Ask HN: Should ad blockers be limited?

I have removed ads from most of my websites. I have a Patreon account and I take tips.

It's a problem space I've studied and thought about for years. Ads pay very little and can introduce a conflict of interest.

For example, trying to write about alternative health tends to attract ads for products like colloidal silver. I am not for the use of colloidal silver, but my audience may not realize that. They may see the ad on my site and infer that I am advocating for its use.

Alternately, making money off a product I do advocate for can be misinterpreted as a conflict of interest. People may be suspicious of a product I actually think is genuinely a good product because its sale makes me money.

The solution to both problems is the same: If my audience supports my work by paying me to create good information, then I don't need to be a shill for some product or other while my audience wonders why I really suggested it.

Ad blockers are here to stay. You don't need to combat them to help foster good, independent content. There are other ways to pay content creators that have additional benefits, such as combating conflict of interest.

Until ad blockers are outlawed, I will block as many ads as I can, in as many ways that I can. After that, I will mock advertising as bitterly as I can, and engage advertisers to let them know how un-american they are.

Fixing advertising is an uphill battle, and while I do think there is such a thing as positive advertising, I see that way too rarely to justify all the downsides of advertising. Targeted ads are still bad 95% of the time, which is hardly better than content based ads, if not worse.

The current alternative is, for the most part, subscription services. The problem with these is that the number of websites I visit within a given month is just massive compared to the tiny fraction of sites I use frequently enough to warrant at least considering paying $5 a month or whatever.

That leaves efforts like Brave/BAT that look to create an automated solution to get the best of both worlds, which can be a step in the right direction, if done right.

There is also the option to use site A to onboard people for site/service B in a natural manner. The Backblaze reports which regularly make it to the front page of HN being one example of that. Merch shops from Youtubers and streamers being another. Obviously, that is not applicable for most websites.

Coming up with better strategies really is the only long term solution to improve the situation.

Whether they reduce the quality of the web or not, they are here to stay.

Not my concern as a user.

> should they be limited?

How and by whom would they be limited? Ad blockers - essentially user agents - are already open source and freely available to use, modify and redistribute. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and you're not getting him back in.

Given how obnoxious a lot of ads can be and how various site owners deploy them, I'm of the opinion that advertisers should be demanding basic standards of conduct. Quickly. Or risk completely losing any credibility. Trust has to be re-established. Your web site's continued existence is not part of the journey towards re-establishing that trust. Don't bother: you and your industry have committed unethical behaviour. You don't get to quote declining earnings now. You've caused massive trust issues and your declining advertising revenues are just a symptom.

Ever been to a download site and seen ads with big fake download buttons? Especially near the actual download link? That's unethical behaviour. Its also why I feel completely at ease if I simply block all ads from that page in the name of basic security. Nothing anyone can say would convince me to re-enable ads on that page. I am allowed to know which button is real. Simple as that. Its a real shame the site owner tolerates such ads. Their unethical behaviour means I must now defend against a deliberate attack. They could easily not put fake download links on there. But they didn't. Do you see the problem now? Advertisements are now associated with bad and/or deceptive behaviour.

What does all this mean? Simply put, I can now justifiably treat ads on websites with a basic level of suspicion. They are privacy nightmares and cannot be trusted to be benign. They aren't just "show this ad to eyeballs for awareness and generate leads for sales". They are now actively designed with fingerprinting, targeting, logging, tracking, identification. Some of them have defences to reestablish tracking in the face of adblocking such that fingerprinting involves more than cookies or other straightforward means. They are intended to follow site visitors around the internet like some creepy stalker. The extent to which this tracking goes simply demonstrates how desperate the need is to associate, track and identify every little aspect. This is the opposite of benign.

I'm now at the stage of almost considering ads as a form of malware. That is how bad the advertising companies have let things go. This is advertisers fault. Don't complain about losing revenue when even one straightforward example is so pointlessly deceptive to be indefensible. There are plenty of other examples I'm sure.

It's a pity you can't just put ads on websites. But, no, you have to make it as creepy as possible. The distance between creepy and criminal isn't that far. People are noticing and they don't like what they find. You think it's bad now but wait until it really takes off. Adblocking may well become the least of your worries.