UBlock Origin

It's the fork developed by the original author. He transfered the main repository to another contributor for maintaining and then open-source drama ensued.

I don't think they've diverged enough to recommend one over the other. I'm using Origin.

tuananh• 11 years ago

i think the original author doesn't want to take such big responsibility. it's a hobby for him only. he only works on it for fun so he transfer to another, forked it and add features as he sees fit.

gitaarik• 11 years ago

From what I can tell it looks like the original author transferred his project to someone else, but then forked that to be able to add stuff without having to merge into the original branch. But the actual difference I'm not sure about.

david_p2• 11 years ago

TL;DR: "uBlock Origin" (or "uBlock₀") is the version you want (maintained by the creator of the project, up-to-date)

The original "uBlock" github repo was created by gorhill. Later, the repo was handed to a contributor of the project (chrisaljoudi) who did nothing good with it. Finally, gorhill forked chrisaljoudi's repo to create "uBlock Origin" and resumed development.

onli4• 11 years ago

I don't think that this is actually true. Yes, gorhill started ublock and then handed it over, but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some changes (like a call for donations). I'm not aware he did anything bad, and in the video he put up sounded just a bit unlucky, not like planning to do bad things (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D1TpddtVUA). Or see https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/38lf1y/any_differen..., where a made statement about feature-completeness caused a minor dispute.

Which version to run probably more depends on whether you want that per-site switches feature.

edwintorok• 11 years ago

The version of uBlock Origin on AMO is higher than the version of uBlock, so at least for Firefox uBlock Origin seems better maintained.

logn• 11 years ago

Gorhill wrote uBlock. After the project took on a life of its own, Gorhill handed the primary repo over to the contributors so he could develop from a fork of it. The primary repo then introduced requests for donations, changed attribution/authorship, and ended some features. As a result of the feature set difference, Gorhill renamed his fork to "uBlock Origin" so the features he wanted would be available in the addons sites without conflicting with "uBlock". At this point given their divergence, both projects are fully maintained and developed in parallel, with relevant revisions merged to each other where possible.

That's the neutral summary at least.

(edited slightly for clarity)

Kurtz79• 11 years ago

Yes, it's great and I have been using it for quite a while (on Chrome as well), but it's nothing new, unless I am missing something.

It would be helpful if the submitter also wrote a comment about the reasons of the submission, when they are not immediately apparent.

kissickas• 11 years ago

I've seen comments on reddit saying that often legitimate "Pay Now" buttons etc. are blocked by this add-on. Can anyone with recent experience weigh in? I don't really feel like switching from ABP which I'm perfectly happy with unless this is 99% kink-free.

mziulu2• 11 years ago

The add-on shouldn't block anything on its own, so if there's a problem it's probably on some filter list that the user enabled. There's a pretty good way to debug these situations though, the network request log ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger ). It will let you see the history of requests for a given page, and one of the colums in the log lets you fine tune what uBlock should do for that particular request - so, if you see that something that you don't want to be blocked is filtered out, you can reverse that and reload the page.

EDIT: in the latest release (0.9.9.0 at the time of this writing) the request log will also tell you which list provides the rule that blocks a particular request, it's pretty handy to debug this kind of issue.

wooger• 11 years ago

All the major ad blocking extensions work by applying various filter lists, all separately maintained.

They may choose to enable different lists by default (uBlock turns on more than ABP for sure), but they can be configured in a few seconds to do the same thing.

This extension is so much more efficient than ABP or any similar extension that it's a no brainer, and I've had zero problems with it when bearing the above in mind.

1/3 the total ram usage on both FF and Chrome, it makes it possible to use Chrome on a PC with <16GB of ram again.

decasteve• 11 years ago

From the horses mouth [1]:

Main reason I published on AMO is because a feature which I think is important was removed from uBlock (per-site switches). That both versions diverged significantly enough so soon is not in my control.

When ABP added "acceptable ads" in their fork, they also created a demand for a version uncompromised by the "acceptable ads" principle, hence ABE happened. When uBlock removed the per-site switches, a demand was created for a version of uBlock with the per-site switches.

This is the reality of GPL: anybody can fork and create their own flavor if they disagree with the pre-fork version. This should not be seen as wrong when it happens, it's expected. In the big picture, users win.

As far as trust is concerned, both versions can be trusted -- that should not be an issue in either case: the development and source code is public in both cases (every single code change can be easily browsed on github).

Edit: Notice that I still contribute fixes to uBlock since the fork, and also try to deal with filed issues (those issues which are relevant to both versions), so it's not like I am ignoring uBlock to the advantage of uBlock Origin -- I also want uBlock to work fine for whoever uses it, I just strongly disagree with the removal of the per-site switches feature.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-966...

pen2l• 11 years ago

When ABP added "acceptable ads" in their fork, they also created a demand for a version uncompromised by the "acceptable ads" principle, hence ABE happened.

I wish they'll go one step further and add the "Please remove us from your adblock" notices to default blocking list

laggyluke• 11 years ago

You might like these options: https://cloudup.com/cJeKg7Zljwa

currysausage• 11 years ago

hence ABE happened

Fun fact: ABE is now discontinued "in favor of uBlock" because the latter is just so much more efficient. [1]

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

izietto• 11 years ago

It has been discontinued too early; from an AdBlock Edge comment, titled "uBlock may be fast, but is rubbish":

I've been using uBlock now for a while and while it is light and fast, it's is rubbish to use. Exclusions are idiotic, context menu controls don't work, default filters selection is idiotic, it doesn't sync settings like Adblock Edge does, I'm just starting to hate it.
I'd too like to see AdBlock Edge continue its own development path even if it's not the fastest or lightest. It's still better than all other ad blockers...

lentil_soup• 11 years ago

Honest question, what's AMO?

coldpie• 11 years ago

addons.mozilla.org

fredmorcos• 11 years ago

Addons.Mozilla.Org

piyush_soni3• 11 years ago

Others already told the url it refers to. In other words, it is the term used for Mozilla's add on store in the absence of a suitable name.

karlzt• 11 years ago

"Edit (2015-06-15): Somewhere toward the end of May, I decided I will not contribute code anymore to https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock anymore. See top of README."

nickysielicki• 11 years ago

You should all check out umatrix if you have 15 minutes to spare.

Made by the same guy, it's adblocking and noscript done exactly how you want it done. Block pulled-in third-party sites by default, accept all on the primary domain you're looking at, and especially block from domains on a blacklist.

It breaks on a few sites, but it's not in my way as much as noscript and it's a 5 second job to get most any website to work. If you don't know how the web works, you'll be frustrated. If you understand how the modern web works, you'll wonder how you ever did without.

the84722• 11 years ago

it's adblocking and noscript done exactly how you want it done.

it's good, but not exactly how I want it done. Namely, it's not hierarchical. E.g. I can say Site A may load frames from site B. But then site B tries to load stuff in its frame and I have to set additional rules for Site B. instead an forward pointer to "Site B default inclusion set" or something like that would be useful.

Basically, hundreds of sites embed youtube. And on some (but not all) I simply want to apply a "load the minimal amount of stuff necessary to embed youtube" rule. If loads are conceptualized as a tree (A loads B loads C) a flat matrix is not powerful enough.

tasqa• 11 years ago

All scopes import from higher level scopes. E.g. bl.com imports from * and www.bla.com import from * and bla.com.

I've made soem modifications to the * (global) scope to allow the minimal version of youtube to load. So whenever I visit a new website youtube just works.

anc845• 11 years ago

Same here. I DO want to have to re-enable third-party sites on each site I am on.

I hereby offer 10$ for someone to implement that. Yes, that is nothing for the work but that is what I feel having that feature would be worth for me right this moment.

benedikt2• 11 years ago

Is it supposed to run alongside uBlock Origin or is it indended as a replacement?

anc845• 11 years ago

Not a replacement per se but they would conflict, yes.

kevingadd• 11 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation! Uninstalled noscript, installed uMatrix in firefox, and wow - everything feels faster and configuration is less finicky. Loving it.

gluegadget• 11 years ago

uMatrix for Firefox seems to be released as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

Policeman was the closest thing —that I know of— to uMatrix for Firefox users, but —at least for me— Firefox is always complaining that Policeman is slowing down the browser. And also, it's nice that you can easily import your Chrome uMatrix rules to Firefox.

skrowl• 11 years ago

Love uBlock Origin. I upgraded from Ad Block Plus to uBlock (and finally uBlock Origin) and was amazed at how much faster it is.

hnama• 11 years ago

i know ublock is on safari. but will we see a ublock origin on safari?(specially after per-site switches)

ReddestDream• 11 years ago

Same. I wish we could get a Safari version of uBlock Origin since it does seem like in time it will be the clearly superior version.

Not to knock anyone working on mainline uBlock, but the frustrations of the original developer (justifiable or not) have led him to discontinue contributing code to mainline uBlock.

That's a serious blow to its development . . .

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38

FYI, I would just use Chrome if it didn't just kill battery life on OS X. Don't think I use Safari by choice here . . .

Nadya5• 11 years ago

You're in luck!

https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF

StavrosK2• 11 years ago

I've tried uBlock a few times, but it's always been inferior to Ghostery. I want to choose what I block on each page, e.g. sometimes I want to load Disqus, sometimes I don't, etc. uBlock doesn't allow me to do any of that, does anyone know a lighter alternative to Ghostery that will still have sane lists and allow me to unblock elements on a per-page basis?

83a• 11 years ago

i'm using https://www.requestpolicy.com/ (ghostery seems to phone home, requestpolicy not (afaik))

acheron• 11 years ago

There's an opt-in option in Ghostery that reports usage info, but as far as I know it doesn't "phone home" if you don't opt in to that.

benedikt2• 11 years ago

What about Disconnect or Lightbeam? (as alternatives to Ghostery)

quadrangle8• 11 years ago

uBlock has advanced features that function like request policy (effectively can replace it, though RP is still a good plugin)

losvedir• 11 years ago

The developer of uBlock also has a version called uMatrix[0] for advanced users which gives you finer grained control. I use it and it's great.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

e40• 11 years ago

I switched to Disconnect a while back when I heard who runs Ghostery. Disconnect allows what you seek.

gorhill2• 11 years ago

I want to choose what I block on each page

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-qu...

uBlock doesn't restrict itself to a set list of domains (Ghostery), it will show you all connections.

fridek3• 11 years ago

Honest question - what business model for free content do you see other than ads? I understand all the privacy and distraction issues related, but increasingly many news sites I read feature only paid content. I suppose it's connected to the rise of ad blocking.

At the moment I'm not hosting any content of such kind myself, but I wanted to publish a game and I'm facing the same question. Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids, or host ads and risk not earning a dime because every single gamer I know is tech savvy enough to have an ad blocker?

beagle32• 11 years ago

How much do you think you'll make from ads? Chances are, much, much less than you expect. There are exceptions (e.g. plentyoffish.com), but people I know who run popular niche sites (in the low millions of page views per month, a few tens-of-thousands unique) are happy when they manage to make $1,000/month from ads.

h43k3r• 11 years ago

I support your arguments of free content, but there are some sites on the internet that will serve you spam if you don't use a ad blocking software.

I unblock ads on the free websites that I use frequently which present ads in a nice way.

Some websites do show a popup that they earn from ads and it would be great if you could turn off your ad blocker and I mostly comply with that. The reason for this is that these sites know when and where to show ads.

fridek3• 11 years ago

Actually I have no idea. Never made any money from ads, but $1k/month sounds like the kind of money I could use to improve/market the game I'm working on.

There is also another question with the same roots - how much money do the sites I read need to make in order to work and maintain the same quality. I'd be glad to pay something like an equivalent of what I'm worth as an advertisement target. There was Google Contributor (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) project but I don't know the current status.

Anyway, I have recently deleted my adblock. Not having it, ads are super annoying on some sites and I miss it, but I see no other way to discourage paywalling good, free content.

Anderkent• 11 years ago

Donations. You can also do freemium without doing evil stuff: it doesn't optimize your income, of course, but it's better than nothing?

I also don't really think it's that important to have free content. I'm happy to pay for entertainment, and for other stuff most content isn't really produced with income in mind - stuff like blog posts etc don't have to make money, people will write them anyway

arbitrage• 11 years ago

The whole point of a business is to come up with a plan to get people to give it money for a service. If your entire business plan is to get someone else to give you money because people completely unrelated to and uninterested in it happen to be using your service, it's not really a good plan.

I'm ecstatic about the seemingly new increase in paid-for content. If it means the long dark era of scatter-shot shotgun creation of incredibly lousy and shallow information in mass quantities only to garner advertising payments comes to an end (or even decreases slightly), I think the web and software in general will be a better place.

frik2• 11 years ago

Would you like to go back to Internet stoneage where you had to pay per page view in Microsoft Network '95 (MSN v1) or Germany's BTX from 1980s.

Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall?

The WWW got popular because it's friction-free and many sites are paid by advertisement money. At the moment many ad networks are just stubborn (bad ads) and greedy taking big chunk of the ads money away, instead of sending it to the website owner who is doing the majority of work. So there is definitely a place for a new ad network that disrupt the Web ads that don't suck and with a smaller cut so that the website owner get again a bit more money.

Zarel2• 11 years ago

An internet full of paid content is an internet that excludes many children and people in third-world countries, and in general more hostile to the poor than the wealthy. It's also an Internet that incentivizes sticking to a few sites you're used to rather than exploration of new things.

Is that really the internet you want?

manigandham10• 11 years ago

That seems incredibly dismissive of all the content out there. Just because something is "shallow" to you does not mean others don't enjoy it.

There is no such thing as "quality", its all subjective and the reason why there's so much gossip news and stuff is because so many people like to read it. BuzzFeed didnt get this big because nobody comes back to read their articles. That's the simple truth.

And nobody wants to pay for content when it's so easy to get things for free. Micropayments are not some easy answer (very hard to pull off) and they are no less private, in fact they will require even more tracking and even more data, down to your real identity and billing details.

bobajeff3• 11 years ago

If you only see a choice between "Free to Play" or hosting Ads then you have a problem greater than choosing your business model. You don't value your work enough to consider it valuable enough to pay for outright. First, ponder why that is, then address that issue.

fridek3• 11 years ago

Because:

* it's not what I want - I prefer to deliver it for free and do not plan for it to become any source of income, just to not have costs scaling with popularity

* I don't need to sell it - I'm reasonably wealthy, with a good 40h/week job and salary. This is a side project and will loose it's charm when I convert it to a business project.

* it's hard - I work on a browser-based game (no easy to implement payment options)

In other words, it needs to be free for users and possibly earning just enough to not cost me anything.

aravindet• 11 years ago

One more: because its value depends on network effects. For example, it might be a communication service, a community forum or a multiplayer game.

Free (of cost) results in more users, which makes the service more valuable for every user. Unfortunately, it also prevents the developer from capturing this value directly.

In some cases, user segmentation and price discrimination is possible (ancillary paid features) but they come with extra design and development cost.

manigandham10• 11 years ago

Please... it's so easy to just dismiss these problems as "hey you should find a better business model" when lots of very smart people have been trying for a very long time.

Free + ads vs Paid access are the only viable models today. Anything else is an offshoot of less ads with more donations or merchandise or something else but there's no real 3rd option. If there was, we would have figured it out by now dont you think?

manigandham10• 11 years ago

I dont think OP's question was serious, there really isnt any other business model. And how is saying there are more important things to be worried about giving an answer to his question? Obviously not everything is worth an upfront payment and sometimes freemium is the best way to gain users and sales. Why is that somehow an "issue"?

hellbanner• 11 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9716430, particularly Freditup, the_af & my comment discussing Emily Greer's rationale that players "pay-to-win" with large sums in physical sports games.

Also, https://badgeville.com/wiki/Game_Mechanics for a list of "engagement mechanics"

Lawtonfogle3• 11 years ago

Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids,

You can do freemium without selling your soul. Look at LoL or Path of Exile for the best examples. Others would be Bloons TD 5 or Bloons City, where coins allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added. Only when you add something that basically drains the fun out of the game unless money is spent are you selling your soul.

talles• 11 years ago

I never played those games you mentioned but I don't get "allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added".

If you can skip ahead by putting money on it you have slowed down who didn't (right?)

chc4• 11 years ago

League of Legends is not a great example IMO. That game has a huge grindwall. Gaining access to just the gameplay-affecting elements of the game — not even looking at the cosmetic items — would cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars and take huge amounts of play time on top of that.

lahata• 11 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Stands and we work on a product that addresses this issue specifically

From a wider perspective - I believe that the ideal is a fair ad based model which funds a free web and promotes equality and democracy, but it needs to put us - the citizens of the web - on an equal playing field in the ad/data business, and respect us (our privacy and experience). We wrote a post about it here: http://blog.standsapp.org/how-to-fund-a-free-web/

In short: - It blocks obtrusive ads - Protects your privacy by blocking tracking companies - Shows only standard banner ads and the revenue from these ads split between the site and the charity you choose - Provides you with the ability to control your online experience by limiting the amount of ads and other capabilities - Ads load after content loads

We're working on a product publishers can use to convert ad block users to Stands, let me know if and when you are interested to work with us on the beta.

anc845• 11 years ago

I run a free website and every year I do a one week fund raising for the costs. I don't have customers but a more or less dedicated community (some people are around for years, others come and go). The community always exceeds the amount I ask for.

omegaham• 11 years ago

This is a fantastic idea. "Hey, you guys obviously get a kick out of my website. Not asking for much - just enough that I can keep the site running and still awesome." I'd definitely pitch in $20 a year to a site that has entertained me for years.

The most immediate example that comes to mind is Wikipedia.

JohnTHaller8• 11 years ago

The vast majority of games on either platform won't make enough money to matter either way at this point due to oversaturation. There's still a small chance for a moonshot with the right game and the right marketing and some luck.

ajkjk3• 11 years ago

I think we're ripe for some new business models becoming mainstream.

As I see it, ads just suck. I don't just mean suck as in "I just don't like them"; they're also just terrible at accomplishing what they want to accomplish, and they're getting more terrible, and because of this there's getting to be more and more of them everywhere. I get the impression (just an impression) that society is sort of 'wising up to' ads. (Admittedly, this may be because I've grown up and have personally wised up.) I personally have not clicked on an online ad in .. it's got to be at least a few years.. and I long for a day when everyone has wised up to the point where the model falls apart. (but I'm aware that ads can affect you by other means than having you click on them, such as by planting ideas in your head or making you gradually accustomed to company or product names.)

My big complaint is simply that I just hate having every second of my day filled with people trying to sell me crap! And more than anything, I hate when content is also an ad, or disguised as ads. I loathe product placements in movies and 'sponsored by' sections that play the company's commercials. I especially loathe when huge boardroom corporations task a bunch of advertisers to come up with an ads that will appeal to an 18-25 audience, and they crack their heads together and come up with a cute, ukelele-filled, animated skit that (literally) begs you to hashtag it. I want people to stop taking culture and trying to figure out how to manipulate it to sell their crap.

Like, it seems obvious that the fact that, in order to watch a TV show, you have to spend a quarter of your time watching (or ignoring, or muting and browsing the internet during) ads, is a completely terrible user experience! Imagine if every fourth page of a novel was an ad. Or if a fourth of popular websites were ads - oh wait, they are.

It's all monstrously unpleasant. I sometimes torrent movies and TV not because I couldn't pay for them, but because even if I use the right channels, the experience is awful (among other reasons). It's crazy to me that there's not yet an option to just pay more to disable all ads on TV. I guess it was technically infeasible for a long time, but, still.

Netflix is an example of someone figuring out how to take ad-supported things and turn them into a new model. That's a good thing. (Though I suspect a huge portion of their profits comes from it being so easy to ignore their bill because you sign up once and never get notifications about it?)

Ultimately I'd like to just pay for what I consume. I like Netflix because I give them money and I get service. I give Spotify money and I get service. I wouldn't mind a service that (via browser extension or something) allowed me to specify donations per month to various sites on the Internet that I visit - so I insert 100$ a month and it gets divvied up, and in exchange I have no ads. (With the caveat that if a site shows ads anyway, or tries to bait me into reading it, or is bullshit in some other way, I can revoke their piece of my payment..).

For creative work I think patronage is an underrated business model, largely because there's a high barrier to actually giving money to something. I'd love to just be able to say, I have 50$ a month for bloggers whose blogs I read - I don't want to push to "donate via paypal" button on every site; I just want it to get sent out by virtue of my being there and liking it. [Note: what doesn't work is paying proportionally to time spent on a website. That's how you get mindless Buzzfeed clickbait everywhere. Gotta figure out something else.] Twitch figured out how to get its users to actual donate money with minimal friction and that seems to be working well for them (though they're hosting a lot more ads lately, which is very tedious).

I'd also love to see a return of the renaissance style patronage of "rich people funding artists". Seems like funding happens mostly through grants and scholarships these days, instead of people just funding specific people who can do things they want to see in the world.

For your game, if it's multiplayer, the "cosmetics cost real money' model seems to work pretty well, and avoids you being resented requiring money just to access the whole game. As does just having the game cost money up front, but, that tends to lower demand. If you want to add content to the game after it's released, I think "expansions" are treated much more favorably by the public than "DLC" is: we feel cheated when we pay half as much as the game itself and get a single, probably crappy level. It's a lot nicer to get a large chunk of content with new mechanics and new stories that isn't just a tacked-in moneymaker level like a lot of games are doing.

michaelaiello• 11 years ago

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

yAnonymous• 11 years ago

This might very well lead to better content on news sites. Content that at least some users are willing to pay for, instead of link bait bullshit.

Premium user systems that offer full HD videos and other extra content to paying users seem to work well enough if the content is good.

sergiotapia• 11 years ago

I feel like I'm not missing out on anything from those news sites. I just don't visit them after I hit my 5/month limit. No big deal.

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

In terms of business models for free content: I'm a big fan of Patreon, and I use it to actively pay for a half-dozen sites and authors I enjoy. There are many more sites and authors I'd pay if they offered the option.

On the other hand, consider actually charging for your game. Or, alternatively, give the game away but charge a nominal amount for access to multiplayer servers, since that's a significant source of your costs.

nfoz2• 11 years ago

Good grief, we had an Internet full of fantastic content before the ads showed up. Universities, libraries, Governments and NGOs, donation- and government-funded organizations like many news/media agencies, stores/businesses, and just real people -- amateur and professional.

navait• 11 years ago

Fairness is irrelevant - we take what we can as long as we can rationalize it.(surprisingly easy to do). Look at all the comments under you blaming you for not wanting to publish content without compensation.

Do what you must to be successful, because few will pay for things they don't have to pay for.

746F7475• 11 years ago

Set up code on your site that detects that I'm using adblocker(s) and I won't visit your site.

It really is that simple. Either you bite the bullet and accept that some of us don't want random 3rd party code running on our browsers or you gate us away. We won't hold it against you.

I would prefer to have option in uBlock that notified me if I was about to enter a site that didn't want me viewing their content if I had adblock enabled, so I could avoid those sites.

As for games free with buyable skins seems to be working well with many games.

malchow• 11 years ago

"I would prefer to have option in uBlock that notified me if I was about to enter a site that didn't want me viewing their content if I had adblock enabled, so I could avoid those sites."

I suspect such a feature would do serious harm to the adblocking business. They do not want to surface the latent discontent that writers and publishers feel.

If it were as simple as the publisher pushing a button and blocking adblockers, and for adblock users it was as simple as pushing a button to notify you that you are heading to a site that had such anti-adblock penalites, the result across the web would be pretty uniform: you wouldn't get to go to any high quality websites.

They'd flip the switch, and 90% of adblock users will whitelist what they really do want to see --- whether it's The Economist, The New York Times, or whatever. Surfacing the idea of publishers implementing anti-adblock measures could actually reduce the adblocking footprint.

manigandham10• 11 years ago

Since any code that sites install will just get circumvented by these adblockers (as they already do if you check the filters) what we're headed towards are hard paywalls where you have to login to access any content.

zanny• 11 years ago

I've preached this for years, and its my ongoing pet project, but patronage really is the endgame for information content.

Pretty much any freelance animator online is already using patreon. Writers, artists, and comedians are using it. I'm surprised its taken this long for news companies to start trying it.

Fundamentally, the information created is not scarce. It is knowledge. It deserves to be free. But the work to create the information is scarce. Valuable. Some might even say worthy of compensation.

There are so many ways you can present patronage to your audience. Hell, advertising honestly is a kind of patronage - your viewership translates into third parties valuing your work enough to pay you for it, so their ads can go along for the ride. But on the other extreme, you could be a writer or animator or comic artist who says "next episode costs $XXXX, when I get that much money I'll produce it / release it". And there is an entire range of other options in between those two, and its really stifling how content creators are still so limited in their options.

astrobe_• 11 years ago

I believe short term sponsoring should be worked on. Your game needs a good mouse and Logitech wants to increase its presence on the gamer market? You feature an ad from them.

The way ads are served usually today is so terrible that it encourages the use of ad blockers. Get the control back on them. Integrate them in your contents - on your terms and transparently - and the Web will probably be better for everyone.

The problem is that it's a lot of work and you have better things to do. I've heard of proxy companies that to do the boring stuff (hunting announcers, contract negotiation, etc.) for YT streamers.

marrs8• 11 years ago

Speaking for myself, I tend to purchase games. I avoid in-game purchases like the plague. I might download an ad supported game if the ads stay out of the way. If I continue to play an ad supported game and there's an ad-free, payed for version, then I'll upgrade.

infogulch• 11 years ago

I hoped a flattr-like solution would work, but it would need to be more automatic.

How much is all the longform article content you consume in a month worth to you? $5/mo? 20? 100? Take that, and split it up between all the sites you read news from. Multiply by 100k readers, boom! viable business model. Now the question is how you split it up. It needs to be thoughtless and as fine-grained as possible: maybe number of articles read or minutes spent reading.

This keeps the open internet: sites still compete on merit not on the inertia of subscription since the money follows the user's reading habits closely.

abrowne2• 11 years ago

Another option for Firefox is the built-in "tracking protection". It is off by default, but can be enabled via about:config (set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true). Works on Android, too.

HunOL• 11 years ago

And it breaks a lot of web sites.

acdha• 11 years ago

Have you reported those? I've only encountered one and it was apparently fixed awhile back.

abrowne2• 11 years ago

I've haven't noticed any problems myself. I run mostly Firefox Beta on OS X, Linux, and Android and have been using it since late May.

rockdoe2• 11 years ago

Yes, the ones that track you. That's the point, isn't it.

iamcreasy• 11 years ago

Why it removing the youtube logo on the top left corner? Just because it's showing that youtube is streaming E3? :/

How do I let the extension know that some adds are part of the page?

leke• 11 years ago

I have uBlock installed from Allex Vallat. What is the difference?

jedberg4• 11 years ago

If people who made ad blockers were ethical, they would make their software easily detectable by the websites, so those websites could choose not to service those users.

tho9Ohx1eo• 11 years ago

If people who run ads were ethical users wouldn't resort to ad blockers.

See how easy that was? It's called bullshit logic.

jedberg4• 11 years ago

Except that the people who are running the ads aren't hiding that fact. The people blocking them and stealing service are trying to hide behind their ad blocker.

DaFranker• 11 years ago

Heh. Gotta love how the default filter already blocks ||sourceforge.net^

fapjacks• 11 years ago

The amount of vitriol by pro-advertising forces in this thread are pretty hilarious. As if the planet would stop spinning if people used adblock.

snissn• 11 years ago

The eff released their own ad blocker type tool available here https://www.eff.org/privacybadger and it's great. It doesn't come with a singular list of sites to block, but instead blocks domains that are seen across many domains.

Kiro• 11 years ago

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719926

tzs• 11 years ago

Is there a good ad blocker that can be set to NOT block by default, and that provides an easy, one button or so, interface to turn blocking on for the site currently being viewed? I want to operate under a policy of giving new sites I visit a chance to show me that they can advertise responsibly and blacklist them if they show that the cannot.

All the ones I've tried so far (AB, ABP, uBlock) are strongly oriented toward blocking everywhere by default and whitelisting sites that you do not want to block on.

I suspect that most people who use an ad blocker do so not because of some moral objection to the very concept of advertising to pay the bills so that a site can provide free content to the general public. They use an ad blocker because they got tired of sites whose ads do obnoxious things like block the content, move the content around [1], make noise, put distracting animation in your peripheral vision, and so on.

By blocking all ads by default, the current ad blockers break the feedback loop that should be pushing sites toward ads that don't have the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph.

[1] moving the content around is what got me to install an ad blocker. Gocomics.com started doing ads that slide in from the left side, pushing the comic you are reading to the right. If you have zoomed in to make the comic more readable, this could push the right panel of the comic off the screen. Since the slide in ads did not run on every page (and when they did run, it was with a delay of a few seconds), you could not anticipate them and position the zoomed comic appropriately.

erikcw• 11 years ago

What about removing the default filtering lists from ublock and then building it back up as you go using the "picker" ui?

guelo• 11 years ago

uBlock has a big on/off button. You can just leave it off until you want it on.

bcoates• 11 years ago

This is how I use uBlock, by disabling all the built-in filter selections and blocking ad providers when I notice them doing something shady/annoying, or going down in a way that hangs site loads.

Spoiler alert: you wind up blocking all ads anyway. There aren't any ad networks that have anything approaching the standards and practices of late night cable. If you don't believe me please run this experiment yourself.

Menerve• 11 years ago

I just found out how to do this exact thing with uBlock today, take a look at: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filterin...

It's not as easy as AdBlock but that's not too complicated when you understand how it works.

It seems that they changed the ordering of columns in the last versions (the global column is the second, not the first).

of• 11 years ago

It's better to download ublock from their source repo here: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases

Due to Mozilla's review process, the version of uBlock available from the Add-ons homepage is currently often outdated. This isn't in our control.

luxflux• 11 years ago

Actually, this is about uBlock Origin (by the original developer), so it should be: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock

alexnewman• 11 years ago

This is the main reason I've switched to Firefox on android

UBlock Origin

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