to confront the fact that people are tired of their attention being diverted from their goals every day just so some dumb companies can remind us they exist. Is there nowhere in society considered sacred enough to not litter it with advertising filth?
> Is there nowhere in society considered sacred enough to not litter it with advertising filth?
Yes, there is still a last bastion of focus, productivity and anti-distraction. It's the terminal, which is why I find myself using TUI apps more and more as time goes on.
There are specifically a few principles we need to preserve to prevent the marketers from ever getting a foothold in the terminal. They are: general computing, text-based UI, and composability.
What that means is we need control over which programs we can run, we need to work with programs that view/input/output primarily text, and with programs that are modular (so that if a marketer injects their filth we can run it through grep and strip the filth out).
In other words, our modern needs are not much different from the old UNIX philosophy.
That is the technical remedy. From a sociocultural standpoint, though, the best way to avoid advertising is simply to be esoteric. Be interested in weird stuff which is too small to attract the interest of marketers and their filth.
Nice to see this sentiment on a mainstream site. :)
There is some risk of ads on other protocols, but yes, text-based ones are the most flexible and powerful. Even if a gopher server starts getting ads, a gopher client can be configured to sed/grep/whatever certain URLs or domains, just like uBlock is for web browsers.
Staying esoteric, and in self-hosted community spaces, is how I've best stayed away from corporate communications.
Funny you say that, I was just thinking earlier today back to the core-js drama.
In short: the creator of a NPM package that is used by approximately everyone, everywhere, was facing a legal battle. He had been developing this package full time for years and did not have the cash on hand to hire a lawyer. He added a console log that ran on installing his package that said something like "If you're using core-js please consider donating". Queue an absolute shitstorm of people screaming at him in the GitHub issues and him eventually going to prison for around 10 months.
It can be a rough world out there for the folks building for the "focus, productivity and anti-distraction" platform.
Luckily he seems to be back on the grind nowadays, with a decently robust cross-platform donated slush fund to boot (~200k USD across Pateron, Open Collective, Bitcoin).
I said he was facing a legal battle in the opening. From what I can remember of his description of it, a teenager was lying down on a dark stretch of road at night and he ran them over in a motorcycle. Apparently one of the teenagers friends was trying to pull the other out of the road at the time? The details are shady and somewhat irrelevant.
They do and it proves the points I made in my prior comment. It's A) fairly non-intrusive because it's just text, and B) pretty easy to remove because Linux is a highly composable operating system where you're basically just pushing text files around.
>Yes, there is still a last bastion of focus, productivity and anti-distraction. It's the terminal, which is why I find myself using TUI apps more and more as time goes on.
Welcome to the club. I've been using Emacs for more than a quarter century, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but stayed with slrn because of Emacs's lack of multithreading.
I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix)
* does a great of job displaying HTML messages. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally.
* sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser
* opens images and attachments
* auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient
* archives messages to various folders using various criteria
* searches my archived mail going back a quarter century at lightning speed
Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above.
VM isn't perfect. I'm sure that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.
uBlock Origin is a terrible name, specially when you consider that there is a different extension simply called "uBlock", that at this point has little to do with uBO.
There is a historic reason for this. uBlock was handed over to another entity, who then engaged with ad networks and did "Acceptable Ads" BS. gorhill's fork appears to have been immediately after the hand-off, however.
I would actually argue that "can't be won from the server side" is completely untrue. However ad companies don't trust websites to serve ads and report and so there are obvious to block setups because of that distinction, which is what makes ublock work. If there was trust between ad networks and sites it'd be a lot harder to block. I find it pretty ironic. and I continue to be surprised how completely terrible ad networks are from a tech standpoint. All of this makes sites spam the average user with more and more ads while tech savvy users continue to not see ads. Its fun.
As a passionate competitive gamer since 20+ years I see a 100% parallel to the "Cheating" problem in PC games. There is a HUGE market there and a never-ending game of cat and mouse between cheat developers and anti-cheat developers.
I fundamentally see the same structure: A client-server relationship, some game developers DO trust Anti-Cheats to a huge extent and the AC tools even have ring0 power on your device. And every game ever is full of cheaters and most of them with 0 IT knowledge.
As long as you have access to the network connection or own the end device, I dont see how this can end well for advertisers. Maybe for a few days / weeks / months here and there, but at what price.
That's a good point, but you also explained why it's not too much of a concern.
There are ways to fully control it, but it's all server side. The best protected content is the content never served.
They're stuck in a situation where the business model is pissing off (some of) their users, and they want to turn ad blocking users into either ad viewers (not going to happen) or paying customers (limited but possible success).
Paywalling is the ultimate solution, but if Youtube does that, its status as the place to host video disappears within 6 months.
This is why it's a pointless war; every effective solution to force ads or control content to restrict revenue loss will result in lower exposure and/or popularity.
Ad companies can do a lot to build trust by no longer shipping Javascript-enabled bullshit, and stop selling scams. None of the bytes coming down the wire from an ad company are trustable, or do they contain anything actually useful. Why should we enable these designs or accept connections from those servers? All arguments boil down to half-assed moralizing about how we owe it to companies to help them profit. I'm not convinced.
Markets are simple: provide value and you will find customers.
> they want to turn ad blocking users into either ad viewers (not going to happen)
Actually if a niche is well-defined, and you don't push anything off-topic, this can work very well.
My example: I often watch the DevOps Toolkit videos on YT (with the guy who works for Crossplane now), including sponsor block and often find something interesting and try it out. Some details to share:
* DVT advertised Civo as the fastest k8s (in terms of time between terraform apply and a running cluster). Since I set up k8s clusters very often and I'm fed up with usual waiting times (20-30 mins for EKS, 3 minutes for Civo) I decided to give them a try. But it was impossible to get the account verified - my card was added but they couldn't "verify my account", whatever that means. And only at that moment I discovered why Civo was faster than the rest: they used k3s instead of k8s! I don't mind, k3s is CNCF-certified (but so is Minikube...). So I was a bit upset this important detail was missing from the comparison.
* DVT advertised Hivelocity as the cheapest and fastest VPS, even cheaper than Hetzner (and they had a comparison table). Since I'm using Hetzner a lot I was curious to check them out and... for roughly the same price (around $4), Hivelocity has twice less RAM! Again, this little detail was missing from the ad.
As you can see, I not only watch the videos but also check the ads, even if they are misleading, and will continue to do so because they are interesting to me. The moment DVT introduces ads for, say, air purifiers, I'll start blocking ads. It's not that I'm not interesting in air purifiers, it's just it doesn't fit the context.
Yeah, that's not for me. Ads don't encourage me to buy products, they annoy me. Especially if it's a brand I've already engaged with by buying their products. For example, don't serve Verizon ads to Verizon customers!
Better yet, let me decide where what little capital I have will go. I don't need LLCs telling me what to buy, I know what I want better than they do.
You're both correct and also missing nuances that make it a lot more complex than what you're thinking. Ask yourself Why is paywalling different than ads that makes it more effective, then question if it actually is and if ads could be just as effective? I'm sadly not going to be able to explain more. Otherwise this would be a fun discussion.
I do know with a low ad rate you could have people who block ads watch ads with an effective delivery system. Like everyone it's the right balance of ad rate with content rate, or you know just charging directly.
Paywalling doesn't have to be all or nothing, you could show thumbnails and preview clips, but then require payment/subscription once the vid's clicked on. Or track them server side and give a limited number of video minutes before they're prompted to pay up. I think it would be effective because it would retain the "hook" that typically generates traffic. Show just enough to make the "Subscribe" button look easy and cheap.
Native ads are annoying and thankfully skippable with things like SponsorBlock. Hard/impossible to block in the middle of a stream, though...
I remember when ads on the Web were just clickable banners or those silly animated GIFs. While they still took up way too much screen real estate, it was possible to ignore them to some extent. Now it's not that easy, and you risk security because of all the surveillance.
The people who avoid ads would rather not visit or use a site than reward the ad-shoving behavior. It's about time and respect; there really isn't any threshold that I will accept ads. If they ever play I reach to mute or switch or even close the tab. My attention isn't for sale.
> Our culture needs to confront the fact that people are tired of their attention being diverted from their goals every day just so some dumb companies can remind us they exist.
This seems like an argument against non-targeted/contextual ads only? Because goals and ads can align.
While it's hard to disagree, I'd like to remind everyone about that in many cases the alternative is to pay for services. The suckers who don't use AD blockers are effectively paying for our content.
Yes. There were a few days where they were using odd hueristics that managed to detect uBlock, but after following instructions to clear my cache and update my lists, I re-enabled other lists one-by-one, realizing I needed fewer than I had to begin with, and Youtube's worked ad-free since.
Some people are coming up with one-liner Javascript functions to fool scripts on the page as well, but I have to question the durability of that approach. It should work until their JS code changes, in theory.
privacy badger is useless at best and can do a disservice. uBlock origin can do everything privacy badger does and more. Also it has been known that having both privacy badger and uBlock origin causes conflicts and issues.
uBlock Origin is indeed an excellent privacy tool. However, uBlock Origin is not a replacement for Privacy Badger (nor is Privacy Badger a replacement for uBlock Origin). For one, uBlock Origin uses manually compiled ad blocker lists, while Privacy Badger automatically learns using heuristics. Both approaches have their pluses and minuses. Our FAQ goes into what makes Privacy Badger different here[1] and here[2].
> Also it has been known that having both privacy badger and uBlock origin causes conflicts and issues.
As far as I know, the two extensions work well together. Could you point me to some of these issues?
Which websites have issues with both uBO and Privacy Badger installed?
Privacy Badger uses heuristics, so it is possible to get it wrong, but it gives you a UI to toggle with things and correct its heuristics. Since uBO uses manual filters, you rely on list maintainers for your blocking instead of a heuristic that can deal with new threats that manual lists haven't accounted for yet.
Using both in tandem should be better because you get the adblock lists and something on the lookout for more trackers.
It doesn't for me - first I got warning popups, and eventually videos wouldn't load at all.
I found a different extension called Ad Speedup that basically plays ads at infinite speed, so the ad's first frame loads, but then the video resumes. This is working reliably so far. I would also be interested to know if it still gives revenue to the channel because technically, the whole ad plays (just not at 1x speed).
Oh yeah, chrome. I was thinking the anti-block was tied to my account since clearing cookies and updating ublock's filter list didn't fix it, but I'll give firefox a try.
I find it funny that you are discussing how to block YouTube ads —- when you can just get YouTube premium. Makes me ask the age old question: how can creators supposed to eat?
Do you worry how the actors eat in the shows you watch? If at any point a "content creator" can't sustain their video production, they can do what every other failed entrepreneur does and move on to another job, or re-assess the business model and adapt.
So far, nothing's been put on the table for me to feel compelled to buy video access, or videos themselves, for. If Youtube paywalls tomorrow, I'll go somewhere else. I got by on the Web before Youtube and I'll get by after them, too.
The only thing worse than an ad is being in the middle of deep thought on a deep task and being instantly, and without warning, switched to the full screen red colored Ad-Blocker update / donate tab. I uninstalled it immediately.
Is the same one that allowed advertisers to pay to get around the block? Because if so, then the new subscription thing they're pushing makes perfect sense.
They probably assume that only if you on PC you will be interested into reading reviews about extensions. Because you can't use them them on mobile (android or Firefox) while using vanilla chrome.
This is one of the biggest threads to all those adtechs. We only start to recently see Google starting to attempt to crackdown on all of those. Youtube is now playing a cat and mouse game.
The single best thing we can all do to prevent this is to stop using Chrome.
Raymond's proven so far he won't be shady, and has made a tool that's incredibly resilient to anything the server side can do. The adblocker wars cannot be won by the serving side. There will always be a way to browse the Web without ads, or there will simply be fewer people using the Web; they will move onto other protocols where they can avoid ads.. at least until the marketers catch on.
Our culture needs to confront the fact that people are tired of their attention being diverted from their goals every day just so some dumb companies can remind us they exist. Is there nowhere in society considered sacred enough to not litter it with advertising filth?