from Hacker News

“We're considering banning domains that require users to disable ad blockers”

by Hjugo on 5/9/16, 7:01 AM with 257 comments

• by econnors on 5/9/16, 8:13 AM

  As noted other comments, this would only apply to the /r/technology subreddit. The general feedback is in favor of blocking these types of sites.

  I'm pretty amazed at the current state of ads. With multiple ad exchanges, private sellers, and static brand deals, the entire serving process is a mess and users are paying for it. I don't think publishing websites are being malicious; they're incentived to make money and just haven't figured out how to do it at a high enough margin while keeping users happy. I just think the entire internet ad industry is in shambles and nobody really knows a solution that makes everyone happy.

• by alblue on 5/9/16, 7:30 AM

  The nub of the thread is: these sites have put up ad blocker blockers, so you can't see the content without disabling your ad blocker. And yet when you do you are either exposed to full screen or video auto play ads, or in some cases, malware: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-rea...

  Given that Reddit is a large source of incoming referrals this stance (if implemented) might be a sufficient lever to send a signal to get those sites to improve their environment.

  In any case since the sites are still able to use curated self hosted ads (ie not JavaScript redirects to externally hosted providers) they are able to sell static ad space to make money even with adblockers enabled.

  It might be worth seeing what the outcome for the experiment is (if it goes ahead) and then seeing if the same logic would work for HN.

• by esoteric_nonces on 5/9/16, 1:54 PM

  Maciej (HN handle 'idlewords') has an interesting take on this that I'm struggling to find in my history right now. The basic idea is that all of the data these companies collect is still ultimately useless in practice. We still don't have advertising that is even close to being relevant.

  But the data retains its toxic qualities (of being a database of every action I take on the Internet and some in the real world).

  I fire up the YouTube homepage and all of my recommendations are for UK daytime TV. Celebrities, 'Jeremy Kyle' (the UK Jerry Springer), etcetera.

  YouTube sends me adverts for female hygiene products and dog food. (I am male and I own no dog.)

  Even when I get advertising that's not selling me stuff that would require I buy something else first (sex change, dog) it's invariably for something vastly overpriced or some sort of megabrand.

• by MichaelBurge on 5/9/16, 9:44 AM

  I wonder if you could sue a website for serving you malware.

  Here's my idea for an ad company:

  * People who want to post ads have to provide their name, address, verified email, and a security deposit(say $500). Larger volumes of ad purchases require either a long history, insurance, or a bank letter to vouch for you. If you load malware anywhere into the system, you get fined and your information gets turned over to the police.

  * People who want to earn money with advertisements have to provide name, address, verified email, and a security deposit. The security deposit could be funded out of earnings(or not). Fraud is countered by randomly sampling websites and fining offenders if the ad isn't visible. Also they get their information turned over to the police if it was intentional fraud.

  * Security deposits are returned within 1 month after the advertising relationship is terminated.

  * Fines are paid out of the security deposit, and your access is restricted until you refill the account(possible with an even bigger deposit).

  * People who are higher risk(from a shady lawless country, no history or background, etc.) have to pay a higher security deposit.

  * Ads can be either text or banner ads. Anything Turing-complete needs insurance or a bank letter.

  * If someone pushes through a porn ad to get advertised on the NYT by miscategorizing it, they get fined.

  Now all the ads are guaranteed to be of high quality, and the websites you're advertising on are probably higher quality too.

• by Zelmor on 5/9/16, 9:34 AM

  Same should go for HN, really. Paywalls and adwalls are a great way to make me not even read the article and thread. Yet, they make frontpage due to buzz.

• by kinghrothgar on 5/9/16, 3:17 PM

  All of this was started by a false accusation. The same guy that posted the tweet that went vial later said he was mistaken:

  http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware...

  "Here is what is clear:

  The advertisement was not malware.

  Forbes is still whitelisted from my ad-blocker.

  We have no evidence of what exactly created this pop-up."

• by awinter-py on 5/9/16, 12:12 PM

  Hmm; how about a +5 point boost instead for sites doing paywall innovation? Free content isn't the end goal. Don't we want people to make a living off content? I can't imagine anybody here wouldn't pay 1 or 5 pennies for the second half of a useful article.

• by willvarfar on 5/9/16, 10:23 AM

  Tangentially, I would like Google to put a warning on navigating to a site that has served malware any time in the past month. This will increase the penalty of serving malware so much that sites will suddenly push back on the ad networks and improve quality dramatically.

• by SEJeff on 5/9/16, 6:02 PM

  I genuinely wish HN did this, but with uBlock origin, you can block most of the scripts that ask you to disable adblockers. In a cat/mouse game, the techies are going to win.

• by jimbobimbo on 5/9/16, 2:59 PM

  I wish search engines would start banning Forbes too: very often they're one of the top results, but their implementation of interstitial is broken and lands you on their home page instead of the page which search engine links to. And I don't even use ad blocker!

• by niccaluim on 5/9/16, 5:24 PM

  Have media companies ever considered something like the cable TV model? I'm thinking something like ten different sites form a network, and readers pay once (on a subscription basis) for access to the whole network instead of paying each site separately.

  I definitely am not interested in subscribing separately to (e.g.) Wired, the NY Times, the Economist, WSJ, the New Yorker, etc. But I think I'd be totally down for a single rate that gave me ad-free access to some or all of those.

• by keypusher on 5/9/16, 8:00 AM

  This only applies to r/technology. Which is a large sub, but still a very small part of reddit.

• by TheRealPomax on 5/9/16, 6:16 PM

  Why are people commenting here, instead of in the reddit request for comments thread? It's literally a call for you to leave your comments on this matter for reddit to read, doing so here is in this case about as counter productive as it gets...

• by threatofrain on 5/9/16, 12:36 PM

  What consumers want is a combination of product or service (1) database, (2) curation by category + quality, (3) recommendation, and (4) discovery. As an odd category, there may also be product sponsorship, like with Kickstarter.

  Advertisements suck at all of these.

• by return0 on 5/9/16, 8:18 AM

  Anything that expedites the process of moving from ads to paying "somehow else" for good content is good. But it falls on the technologists side to come up with something that replaces ads. Redditors are only curing a symptom.

• by phereford on 5/9/16, 4:09 PM

  This industry is ripe for innovation. I agree that the state of malware being served through Ad Exchanges is grotesque and I fully employ my ad blocker everywhere.

  Here is the thing I just dont get. Why doesnt some tech savvy organization create a white label solution that companies can either slap a subdomain on and invite "Customers" to fill ad supply. Self host the curated assets through said white label solution. Moderate with sophisticated computers that are not subject to the vast majority of mal ware (excluding 0-day obviously), and move on. Im sure someone could easily serve the ads off of the main domain anyway to circumvent all of the ad blockers on subdomains.

  This is a perspective from the outside looking in, but people seem to just complain about the problem instead of looking for solutions.

  EDIT: BAH, so there is a conversation from last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221859

• by cha5m on 5/9/16, 11:16 PM

  I honestly like the sites that block adblock. I only use adblock because it is so easy and has such massive benefits, but I still feel guilty than I am not supporting content creators.

• by xrisk on 5/9/16, 1:06 PM

  You should really post np.reddit links to prevent non-users of said reddit community from voting. It's the standard practice -- https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro

• by snappythrowaway on 5/9/16, 10:55 AM

  I would suggest a emoji based labeling system. Not too intrusive (grey scale) that somehow could signal if article is paywalled / blocking visitors with ad-blockers.

  For a subset of users (either detected or by user preference), there might be another useful symbol as well for indicating if a website is not tor friendly.

• by jcoffland on 5/9/16, 8:42 AM

  I think HN should automatically penalize the scores of paywalled sites. Although I'm not sure HN's pro-corporate politics would ever allow it.

• by aaron695 on 5/9/16, 1:23 PM

  How about they bugger off and not censor my content.

  Power hungry censors from either the government or forums piss me off.

  People who own forums have a right to regulate content, true.

  But bullshit like this aint cool, I and the users are not babies, bugger off, we'll decide with votes.

• by pmontra on 5/9/16, 10:35 AM

  I second that.

  I also don't like those sites that require JavaScript to read plain text content. Forbes is an example of both cases, with a twist. The text of the article is embedded in a script tag inside the HTML page and then added to the visible DOM. I could understand a SPA getting JSON from the server but here the content is already in the page.

• by moron4hire on 5/9/16, 12:18 PM

  You would think, if they have the ability to detect that a user has an ad blocker in place, they could just as easily redirect them to a subscription form for an ad-free experience, rather than block people and lose revenue completely.

• by xg15 on 5/9/16, 4:58 PM

  "We're forcing our users not to post sites that would force them not to force the sites to not force the user's viewing habits by posting ads".

  You know an arm's race is in progress when...

• by mcbits on 5/9/16, 8:06 AM

  I share the sentiment of the proposal, but what I really don't understand is why user moderation fails to suppress those sites despite their tactics angering so many people.

• by ctulek on 5/9/16, 12:08 PM

  Sidenote: we should call it ad-company blockers, not ad blockers

• by S_A_P on 5/9/16, 12:57 PM

  Ive actually implemented this locally. I reached a breaking point with some of the intrusive ads, so I block ads. If a site(such as Wired) asks me to turn that off, I add it to simple blocker and dont go back. The funny thing is a) I have a print subscription to wired but I cant access the site without turning off ad blocking, and b) I dont miss the online version. If Im just being honest with myself, its doing me a favor by preventing procrastination.

• by rdudek on 5/9/16, 3:14 PM

  uBlock Origin and enable the anti-adblock killer under 3rd party options seem to usually work great. I also run Privacy Badger add-on which allows me to disable certain scripts and trackers from pages. Works great. I'll subscribe to sites that I visit on daily basis if they offer it with option to disable ads. I have no problem with this. I don't want to be served idiotic malware from some ad-exchange.

• by rodionos on 5/9/16, 8:32 AM

  Banning these sites altogether would be too much. Assign a pre-defined downvote so that the hurdle for ad-driven sources is higher to overcome.

• by anonymousab on 5/9/16, 1:10 PM

  I should think flair would be enough. The community would naturally downvote those links when they thought the content wasn't worth it.

• by _audakel on 5/9/16, 3:19 PM

  One easy way I have found to get around some of these site's blocks is disabling javascript in the chrome console and then reloading the page. it works a good amount of the time. you can also wget the page and pass in headers that your a google bot to bypass paywalls on sites like economist and wsj. (this was documented in a previous hn post exactly how to do this)

• by tacos on 5/9/16, 2:27 PM

  Make it a user option -- sites really shouldn't be in the business of globally blocking domains. And then let me add sites to the .ignore file too, please.

  Anyone got the list of sites HN currently blocks/penalizes/rewards? I'd love to tweak those options, and add marco.org and buzzfeed to my personal blocklist.

• by jasonkostempski on 5/9/16, 3:21 PM

  I'm not sure this would be possible via normal subreddit admin tools but I'd like to see this done as an user opt-in feature. Let people post those link if they choose to but also let users choose if they see them or if they get a notice when they try to post a link to one.

• by therealdrag0 on 5/11/16, 1:08 AM

  This week I noticed that StackOverflow has voting on ads. Hover over an ad and it shows thumbs up/down. I disable my ad-blocker on sites I want to support and just noticed this.

  Seems genius to me.

• by X86BSD on 5/9/16, 5:53 PM

  I personally do not mind the "Deck" ad network. To me that is ads done right.

  I learned about the deck from daringfireball.

• by gjolund on 5/10/16, 1:02 AM

  A simple solution to publishers:

  Curate your ads and serve them statically.

• by dredmorbius on 5/9/16, 3:59 PM

  Yes, ban both adblock blockers and paywalls.

  The first are overtly refusing to accept users' terms. The second are trying to have their cake and eat it too: viral content propogation whilst refusing to present content to those who come at it via link aggregators and discussion sites such as Reddit.

  Both actively thwart Reddit's intended aim: informed discussion of an article _by having read it_. If they don't want to participate, then don't participate.

  Moreover, advertising, the advertising infrastructure, and multiple aspects of it are creating a seriously problematic WWW information structure: crap content, user-hostile design, hugely excessive bandwidth usage, slow browser response, and privacy and security risks galore. At the same time, the actual creative producers and journalists responsible for primary content are hugely undercompensated.

  Eliminating the existing advertising regime would allow all of these to be addressed.

  That said, high-quality information has a very serious revenue problem, and I'd like to highlight that.

  It's a topic I've explored in some depth, "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_info...). Or if you prefer a real economist, Hal Varian's "Markets for Information Goods" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.h...).

  A frequently proposed solution is micropayments. I don't see those as viable, Clay Shirkey, Nick Szabo, and Andrew Odlyzko have all written at length on why not.

  Rather, a universal content tax or broadband tax seems an alternative. Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation have suggested this, I'd made my own universal content proposal some time back (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...)

  I've also done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on amounts. _Total_ global ad spend in 2013 was $500 billion, online was $100 billion. If _only_ the world's richest 1 billion (roughly: US, EU, Japan, Australia) were to contribute to this, the tax would be $100/year to eliminate _all_ online adverts, and $500/year for _all advertising entirely_. The money could fund existing creatives -- writers, editors, film producers, journalists, and musicians -- at roughly _twice_ today's compensation.

  It's worth a thought.