Mozilla’s newest app perfectly captures the ethical dilemma of ad-blocking

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/08/mozillas-newest-app-perfectly-captures-the-ethical-dilemma-of-ad-blocking/

by Libertatea • 11 years ago

61 91 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

iaskwhy• 11 years ago

"Whomever you think is to blame for the sorry state of Web browsing, content blockers have a kind of ratcheting effect: Once you turn one on, chances are you won't see the kind of high-quality ads that might convince you to turn it off again. It also involves the risk that you'll miss whatever advertisers or publishers come up with to make the Web better again.", said no one ever.

lmm• 11 years ago

Eh. I noticed web ads got a lot worse exactly when Mozilla started shipping Firefox with a pop-up blocker enabled by default. Not saying it justifies anything, just that the immediate effect is real.

Karunamon2• 11 years ago

Yeah. I'd attach many adjectives to the ads I've seen over the years, but "high-quality" is not one of them.

67726e• 11 years ago

I think StackOverflow is the only site I've visited with relevant ads that are not terribly intrusive. In fact that is the only site I've have Ad Block Plus disabled for. There are sites with good ads, but they are rare to the point that they might as well be considered to not exist.

dionidium• 11 years ago

I actually think the ads on Facebook are done in a transparent and un-annoying way. Unfortunately, they only show me two things:

1. Geeky shirts with "clever" sayings on them (since they know I'm a programmer, I guess).

2. Things I've already recently bought on Amazon (or elsewhere).

In the first case, what they know about me leads to a severely mistaken impression regarding something else about me. In the second case, what they know about me is already outdated.

ryandrake2• 11 years ago

That "ratcheting effect" is by design.

Similarly, anti-virus software has a "ratcheting effect" in that once you install them, you don't get to see the kind of high-quality viruses and trojans that might convince your computer to encrypt all your files or give up your bank passwords.

Installing an ad blocker has become another one of those "hygiene" steps that you do whenever you set up a new PC: Install Anti-virus, install OS-provided updates, install ad-blocker.

Lawtonfogle2• 11 years ago

install OS-provided updates

Windows is working pretty hard to reverse this. At the very least you now have to scan through the updates to uncheck the telemetric ones.

pmontra• 11 years ago

What a high quality ad is supposed to be? If the product is any good I'll get to know it anyway.

sosuke• 11 years ago

There are ads that can be enjoyable. It is just short entertainment. My wife and I both thought of a commercial from Target where Santa was running to the store in the middle of the night in a partially empty parking lot. https://vimeo.com/55792604

I looked up to watch that one when it would come on. It was fun. I mute the TV when I get too many drug and insurance commercials.

fulafel• 11 years ago

The whole current conversation about this is weird. Why are people acting like ad blockers are new when iOS, a mobile platform with a small market share, stops banning them and gets back in line with everyone else?

ashark• 11 years ago

A lot of sites receive a huge percentage of their views from iOS devices. Way, way more than Android/iOS/WinMobile/Desktop market share stats might lead one to suppose.

Not that I'm anti-adblocker—src attributes are a suggestion—just guessing why people might be freaking out about this.

tdkl• 11 years ago

It's how you get attention to John Doe, who doesn't cares about ad-blocking until Apple does.

Similarly how this "dilemma" is again rehashed because Mozilla made a content blocker. Not that about 10 others sprung out since September where the content blocking support was introduced.

pitay• 11 years ago

That suggests Mozilla is least influenced by the ad serving networks. I like that.

frik2• 11 years ago

WashingtonPost.com serves many ads and consumes too much memory resources - thanks for crashing my Safari (iPad) while reading the article, a very unnerving moment.

I still have no Safari adblocker installed, as I believe in ads. But such bad ads citizens needs a disruption ala Google text-based Ads 10 years ago that changed the ads landscape.

Symbiote• 11 years ago

Ghostery counts 16 things to block on the article's page, and without it I was shown two large, animated adverts.

frik2• 11 years ago

Ghostery found:

  Amazon Associates (Advertising, Affiliate Marketing)
  ChartBeat (Analytics)
  Criteo (Advertising, Search)
  DoubleClick (Advertising)
  Effective Measure (Analytics, Analytics)
  Krux Digital (Beacons)
  MediaMath (Advertising)
  Moat (Advertising)
  Omniture - Adobe Analytics (Beacons)
  OpenX (Advertising)
  Outbrain (Widgets)
  Polar Mobile (Advertising)
  Sailthru Horizon (Beacons)
  ScoreCard Research Beacon (Beacons, Analytics)
  Twitter Button (Widgets, Social)

Way too much "Analytics" in the list.

116 requests; onload: 7.77s

Chrome DevTools timing said:

2.71s Scripting; 636ms Rendering; 210ms Painting

Dozens of reflows are visible in the flame graph! Poor mobile devices, such websites eat battery like there's no tomorrow. Summary: One hell of a page.

oldmanjay3• 11 years ago

There is no ethical dilemma on the user side. No web user guarantees making any particular request, and no one is owed the viability of a business model.

The ethics of defending the descent of the ad system into such destructive behavior is an interesting discussion, perhaps.

mangeletti• 11 years ago

Exactly.

They (the media companies that took ads too far and ruined the experience for us) did this to themselves. Ad blockers would have never proliferated, had the web not come to a state where 25% of web requests were ads and tracking requests.

justaman• 11 years ago

I'm reminded of the ads that had audio. These were the worst!

Imagine an adblocker that blocks what we know are the worst. Then, implement an upvote/downvote overlay system to the ads and if downvoted, dynamically remove them from the page and future requests on a per user basis. The votes are tallied and if beyond a certain threshold, global block. Then, sell this information back to the advertisement agencies.

srameshc3• 11 years ago

The very incentive of web advertising has incentivized creation of massive knowledge content and created platforms to do so, for example Stackoverflow. To totally disregard it will be a bad decision and it would eventually drive everyone to pay per view/create way.

hackuser2• 11 years ago

it would eventually drive everyone to ...

... a new business model. I have no problem with that.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

I disagree. The will to push the programming industry forward is what created SO. Web advertising is what created all the sites that scrap and repackage content from SO.

hackuser2• 11 years ago

no one is owed the viability of a business model

I'd like to emphasize this. Somehow there is a sense of entitlement. Many businesses got where they are today by driving competition out of business, preventing new entrants in their market, and/or 'disrupting' entire industries.

rrego• 11 years ago

Well, the majority of users are pro status-quo. Most people want their content (their facebook, youtube, and links stemming from) to be free in cost, and are ignorant/unconcerned about tracking.

The ethical dilemma I see is whether users should have tracking disabled by default. These users do subsidize much of the content on the internet; is it wrong to leave them be.

specialist• 11 years ago

This is an arms race, not a dilemma.

"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it." -- John Gilmore

The advertisers will just inline the ads, changing content sites from redirectors to proxies.

Rock, paper, scissors.

oldmanjay3• 11 years ago

That in itself is a win, as it relieves the user from third party trackers. It also raises the barrier to integration, potentially causing ad-including web developers to pay a little more attention to the hell they are foisting on their users.

pmoriarty• 11 years ago

Advertising is a cancer.

ArtDev• 11 years ago

There is nothing wrong with text-based ads.

randall• 11 years ago

Why is there no opt-in ad blocker? "eff these guys i'm blocking their ads." Or like if your resources go over some threshold they get blocked?

I want to punish bad actors, not all.

Karunamon2• 11 years ago

Run any of the common apps like uBlock and disable the filter lists that come with it, then just add sites as you go. Same effect.

pjc50• 11 years ago

Ironically, the whole advertising system is set up to identify the viewer to the advertiser, not the other way round.

I built my own "opt in" by watching the status bar for slow loading sites and using the DOM inspector on visually annoying ads, then adding the host to my hosts file. It's very short: basically just google, doubleclick, outbrain, taboola.

http://pastebin.com/YAbJHe5j

ryandrake2• 11 years ago

That would be like an anti-virus software that ran every virus it found and then asked you opt-out of the ones you don't want.

rplnt• 11 years ago

Opera used to have opt-in content blocking and I used it for years without any trouble. I only blocked annoying ads on sites that I visit more than once. Of course it meant that I disabled whole ad networks sometimes, but that's entirely their fault. In the end, I was shown many ads while browsing.

That being said, Opera had a proper pop-up blocker and didn't implement every junk feature from javascript (prevent closing windows, change clipboard, ...). Disabling js (on per site basis) was two clicks away as well.

With Chrome, you can't really use it without ad blocker. One bad site and you end up with dozens of new windows, unclosable tabs, ... So the browser itself is yet another reason why people turn to ad blocking.

muddi9003• 11 years ago

Opera 7/8 was way ahead of it's time. The tabbed interface was faster than Firefox, and better implemented, because Shift+Click opened new tabs, pretty much how I learned about tabs.

drdeca• 11 years ago

The freedom to run what software one wills has priority over the wishes of the website that their ads be viewed.

Viewing ads is then, not a payment, but a donation. And it is generally one that I am willing to make. But I reserve the right to block whatever ads I choose, provided that I have not agreed to do otherwise.

Note:the freedom to run what software one wills does not have priority over everything. I am only talking about this thing.

AdmiralAsshat• 11 years ago

So did the WP guy literally just pound out this article in the last hour, or did Mozilla inform the press about Focus before the announcement went live?

dikaiosune• 11 years ago

Unless I'm mistaken, Focus is specifically a tracking blocker, right? As in, it's only a content blocker insofar as the advertisers are collecting data about visitors in addition to selling their page views? I really don't see the problem, and it's hard to take sites like WaPo seriously when editorializing about users trying to circumvent their ethically dubious revenue streams. I get that the whole media is in a crunch right now to figure out what to do about online advertising, but whitewashing the privacy invasions isn't helping.

cryoshon• 11 years ago

What ethical dilemma? If you want to make money from me as a visitor to a website, create a paywall so I can decide to find the content elsewhere for free, or subscribe to you if I really, absolutely can't do without it. I will tell you now: I have been on the internet for my entire life and clicked less than a dozen ads in that time, most of which were pre-2010. I am not the only one who browses in this way-- hopefully there are millions more.

I block 100% of ads because I detest being hectored by attention-depleting visual waste. My position is ethical, because it improves my experience immensely by altering the set of data to reach my eyes that websites decide to offer to me for free. Once again, if websites or services want to get money from me, they can ask directly and change the terms of access.

sarciszewski• 11 years ago

Imagine these arguments about ad-blockers, but instead being leveraged against spam filters on your email inbox.

If you don't think you have an ethical obligation to read your spam emails, then you also don't have one to view advertisements.

Also, nobody should be able to force you to run their code. The publisher's rights end where your computer begins.

sysread• 11 years ago

The "conflict" described here is a result of unchecked greed in advertising as they worked to grab user focus at all costs. Had they behaved in a more disciplined manner, ad blockers would not be so popular or would work more like Disconnect.me and Mozilla's new product. Instead, they will have to earn the chance to be seen again the hard way.

wang_li• 11 years ago

As long as websites act like they are the victims when ad networks are compromised and serve malware to visitors, I see no reason anyone should feel bad about blocking content. It's simple prudence to not download malicious software to your computer.

eCa• 11 years ago

The title and first paragraph are somewhat at odds with each other. Copy-pasting a bit leads to this:

    > Mozilla’s newest app perfectly captures the ethical dilemma of blocking
    > the parts of the web that slow down your Internet, spy on your online 
    > activities and generally make Web-surfing a tedious experience.

There is an ethical dilemma, but it is not on the user side.

arjie• 11 years ago

While the interaction between advertisers and consumers is somewhat poisoned now because of bad actors, I still think there is potential in online advertising.

In the end, I want to know about things that would interest me (and which I'd like to pay for), and those selling those things want me to know about them too. If we do it right, it's in both our interests.

The problem is that it's also in the interest of the guy selling to show me things I'm not interested in. But if an ad service targets me sufficiently well, filtering out the nonsense, my life is actually better than otherwise.

BinaryIdiot• 11 years ago

It's so frustrating seeing people talk about ad blocking as some ethical issue. If your revenue model depends on the honor system (that a user will load what you send them) then it's inherently flawed and will eventually founder.

It's time to move to a new model and stop trying to cling onto the past by calling users of such tools unethical.

212d1d• 11 years ago

It's so frustrating seeing people talk about ad blocking as some ethical issue.

How often do you hear your family talk about the ethical implications about ad blocking? What I mean is, how often do people with no dog in the fight talk about ad blocking ethics? For me, never. Of course websites that depend on advertising dollars are going to complain about the public blocking their advertising dollars.

neves3• 11 years ago

I really love to be called anti-ethical by advertisers. Last time I watched TV I saw ads that told me: to drink unhealthy sugar beverages, that my son would be ashamed if I have an old and cheap car, that I should use a financial service that would give a terrible return on investment, that happiness is the same than buying things, alcohol is to only way to have fun.

Sure, I have no ethics because I want to control what my computer executes and display.

Splines2• 11 years ago

Not to be that guy, but I cut the cord, and it's seriously like a breath of fresh air. It's like discovering ad-blockers in the era of incessant pop-ups and flash ads.

mei0Iesh• 11 years ago

Netflix was TV ad-blocking for me. I hated TV and stopped watching it for many years. Then when Netflix came around, I discovered that TV production had greatly improved, and it's the ad interruptions that was poisoning the art, making me feel sick to watch it. Without the ads, I could binge watch a multiple-year series of a television show, and not feel sick.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

It's always a good advice, but you're ignoring GP's point that I believe the discussion around ads should be focused on: that a lot of advertisers are malicious actors. They are bunch of liars who want to profit by hurting people, and this is somehow not only totally legal, but a respectable occupation.

berberous• 11 years ago

You know, I cut the cord years ago and felt the same way, but increasingly, every video on the internet has forced pre-roll ads I can't escape from (especially when watching YouTube on iOS), and it feels WAY worse than TV ads ever did. There is no free lunch...

chrisBob• 11 years ago

I can't imagine feeling so entitled that I would argue that people owe me web and TV content. I think that your option if you don't like the advertising that is supporting a service is to not use that service. If you feel strongly about it you could even tell the station/site the reason you are no longer using their service.

I really don't understand the argument that "I don't like how they want me to pay for this service; therefore it is ok to steal it"

icebraining5• 11 years ago

I don't understand that argument either; but no one is making it. First, filtering ads is not stealing. Secondly, nobody says content is owed - those companies are free not to provide it.

muddi9003• 11 years ago

So you like watch ads when they come on? You never change the channel?

Lawtonfogle2• 11 years ago

I can't imagine feeling so entitled that I would argue that people owe me web and TV content.

I can't (ok, really I can, but I don't like to) imagine feeling so entitled that I would not only force someone else's computer to execute code at their detriment for my benefit, but then argue them selfish for deciding to limit what code I can get their computer to execute.

thefastlane• 11 years ago

no one is 'stealing' anything and elevating the notion of adblocking from 'unethical' (it isn't) to 'theft' (which it definitely isn't) is exactly the sort of language-twisting that corporations attempt to employ and legitimise to where we don't even think about it.

as many others will explain on HN: i own my hardware; the code i choose to run or not run on my machine is my choice. got a problem with that? feel free to shut down your web site or put it behind a paywall. i have a whole shelf of books that i should be reading anyway rather than surfing the web. i won't miss your web site one bit. i promise.

ksk2• 11 years ago

OK, hyperbole aside, if you really want or care enough to solve this problem, you should refuse to visit/watch content with ads. Support people who use alternate business models. Content creators are people who want to get paid; if you show them an alternate way to succeed, they're going to want it.

draw_down• 11 years ago

Indeed, it's quite easy to shake one's head at the message of ads and stop there. Where does the demand come from? Where does the money go? Why does this system have this outcome? It's too hard to think about that, let's just condemn the ads and move on.

intrasight• 11 years ago

With the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's not 'ad blocking' - it is 'content blocking'. I wish these articles would just drop the term 'ad blocking'. There may be a small minority of folk that want to block ads. Most people want to block 3rd party content and trackers. If a publication needs ad revenue, they should put the ads in their content - just like a newspaper or magazine.

serge2k2• 11 years ago

Source on that, cause I block ads.

backtoyoujim• 11 years ago

I feel no ethical dilemma in dumping ads.

These are ads paid for by corporations that regularly screw people with the "sorry, I have shareholders to answer to" line.

I have my life to answer to, and it is limited. I owe zero to your cdn.

mikestew• 11 years ago

Just because the Washington Post (who makes their money from...) says there is an ethical dilemma doesn't make it so. I once tried to make it an ethical argument, then the sites and advertisers decided they weren't going to take part in that argument ("'do not track'? Nah, we decided that's not going to work for us."). Works for me, I'll not have the argument, either.

So, thanks web sites and advertisers, I lose not a minute of sleep as a result of surfing the web ad-free.

serge2k2• 11 years ago

Once you turn one on, chances are you won't see the kind of high-quality ads that might convince you to turn it off again

I don't understand this idea that we will see "high quality" ads and actually enjoy them.

The problem is it seems like advertisers are still trying to cram in more and more and more. Ads that block content, interstitials, ads all over the page to the point where clicking anywhere is a risk.

I agree that adapt or die isn't fair. Neither is cramming ads down your users throats.

cromwellian2• 11 years ago

I'll be contrarian here, since there are many people claiming the solution is paywalls (which people also whine about). (and BTW, the opinion that follows has nothing to do with my employer, Google, and their business model)

I grew up poor, my family didn't have disposable income for buying media. Everything I got, came from ad supported radio, TV, or public libraries. I used to call into radio stations to ask them to play a song, and then wait for hours so I could tape the songs and create tapes. Our family did not have cable, and though we had VHS, we often didn't rent movies, but rather used the VHS like a Tivo.

There are billions of people in the world who now have access to billions of Web documents that were paid for by advertisers, many of whom probably didn't even get their moneys worth. If the Web originated as a paywall, it would have never grown to the size and usage rates that exists today.

The first crawlers would have never arisen if anyone wanting to built a search index had to strike deals to access content for indexing.

Paywalls raise transaction barriers that ads do not. Ads make you pay in bandwidth and time, but for much of the internet's life, those were tradeoffs that were much easier to make than having to break out a credit card everytime you saw an article that MIGHT interest you. Paywalls also make centralizing vs federated/decentralized content more economically efficient.

How many of you have searched for scientific papers only to be pissed that they're behind some Springer-Verlag paywall?

Do we want to live in a world of walls, or a world of open highways with billboards? That's the choice being made here. And the scorn being heaped on ads is the luxury and privilege of living in a time when most of the content on the Web and most of the infrastructure costs have already been sunk and payed for by advertisers in years past. We live in a Web of excess now, forgetting the hundreds of billions sunk into datacenters and network infrastructure and content creation that came before. Who paid for that, and would it have even existed if the entire thing was like Cable TV premium channels?

I don't really want the Web to turn into a giant Apple Store, where every link, I must face the cognitive burden of paying for it before I know that I even want it. We need to solve the issues that ads create with respect to bandwidth hogging and privacy, but I think paywalls, even micro-payment paywalls, impose too much of a transaction cost and cognitive burden for the free exchange of knowledge.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Its not a choice between a world of paywalls and a world of ads -- closed, for-paying-users services are going to exist whether or not ad-based services also exist. And, open services without distinct ads (which may themselves be ads, on some level) that are paid for by someone other than the direct user are going to exist. The real question is in what circumstances, and to what extent, are services with intrusive ads disrupting the main content acceptable alternatives to those other two models, not an exclusive choice of a world with one model or a world with one of the other models.

I don't really want the Web to turn into a giant Apple Store, where every link, I must face the cognitive burden of paying for it before I know that I even want it.

Life is that way: even with "free with ads" content, you are accepting a cost for the content before you can be certain that the benefit justifies it. (Heck, there's an opportunity cost even with "free without ads" content.)

If you just mean the friction of active choice with each click, well, even in a payment model you could create a system with configurable passive thresholds and lumped periodic payments where the cognitive burden of an active purchase decision was avoided for people who preferred to do so.

cromwellian2• 11 years ago

Yes, there's an opportunity cost for content, but different people have different marginal utility for their dollars vs their time.

For children, or the unemployed, the marginal utility of a dollar is quite high, but free time is cheap.

Likewise, the unauthenticated, un-paid-for Web has permitted frictionless composition and repurpose of content without the need to 'do deals'. Beyond just the consumer issue, a non-Ad supported web would have severely limited its evolution, by forcing content to require authentication.

TravelTechGuy• 11 years ago

The solution, as always, will lie somewhere on the axis between allowing advertisers to run rampant on your page with obnoxious, harmful ads, and content providers charging you.

Perhaps we'll all agree to unblock a small part of our pages if we get promised that the content would be tasteful, and controlled. Perhaps I'll turn of my blockers if I know I don't have a dozen 3rd party cookies installed every time I read the news. But knowing advertisers (I used to work for your employer's competitor BTW) this will not hapen anytime soon.

meesterdude• 11 years ago

Advertisers brought this on themselves. With their ceaseless push to put ads everywhere, even within articles, this is what you get.

Advertising isn't inherently evil; it can be useful. It can be artistic. It can be educational. those are qualities that make ads appealing.

But if you interrupt me from what I was trying to do, it doesn't matter what the ad is. that's just rude.

Humor is a goto for advertisers, and maybe that works for some people, but for a lot of people it just rolls off.

Tide laundry detergent could show me an ad for getting a stain out using vinegar and baking soda. But instead everything needs to push people towards their products. Their products are the be-all end all. buy buy buy.

And advertisers need to be more selective of who they advertise to and how. The more verzion ads I see, the more I despise them. And if i'm watching a bunch of videos and you show me the same exact ad every time, over the course of weeks, you're a fucking idiot.

In short, this is a good thing. It's a process of evolution. Maybe they'll get their shit together, or invent something worse.

homulilly• 11 years ago

Ad blocking isn't just about improving "user experience." Current ad providers are so widely negligent and irresponsible with the content they allow on their networks that they are a tremendous security risk these days. It takes a truly incredible amount of hypocrisy or ignorance to rely on a known malware vector for your income and then accuse people of being "unethical" for protecting themselves.

ksk2• 11 years ago

I fully realize that advertising, whether is direct, indirect or second-order is what keeps companies in business and keep paying us. I'm fine with ads as long as they're static images and/or text. When you lose me is when websites keep loading up script after script of some CPU hogging bullcrap that tanks my browser perf; then we have a problem. Google is bad when it comes to this, but not as bad as the Taboolas and Perions who are so in your face that all you want to do is block these idiots from ever sending a byte over your network.

logn• 11 years ago

Stats on this article...

With uBlock turned on and JS blocked: 65 requests, 2,015 KB, 1.73 seconds

Without blocking: 391 requests, 7,354 KB, 54.57 seconds

In each case I can read the article. The latter case uses 3.5x bandwidth.

I hope news sites find that the reason their print ads fetch more money is because it's prestigious to have a newspaper ad. Web ads are junky. Sites should vet ads themselves or use a reputable firm and work with advertisers to place tasteful, inline, plain html ads.

theworstshill• 11 years ago

Looks like ad conmen just got disrupted even more.

marssaxman• 11 years ago

There is no ethical dilemma. It's my machine and my choice.

Publishers get to make choices about their machines, not mine. If they don't want to give me stuff for free, then they should stop giving me stuff for free!

scotty792• 11 years ago

There's no social contract between me and people who put up things on the internet. I never entered any. They put up there some stuff for consumption and I will consume it or not whatever they serve in whole or in part solely on my terms. I have my own set of terms and conditions and any site I visit automatically agrees to it because it's no more stupid wishful thinking as the other way around.

scotty792• 11 years ago

What's up with the recent onslaught of ads for scams like "One easy trick to ...'?

Why would any ads publishing network destroy its own value by publishing such criminal crap?

It's like you have a forest and you burn it because somebody paid you to make a lot of smoke. You are destroying your business and helping poison the environment at the same time.

Mozilla’s newest app perfectly captures the ethical dilemma of ad-blocking

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