Adtech is cyber warfare. Used to manipulate, control, and feed our minds with things that not even we understand what they're up to. There is no argument for uBlock being disabled/removed.
“it’s the Google ball on the taskbar and when you click it, the internet comes up” — is the argument to use Chrome that many people will go with.
I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either. We are all more vulnerable in some parts of our lives than others. Maybe a giant internet tech company won’t abuse you like it abuses people who don’t know much about computers, but big chemical industry may abuse you and kill you early through environmental pollution.
We must recognise that there are many people vulnerable to different kinds of abuse through destructive business practices in pursuit of growth (“rot capitalism”). And if we don’t have a culture of protecting the most vulnerable, someone won’t protect you in areas of your vulnerability.
>“it’s the Google ball on the taskbar and when you click it, the internet comes up” — is the argument to use Chrome that many people will go with.
>I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either.
The problem here is that when Joe Sixpack buys a Windows PC and starts it up, there is no "Google ball" on the taskbar: there's an icon for Edge, Microsoft's own browser that's included in Windows. Chrome is nowhere to be found. Joe only sees Chrome when he goes to a Google site like YouTube and gets prompted to install it, and goes through the steps of doing so. Joe could just as easily install Firefox, but he doesn't, perhaps because no huge website like YouTube is encouraging him to.
And also, the majority of people in tech still use chrome out of convenience, because they don't give enough of a shit about Google being an evil monopoly.
How can we the expect Joe to "do the right thing" when his tech-friend uses Chrome too?
"but that one website I need to use once a month doesn't work in Firefox" - fine, from a techie it seems too much to ask to just use a different browser once a month.
All these things are likely. It is also often the case that Joe's friend who's "good with computers" will install Chrome for him. Chrome is massively popular and overall a very functional browser.
As another commenter mentioned, too, Edge is Chromium-derived. The manifest v2 will soon (2025) be deprecated in Chromium, which is not that different from the Chrome deprecation. In Chrome, v2 is still technically supported until further notice, even in the newest Canary builds. It's just that plugins using v2 will require manual installation. All in all, it looks to me like 2025 is when v2 will be properly dropped on Chrome and Chromium.
Google needs to be broken up. It's extremely concerning that a company that derives most of its revenue from internet ads, can use its control over the world’s most dominant browser to limit apps that are a risk to its bottom line as it pleases.
Between Wordpress's bullshit and capitalist bullshit like Google doing things like this, I'm honestly just in utter shock at what the internet actually _is_ now adays.
Folks, Google just saved Mozilla. For nearly two decades, Google dumped limitless resources into Chrome and gave it all away to gain maximal adoption. That would be considered anti-competitive behavior in any other context. By acting more competitively, Google is giving the competition an opportunity to finally compete. Firefox was so close to hitting that red line in terms of market share. Now Firefox is going to not only survive, but thrive, and so will other newer browsers like Brave and Ladybird too.
How exactly do you think Mozilla is going to get funding to continue Firefox development with Google now unable to pay them billions to keep Google Search the #1 default?
This Google breakup is only going to destroy Mozilla entirely. Brave will survive as long as it can piggyback on Chrome development, and by getting bribed/paid by advertisers to have their ads shown instead of blocked. Ladybird can survive because it's all-volunteer, but it's not even close to being a viable browser for regular use, and with the limited development resources it has, it's questionable it will ever be really usable for general users.
The real winners of this "antitrust" action will be Microsoft (who can then dedicate more resources to Edge and make that the new IE6.0) and Apple. There will only be two browsers you can use in the future: Edge (Windows-only) and Safari (Mac/iOS-only). Other browsers will wither and die since you won't be able to use them for your internet banking and various other tasks. You'll just get a message like we did back in 2002, saying "this browser not supported, please install Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari to continue".
Have they even tried getting funding via national digital sovereignty efforts?
The justification seems easy - "fund us so your citizens don't need to depend on foreign ad companies and US-based tracking to access local and national services."
Make sure any parts which are dependent on Mozilla infrastructure can be re-hosted by other providers.
Have releases which are fully free software, with reproducible builds, which can be audited to ensure privacy protections.
And commit to legal agreements to preserve those protections.
The countries in turn can require that services in those countries must support Firefox, or perhaps specifically ESR versions of Firefox.
That sounds great in theory, but I'm extremely skeptical of it working in reality. Do we have any good examples of governments backing significant open-source projects like this, and even worse, in a manner collaborating with other governments? Basically you're asking for the EU to become the main funding source of Mozilla, because it's hard to envision anyone else joining this effort.
Swiching from chrome to firefox at work, this was the final straw. Internet/youtube etc is almost unusable without uBlock origin. Glad I already use FF privately.
I used Firefox for 5 years until I met my husband, who pointed out how much time I waste dealing with Firefox rendering bugs and freezing and how much it aggravates him. After the 15th time I switched to Chrome and it's helped my relationship grow. But I use uBlock Origin religiously so it's time to go hunting again...
- Uncheck the Firefox ads and remove commercial stuff.
- We all convince Mozilla to refrain from enshittifying Firefox or abandoning it, somehow, because ads are the main reason people hate browsing the internet, so if Firefox becomes a safe haven, Google will stop giving it money to stay alive.
I think they were just waiting for the inevitable. Instead of cutting off the competition and risking an antitrust lawsuit due to their browser monopoly, they simply waited for an antitrust case on their search engine monopoly to force their hand.
The courts have failed to realize the obvious consequences of this.
Linux distributions should patch chromium downstream, enabling the "webRequestBlocking" API in manifest v3. The alternative is to load "policy" extensions, so I guess a system-wide ubo linux package could do it..
Imo, Google's plan is to make Chrome a sealed OS like Windows, where MS has all the control and users have no control.
But Google isn't alone. The pressure to show the 25% YoY growth means you need to do worse things than your competitors or die. If you don't poison the river, your neighbor will and you'll starve to death next year. It's the Saw movie, but for corporations.
The pressure to grow the stock price never stops, and next year Google will have to invent something else, something even more morally depraved.
And when all those idiots die because the spent time destroying the very society they lived in, all the people that choose not to poison the well will be free to make the world a better place. It's not going to last forever. Their time is limited.
> uBlock’s own uBlock Origin Lite, which uses Manifest V3 and has received positive reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Still, the ad blocker’s developer Raymond Hill has said the Lite version can’t match the full capabilities of the original uBlock Origin.
To me the developer should update the current v2 version with the new approved v3 version. Yes, is worse but at the end of the day is better for those 40M of users [1]. I'm speculating but I think he don't want to show defeat, maybe some ego is involved there.
Why should the developer do that? So Google won’t lose users? So uBlock Origin won’t lose users?
In the end there are alternatives, like using Firefox. Saying the developer ‘should’ do something when you admit that something is worse than what he has going now is super weird.
Personally I think if Google wants to kill their browser engine for everybody who hates ads, we ‘should’ welcome it, because it will hopefully cause Chromium’s browser dominance to fade at least somewhat, and Google’s monopolising position in terms of browser market share is what enabled Google to make this Manifest 3 decision in the first place.
There's plenty to speculate or inquire about without jumping straight to assumptions about a stranger's personal motives. What about all of the users that haven't been flipped yet, all of the ones using Chrome based browsers still supporting v2 but using the Chrome Web Store for the extension at the moment, all of the users and corporations using ExtensionManifestV2Availability who won't be flipped for a year? Heck, maybe it's even a good thing users have Chrome tell them the old extension is expressly disabled so they can find out the limitations in the new one and chose for themselves rather than have their extension's functionality cut silently made for them.
I can't find the tweet, but gorhill himself has said that as well as ublock lite not being a drop-in replacement, there are other MV3 content blockers that could work better depending on what your usecase is. He doesn't want to just silently degrade user experience.
I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of malware and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.
You make it sound like it's a bad thing if those ad infested web sites disappear, but I beg to differ. If there's a demand for the service but ad revenue is no longer viable, then surely alternatives based on subscriptions, donations or some other for-profit or non-profit model are ready to take over, and that would be fantastic.
If there's a social contract, it goes both ways, and it wasn't the operators of user agents who broke it. They can't expect me to let their ads and trackers load if it's going to add 20MB and potentially compromise my system because they don't actually control where any of it comes from.
The websites are welcome
to expect payment if they so desire. They chose to host the content for free, and we get to choose which of that content we consume, and which of it we block. They have as much of a right to advertise as we have to block advertisements.
>There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads.
I'm not seeing the "unwritten social contract" when I look up something on Wikipedia, or download an old textbook or manual or something off Archive.Org. I don't remember seeing advertising on either of those services.
You haven't seen all the requests for donations on Wikipedia? It's not technically "advertising" I suppose, but it's basically the same, just more direct.
The only “unwritten contract” (aka “my rights”) is that if you display something publicly (on the web or otherwise), I can choose whether to look at it or not.
If you put an informational poster on the street next to a billboard, I’m free to:
- ignore the billboard
- take a photo including only the poster and look at it later
- get someone else to take a photo of just the poster and send it to me
- get someone else to look at the poster and summarise it for me
- etc.
When you put something in the public sphere you give up control of it. If that deal doesn’t work for you, find a new business model.
In fact, as a society, we ought to protect ourselves better and ban most or all forms of passive/unsolicited advertising. So not only is there no “unwritten social contract” that requires us to accept ads everywhere, there’s a moral and ethical imperative to fight to reject ads.
Yes but what tipped the scales was when policymakers all over the place started requiring adblockers. For example if you manage a company with 100,000 employees, you can push a button in Google Admin that installs uBlock Origin on all their browsers. Those people didn't have a choice. Enough organizations probably did this that I imagine it started threatening the whole economy.
That's great, the ad economy can die in a fire and leave the space for alternatives that aren't focused on turning your brain to mush and promoting overconsumption. Some content creators will be hurt but the good ones will be fine.
>If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system.
No, it wasn't: it was on what I would call "the ignorance system". The vast majority of users were simply too lazy or ignorant to install ad-blockers. Ads made money because most users had no idea they could be blocked, or because the users just didn't care. Hang around non-technical people and talk to them about this and you'll see: many users just don't see what the big deal is, while others will admit to finding the ads annoying but don't even know it's possible to block them easily.
However, this is slowly changing, as 1) word spreads about ad-blockers, which isn't just word-of-mouth, but all these news articles lately probably help too, and 2) the ads get more and more annoying and intrusive. Remember how everyone wanted pop-up blockers 20 years ago when those became so popular with advertisers? It took a while there too, for word to get out about the ability to block pop-ups, but eventually it became the norm and was even built into browsers because the pop-ups were SO annoying and even destructive.
>But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service
Yes, they should, if they want to. Contracts require two parties to agree to something, and there is no such thing here. You can't just come up with a business model (e.g. pop-up ad supported website) and then claim there's a "social contract" in place when you just implemented this unilaterally.
The REAL social contract that's in place is the HTTP system the entire WWW is built on, where you send a request to a web server and it sends a response. What you do with the data you receive is up to you. It's absolutely no different than watching a TV show (in pre-DVR days) and then muting the volume or leaving the room when the commercials come on. Or better yet, in 2002 buying a DVR and just skipping the commercials.
You do have a point that a lot of services are funded by ads, and depend on enough people seeing these to sustain operations financially. But that's a business model chosen by these companies; they're free to choose a different business model if too many people start blocking ads. If people block ads, it's their own fault anyway, for making the ads too annoying. Back in the days of banner ads, almost no one cared about blocking them, because they just weren't that bad, just like no one really cared much about all the ads in newspapers. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They brought ad-blocking on themselves by their own actions.
You know that's the argument used against people switching channels during advertising breaks, right?
And against the mute button?
And against the VCR?
And against DVRs?
When I buy the newspaper I don't read every ad in the paper. I might even skip an entire section of the paper. If you have the money you could even pay someone to clip out the articles and get no advertising at all.
History therefore 1) provides strong evidence that the unwritten social contract you are thinking has a clause that people are free to do what they can to avoid advertisements, and 2) shows that pro-advertising people will try to guilt trip them over exercising that clause.
Adtech is cyber warfare. Used to manipulate, control, and feed our minds with things that not even we understand what they're up to. There is no argument for uBlock being disabled/removed.
Fight for an internet where we're not exploited.
There’s no argument to use chrome either. Hopefully they will lose users.
“it’s the Google ball on the taskbar and when you click it, the internet comes up” — is the argument to use Chrome that many people will go with.
I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either. We are all more vulnerable in some parts of our lives than others. Maybe a giant internet tech company won’t abuse you like it abuses people who don’t know much about computers, but big chemical industry may abuse you and kill you early through environmental pollution.
We must recognise that there are many people vulnerable to different kinds of abuse through destructive business practices in pursuit of growth (“rot capitalism”). And if we don’t have a culture of protecting the most vulnerable, someone won’t protect you in areas of your vulnerability.
>“it’s the Google ball on the taskbar and when you click it, the internet comes up” — is the argument to use Chrome that many people will go with. >I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either.
The problem here is that when Joe Sixpack buys a Windows PC and starts it up, there is no "Google ball" on the taskbar: there's an icon for Edge, Microsoft's own browser that's included in Windows. Chrome is nowhere to be found. Joe only sees Chrome when he goes to a Google site like YouTube and gets prompted to install it, and goes through the steps of doing so. Joe could just as easily install Firefox, but he doesn't, perhaps because no huge website like YouTube is encouraging him to.
And also, the majority of people in tech still use chrome out of convenience, because they don't give enough of a shit about Google being an evil monopoly.
How can we the expect Joe to "do the right thing" when his tech-friend uses Chrome too?
"but that one website I need to use once a month doesn't work in Firefox" - fine, from a techie it seems too much to ask to just use a different browser once a month.
All these things are likely. It is also often the case that Joe's friend who's "good with computers" will install Chrome for him. Chrome is massively popular and overall a very functional browser.
As another commenter mentioned, too, Edge is Chromium-derived. The manifest v2 will soon (2025) be deprecated in Chromium, which is not that different from the Chrome deprecation. In Chrome, v2 is still technically supported until further notice, even in the newest Canary builds. It's just that plugins using v2 will require manual installation. All in all, it looks to me like 2025 is when v2 will be properly dropped on Chrome and Chromium.
Amusingly Edge recommends installing an ad blocker.
But then Microsoft isn't in the advertising business.
It is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xandr
[dead]
Edge is Chrome reskined.
.. as a parasitic face-hugger that takes acid and flamethrowers to kill.
With a twin process that attaches to search and background cross references your every action with the web "just in case" it comes up later.
The argument is to bring more power and money to Google.
Google needs to be broken up. It's extremely concerning that a company that derives most of its revenue from internet ads, can use its control over the world’s most dominant browser to limit apps that are a risk to its bottom line as it pleases.
Microsoft needs to be broken up as well, but that didn't/isn't happening either. Do we have a justice system that will protect people?
I once heard it said that we don't have a justice system, we have a legal system.
Don't recall who or where but it always stuck with me.
> Google needs to be broken up
It's very unlikely that any break-up would result in Chrome floating off on its own.
Between Wordpress's bullshit and capitalist bullshit like Google doing things like this, I'm honestly just in utter shock at what the internet actually _is_ now adays.
What a dystopia.
Folks, Google just saved Mozilla. For nearly two decades, Google dumped limitless resources into Chrome and gave it all away to gain maximal adoption. That would be considered anti-competitive behavior in any other context. By acting more competitively, Google is giving the competition an opportunity to finally compete. Firefox was so close to hitting that red line in terms of market share. Now Firefox is going to not only survive, but thrive, and so will other newer browsers like Brave and Ladybird too.
How exactly do you think Mozilla is going to get funding to continue Firefox development with Google now unable to pay them billions to keep Google Search the #1 default?
This Google breakup is only going to destroy Mozilla entirely. Brave will survive as long as it can piggyback on Chrome development, and by getting bribed/paid by advertisers to have their ads shown instead of blocked. Ladybird can survive because it's all-volunteer, but it's not even close to being a viable browser for regular use, and with the limited development resources it has, it's questionable it will ever be really usable for general users.
The real winners of this "antitrust" action will be Microsoft (who can then dedicate more resources to Edge and make that the new IE6.0) and Apple. There will only be two browsers you can use in the future: Edge (Windows-only) and Safari (Mac/iOS-only). Other browsers will wither and die since you won't be able to use them for your internet banking and various other tasks. You'll just get a message like we did back in 2002, saying "this browser not supported, please install Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari to continue".
Have they even tried getting funding via national digital sovereignty efforts?
The justification seems easy - "fund us so your citizens don't need to depend on foreign ad companies and US-based tracking to access local and national services."
Make sure any parts which are dependent on Mozilla infrastructure can be re-hosted by other providers.
Have releases which are fully free software, with reproducible builds, which can be audited to ensure privacy protections.
And commit to legal agreements to preserve those protections.
The countries in turn can require that services in those countries must support Firefox, or perhaps specifically ESR versions of Firefox.
That sounds great in theory, but I'm extremely skeptical of it working in reality. Do we have any good examples of governments backing significant open-source projects like this, and even worse, in a manner collaborating with other governments? Basically you're asking for the EU to become the main funding source of Mozilla, because it's hard to envision anyone else joining this effort.
I know the German Sovereign Tech Fund is funding some FreeBSD development.
I know Schleswig-Holstein is moving to LibreOffice and believe some of that includes funding.
That I don't know of more is besides the point, which is have they tried?
Don’t give up, fight’s not nearly over.
An honest question, what’s the news on Wordpress episode? Didn’t follow the topic
On macOS I recommend kagi AND Orion for the ultimate zero telemetry search experience.
No need to block when you are not the product
https://kagi.com
full disclosure: I am wearing my free kagi t-shirt right now
I tried Orion a few months ago but it didn't at all play nicely with 1Password, any idea if that's changed?
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41852580
Chrome?
I switched to Firefox a few years ago, when Chrome would only play Youtube with 480p resolution. Too bad, the Youtube/tv interface was slick.
Then Google went on killing the Youtube experience on firefox
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1cjbsmj/youtube_on...
Perfect timing, I've fully switched to Firefox over the last month or so.
Swiching from chrome to firefox at work, this was the final straw. Internet/youtube etc is almost unusable without uBlock origin. Glad I already use FF privately.
https://youtu.be/2RmUMmUj3u8?si=PmRdQqMs3KURXytI
Every browser has critical bugs. It's more important how fast they can be patched. And CVE scores are often exaggerated.
Immediately moved to Firefox after "ad topics" were introduced.
They are trying to introduce something similar in Firefox too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643991
I used Firefox for 5 years until I met my husband, who pointed out how much time I waste dealing with Firefox rendering bugs and freezing and how much it aggravates him. After the 15th time I switched to Chrome and it's helped my relationship grow. But I use uBlock Origin religiously so it's time to go hunting again...
> I switched to Chrome and it's helped my relationship grow
Something is very wrong here
I’ll have you know IE6 is known to have caused numerous divorces.
- Switch to Firefox with uBlock Origin.
- Change your default search engines.
- Uncheck the Firefox ads and remove commercial stuff.
- We all convince Mozilla to refrain from enshittifying Firefox or abandoning it, somehow, because ads are the main reason people hate browsing the internet, so if Firefox becomes a safe haven, Google will stop giving it money to stay alive.
Google was ordered by the court to stop giving it money: https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-poten...
I think they were just waiting for the inevitable. Instead of cutting off the competition and risking an antitrust lawsuit due to their browser monopoly, they simply waited for an antitrust case on their search engine monopoly to force their hand.
The courts have failed to realize the obvious consequences of this.
[dupe]
More discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41809698
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757178
Linux distributions should patch chromium downstream, enabling the "webRequestBlocking" API in manifest v3. The alternative is to load "policy" extensions, so I guess a system-wide ubo linux package could do it..
Imo, Google's plan is to make Chrome a sealed OS like Windows, where MS has all the control and users have no control.
But Google isn't alone. The pressure to show the 25% YoY growth means you need to do worse things than your competitors or die. If you don't poison the river, your neighbor will and you'll starve to death next year. It's the Saw movie, but for corporations.
The pressure to grow the stock price never stops, and next year Google will have to invent something else, something even more morally depraved.
> Imo, Google's plan is to make Chrome a sealed OS like Windows, where MS has all the control and users have no control.
ChromeOS is already (albeit a different) thing
And when all those idiots die because the spent time destroying the very society they lived in, all the people that choose not to poison the well will be free to make the world a better place. It's not going to last forever. Their time is limited.
> uBlock’s own uBlock Origin Lite, which uses Manifest V3 and has received positive reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Still, the ad blocker’s developer Raymond Hill has said the Lite version can’t match the full capabilities of the original uBlock Origin.
To me the developer should update the current v2 version with the new approved v3 version. Yes, is worse but at the end of the day is better for those 40M of users [1]. I'm speculating but I think he don't want to show defeat, maybe some ego is involved there.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
Why should the developer do that? So Google won’t lose users? So uBlock Origin won’t lose users?
In the end there are alternatives, like using Firefox. Saying the developer ‘should’ do something when you admit that something is worse than what he has going now is super weird.
Personally I think if Google wants to kill their browser engine for everybody who hates ads, we ‘should’ welcome it, because it will hopefully cause Chromium’s browser dominance to fade at least somewhat, and Google’s monopolising position in terms of browser market share is what enabled Google to make this Manifest 3 decision in the first place.
There's plenty to speculate or inquire about without jumping straight to assumptions about a stranger's personal motives. What about all of the users that haven't been flipped yet, all of the ones using Chrome based browsers still supporting v2 but using the Chrome Web Store for the extension at the moment, all of the users and corporations using ExtensionManifestV2Availability who won't be flipped for a year? Heck, maybe it's even a good thing users have Chrome tell them the old extension is expressly disabled so they can find out the limitations in the new one and chose for themselves rather than have their extension's functionality cut silently made for them.
I can't find the tweet, but gorhill himself has said that as well as ublock lite not being a drop-in replacement, there are other MV3 content blockers that could work better depending on what your usecase is. He doesn't want to just silently degrade user experience.
I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of malware and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.
You make it sound like it's a bad thing if those ad infested web sites disappear, but I beg to differ. If there's a demand for the service but ad revenue is no longer viable, then surely alternatives based on subscriptions, donations or some other for-profit or non-profit model are ready to take over, and that would be fantastic.
If there's a social contract, it goes both ways, and it wasn't the operators of user agents who broke it. They can't expect me to let their ads and trackers load if it's going to add 20MB and potentially compromise my system because they don't actually control where any of it comes from.
The websites are welcome to expect payment if they so desire. They chose to host the content for free, and we get to choose which of that content we consume, and which of it we block. They have as much of a right to advertise as we have to block advertisements.
>There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads.
I'm not seeing the "unwritten social contract" when I look up something on Wikipedia, or download an old textbook or manual or something off Archive.Org. I don't remember seeing advertising on either of those services.
You haven't seen all the requests for donations on Wikipedia? It's not technically "advertising" I suppose, but it's basically the same, just more direct.
> There is an unwritten social contract here.
Nope nope nope.
The only “unwritten contract” (aka “my rights”) is that if you display something publicly (on the web or otherwise), I can choose whether to look at it or not.
If you put an informational poster on the street next to a billboard, I’m free to:
- ignore the billboard
- take a photo including only the poster and look at it later
- get someone else to take a photo of just the poster and send it to me
- get someone else to look at the poster and summarise it for me
- etc.
When you put something in the public sphere you give up control of it. If that deal doesn’t work for you, find a new business model.
In fact, as a society, we ought to protect ourselves better and ban most or all forms of passive/unsolicited advertising. So not only is there no “unwritten social contract” that requires us to accept ads everywhere, there’s a moral and ethical imperative to fight to reject ads.
You should have control over what content gets displayed on your screen.
This is an ad network using another unrelated product (chrome) to enforce its market dominance.
Yes but what tipped the scales was when policymakers all over the place started requiring adblockers. For example if you manage a company with 100,000 employees, you can push a button in Google Admin that installs uBlock Origin on all their browsers. Those people didn't have a choice. Enough organizations probably did this that I imagine it started threatening the whole economy.
That's great, the ad economy can die in a fire and leave the space for alternatives that aren't focused on turning your brain to mush and promoting overconsumption. Some content creators will be hurt but the good ones will be fine.
No. Im sorry, find another way to make money. Nobody has a god given right to deliver me ads.
Except the “social contract” is manifested as laws and enforced by the state.
Currently at least 50% of online ads are outright illegal in most parts of the world.
Nobody is morally required to have their legal rights violated to get information. Period.
>Currently at least 50% of online ads are outright illegal in most parts of the world.
source?
>If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system.
No, it wasn't: it was on what I would call "the ignorance system". The vast majority of users were simply too lazy or ignorant to install ad-blockers. Ads made money because most users had no idea they could be blocked, or because the users just didn't care. Hang around non-technical people and talk to them about this and you'll see: many users just don't see what the big deal is, while others will admit to finding the ads annoying but don't even know it's possible to block them easily.
However, this is slowly changing, as 1) word spreads about ad-blockers, which isn't just word-of-mouth, but all these news articles lately probably help too, and 2) the ads get more and more annoying and intrusive. Remember how everyone wanted pop-up blockers 20 years ago when those became so popular with advertisers? It took a while there too, for word to get out about the ability to block pop-ups, but eventually it became the norm and was even built into browsers because the pop-ups were SO annoying and even destructive.
>But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service
Yes, they should, if they want to. Contracts require two parties to agree to something, and there is no such thing here. You can't just come up with a business model (e.g. pop-up ad supported website) and then claim there's a "social contract" in place when you just implemented this unilaterally.
The REAL social contract that's in place is the HTTP system the entire WWW is built on, where you send a request to a web server and it sends a response. What you do with the data you receive is up to you. It's absolutely no different than watching a TV show (in pre-DVR days) and then muting the volume or leaving the room when the commercials come on. Or better yet, in 2002 buying a DVR and just skipping the commercials.
You do have a point that a lot of services are funded by ads, and depend on enough people seeing these to sustain operations financially. But that's a business model chosen by these companies; they're free to choose a different business model if too many people start blocking ads. If people block ads, it's their own fault anyway, for making the ads too annoying. Back in the days of banner ads, almost no one cared about blocking them, because they just weren't that bad, just like no one really cared much about all the ads in newspapers. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They brought ad-blocking on themselves by their own actions.
You know that's the argument used against people switching channels during advertising breaks, right?
And against the mute button?
And against the VCR?
And against DVRs?
When I buy the newspaper I don't read every ad in the paper. I might even skip an entire section of the paper. If you have the money you could even pay someone to clip out the articles and get no advertising at all.
History therefore 1) provides strong evidence that the unwritten social contract you are thinking has a clause that people are free to do what they can to avoid advertisements, and 2) shows that pro-advertising people will try to guilt trip them over exercising that clause.
Just like you are doing.