What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?
The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).
Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).
"Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
The society we live in demands that you earn money, if you don't want to die. The only thing that you have in a high enough amount is time, so if you use time to do anything, at some point it must earn money or you die. In the digital world there is no scarcity, so the old model of physical stuff you sell for $X a piece doesn't work. There are no systems to guarantee a life to everyone, everyone has to fight for themselves. If you want to produce content, content that is not necessary to live, you necessarily enter non a competition for attention, for money, against everyone else. If people justifiably can't give you money, you must resort to the only way that gives you a survival fee: shove crap in the eyes of the reader. Give them not what they want, but what others want. Influence their decisions.
It's a shitty system. The analogy is interesting because if there's a single vendor that holds what you need to survive, and they price it at an outrageously high price just for their profit, is it acceptable ? Is it OK, as a society, to say no to this practice ?
When I buy a banana, I see the price beforehand. With ads on websites it’s more as if upon me taking the banana, the banana seller gained the right to search my pockets and take anything they fancy.
I am absolutely within my rights if I instruct my computer to honor some of these requests and not others. Any other perspective is crazy when you think about it. I own the computer, I choose the programs that I run. I'm not leasing this computer from Google or from the business that owns the website in question.
This is really a matter of property rights. If somebody wants me to use a computer which is unable to block ads, they can offer to lend me a free computer which has that limitation, I suppose. I mean I'd say no, but other people might say yes.
Yes, it absolutely is. Ads not only cost me my time and attention, but also consume resources (network bandwith, CPU time, screen real estate) that I might not want to be consumed. Just open any consumer-oriented webpage these days, and I can guarantee you will get 2-3 videos (!) or animations autoplay immediately, and a large part of your screen eaten by "garbage". Sometimes reader mode helps, sometimes it does not...
One thing that I usually do is when a page shows an explicit ask to turn my adblocker off, I close that page. This is fair enough, you can call this a transaction, and I can opt out of it.
Story time. In the 1970s, my grandfather wrote a letter to our local newspaper, asking them to omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the news. "I never read them" he said.
Then my mother had to explain to him a little bit about mass production.
He would have loved ad-blockers.
following your reasoning it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?
no, the browser job is to display what he receive from the resource YOU requested what the server put in that resource is between you and it (you can "cheat"(not my word but liked/steal it from another comment) by drop the ad or choose to not requesting the resource all together).
it's not perfect, im using an ad blocker and i can't understand how people can surf the internet without one but hopefully we can find a solution the change the whole free internet based on ad with something else
Black Mirror did a delightfully dark take on this, it might have even been the first episode.
All other forms of advertisement are a deal between 2 businesses. They work out all the details of when and where an ad will be shown, and what methods will be used to verify the deal is being upheld, none of which rely on the consumer. It would be insane to expect consumers to volunteer their time and effort to fetch the ad and show it to themselves, especially before they even know what they’re getting out it. Add to that expecting the consumer to answer a large list of personal questions, and it’s downright certifiable.
It is our right.
These corporations do the exact same thing, they change their little terms of service all the time, often without notice, and we're forced to swallow it. Why is it suddenly wrong when we do it? Because it costs them money? Fuck their money, we owe them nothing.
> Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway
Complete bullshit analogy. There is no "transaction". There never was, not even once, a "transaction". Only assumptions.
They are not charging us anything. They're giving us the banana for free after putting some advertising stamps on it. They're hoping we'll look at the ads but the fact is we are under exactly zero obligation to do so. We invented technology that peels the bananas automatically and gives us the fruit while throwing the trash away and the ads along with it.
Our attention is not currency, nor can it be sold to the highest bidder. We are under exactly zero obligation to "pay" with our attention. Zero.
> "Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
Absolutely agree. Businesses are the ones that come to us with their idiotic "our way or the highway, take it or leave it" deals. Functionality such as ad blocking is absolutely vital for consumers because it empowers them to alter the deal. It doesn't really matter what the corporation thinks, the deal is gonna be altered whether it likes it or not.
Such is the power of adversarial interoperability, the nightmare of every monopolist.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
It's kinda tiring really - seeing people constantly bark past each other with no understanding of nuance. But that's the modern internet I guess.
Can anyone really make that argument though?
Maybe making sites repulsive is the default because those that push that default earns money on it?
You recognize these dark pattern modal boxes that absolutely ruin a site and you feel the complexity. The mom and pop site most assuredly did not invent this, and if they believe they even wanted it is because they were tricked into it.
Sites that are "well behaved" with ads are fine to me. The problem is too many abuse the css/js capabilities of the browser to make a result similar to the popup problems of yore. The only sane solution from a consumer point of view is block by default and whitelist the good places.
May not be the job of a web browser but it’s the job of MY web browser. I either have a web browser that blocks ads or I have a broken web browser that’s soon to be replaced.
The business that I'm boycotting with uBlock Origin is the one that tracks me as I move around the internet and builds a dossier on me that they sell ads against.
It’s not even a “what if”, we all experience it on a daily basis.
This resonates with me. Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. I think that evolves way down the line. Initially it's just about getting stuff done.
* You (some caveats).
* Maybe your family (lots of caveats).
As Stallman has been pointing out since the early 1990s, if you give up your freedom you won't be free any more, and other people can do stuff you don't like to you. People still refuse to use that logic despite its excellent predictive track record.
Google hasn't actually asked anyone to give up any freedom, so little meaningful damage is being done despite the fact that Google is going evil. The Microsoft era was much worse for the internet.
You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better.
The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.
Chrome now sends all of your URL's you are viewing to Google by default.
So does Edge, to Microsoft.
Big Tech is Malicious.
There are many different ways to make money though. I work with green energy tech in what is essentially an investment bank. Like most companies our main purpose is to make rich people richer, but we do this by building solar and wind power plants along with storage. We do this in the most ethically correct way possible, which is often also a much more expensive way, but it gives us the opportunity to sell our products to customers who will not buy things that are build in what they view as terrible countries. From a cynical perspective, I can see how this could get interpreted as being done because of money. But the truth is that it has been one of the organisational goals from the beginning, and it's hammered into every part of the company in such a way, that we don't hire people we don't think are committed to doing things the right way. It comes from the very Scandinavian belief that there is enough money to be made by doing things right. This isn't necessarily a competitive strategy on the 1-10 year plan, but when you look beyond those 10 years, it's slowly turning out to be the only profitable way to turn out a healthy consistant profit in the green energy industry.
I think Google had that when they had their "don't be evil" spirit going for them. In many ways I still think they have that going for them. I also think the company struggles to become more than just an advertising company, and I think it's a shame, because they seem to have some genuinely great products that are completely unusable for businesses (especially here in Europe). Which is also where I think things get sort of interesting with stuff like ad-blockers and Manifest V3. Because ad-blockers are consumer friendly (sort of), but they aren't business friendly.
If you want to run a website that offers content that is paid for by ads, then you can't do that if everyone uses an ad-blocker. Google, Apple and Microsoft can, because they have ways around it by building ads directly into their core products in a non-skippable fashion, but you can't. This is what has been hurting journalism, or at least the journalism that people don't want to pay for, but it's frankly hurting any sort of content creation. If you want to create videos about something, you're going to put it on YouTube. Both because it gives you exposure, but also because it gives you an easier revenue stream with the (sort of) unblockable ads in their app. Once you get enough people following you, you may build your own content-site and rely on subscribers, but you're not going to do that when you're just starting out. This is a stark difference compared to the early web. I remember running a Diablo 2 fan site for the fun of it, that generated enough ad revenue from a single non-intrusive banner add, to pay for a laptop back when I was a teenager. You can't do that on the modern web, and ad-blockers are a big part of the reason.
I don't have a good answer for you, but I don't think you can say that ad-blockers are inherently good, or, that Google is inherently evil for wanting to change the way advertisement works. I'm also not sure you can expect power houses like the EU to uphold the right for browsers to be capable of blocking ads. They may but the EU is also looking for ways to save journalism.
Lastly. I'm as much a fan of the old punk saying "the guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to" as you seem to be, but I'm just not convinced it really applies here.
I am so thankful I got to take part in the Chrome adventure with so many people I still call my friends.
Also the close button was only not funny for a stomach churning 5 minutes after I saw the techcrunch article; at all other times: hilarious.
That is indeed hilarious.
It's kind of surreal because I'm not sure desktop software really does that anymore; maybe apps, but they seem to fizzle out really weirdly. It's very crazy to consider Chrome's influence on the Internet, and how most browsers are just skinned Chromium now.
- Stable Diffusion
- Unreal Engine 5 (in particular, the Matrix demo).
Chrome was a ground-up project, written by highly-paid Googlers, while other browsers were sitting on old codebases built up by many average employees and unpaid volunteers over a decade+.
Chrome was also, at that time, allowed to be a pure browser for browsing the web while other browsers were trying to get you to sign up for toolbars (essentially more ad real estate for them) or use their homepage (more ad spots) and were pushing out updates constantly (an excuse to show you more ads in the updater progress window!)
I think this is biased. It's closer to "Apple cares about rendering currently existing web pages superbly" while "Google also cares about rendering future web pages".
Once upon a time, V8 won benchmarks and ran demos faster but JavaScriptCore rendered the web faster. This was mainly due to JavaScriptCore having an optimized interpreter and V8 lacking one, and actually existing web at the time didn't execute JavaScript long enough on average to compensate for JIT overhead.
Safari doesn't properly enable PWA features on purpose. So, 10 years later, that's more correct than ever. Anything that can be used to replace an app would see strategically slow or non existent adoption.
I have reported several rendering bugs. Those are usually fixed in a year or so.
But you cannot update Safari without iOS update, then those sites stay broken for years.
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68196
Also, I have the feeling that there is exactly ONE person working on Safari. I always run into the same same when reporting or browsing bugs. I hope that this is either an alias used by many developers or the poor guy is making a ton of money.
Pro: battery life
Con: lagging behind on some features
Google is utterly evil for driving people towards web Ads for profit, while Apple drives people into their 30% tax AppStore by pure altruistic battery concerns?
Now I feel that it is just an other bloated beast, and only use it when forced to access online Google tools (drive etc.) for work.
And then Google started doing the same, against Mozilla (and probably Apple, too): https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20&...
Quote from that thread: "The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional."
I really appreciate this attitude - definitely something I can learn from. It's easy to look back on something and say, "I knew X was the right idea, if only everyone listened to me". It takes maturity to say, "It was a failure on my part for not advocating more for X". It's not applicable to every team or situation, but in general I think it's a much better attitude to have.
I don't think you've kept up with the way Google has treated certain extensions if you're still considering the possibility that it's in good faith
Anybody remember AdNauseam (still available on Firefox)? It's an adblock that doesn't just block ads but in the background silently clicks ads to create noise and make you harder to track. Clearly against Google's business model
It wasn't enough for Google to find some rules in their policy to exclude it from their app store. They literally labelled it as malware (completely unfounded)
Google's been pretty ruthless about this stuff
If those people truly think it's absolutely essential for the extension system to have the pre-MV3 webrequest API, they should either stop using Safari, or ask Apple to support the same as loudly. But they don't. None of the critics I know does.
I think Google sees this as matching Apple for privacy and security - as there has been so many malicious extensions that caused significant harm. Everyone thinks they won't be affected by malware or bad extension, and they think it's personal responsibility but as is often the case, the best way to improve the security is to eliminate the attack vector whenever possible, instead of trying to control / safeguard it. Given the practical downside is virtually non-existent - I have been using uBlock Light since it came out, and there's been no noticable change in adblocking - I think MV3 made the right trade off, and I would be disappointed if Chrome team cave to the emotional and irrational critics.
It's just that certain extensions are so important and trusted that it doesn't make sense to restrict them like this. Extensions like uBlock Origin should be a special case in the source code. If it's uBlock Origin, then give it direct access to all APIs so that it can do anything. The rest can deal with Manifest v3.
Truth is uBlock Origin should be literally built into the browser instead of being a mere extension. Only argument against that is conflicts of interest. Google obviously has no interest in properly integrating uBlock Origin and Firefox is funded by Google. Ironically, Brave seems to be the only browser where such a thing could actually happen.
Wrong.
I don't remember being disturbed by advertisements in the magazines are read, and even in some of the books I read, nor in the print newspapers.
What I hate are advertisements that attack me: vectors for viruses, assault me with noises when I am reading, suddenly block the page I am viewing.
If Web advertisers treated their audience better, I suspect there would be a lot fewer installations of uBlock origin
Anyone know if this still applies to Apple’s SW engineering culture? Or if it’s just some urban myth? Hard to believe.
Chrome is winning for a few reasons, least of which is that it is a good browser. I believe Chrome is winning because:
1. Chrome is advertised on the most popular website in the world for free. 2. Chrome is the bundled in both ChromeOS and Android. 3. Some of the most popular sites in the world are only built to work well in Chrome (Blink), ala YouTube, at least in the past. 4. Chrome is a performant web browser.
Chrome is an inherently political project. Google is using Chrome's market leader position to push what it wants on the Web, whether that is standards, Manifest v3, removal of third part cookies, etc. Mozilla is honest about the politicization which mainly revolves around an open Web and freedom of information. Chrome's politicization happens in the background where a normal user wouldn't see it. You seem to have fallen into this trap.
I don't think newspapers (here standing for media organizations in general) need saving. Newspapers have great influence, and they will be funded for that. Let's say, ads go to zero and all newspapers are bankrupt, except BBC, NHK, NPR, and Al Jazeera. Is that a problem? I don't see a problem.
I'm not saying any of those have a slant or not. I'm just seeing how it's pretty obvious there's going to be public perception problem with your list
