Ads suck. I block them universally. I understand the desire to “get back at the man”, and I don’t begrudge anyone for doing so. But we have to ask ourselves, what’s the real path forward, away from ads?
If a different model existed where users could pay for sites, I’m confident some would use it. I’m also confident many more would not use it. I expect a lot of users unwittingly want to be able to browse the web ad-free, for free, subsidized by the tech-illiterate and those too lazy to block ads.
We desperately need a better model for funding the internet. I’m aware of the work Brave did, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the internet being funded by ads. It instead brings users into the loop. Donations might work, and the “ad-free” subscription tier products seem sustainable. However, at scale, paying to waive ads on an individual site-by-site basis seems absurd.
Public funding for a noncommercial web. Websites that sell things have no problem paying for themselves. The noncommercial web would be a place for people to socialize, share media from their lives, and enjoy their hobbies.
Amateur radio is noncommercial. We should be able to have a similar regime on the web. It shouldn’t even really be that expensive to host. With peer to peer protocols there should be no need for paid hosting companies. Government could mandate that ISPs facilitate self hosting. With IPv6 every device should have static, publicly-routable IPs.
Everything needed for you to post that comment had to be heavily subsidized by your local government, almost every single piece of infrastructure involved, even the protocol itself was subsidized by the US government. It reminds me of that great quote: "Libertarians are like house cats, they naively believe in their fierceness and independence while being fully dependant in a system they don't understand or appreciate".
Can you really blame libertarians for wanting a smaller government? Sure, the government subsidizes some useful activities, but more than half of US government tax dollars go to income redistribution or welfare programs.
Sorry, I don't know anything about the US, but according to this one 2020 pie chart [1], 15% of the federal budget was spent on pensions/social security, and 12% was spent on welfare (the "Other" is "Agriculture, Energy, General Government Services, and International Affairs"). That doesn't add up to "more than half", so can you clarify?
Edit: and, I suppose, it's a little weird to insinuate that welfare programs aren't "useful activities".
My apologies. You’re right, my math was off. I based my data off that exact chart and counted “healthcare”, “social security”, and “welfare” in my statement and just had my math incorrect. The healthcare is Medicare/Medicaid which workers pay into to give themselves health insurance in old age and for the disabled, etc. Social security works similarly.
I suppose it is unfair to classify them as not “useful activities”. I just think that they’re by definition negative for society. Individuals can get higher rates of return in private accounts than they can in the governments coffers. They don’t have to pay as high of administrative fees (since they are the administrators). From the perspective of people who are always having wealth redistributed away from them, these programs are unlikely to be perceived as “useful”, is what I meant.
I doubt you’d see a libertarian who is a beneficiary of government programs, is more what I meant to say.
EDIT: now that I think about it, there is another dimension to this. It’s not fair to say the above about high income earners without mentioning that a portion of US spending is financed entirely by debt and has been for many years. We are forcing future generations to subsidize our present-day spending. This is some of why there is a common anti-boomer sentiment amongst millennials: they prospered racking up the national debt, ignoring climate change, etc., and millennials are left to foot the bill. I’d imagine this causes a non-negligible anti-government lean to some younger folks.
Americans pay way way more for healthcare than any other country _because_ the prices of the medical resources are in private hands, in complete opossition to your claim that they would get "higher rates of return in private accounts": https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2... , and you can easily find that the countries with the most control, e.g. Denmark have the best healthcare while disallowing for-profit enterprises in anything healthcare related.
I doubt you’d see a libertarian who is a beneficiary of government programs, is more what I meant to say.
Don’t libertarians drive on public roads? Don’t they shower and do laundry with water from public utilities? Don’t they shop at Walmart where the employees are subsidized by welfare? I’m sure plenty of libertarians own businesses whose foot traffic is brought to their door on public sidewalks and roads.
This is what is meant by the cat quote. All of the infrastructure of society is paid for by public spending. Libertarians ignore all this and complain about misappropriation and government waste. Very few libertarians talk about what it would really be like to live in an “anarcho-capitalist paradise”.
The answer is it wouldn’t exist for long. Pay a private corporation for everything the government does and it becomes the new government. Don’t be surprised when it starts pushing you around.
I think the reality is that most libertarians don’t want that. They want to benefit from the status quo but find ways to escape paying for it. That’s fine, everyone does that to some extent. It’s just annoying when they get so self-righteous about it.
> Very few libertarians talk about what it would really be like to live in an “anarcho-capitalist paradise”.
Actually, a lot of libertarians have talked about that – and it's pretty much a solved problem. I can't recommend any particular resources in English, but if you happen to speak Russian (or don't mind doing a bit of Google Translate), https://ancapchan.info/ talks a lot about this for example.
I’m using the term beneficiary to mean “someone who gets out of it more than they put into it”. For the upper half of taxpayers who pay 97% of the cost of those public goods, they’re losing.
Regarding subsidization of low-income earners by welfare, I see it as a moot point. The cost of their labor has been artificially decreased by the presence of the welfare system. Society as a whole still pays the cost of that labor, just Walmart gets to get away with not being the one paying it.
I am also yet to meet even the hardest-core of libertarians who don’t believe the government has business funding roads. Anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are separate things for a reason.
I’m using the term beneficiary to mean “someone who gets out of it more than they put into it”.
I’m talking about the same thing. If you’re a business owner, you’re getting far more out of infrastructure and stable government than an average person. Without all of that, you have no business at all!
I am also yet to meet even the hardest-core of libertarians who don’t believe the government has business funding roads. Anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are separate things for a reason.
Of course not! Because anarcho-capitalists are principled in their stance. Libertarians just want to get rid of anything they, personally, don’t benefit from directly. In other words, they want to tear up the social contract. It’s not a valid philosophy at all, it’s just naked hypocrisy.
Assuming you believe prices represent value, then if you believe that high-income earners get more out of roads than they pay for them, either low income earners get less out of them than they pay for (regressive taxation), or the price of roads is simply too low. Either you think the premise is wrong, or I’m missing something.
I'm not talking about income earners, I'm talking about business owners. You can be a billionaire owner while drawing a $1/yr salary. Steve Jobs was one famous example. He got far more benefit (net billions) out of the infrastructure of the US than an average person (who will not get anywhere near a billion in their lifetime).
Percentages are misleading when it comes to economic status. Look at it this way. Say you have 2 people, one who works retail and earns $10/hr and pays 10% taxes, pocketing the other $9/hr. The other person owns $2 billion worth of stock and cashes it out and pays 12% capital gains tax, pocketing the remaining $1,760,000,000. Even though the billionaire paid higher tax as a percentage, they received far more benefit from having a safe, stable, secure society than the retail worker.
Why do so many people with money choose to move to the US from 3rd world countries? Even when they could stay home and pay no taxes and live like kings due to their purchasing power, they choose to come to the US where their wealth instantly shrinks (lower purchasing power) before even paying a cent in taxes. It's because they recognize the enormous benefits of low corruption, security, safety, education, health care, and infrastructure that the US has that their home country lacked.
People who think like that are exactly the kind of people I don't want around, among many reasons is that I'm certain that the cities where they are the majority are not doing well compared to their neighbors.
I personally view all forms of advertisement as a parasite or cancer on our eyes and ears. People disregard it as not that important, but I feel like it's way more impactful than most people think. It's constantly invading our spaces of work, casual enjoyment, transit, etc. It's a mental tax we're constantly paying.
I'd love to see a web standard for small donations via the browser. Whenever I see an article that helped me with a problem or was entertaining to read, I'd like to donate a small amount for it.
At the moment I only have the following options:
- clicking on ads on that page, to hopefully intirectly generate income for the author (but more likely will cause some profiling AI to wreak havoc on my reputation)
- having a paid account upfront, which is usually connected with the entire site and not this specific article
- create accounts for numerous payment and donation systems (patreon, paypal, buymeacoffee, ...)
- manually reach out to the author and ask them for their bank connection.
For me the perfect solution would be a browser-plugin, where I click on "Donate for this Article", enter an amount and maybe an optional comment and click "ok".
When ads are relevant and contextual enough, they become as good as or better than content. The problem isn't advertising. The problem is bad, mediocre, even malicious ads and ad formats.
The proliferation of terrible ads and ad formats fueled the rise of adblock. Adblock is how users fight back.
Adblock companies could collectively start to influence what ads are allowed through, but most attempts at this have been corrupted in the usual and predictable ways.
I used to think this way too, back in like 2009, but the years since then have changed my mind back around to completely hating all advertising. when was the last time you saw a relevant, useful, unobnoxious, unobtrusive, just really great ad? I can't remember the last time I saw one.
We have traditional banners as well as micro ads where we highlight and link to the specific products found in the office design project photos we publish. The latter are very helpful for designers in the industry as they are 100% contextual.
I worked at an ad search company for local businesses. This question was raised at all hands: what if we provided a paid ad-free experience?
The answer was simply: we earn $35/mo per user from ads. Do you think people pay that much for an ad-free experience? Our most valuable users might can afford that fee, but we earn way more from them.
Plus, how many ad companies are there? How many different people would we have to pay to browse without ads?
How many companies, once the ad revenue dries up, would charge for content? How many would charge for content AND heavily lace their websites with ads?
How expensive would the internet be if we had to directly pay for every website we wanted to use?
Personally, I think the internet is worth the cost of access. I don't think sites are worth an additional premium on top of that.
I have a different idea. I think ads can still exist, but in the form of more personalized sponsorships. For example, a company can send a person a product to try and then they can review it. That type of word of mouth is a bit less impersonal than a random ad and maybe we can even have models of trust so that the content creator is known for being objective. An example is Julian Krause on YouTube, who reviews audio gear. His reviews are so good and I feel he is very trustworthy based on what he says.
In my mind, if companies get a few of their products out there and get people to talk about them, it's better than random advertising in several ways. The only downside to companies is that it doesn't rake in as much profit, but I think they can still be profitable, just not as much as they are.
But then again, it'd be much better if we had a society where people bought things only if they really needed them, not if they are assaulted with ads left right and center. In my opinion, such a model is more along the lines of people buying things that really improve their life, rather than accumulating stuff because it seems in vogue.
One consequence is that advertising companies like Google and Facebook will be vastly less profitable, and that's okay. Too much wealth is concentrated to them anyway, and their employees are vastly overpaid in comparison to the value they actually deliver to society.
If a different model existed where users could pay for sites...
The devil is in the details.
"If a different model existed where users could pay for tv shows..." and then Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, etc. came.
I subscribed a bunch, the cancelled. Why? Different reasons, but in general: I wasn't able to really vote with my wallet. Shows that I liked very much got cancelled or, more often, degenerated horribly in subsequent seasons.
So any kind of fine-grained payment would be greatly appreciated. Not only for web content, but also for any kind of media.
I guess it would come with its own set of problems, trying too hard to content the public. But I feel that's better than the current situation, more on the top-down educating the unwashed masses.
I imagine a scheme that would socialize the burden of hosting and create a revenue stream for content creators. The revenue would come from those who paid up front for access and then didn't pull their weight re: hosting.
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0. content-addressed data (e.g. IPFS) and a web of trust where trust means "not a bot, not a malicious human"
1. participants have a team number (0-255)
2. either participants are running a node, or they have a provider running one on their behalf.
3. every time your node requests data from another node by CID, it hashes the data twice (to get something other than the CID) and divides by 256. If the remainder is your team number, your node pins that data for a month. Otherwise it pins the data for 24h.
4. randomly, the nodes check to see if their neighbors are actually pinning the data they're supposed to, and make a naughty/nice list.
5. at the beginning of the month, participants put $10 into a smart contract, unless they have money left over from last month
6. at the end of the month, your node directs the contract to split $5 among the top 50% best citizens (re: pinning), paying nothing to the bottom 50%
7. your node also has kept track of which content you've requested. If you haven't +'d or -'d any content it just splits the other $5 evenly among the users who created the content that you requested. Otherwise it splits it according to your +'s and -'s.
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You can make money if your node is reliably helpful to its neighbors, or if you're a content creator. On the other hand, if you don't care to run a node, the contract ends up at $0 for you at the end of the month and you can just pay $10 again next month if you want access to the content. If you run a node but your internet connection is unreliable (or your node is offline), maybe you end up paying $8 per month because for 80% of your neighbors you were in the bottom 50% on the naughty/nice list
Probably there's also reward money for people who sniff out bad actors and cause them to be excluded from the web of trust on the next go-around.
In summary: reciprocity, with a little $ on the line to keep people honest. And since power corrupts, so it can't be managed by a corporate entity since the corruption would kick in before it got big enough to be "the" go-to place for content on the web--it's got to be a protocol without privileged roles.
You can pump money into the system by buying adspace and just putting up pictures of cats or whatever. Either target them very carefully to always be shown to you, or better yet have them go out far and wide while you keep blocking ads on your devices guilt free.
Been using this for a while, and I forget about it just as much as I did when using ublock (which is what this uses under the hood). I think I've had it installed for 2 months, and my ad spend is calculated to be about $400. Not bad.
It feels like the nuclear option, but the absolute lack of respect that advertisers seem to have for me has gone entirely too far, and it's nice to be able to punch back in my own small little way.
no marketer optimizes for clicks, they optimize for conversions.
so unless this bot is going to go onto the advertisers site and purchase something, which can then be attributed back to the viewed impression, then this will just be ignored by ad tech like any other bot click
That's exactly why the extension works. Imagine paying for advertisements thousands of dollars just so that people keep autoclicking to cost you a few cents out of spite. The advertiser loses money but doesn't get conversions, Google gets the advertisers money but loses them as a customer in the long term. If everyone did this then the model would become unsustainable and we would be finally forced to find an alternative.
Whether that's the right to solve the issue or not is another matter altogether, but the fundamentals of this extension are sound.
You're missing that ad networks can detect and exclude these spammy clicks. And on many networks advertisers can choose to be charged on a per-conversion basis.
I used to work on ads at Google, and knew folks who worked on invalid traffic detection. They seemed to spend most of their time on much more subtle sorts of problems, so given how simple AdNauseum is I'd be surprised if they had trouble filtering it out.
Same, so many "root@localhost" or "admin@atlassian.com" sign-ups purely because I've seen automated marketing systems get setup and understand how easy it is to flag a flow as "Oh yeah they're about to buy something, give the source $" before confirming an action.
I've been using the extension on Firefox for years. Their browser context menu for blocking individual HTML elements has been really handy for the more aggressive AD-heavy sites, though I sometimes miss uMatrix's fine-grained controls.
On the plus side, I can't recall the last time I needed to disable the extension to get a site to work; I'm wondering if it's due to the ad networks still being able to ping back despite the element remaining hidden?
It sends bogus search requests in the background. And it seems like it works as intended, as the extension is banned entirely from Google's Chrome store.
Similar thing I made a landing page for but never built to take utms from other users and attach them to your links, break GA sessions, etc to make your traffic adversarial and attempt to make a sites GA data not so good.
We need an extension that filters out hn submissions like this one. They come around once a year-ish and they're not news, they're just artificially boosted content.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
They are boosted by people like me, who haven't seen it before. People on social media have this strange notion that we're all a perfect bloom filter. I don't have the time or energy to keep up with tens of thousands of posts per year, and new users are coming all the time. Reposts are inevitable.
A personalized bloom filter may be useful. That shouldn't be hard to implement in either JavaScript or Emacs Lisp.
This is outright fraud and I would not be surprised if the author receives a cease and desist from Google and likes.
While I am full for adblockers (your choice not to be exposed to ads), this extension is designed to intentionally harm others people business and cause them monetary loss which is considered a crime in many jurisdictions.
To the mods of HN: why do you allow such grey-zone tools to be published here?
I have a friend that actually makes a living with a business that relies on paying a lot for ads. He's furious, too, about me using that extension, but than again... I believe a business like that should not exist, and nevertheless I am not furious about him running such a business, right?
If a different model existed where users could pay for sites, I’m confident some would use it. I’m also confident many more would not use it. I expect a lot of users unwittingly want to be able to browse the web ad-free, for free, subsidized by the tech-illiterate and those too lazy to block ads.
We desperately need a better model for funding the internet. I’m aware of the work Brave did, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the internet being funded by ads. It instead brings users into the loop. Donations might work, and the “ad-free” subscription tier products seem sustainable. However, at scale, paying to waive ads on an individual site-by-site basis seems absurd.
Does anyone have any other ideas?