This is good but do not use Adblock Plus. Use µBlock. Adblock Plus let's through some 'kosher' ads. If that's acceptable to you, all good. If you want no ads whatsoever, use µBlock.
It works out of the box and blocks everything. Uses even less resources that any other alternative.
Yes, I like to support sites like reddit that vet their ads to eliminate the obnoxious ones. In an ideal world, I'd like the speed/memory usage of µBlock with the ability to enable the 'kosher' ads. When 41 goes to stable I'll re-enable ABP.
The problem to me is the tracking across websites. The fact that the website you visit recognizes you and tracks which pages you visit on its site is perfectly fine to me. Particularly if I have an account (news website, ecommerce, etc).
But google analytics, facebook, twitter, adclick, etc all track your activity across websites and to me should be at the top of any decent ad blocker.
I'm not a fan too. But I come to realize that it can be an easy way to support sites you like without having to spend one penny, just by disabling your adblocker. If there are companies willing to give money to websites I like by displaying little images that I won't even look at - so be it.
Ads work even for if not especially for those who think they don't. I'd rather support people by paying for their work directly instead of going through middle ad-men.
Sure, they use the same amount of cpu and bandwidth, they have the same effect when seen from peripheral vision (or even audio), and also have the same effect on the usability of the page, sure
Please keep denying the bleeding obvious (oh and they clearly have different effects on buying decisions)
I will fight anyone who tries to tell me that a auto-playing video with sound enabled is not just as annoying as a small static image on the side of a page. Even when I'm somewhere with a limited internet connection. [sarcasm]
You're arguing semantics. Yes they are more annoying but they are all effective in making you change your thinking/buying habits and decisions. I don't want any of it, "good" or bad.
I actually don't believe that's entirely true either, or at least not as "bad" as you seem to think. Sure, any sort of advertiser would like you to use that product/service, but it's isn't necessarily trying to impact the way you think. There are plenty of ad campaigns that are simply trying to be made known. Without that, how would you expect any product to reach some sort of critical mass? Word of mouth alone?
Firefox, for example, used several different marketing avenues including a newspaper ad to try to make people aware of them. As far as I recall, that was all they were trying to do, let people know another browser option was out there. It seems a stretch to consider that as trying to manipulate your thinking.
You can disable ad blocking for sites you regularly use. When the ads on a site are annoying, simply re-enable blocking for that site until you feel like giving them another chance.
I don't think the average Reddit user knows what an ad blocker is these days? I wouldn't feel guilty blocking their ads? I have a feeling they are making a lot of money?
People can buy gold (a month of "reddit premium") to thank others for their contributions. In October 2013, they launched the "reddit daily gold goal" bar that displays how much gold is needed every day to pay for all (server?) costs (http://www.redditblog.com/2013/10/thanks-for-gold.html). I don't know if it includes other costs or just server costs actually. I've looked for some statistics over time to see whether the goal is being reached often or not but I can't find a graph.
They've got a couple other revenue sources like merchandising and their own advertisement system. But it would seem Reddit is not a massively profitable business at this point.
I am not 100% convinced that they will ever (officially) be profitable (or that they would need to be).
There is a lot of corporate crap that makes the front page, I expect that reddit receives remuneration for this. e.g. there was a front page post recently of a TacoBell sign that was 20 years old, a crap post with little value, but it ends up with +2000 votes and is front paged on a friday(i think). What do you think that sort of exposure is worth to Tacobell? If Tacobell did pay for some product placement of this nature do you think reddit would ever tell its users? Nope, that would pretty much kill any future attempt to do this sort of thing.
Whether the Tacobell payment is official or hidden by way of increased ad costs on other CondeNest properties or even if it is offered as a sort of add-on to their usual advertising in print media. Reddit is selling their front page one way or another becuase it is pretty much their cash cow, however milking it must be done very carefully because a user backlash would kill the site or future opportunities to monetise in this manner.
That's just speculation though. It could be happening, sure, but that sounds very risky, and doesn't pass Occam's razor as far as I'm concerned. On Twitter, time and time again, some people will retweet / fav corporate stuff because it's funny or makes them feel good / outraged / etc. Some people love to associate with or promote a brand they like.
Maybe Taco Bell puts a lot of work in creating content that works well on the Reddit frontpage (which would definitely be manipulative, but hey, what are you gonna do), and maybe their own employees at home are upvoting it ("it's for the good of the company"), but I very much doubt the top people at Reddit are making a business out of this, if only because they couldn't justify it to their employees.
It just seems more likely to me that 1) a lot of material is organically upvoted, and it includes corporate stuff from well-known compagnies because a lot of people relate to them 2) some companies are (trying to) game the system in various ways that violate the spirit but not the letter 3) Reddit is trying to extract profit from all that but isn't being very aggressive about it because they don't have very high operating costs, are VC-backed and they'd rather find something that's compatible with the spirit of the platform and sustainable in the long run.
> There is a lot of corporate crap that makes the front page, I expect that reddit receives remuneration for this.
That's almost certainly false. Even if you believe the people running Reddit have no morals, the money from promoting Taco Bell can't possibly be close to enough to the legal and business risk to getting caught.
I've unchecked this option since I used AdBlock Plus (years ago, I'm sure) and I've never seen an ad. The closest thing I've seen is "please disable your adblocker" banners.
You can disable that. The only questionable part is who decides what ads should be allowed when that setting is on. Here I agree, if AdBlock developers are paid for whitelisting, such practice is very questionable. Are they?
Source: My employer (a major site with Alexa rank <100) contacted ABP asking to have our text-only, clearly-delimited sponsored search results whitelisted. They told us that it wouldn't happen unless we signed an NDA, paid them a share of the revenue difference, and installed a third-party script on our site to allow them to track our users. (We just laughed at them and changed our markup to work around the block.)
I love the NDA part. Looks very transparent and opensourcy..
I wonder if there would be interest in a real community driven whitelist. One without money involved or a dominant company applying it.
edit: This might work under the premises that there is (1) such a tool/list itself (2) a maintaining community and (3) a set of adblockers to support the list.
(1) is pretty simple. It's a list of ad-placements followed by a set of exclusion filters. This one needs to be transparently editable and commentable (both the ad-placement and the filter list edits)
(2) is a bet, I admit. I could imagine that if there is a serious interest in the allowance of unintrusive ads than this would be not a problem if enough reach is provided.
(3) is again an easy one. There are only so many adblockers out there. One key differentiator to ABP is that they don't allow ads on default. If that stays the same and the exception list is treated as an opt-in addition, I can only imagine benefits for those blockers.
The only losing party is ABP since their overall impact might be reduced due to the lost of their monopoly. Since lists need to be transparent, their list could be used to start off and improve further maintainance.
Yes, Adblock Plus' whitelist has been compared many times to a mafia style extortion scheme. Companies pay to let their ads through. By using ABP over other copies of the same open source code (or competitors like uBlock), you are supporting this business model.
I tried uBlock origin and I didn't find any advantages over adblock plus besides not having to disable an option to block most ads... but either way, noscript is still necessary
no. noscript is not necessary. ublock can block every javascript until I allow it for a website.
I had 3 addons before I started using uBlock: noscript, ABP and request-policy. uBlock replaced them all and is much better. It has a nice clear interface and gives an even biiger amount of control.
yes. I enabled "Im an experienced user" option. Then one can see a matrix with two columns in the uBlock menu. Left one is global. I set everything (including javascript) to red (disabled) in the global column. When visiting specific sites I can allow some resources (like javascript) locally (only for that domain) in the right column.
that would only make the Application Boundaries Enforcer and ClearClick (anti-clickjacking) missing from uBlock origin, if you don't install noscript [1]
I have a question about NoScript. I run Ghostery which blocks all tracking and analytics js files, preventing most of the tracking I'd like to avoid. What does NoScript offer here? Seems like you'd want to block analytics even if you're browsing a "trusted" site.
First of all ghostery is far more beholden to advertisers than ABP. On that basis alone they can't be trusted. It also only screens for known vulnerabilities which leaves you open to js zero days that noscript would have prevented if you are aggressive about what you permit to run.
I used to be a big RequestPolicy believer, but single-page apps (which feels like saying "horseless carriages" in mid-2015) make it a lot of work. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Sw... is the best thing I've found if you're into granular control over sites. uBlock also has an ~"I'm an advanced user" option which will give you a little more blunt but still useful control over cross-site requests.
This is just a default whitelist that's trivial to remove. Yes, it's dumb, but it doesn't completely compromise NoScript if you're aware of the whitelist.
I think you're expecting it to solve a problem it's not intended to solve.
I'm not expecting it to block all javascript, or all malicious javascript. I'm just expecting it to block most or all of the annoying stuff on the web.
To the extent that this is the job it's being hired for, you don't really need to 'trust' it. You run it and it either does what you want or it doesn't. Personally it suits my needs perfectly.
First there was uBlock. Then the maintainer got tired of it and passed it on to someone else. That next maintainer made some changes in the first couple weeks that made the original guy not happy about the direction he was taking it. So the original guy tried to take it back, but ended up forking it and calling it uBlock Origin.
That's my best recollection, I might have some details wrong. I believe Origin is the favored one right now.
The maintainer of uBlock Origin needs to do a much better job of explaining the difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin. The extensions' descriptions on addons.mozilla.org are word-for-word identical:
Interesting. He still hasn't answered why a user should pick one or the other. If he wanted to focus on refactoring and larger features, he could have enlisted a "lieutenant" to manage bug fixes and releases while he works in a dev branch. The uBlock "brand" had quickly become the "new, memory-efficient ad blocker", but now the brand has been divided and muddied. This seems like a good example of the problems with 'product line extension', where a new extension should have used a new name.
I don't understand why he doesn't just re-po the repo (ha) from the guy he gave it to. it would solve the strange monetization problem and fix the schism the two projects have created for end users.
You can disable the "kosher" ads, there's a checkbox in ABP's settings. Pretty simple. Just uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" http://imgur.com/BWzIEyo
ABE has been great and even after their controversial whitelist was added it was always very simple to disable. But ABE never innovated or focused on performance and so now uBlock (Origin) is all you should consider running.
This is good but do not use µBlock. Use µBlock Origin. µBlock's developer lets through some changes the creator of µBlock didn't like. If that's acceptable to you, all good. If you like the original µBlock, use µBlock Origin.
Sigh. Adblock Plus / µBlock are almost as broken as not using them.
I only want to block obnoxious ads. First and foremost, popunder (these should not even exist, I don't see any legitimate use for them) and also popups.
Let's add the very aggressive ones (blinking content).
I don't want to block the ads on my favorite blogs and I really don't like the fact that I have to create a custom rule to do so.
Funnily, the guy who owns AdBlock Plus also worked in the department of United Internet which invented Binlayer back in the day.
The issue I see mostly is that they actually sell access to the "acceptable ads" list. If it was just actually acceptable ads, it would have been okay, but mafia-like methods? that’s just morally inacceptable.
uBlock and Adblock Plus are built around filter lists of urls (in fact, both use essentially the same lists). So if something is blocked in one but not the other, it's probably a difference in the filter list subscriptions. This is easily configurable in both.
Can you be more specific? What does ublock do poorly?
I find it works well for me with a minimum of fuss. I even got it to block those awful "Powered by Outbrain" clickbait links that have been showing up on news sites lately.
It blocks those? Thanks, you've sold me. I find them incredibly annoying because sometimes it looks like an interesting list on the site I'm currently visiting and then realize it's taking me through 3 other portals.
Last time I tried it, it seemed to be filtering out too much javascript. Like I would occasionally click on buttons on legit sites and they would do nothing.
It works out of the box and blocks everything. Uses even less resources that any other alternative.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...