zlacker

Is it time for an open source adblocker that only blocks bad actors?

I am perfectly fine with ads, I've previously run sites where it was a small source of income myself. I know it would be in a cat and mouse game with the bad guys but if it blocked most of them it would certainly help a lot of people.

>>rmason+(OP)
Let's build that company that serves ads and blocks bad actors. We can then offer the blocklist to other blockers.

Problems: * vetting ads costs a lot of time (= money). So you're getting less money per impression * requires a massive amount of infrastructure if you want to ensure that the ad doesn't change in between you vetting it and you serving it to your clients (= money).

Meaning the consumers of our company will get less money per ad they show to their visitors.

So they'll go to one that offers more. Simple as that.

In order to fix the bad actors we need to start making the websites serving the ads (like Reddit) and/or the networks (DoubleClick) responsible for what they offer up.

As long as that doesn't happen it'll remain a cesspool.

>>rmason+(OP)
It is already a cat and mouse game, adding another handicap for the good guys seems like too much. Plus, perverse incentives might creep in on the “bad actor” definition.

>>rmason+(OP)
Brave does this, to some degree, but then you have to endorse crypto as the means of solving the monetization problem.

>>rmason+(OP)
Adblock Plus is already like this and everybody technical quickly realised the reality of an advertising "Whitelist" instantly creates a de facto protection racket where getting an exclusion from the adblocker becomes a valuable commodity. It's worth paying WHATEVER the adblock operator is asking to get on the whitelist. Adblock Plus got big bucks from Google who in turn have saved billions from striking a deal with them. The small guys - well they got screwed - you need to go through certain well financed ad networks to deliver "Acceptable ads". Adblock Plus is still popular for some reason but I don't know any technical people who still use it because well it's corrupt and hostile to its own users and has a clear drop-in replacement.

In the opinion of the vast majority of adblocker users, agree with it or not, ALL advertisers are bad actors. So they will never voluntarily choose filter lists which allow "good ads" the vast majority of the time. As such this will only happen if you get the adblocker to set allowing "acceptable ads" as a default, which makes what you're talking about INTRINSICALLY corrupt and paternalistic. If you want people to actually do this, show up at the houses of Adblock developers with suitcases of money, plenty of drugs, and beautiful prostitutes and whisper sweet stories into their ears about how they can help small businesses find markets for their products. Sadly ublock origin's developers appear to be incorruptible.

Google has figured out trying to push "acceptable ads" any harder is pointless and has instead moved to simply make adblocking technically harder to do by taking control of web standards.

>>rmason+(OP)
Just put relevant ads locally and the problem goes away.

By that I mean, if you're a site about say, board wargames, and there's some new board wargame that wants to advertise on your site, ok. Edit your page to add an ad graphic with a link to the seller. That's cool. And maybe the people reading your page will actually want to buy it!

But there's just no way that third-party ads through some generic ad network will ever achieve that fit or reliability. And ads based on tracking people's data and suggesting things based on what you interacted with on social media or whatever? That's always going to be hot garbage at best. Adding in a third-party ad network (and probably behind that brokers and other middlemen) can't possibly make it better, it can only make it worse. So that's what we have today.

But go back to simple static ads relevant to the content of the page and problem solved.

>>rmason+(OP)
Most ads are bad. I think uBlock Origin's list leaves most static banners intact. I don't mind seeing ads too much if they are the same for everyone that visits the website and is relevant to the content.