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We Asked Doc Searls: Do Ad Blockers Cause Cancer? (Video)
A whimsical headline, but not much more of a shark-jumper than some of the talk we've heard lately from ad agencies, online publishers, and others who earn their living from online advertising. Doc Searls recently wrote a piece on his personal blog titled Beyond ad blocking — the biggest boycott in human history. Naturally, we wanted to ask Doc to expand a bit on what he's been writing about ad blocking and advertising in general. So we had a fine conversation about online advertising -- ending with a challenge to the advertising industry, which Doc says should be looking for ways to produce better, more effective, and less annoying ways to sell to us online.
Do Ad Blockers Cause Cancer?
No. But videos on Slashdot do.
The bad apples are ruining it for the good apples. The good apples should get together the define good ad standards and enforcement procedures, otherwise nobody will get apples.
Table-ized A.I.
I followed the link to his blog and he managed to be patronizing inside the first three sentences. That's certainly efficient I guess.
I use Ad-Block's element-hiding add-on to get rid of not merely ads, but various other elements I dislike — including the incessant newsletter sign-up invitations, footers full of legalese, persistent "navigation" menus, "share-bars" and "article-tools" (thank you, I can increase the font without your little icon), weather-widgets, "related articles", "back-to-top" (seriously, who needs these on a desktop??), "next" and "previous" arrows — all of that crap...
In fact, I'm addicted. Upon coming to a new (or recently redesigned) site, I must clean it up before reading. Web-browsing without AdBlocker is just scary nowadays. And revolting...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
... AdBlockPlus
Ghostery
Greasemonkey
HTTPS Everywhere
NoScript
Privacy Badger
Because running code on somebody else's computer without consent is trespass to chattels.
NO TRESPASSING!
Yup, I'm sure Ad Blockers can cause cancer. Just the other day I saw an ad "beat cancer with one weird trick" and followed it and paid and now I won't get cancer, but all those people who blocked the ad will!
One day, I had a Slashdot page still opened in my browser, locked my screen, went to lunch. Came back to complaints that my computer was annoying everyone in the office -- delayed auto-playing video ads were the culprit. So thanks to Slashdot (and me wanting to keep my job), I now have adblock installed.
Oh, not to mention the 3 times in the past I got a nasty computer virus due to an infected ad network. These are now no longer a worry.
Slashdot has always interviewed, reported-on, and catered-to extremists. Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Eric Levenez, Linus Torvalds, even people on the opposite side like those associated with the MPAA and RIAA have been interviewed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
On 3 different computers, 85% of the time on a non-computer related video there was an ad for a Windows 10 driver update tool aka complete and utter malware. Google allows and completely supports this. If you type "HP support" or "Sony support" or "Samsung support" or "dell support" into Google, you get paid ads for scam services in India who are pretending to be the company and then ripping people off. So fuck internet advertising. It's useless, abused garbage and nobody is ever going to do anything to clear it up. I'm going to keep blocking ads until the end of time. You ruined it for your industry.
http://interviews.slashdot.org...
http://interviews.slashdot.org...
http://slashdot.org/tag/interv...
I would say many that are interviewed could be said to be extremists of one kind or another.
Here's one heck of an extremist:
http://slashdot.org/story/07/1...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I clicked on the ad on Slashdot for a robotics kit, I thought it would be a great Christmas gift for the kids. Unfortunately they were all sold out though.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You might want to block the auto-loading of movies. I just get a big empty rectangle that I have to scroll past. Not even close to being as annoying as some video playing without me actually asking it to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Before we get the whining from the ad peddlers: YOU killed your golden goose. Not us. YOU killed it off yourself with the proverbial greed that the story about the original goose conveys.
There were ads and we accepted them as part of the deal. They were non-intrusive and they didn't bother us too much. We thought "fair vs. fair" and didn't block them. Yes, there were always the ones that block anything and everything "on principle" but the majority of those that knew how to block didn't. And the others didn't block because, well, they had no idea how to.
Then ads got more obnoxious. Maybe because too few clicked them and you wanted more, more, MORE! They started to flash and cause seizures, they started to play loud music, they started to pop up, pop under, pop your eyes out. And people who knew how to block them got fed up enough to do so.
But it took even more effort on your part to be obnoxious invaders of our space to actually drive those that didn't know anything about blocking to find out about it. And that's something, you know? The average Joe Randomsurfer puts up with a lot. A LOT. Before the average computer illiterate starts asking his friend about his computer "being weird", it usually means that there are SO many browser addon bars installed that you can't even SEE the actual webpage anymore, and starting it means clicking away like a dozen or two windows popping up from some crapware he managed to step in. THAT is what he WILLINGLY puts up with! That does NOT bother him.
Do you have a FAINT idea just HOW MUCH you have to piss someone like this off for him to bother trying to find out how to block it???
And you did that. You managed to piss people off enough who put up with obnoxious browser plugins and on-start popups. That's a feat and a half.
And there is nothing, literally NOTHING you could possibly do to make them uninstall it. You can promise what you want, you can threaten how much you want, they don't give a shit. It takes a herculian effort to move them and get them to do anything, you will not get them to remove their blockers.
And you most certainly won't get anyone who at least has a remote idea of computers to do so either.
You cannot provide your content without ads? Ok. Shut down, the next one offering it is around the corner.
We don't need you. You needed us. You pissed us off. Now be a good little ad asshole and die already!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That will cut down on the need to advertise. That products nobody sane really wants get heavily advertised for is no surprise, and the advertising is the lesser unethical thing there.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I just get "not encoded for your device", which is funny. Maybe my final de-installation of Flash a few months back is to blame?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Could not agree more. I started looking into blocking only when the flashing and animation insanity started. Blocking was not a lot of effort, but suddenly I could find the web again under all that trash. Will keep blocking, unless they make all ads non-intrusive and they get the problem of malicious ads fixed effectively and permanently. As neither will be happening...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Look, I get it. You're Coren22 and you want everyone to read about you. You you you. Masochist. Now get the F off my lawn and into my hosts file.
Is this ironic because it's an ad? Does your ad blocker block your comments?
+1 Greed.
--
Please publish Gaby's test again. thx
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Ad blocking is not boycott, it is free-riding: using the service (getting the benefits) and refusing to pay (accepting the costs). I'm surprised there is no browser plugin to implement proper boycott.
Boycott (properly understood) means that instead of blocking the ads and still displaying the content, the browser would block the content from loading as soon as an undesirable ad or tracker is detected.
It could even annotate links to sites with such "bad" advertising reputation so the user wouldn't click on them.
Search engines would soon learn to penalize such sites in search engine results, to improve customer satisfaction.
With such a reputation system to implement proper boycott, no consumer is coerced, no consumer sees unwanted ads, and no site owner is or feels cheated.
Of course, in reality, consumers like to get more for less (as normal human beings do) and ad blockers offer a convenient way of having the content and not pay for it. Let's just not pretend that ad blocking is honorable, or that it is analogous to boycott.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Thanks for reminding me that I wanted to ask for a feature: Could we make it so that we don't just browse at -/+ depending on poster but that we could also add keywords of posts we don't want to see? Like, just to pull a random example, I could set posts that contain "start64" at -5 so I would not have to see them?
That would really be awesome!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This.
The thing about ad blockers is that they're fire-and-forget. You install them, and then... nothing. They're low-maintenance and basically transparent. People don't uninstall them because they'll forget they even have them installed within a few days.
And hoping for voluntary whitelisting is a pipe dream.
The best the ad industry can hope for is that they fix the problem before the remaining 80% of people not using ad blockers get around to installing one.
Log in or piss off.
Seriously.
The only kinds of ads most people would look at as "acceptable" are the very types of ads most advertisers and indeed, most people looking to profit from ad revenue, would rather not serve. Why? Because there's a low return proposition on them, and they can't really mine for data (which is even more valuable than actual click-throughs) with them.
Most people, given a choice, don't WANT pop ups, pop unders, video ads, flash ads, tracking, etc. But ad networks and content providers have such a hard-on for The Quick Easy Buck, that they don't want to serve anything else.
So, what we get are ad delivery systems that, over time, grow more and more intrusive.
And, on the other end of the arms race, we have ad blockers that grow ever more elaborate.
Now, were that the extent of it, the end users would win, eventually. As a maximal number of people would eventually migrate to ad-blocking.
But now we're seeing this sort of tracking and ad crap BUILT RIGHT INTO THE OS AND APPS from the get-go. Sure "most" of it, you can opt out of (or just forego the use of). But the actions required for circumventing these hard-coded methods become ever more esoteric and obtuse. Shutting more and more people out, while stealing more screen real-estate, more time, more bandwidth, and more peace of mind from people.
The ad-driven, metrics/telemetry-driven consumer spying industry is a blight upon the Internet and needs to die. Unfortunately, it's like a hydra on steroids.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Worst case scenario you load all the ad wants , and confirm all advertising being loaded in the browser. Except it is not the browser but a VM browser which display nothing just do the actions without displaying or allowing any permanent file change, and is sanitized away from the OS. How are they to distinguish that ? Spend a lot of dollar ? ads blocker only have to stop their work around, and it is much easier than develop a way to bypass the blocker.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Even if it did... how are people using ad-blockers even going to find out?
"Please, give us another chance!" banner ads?
That's where the "ad blocking is a boycott" theme kind of breaks down. A boycott is an intentional action which requires a certain amount of effort to maintain. Ad blocking, once you roll it out, requires no effort or even awareness that it exists. Ad blocking is more like getting out of a bad relationship by burning the photo albums, selling the house, moving to another country, and changing your name.
Log in or piss off.
Even if it did... how are people using ad-blockers even going to find out?
Good point. I will find out because I use several computers and not all have ad-blocking. The ones I use more rarely do not. But that is likely not the typical situation, so most people will not find out. Still a boycott. If you look at what it gave it its name, Mr. Boycott finally had to leave the country because nobody did any business with him anymore. An end to it is not necessary for a boycott. Incidentally, Mr. Boycott seems to have had business practices about as despicable and repulsive as the ad industry.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
WHO CARES? The whole world has turned into one gigantic ad. It's sickening! We've had enough! http://news.slashdot.org/story...