Make Firefox Private Again(make-firefox-private-again.com)
make-firefox-private-again.com
Make Firefox Private Again
https://make-firefox-private-again.com/
347 comments
> advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone
My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting.
Advertising-based social media took all the air from that model and replaced it with the enormous advertising-driven attention economy. Genuine social interaction was largely replaced by vacuous attempts to get "engagement" as the platforms persuaded millions to act in their interests. Vulnerable interactions with persistent communities that allowed real internet friendships to develop gave way to ephemeral rage bait that ruins real life friendships.
I'm not saying that advertising is the root of every single social ill we have today, but it's responsible for its good share of them.
My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting.
Advertising-based social media took all the air from that model and replaced it with the enormous advertising-driven attention economy. Genuine social interaction was largely replaced by vacuous attempts to get "engagement" as the platforms persuaded millions to act in their interests. Vulnerable interactions with persistent communities that allowed real internet friendships to develop gave way to ephemeral rage bait that ruins real life friendships.
I'm not saying that advertising is the root of every single social ill we have today, but it's responsible for its good share of them.
Having run one, I have to say that towards the end people were moving to social media BECAUSE posts had a like counter. I regret not adding one to my forum.
Oh, for sure. They created a drug that suffocated all non-externally-rewarded social interaction and drew users in. But they created that drug in service to advertisements.
I ran one too, I don't think it's so simple as that mechanism! Our forums had reputation counts and posts were the attribution point.
We had 'likes' but with actual accounting! For better or worse 'status' could be built with this. Likes, on the other hand, are fleeting
Both systems have perverse incentives, I think the audience - size/shape - matters, and how it all reflects/bounces.
Conspiracy moment: it's harder to fake 'grass roots' things with a smaller/tight knit community, we've been corralled. Once something is as big as Reddit, everything you're seeing is manufactured.
Personally, I think there's truth to the "Dead Internet theory;" less bot focus. Humans maintain responsibility with our choices.
We had 'likes' but with actual accounting! For better or worse 'status' could be built with this. Likes, on the other hand, are fleeting
Both systems have perverse incentives, I think the audience - size/shape - matters, and how it all reflects/bounces.
Conspiracy moment: it's harder to fake 'grass roots' things with a smaller/tight knit community, we've been corralled. Once something is as big as Reddit, everything you're seeing is manufactured.
Personally, I think there's truth to the "Dead Internet theory;" less bot focus. Humans maintain responsibility with our choices.
Tangentially related but I think upvote/downvote culture is one of the biggest social changes that we unleashed on the world and should’ve walked back long ago. The intent of the idea is good but I think in implementation it’s too ripe for abuse.
In those old forums, you couldn’t (easily) bury things the way you can today. We basically handed an incredibly powerful weapon to anyone interested in controlling a narrative - especially so with the centralization of everything.
(I want to be clear that I’m aware old forums could be gamed still, and I’m mostly trying to underscore how messed up I consider upvote/downvote/ratio culture).
In those old forums, you couldn’t (easily) bury things the way you can today. We basically handed an incredibly powerful weapon to anyone interested in controlling a narrative - especially so with the centralization of everything.
(I want to be clear that I’m aware old forums could be gamed still, and I’m mostly trying to underscore how messed up I consider upvote/downvote/ratio culture).
Despite railing against social media for years, I've recently become a mastodon convert. It seems to bring back a lot of the self-hosted phpBB vibe that I also miss. The instance I'm on is run by one guy and the costs are covered by user donations.
You could argue that greed is the driver. The social networks aren't displaying ads to fund maintaining their operations, they are operating in a for profit capacity and thus are incentivized to find ways to make you want to consume their product.
When someone operated a forum in the days of yore, they had the opportunity to put up ads and many did. The difference I think is that they were doing so to fund or offset the costs of operating the forum, not as a profit engine above and beyond the cost of keeping the lights on.
When someone operated a forum in the days of yore, they had the opportunity to put up ads and many did. The difference I think is that they were doing so to fund or offset the costs of operating the forum, not as a profit engine above and beyond the cost of keeping the lights on.
That's fair. I think all advertising is naturally bad for the world, but you're right that it's the combination of advertising and greed that created the extremely deleterious environment we have now.
That said, greed fed by other monetization models would not have produced the attention economy, and I don't think the evils of other models (dark patterns for subscriptions, planned obselescence, etc) could have come close to the society-wide damage that the attention economy has caused.
That said, greed fed by other monetization models would not have produced the attention economy, and I don't think the evils of other models (dark patterns for subscriptions, planned obselescence, etc) could have come close to the society-wide damage that the attention economy has caused.
The core problem, as I see it, is copyright.
Content must be hosted, and hosting costs money. So how is money going to interact with this system?
Copyright answered that question in the worst possible way. Copyright says that the content itself is the object with monetary value. To support that claim, copyright wraps every piece of content in a box, and says, "Whoever made this shall monopolize its value." In reality, only the box itself can actually behave as a discrete commodity, and no one truly creates content alone: all art is derivative, especially written media. Regardless of reality, copyright demands that we all participate in this delusional game.
So now everyone who hosts content is holding commodities. It's naturally advantageous to exploit the value of your commodities (you can reinvest your profit into actual value), so any business that does that will be more successful than the rest. Anyone who refuses to play the game will simply lose (or be prosecuted). So how do you sell forum posts and memes?
You don't. That doesn't make any sense, remember? You don't actually sell the content: you sell the box. You sell the warehouse. You sell the marketplace. This entire game is predicated on monopoly, so what's the most natural implementation? Vertical integration! Facebook and Twitter don't sell social networks: they sell social walls. What are those walls made of? Incompatibility. The best part is: if anyone tries to build a door into your wall, you get to sue them out of existence! It doesn't matter how broken or exploitative your business model is: if it is based on copyright, then it is guaranteed by law to succeed!
So now you own everyone and everything. How do you make money? By selling them to each other. In other words: advertising.
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But wait, there's more! Copyright answered even more questions: How do you stop people from misrepresenting someone else's work as their own? How do you stop people from sharing your secrets? How do you censor abusive material? The answer is to prosecute fraud and abuse, because those are already illegal. Right? Right? No. That would make too much sense. The real answer is copyright.
Content must be hosted, and hosting costs money. So how is money going to interact with this system?
Copyright answered that question in the worst possible way. Copyright says that the content itself is the object with monetary value. To support that claim, copyright wraps every piece of content in a box, and says, "Whoever made this shall monopolize its value." In reality, only the box itself can actually behave as a discrete commodity, and no one truly creates content alone: all art is derivative, especially written media. Regardless of reality, copyright demands that we all participate in this delusional game.
So now everyone who hosts content is holding commodities. It's naturally advantageous to exploit the value of your commodities (you can reinvest your profit into actual value), so any business that does that will be more successful than the rest. Anyone who refuses to play the game will simply lose (or be prosecuted). So how do you sell forum posts and memes?
You don't. That doesn't make any sense, remember? You don't actually sell the content: you sell the box. You sell the warehouse. You sell the marketplace. This entire game is predicated on monopoly, so what's the most natural implementation? Vertical integration! Facebook and Twitter don't sell social networks: they sell social walls. What are those walls made of? Incompatibility. The best part is: if anyone tries to build a door into your wall, you get to sue them out of existence! It doesn't matter how broken or exploitative your business model is: if it is based on copyright, then it is guaranteed by law to succeed!
So now you own everyone and everything. How do you make money? By selling them to each other. In other words: advertising.
---
But wait, there's more! Copyright answered even more questions: How do you stop people from misrepresenting someone else's work as their own? How do you stop people from sharing your secrets? How do you censor abusive material? The answer is to prosecute fraud and abuse, because those are already illegal. Right? Right? No. That would make too much sense. The real answer is copyright.
There was somewhat of a golden era of independent forums (be them phpBB, vBulletin, etc.), but they were for the most part isolated communities. The rise of social media platforms brought some useful centralisation (lowering the barrier to engage - though arguably OpenID, etc. could have achieved the same), but realistically it has turned many platforms into a hellscape of “idiots”.
I disagree that the centralization was useful. The isolated communities were healthier and funner as a result of being smaller and disconnected from other communities—the isolation worked towards their benefit not their detriment. No one could go trawling through your posts in other communities and decide they don't like you after all because you had an identity there that could be completely different from your identity in other communities.
I think the centralization is actually a huge contributing factor to the decline in overall health of the internet. We didn't evolve in a way that's compatible with seeing everything that our friends say to any of their other friend groups—we're wired for compartmentalized interactions, not global state.
I think the centralization is actually a huge contributing factor to the decline in overall health of the internet. We didn't evolve in a way that's compatible with seeing everything that our friends say to any of their other friend groups—we're wired for compartmentalized interactions, not global state.
Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising.
Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.
That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.
If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.
Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.
That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.
If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.
> It was free before the insane amount of advertising.
It was better before the insane amount of advertising.
It was better before the insane amount of advertising.
> It was better before the insane amount of advertising.
There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.
There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.
Geocities is an interesting case. It didn't start with ads and they monitored sites and told people to remove them (I received one such email). It wasn't out of some altruistic ideals though. They just didn't want anyone to advertise before they got their ads running on everyone's sites.
In the beginning there was no ads, but they got pretty aggressive at the end (1999ish)
> Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising.
It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership).
A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.
Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.
It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership).
A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.
Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.
> The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.
If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?
BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.
If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?
BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.
> If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?
Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns.
The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.
Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns.
The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.
> If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature.
This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users.
They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.
This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users.
They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.
This feels like Adblock Plus adding "acceptable ads".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...
How can you say that the infrastructure costs are secondary?
How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?
How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?
> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?
Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.
When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.
When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.
The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.
> I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.
Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.
The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.
> I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.
> which didn't have the volume
agreed
> and quality
filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...
agreed
> and quality
filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...
Agree. Production quality != overall quality. I'd much rather have great content badly produced than professionally produced crap.
Most people still seem to watch Hollywood quality movies so I don't know if your taste is very representative.
High sales != quality. Maybe high sales ~= lowest common denominator?
High sales doesn't mean quality but it does reflect the choice of the majority.
So if we were to move to a world where high quality productions were not feasible anymore for some reason or another then by definition most people would find this to be a problem.
So if we were to move to a world where high quality productions were not feasible anymore for some reason or another then by definition most people would find this to be a problem.
No, I think the majority would just take what they're given.
Most "content" is "consumed" just to have something to do.
Most "content" is "consumed" just to have something to do.
If by Hollywood quality you mean that it's professionally produced to a high standard (of production, of course), than I don't see what's bad about that. I only said I value content quality much more than production quality. Great content produced to a high standard is better than the same content badly produced.
There are some great movies out of Hollywood.
There are some great movies out of Hollywood.
Would they watch so many if they weren’t available at every movie theater in town and every streaming service on earth? A lot of attention has been devoted to such movies that would have been invested elsewhere in other efforts if movies didn’t exist.
> filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...
Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.
Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.
I would argue that the average quality was higher by a few magnitudes due to the higher entry barrier alone. The average production value is higher these days, but that doesn't correlate with quality too much. Simple truth is that hobbyists, enthusiasts and professionals are often one and the same people.
There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.
With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.
Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.
I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.
There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.
With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.
Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.
I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.
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> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content
This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.
This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.
> This silences a large number of people
I'd argue advertising silences many more.
Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*
* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.
I'd argue advertising silences many more.
Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*
* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.
That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.
Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.
Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.
> That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.
Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.
Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.
The thing is, if your community is small costs are probably in the couple dollars a month range. An order of magnitude lower than the costs of hardware like your computer. If communities are large where an individual cannot trivially bear the costs, donation models have worked where the community itself funds its hosting.
Not nearly everybody on the Internet has ever bought their own computer. There's schools, public libraries etc., to say nothing of the billions of people that have only a smartphone and no desktop or laptop at all.
So what? Takes nothing from the point that hosting is in the dollars a month paid for by a half hour of work in most of the western world. I’m sure developing countries have cheaper hosting costs to match to purchasing power in these locations.
I'd happily provide hosting to a whole lot of media that I enjoy myself and would love to share. I might have bandwidth limits each month, but within reason, I'd share.
predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.
predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.
Honestly, when the internet was younger the costs to host content were basically zero. Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs. Many ISPs offered shell accounts and provided basic webhosting at no additional cost. These could be scaled up as needed, but everybody with a modem and an ISP had the opportunity to take part in sharing content on the internet.
> Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs.
On dialup?
On dialup?
Yes. Websites back then didn't have hundreds of MBs of javascript bloat though so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. The internet over 56k was surprisingly usable.
Maybe in terms of bandwidth, but unless you were fine with never being able to make or receive any more phone calls, how would hosting a website have worked without a second dedicated phone line?
In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.
In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.
It did need a dedicated line. Same with the people who ran a BBS out of their home. I knew people who had 3-5 dedicated phone lines running into their houses to support that. Paying per minute for dial up was thankfully not something I had to deal with (unless I was calling into a PoP that was long distance). I can see how the costs of that would get insane very quickly.
[deleted]
Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right.
has anybody tried to argue this here? who are you replying to?
> Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right
Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.
Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.
I pay my telecom for 500mbit up and down, what other infrastructure must be paid for to support torrenting?
Each individual seeder is paying for electricity, storage, and internet access to make those torrents available to you.
Right, and I'm one of them!
Through torrents, for example.
The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.
And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
> The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.
Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.
> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.
> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
> Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.
I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.
> No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.
> The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.
I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.
> No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.
> The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.
Seems like you think the whole collection has to be in one single torrent, rather than a separate torrent for each video, and that the complete works of all channels have to be seeded from a single source?
The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.
It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"
The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.
It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"
> It was free before the insane amount of advertising.
It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions.
It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.
It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions.
It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.
I might not be old enough to remember when the internet was ad free but I'm 34 and since I've been on the internet, popups and advertising garbage have always been around. I want to say I started using it around 1996-1997
Ad space was sold directly by the website owner, and the ad banner was just static HTML or an image served from the site directly. Then iframes and DoubleClick arrived, and suddenly ads were served from third party sites via iframes, which would load advertiser scripts and it was downhill from there.
Most importantly, advertisement is a business. It's not charity and it's not a publicly owned resource. It doesn't keep the Internet free, because it makes a boat load of money doing what it does. It doesn't take an expert understanding of economics to see that any belief that advertisement allows for a free Internet is smoke and mirrors. The money comes from somewhere, notably from you.
Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.
Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.
Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.
Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.
Right. Again, not our problem. We aren't making money off of it, they are, from exploiting us and finding new ways to psychologically enhance their ways of advertisement to make boatloads of money. That's a solid 'No.' - Everything is a giant billboard already, tailored and catered directly to an algorithm based solely on how it knows me better than I know me; I want less of that. The excuse 'it's how we pay for this and that' doesn't have to be acceptable by all of us, and isn't. Eventually enough has to be enough, that time should be now.
I view content. It either exists and is delivered to me, or it doesn't. Either way, I'm blocking it, for my mental health. I see your viewpoint. But, I'm not a metric, I'm not a KPI, I'm not a cost per click, or a cost per view. I don't want my data saved, tracked, bought, sold, manipulated, interpolated, twisted, catered and sprinkled on top to deliver to the next guy. I'm a human being.
I get it, I entirely do, but that's my stance. I'm sticking with it.
I view content. It either exists and is delivered to me, or it doesn't. Either way, I'm blocking it, for my mental health. I see your viewpoint. But, I'm not a metric, I'm not a KPI, I'm not a cost per click, or a cost per view. I don't want my data saved, tracked, bought, sold, manipulated, interpolated, twisted, catered and sprinkled on top to deliver to the next guy. I'm a human being.
I get it, I entirely do, but that's my stance. I'm sticking with it.
I agree with you. I was just pointing out that the idea of advertisement funding a free Internet is already a lie in the first place.
I am 100% anti advertisement, for the record. It is disgusting and non-consensual, and nobody should tolerate it.
I am 100% anti advertisement, for the record. It is disgusting and non-consensual, and nobody should tolerate it.
> It doesn't keep the Internet free
There are two different definitions of free.
Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However there is also freedom and advertising doesn't help there at all.
There are two different definitions of free.
Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However there is also freedom and advertising doesn't help there at all.
That's the rub. You do pay for it. By the intention and definition of the business, advertisement eventually extracts money from you. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise. The fact that it happens more subtly and enables them to extract money from you in ways that you don't notice doesn't change the fact that it's still paid for.
An advertisement funded Internet is still you paying for your content, it's just built so that you don't feel like you're paying for it. Advertisement is not free money, and it can not be free money. It's for-profit.
So with advertisement, you're still paying for the Internet. We don't have a free Internet. We have an Internet built around businesses that make their entire business around psychological manipulation and extracting money from people without being noticed. The fact that people still push the myth that advertisement enables a free Internet like ad companies are somehow a public service shows how good they are at manipulation.
An advertisement funded Internet is still you paying for your content, it's just built so that you don't feel like you're paying for it. Advertisement is not free money, and it can not be free money. It's for-profit.
So with advertisement, you're still paying for the Internet. We don't have a free Internet. We have an Internet built around businesses that make their entire business around psychological manipulation and extracting money from people without being noticed. The fact that people still push the myth that advertisement enables a free Internet like ad companies are somehow a public service shows how good they are at manipulation.
I think there are legitimate cases where a business has a product available at a price that is net positive to both the business (profitable) and customer (consumer surplus) but is having trouble connecting with consumers. What % of advertising this is versus pushing low quality trash, branding, status symbols, and scams, I have no idea.
I've thought a lot about this because I owned and operated a business for 18 years, for 15 of those years it was my primary source of income, and it was entirely ad-based even though my "users" often complimented me on having an ad-free product. It was all affiliate promotion, they were there for the free content and it wasn't obvious that the free content was promo for subscription services, plus the affiliate links weren't being shoved in peoples' faces. They were there if people wanted more and were willing to pay, and the click-through rates were decent and it was profitable, so this type of "non-intrusive" advertising does work.
But ... I happen to be someone who REALLY DESPISES ADS ALWAYS
I'm not as "black pilled" as the comments that started this. My issue is not that ads try and psychologically manipulate people. I don't think that there is anything intrinsically wrong with trying to persuade someone to buy something.
My problem with ads is that they are annoying and distracting, most are this way by design, and they come at you completely unsolicited.
If there was a way that I could opt in or out of being shown ads in all areas of life, so that if I were interested in learning about new products I can, but if I'm not interested the ads can kindly fuck off and leave me alone ... that would be grand.
And that kind of exists. I mean, if I attend a ComicCon I'm going to a big trade show. I'm hoping that the show floor will have tons of wares and demos and such. I'm looking to buy. If I go on Amazon and start searching for products, by all means spam me with results related to what I'm looking for.
But if I'm trying to watch tv, or I'm on social media or in a context where I'm not actively looking to discover products that I might be interested in purchasing, I get downright offended and triggered when suddenly some dipshit character in a commercial is like: "look how ridiculous and annoying I am while using this product I want you to buy. If you buy it you can be just as moronic, obnoxious and annoying as me." In those situations I wish that advertising would just cease to exist in all forms all together.
But ... I happen to be someone who REALLY DESPISES ADS ALWAYS
I'm not as "black pilled" as the comments that started this. My issue is not that ads try and psychologically manipulate people. I don't think that there is anything intrinsically wrong with trying to persuade someone to buy something.
My problem with ads is that they are annoying and distracting, most are this way by design, and they come at you completely unsolicited.
If there was a way that I could opt in or out of being shown ads in all areas of life, so that if I were interested in learning about new products I can, but if I'm not interested the ads can kindly fuck off and leave me alone ... that would be grand.
And that kind of exists. I mean, if I attend a ComicCon I'm going to a big trade show. I'm hoping that the show floor will have tons of wares and demos and such. I'm looking to buy. If I go on Amazon and start searching for products, by all means spam me with results related to what I'm looking for.
But if I'm trying to watch tv, or I'm on social media or in a context where I'm not actively looking to discover products that I might be interested in purchasing, I get downright offended and triggered when suddenly some dipshit character in a commercial is like: "look how ridiculous and annoying I am while using this product I want you to buy. If you buy it you can be just as moronic, obnoxious and annoying as me." In those situations I wish that advertising would just cease to exist in all forms all together.
I have sometimes bought something via advertisement that I wouldn't have known existed without. As such I'm glad those advertisements exist because my life is better for those things.
Most advertisements are for junk that makes your life worse if you buy, but there are some that are useful.
Most advertisements are for junk that makes your life worse if you buy, but there are some that are useful.
> Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However
Ads and the spying they depend on only trick you into thinking that you aren't paying for it when in reality, not only are you paying (often resulting with money coming out of your pocket) but you also never get to stop paying for it.
Once your data is out there, it will be used against you for the rest of your life. It never goes away.
It'll be passed around to advertisers, data brokers, law enforcement, lawyers, employers, insurance companies, scammers, retailers, and activists and year after year, decade after decade, every single person who gets their hands on your data will try to use it against you in any and every way that they feel will be to their benefit, and it will almost always be at your expense.
Ads and the spying they depend on only trick you into thinking that you aren't paying for it when in reality, not only are you paying (often resulting with money coming out of your pocket) but you also never get to stop paying for it.
Once your data is out there, it will be used against you for the rest of your life. It never goes away.
It'll be passed around to advertisers, data brokers, law enforcement, lawyers, employers, insurance companies, scammers, retailers, and activists and year after year, decade after decade, every single person who gets their hands on your data will try to use it against you in any and every way that they feel will be to their benefit, and it will almost always be at your expense.
That is not a requirement for advertising. It is how it often works, but it need not be that way. How do we stop all the other side effects is the question. (I don't know the answer to this)
I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.
HN does not have extensive server costs. Last I saw (~10 years ago) it was running off a single machine in a closet. Apparently they've since moved to two machines at a hosting company.
But they do employ full-time moderators as well... dang and co. need to eat!
It's no more ironic than the thousands of Google-related topics on this site that focus on their technology, and almost entirely ignores their ad business that holds up the entire operation and drives their strategy.
If Google drops some pet projects we'll see the same predictable stream of comments blaming ladder-climbing PMs, MBA management, H1B employees, everything other than the simplest explanation, that the powers that be got tired of subsidizing it with the one line of business that actually makes money.
If Google drops some pet projects we'll see the same predictable stream of comments blaming ladder-climbing PMs, MBA management, H1B employees, everything other than the simplest explanation, that the powers that be got tired of subsidizing it with the one line of business that actually makes money.
the relationship this forum has to the VC is similar to what a lot of forums had to their operators. There is little direct revenue gathering here - the VCs make money in other ways and spend a small fraction of it on this forum. At most, they advertise their other activities sometimes. The whole web used to be like this.
I come here largely to find out what VC money (and the culture around it) is doing because it affects me (and everyone). Don't mistake that for supporting what VC money is doing.
If HN didn't exist people would gather on another link aggregator.
HN is only as good as dang makes it. There are a ton of other link aggregators out there, many more “free” than this. Yet here we are. Why? Because the folks behind this link aggregator pay dang to be here.
There is obviously also a network effect at play here that makes people unwilling to explore new options. But just like MySpace, Facebook or tumblr showed you can always ruin a good thing and eventually people will move onto greener pastures.
However, I love love love Hackernews and dang is one of the main reasons this little internet place became such an oasis for the intellectually curious, and interesting as well as serious conversation.
However, I love love love Hackernews and dang is one of the main reasons this little internet place became such an oasis for the intellectually curious, and interesting as well as serious conversation.
What are they? Can you link to them? Would love to see what else is out there!
Personally I don't care much for discussion about web programming really, but more general tech news(fusion, space and the related politics).
For one, https://boards.4chan.org/g/. You’ll see pretty quickly why advertising funded message boards with laissez-faire moderation are a bad idea.
Care to explain how those websites are funded? Would any of them be viable with the amount of traffic of HN (server, moderation etc)?
And yet no successful link aggregator has ever been "free" or "open" in a meaningful sense.
Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of people, with no recourse or accountability.
I've been listening to users lamenting "the tech to avoid centralized control doesn't exist" etc. for 20 years, but it definitely does exist today, and it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.
Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of people, with no recourse or accountability.
I've been listening to users lamenting "the tech to avoid centralized control doesn't exist" etc. for 20 years, but it definitely does exist today, and it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.
I think the problem is simply the network effect. Reddit and Twitter are just hard to beat, maybe threads, utilizing the massive Instagram user base managed but I haven't heard anyone use it and I don't think you can force it
Centralization is what makes stuff like this interesting. I come here because the comments are nice, not just because the links are interesting.
It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.
It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.
The fediverse gets all those centralization advantages without being centralized. However there are not (yet!) the quantity of people needed to make it work.
Nor quality, unfortunately.
Depends on what you want. some places you can find just as high quality. There is a lot of junk out there to wage through. They also have a "allergic reaction" to the thought of an algorithm to curate feeds which throws the good out with the bad.
I would very sincerely ask what places and what quality?
More like which niche. I find transit advocates do a lot on mastodon. There are also a lot of great open source projects (the curl maintainer posts some interesting stuff). Those are niches I'm interested in though, YMMV in anything else.
> it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.
This is a fallacy. Sounds like you're invoking "revealed preference."
I care strongly that decentralized tech like Lemmy exists... but Lemmy is a dumpster fire project badly managed, so I've given up on using it.
This is a fallacy. Sounds like you're invoking "revealed preference."
I care strongly that decentralized tech like Lemmy exists... but Lemmy is a dumpster fire project badly managed, so I've given up on using it.
> Matrix
Not a link aggregator.
> Lemmy
Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?
Not a link aggregator.
> Lemmy
Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?
Hey, if the VCs don't want to run this site, I will gladly host it for free.
> They can find other business models other than advertisement.
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.
You're arguing that speech should earn a living, which sounds like asserting everyone has the right to patronage.
Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.
Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.
Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.
Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.
> You're arguing that speech should earn a living
I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.
Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.
I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.
Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.
I agree that ads are basically here to stay, in one form or another. And that most people arguing that the internet could migrate towards another model are probably wrong (people want free stuff, and a lot of people don't even mind ads sadly enough...). But I think that the user agent (the browser) shouldn't care at all about the sustainability of businesses or how viable blocking ads are for tech businesses. It should just do what's best for the user, or at least give the option to do that.
Article in German about this from August 1: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/klage-gegen-datenschutzbehoerde...
They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying.
The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks a month if you don't use targeted advertising as the "threat"? Maybe, just maybe, non-targeted advertising would already be enough? Many people pay to get rid of ads, not of surveillance, after all...
They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying.
The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks a month if you don't use targeted advertising as the "threat"? Maybe, just maybe, non-targeted advertising would already be enough? Many people pay to get rid of ads, not of surveillance, after all...
> The question is, can you convince
Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers, I guess.
I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay.
Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned quite fast. That was still before these vicious tracking techniques and cookie banners. People simply didn't want to pay for the access. Their tagline was "Do you value good journalism?" and it was memed out because the quality of these paid materials was considered as low. Many people complained that it's not that much different from stuff available for free. Others raised an argument that access to the information on the Internet should be free and they didn't want to spend money on this. Discussion happen, taking on paid content in general but whole thing fizzled out just like that paywall system.
Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers, I guess.
I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay.
Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned quite fast. That was still before these vicious tracking techniques and cookie banners. People simply didn't want to pay for the access. Their tagline was "Do you value good journalism?" and it was memed out because the quality of these paid materials was considered as low. Many people complained that it's not that much different from stuff available for free. Others raised an argument that access to the information on the Internet should be free and they didn't want to spend money on this. Discussion happen, taking on paid content in general but whole thing fizzled out just like that paywall system.
Shouldn't you be happy with paywalling, and with these experiments at monetizing content in ways other than ads?
But as I've always said, the staunchly "anti-advertising"/"information should be free"/"the web would have far more high-quality information if it was fully free" people, not you specifically, but most people in this thread, just feel entitled to other people's labor, for free. Content creators know. Most of the people bitchin' about ads are willing to pay you zilch. They still very much want your content, though. Story as old as time. Just strictly regulate any data-collection and data-selling, that's the real problem.
But as I've always said, the staunchly "anti-advertising"/"information should be free"/"the web would have far more high-quality information if it was fully free" people, not you specifically, but most people in this thread, just feel entitled to other people's labor, for free. Content creators know. Most of the people bitchin' about ads are willing to pay you zilch. They still very much want your content, though. Story as old as time. Just strictly regulate any data-collection and data-selling, that's the real problem.
> I'm afraid that it's a new trend
Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?
And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.
Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?
And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.
> The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down.
All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax/license funded media would still be around and assuming that the free market is actually a thing, companies would emerge to plug the holes left be the clickbait sites, at a price.
As it stands we're seeing those with the means paying for actual content and everyone else is just getting absolute garbage.
msn.com is my favorite example, why is that still around? Most of the ads are actual scams, all article link to other sites, which are equally scammy. Why? Because it makes Microsoft money and they do not care about their users getting scammed, as long as they get their cut.
I don't think ads should be the main way we fund content online, it's clearly not working anymore. The ad space has become the product and whatever content remains is just enough to trick people to going to the site and clicking a link or two. The content is no longer about enlightening or even entertaining, it's about trapping people in some twisted hedonic treadmill.
It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down.
All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax/license funded media would still be around and assuming that the free market is actually a thing, companies would emerge to plug the holes left be the clickbait sites, at a price.
As it stands we're seeing those with the means paying for actual content and everyone else is just getting absolute garbage.
msn.com is my favorite example, why is that still around? Most of the ads are actual scams, all article link to other sites, which are equally scammy. Why? Because it makes Microsoft money and they do not care about their users getting scammed, as long as they get their cut.
I don't think ads should be the main way we fund content online, it's clearly not working anymore. The ad space has become the product and whatever content remains is just enough to trick people to going to the site and clicking a link or two. The content is no longer about enlightening or even entertaining, it's about trapping people in some twisted hedonic treadmill.
It's not a problem if you don't go to the parts of the web that have ads. I spend my time online on places like GitHub that operate as ad-free commission-free gift economies. Environments that have ads, have nothing that I want. I don't care about what happens in them any more than I care about what happens in shantytowns. Why do you care? What pulls you into those dark Internet spaces?
That's a fair point, but I care also care a great deal about society as a whole, and I feel like the ad model is damaging to those around me. I quite frankly don't get why TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook and others are allow to manipulate people to spend hours doom scrolling, just to show ads. TikTok even knows this is bad, because that's not how they operate in China apparently.
I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.
The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.
I don't like online ads and the web they've created.
I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.
The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.
I don't like online ads and the web they've created.
Society is full of predators. In the beginning, people got eaten in the jungle, and today they get monitored to learn their desires and then shown pictures of things they want. How do you know you're not being manipulated? Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you. Power is focus which means people are disempowered by getting them to focus their attention on things that don't matter. Advertisers normally need to pay cash money to buy someone's attention but you gave yours up for free. If everyone else is watching ads, then you're watching them watch ads. You're not any more free than they are. The simple fact of the matter is you won't be able to save others from this system, because you haven't even saved yourself.
> Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you.
I'm not sure "you should stop caring about other people" is the right message to take from...anything, really.
I'm not sure "you should stop caring about other people" is the right message to take from...anything, really.
Which people? Anyone who tells me I should care about people in general, I always assume it's an attempt at manipulation, because it's an illogical way of thinking.
At this point, "those dark Internet spaces" includes most news on most subjects. GitHub is great, but it can't be my entire world.
News is a narcotic that, like ads and social media, preys on human weakness. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the purveyors of news would partner with purveyors of ads, similar to how casinos like to partner with alcohol and tobacco companies.
You mean poor news, right? There is such a thing as news, coming from reputable sources, at least, as reputable as a friend of a friend. We can agree to start from the position knowing all news information is biased, but if you still end up with that view, where is the learning coming from?
News isn't just biased. Modern technology gives us the power to get news from the source. In the past, a reporter would report on something that happened to a person. Today, that person can just post what happened to them on Twitter. Where do you think journos get their information from? The only reason to have another layer is to curate, decipher, and explain the raw information. That means applying bias. In fact it means news is bias in today's world, which is fine if you're aligned with the person doing it. For example, internal newsletters at companies are a great source of information, because your interests are intertwined. But you might not necessarily feel that way when it comes to media organizations that are mouthpieces of the state. Algorithms like Twitter are a much better system, because the worst bias they can inject is curation. They can't do spin and they can't assign meaning. At least not if you're only looking at the raw feeds. If you limit it to "Following" then it can't curate either, so the platform is capable of providing a small corner we can choose to be in that has zero bias other than your own.
I don't get your point. You are describing a world I do not take part in, I think for myself. And make adjustments appropriate to me. Your points are mostly circular and decidedly lacking in irony. I repeat, if what you say is so true, how do you learn? It sounds as if the barest of truth is out of reach, no matter what. How do I thus gauge the content of your words?
If by truth you mean facts, then most news is factual. Non-facts are easy to disprove. News is about glomming beliefs and emotion onto facts, similar to how advertisements get attached to web pages. If you're looking for truth, look to math.
That's not what news is at all. That's biased news. And not facts either. You might be confused with talking about how one projects feelings on to stories, filter internally, and, inevitably, bias them all by oneself.
> focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price
We’re a minority. See: every comment complaining about paywalls.
We’re a minority. See: every comment complaining about paywalls.
> No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us.
The internet is neither free, nor open. I'm paying for it and there are all the geo-blocked and walled content. I'm grateful for the parts that are accessible at least (without sucking my private data dry). I don't mind advertising, but it should be a function of what I'm currently watching/listening instead of myself. I pay for F1TV and there are so much logos, but I don't mind them. Likewise for Soccer.
The internet is neither free, nor open. I'm paying for it and there are all the geo-blocked and walled content. I'm grateful for the parts that are accessible at least (without sucking my private data dry). I don't mind advertising, but it should be a function of what I'm currently watching/listening instead of myself. I pay for F1TV and there are so much logos, but I don't mind them. Likewise for Soccer.
And free beer isn't free because you still need to pay for gas to haul it home?
That certain parts are locked off also doesn't make the internet as a whole not open.
That certain parts are locked off also doesn't make the internet as a whole not open.
mozilla used to have this smart guy, brendan something, as their cto. but he was chased out of mozilla and created a new browser called brave. it actually does what this current cto claims to be trying to do
[deleted]
Yeah, being against advertising isn't fundamentally about privacy. I mean, I care about privacy too, but even an ad that collects no data about me is bad. I simply do not want products shoved in my face. If I need something from your company I'll come to you.
Yes, in the current environment, companies have to advertise to compete with competition that advertises. This is why we need to agree as a society to stop this nonsense, so that companies that don't advertise are in competition with other companies that don't advertise, competing for independent review based on the quality of their products and services.
Advertising undermines the fundamental premise that companies win in competition by providing the best products and services. An well-marketed inferior product outcompetes a poorly-marketed superior product every time, and that's a problem. Advertising should be viewed as anti-competitive, because it's not competing on the metrics that serve people's needs: which is the entire point of an economy.
Yes, in the current environment, companies have to advertise to compete with competition that advertises. This is why we need to agree as a society to stop this nonsense, so that companies that don't advertise are in competition with other companies that don't advertise, competing for independent review based on the quality of their products and services.
Advertising undermines the fundamental premise that companies win in competition by providing the best products and services. An well-marketed inferior product outcompetes a poorly-marketed superior product every time, and that's a problem. Advertising should be viewed as anti-competitive, because it's not competing on the metrics that serve people's needs: which is the entire point of an economy.
> is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone
The internet is free to hardly anyone. People pay for broadband and mobile plans.
Free Wi-Fi hotspots are what actually keeps the internet free for many people.
The internet is free to hardly anyone. People pay for broadband and mobile plans.
Free Wi-Fi hotspots are what actually keeps the internet free for many people.
Without advertisements, the internet would only have content worth paying for and content people want to share for reasons other than financial gain. How awful (/s).
That's the thing... people would still make free content, and since there wouldn't be as many shady ways to monetize, it would cut down on low-effort (and AI-generated) garbage. The internet would be such a better place.
We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.
We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.
I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage. The high effort non-garbage stuff is produced by professionals who have the luxury of spending a full work week's amount of time improving their craft. writers writing free content with no business model can't do that unless they have a trust fund. which, I suppose they're out there, but I doubt the number of those that are writers.
> I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage.
Right now the main search engine everyone uses is run by an ad company. Just getting rid of that conflict of interest would probably help to significantly weed out garbage.
Right now the main search engine everyone uses is run by an ad company. Just getting rid of that conflict of interest would probably help to significantly weed out garbage.
I'm pretty confident that without advertising, the majority of YouTube channels people love most would not exist.
maybe overall that would be a good thing as there's so much trash too
maybe overall that would be a good thing as there's so much trash too
Youtube didn't have ads for years. Yet there was plenty of content people uploaded with no expectation of payment. Just like the early Internet. MIT OCW and Khan Academy also pre-date YT.
As for all the high production value channels out there now, YT doesn't pay their bills, subscriptions, brand deals and merchandise do. YT is like MTV: good for exposure, the real product is sold through other channels.
As for all the high production value channels out there now, YT doesn't pay their bills, subscriptions, brand deals and merchandise do. YT is like MTV: good for exposure, the real product is sold through other channels.
I'm pretty sure ad revenue for most channels is negligible so they resort to third party sponsorships or platforms like Patreon. The advertisements are there for Google to recoup some of the cost of running YT.
not sure what your point is. let's assume it's true. That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos. Without that those channels would have to pay for hosting themselves and could not afford to make the content.
Further, most of them would have never even tried if it wasn't free to start
Then, I don't buy your premise. Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly for Brilliant, NordVPN, etc... which means even without YouTube's ads they're still ad driven
Further, most of them would have never even tried if it wasn't free to start
Then, I don't buy your premise. Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly for Brilliant, NordVPN, etc... which means even without YouTube's ads they're still ad driven
> Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly
Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.
> That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos
Your assertion was related to the channels themselves existing, not YT as a platform. I can agree that the platform probably wouldn't exist without some sort of funding source but that doesn't necessarily need to come from ads.
Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.
> That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos
Your assertion was related to the channels themselves existing, not YT as a platform. I can agree that the platform probably wouldn't exist without some sort of funding source but that doesn't necessarily need to come from ads.
> Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.
That supports my point. Ads are paying for the content.
That supports my point. Ads are paying for the content.
Most of my favorite channels make more money from one or more of:
1. Premium subscribers
2. Direct support on Patreon
3. Direct video sponsorship (a form of advertising, but wholly tolerable IMO)
4. Direct support by joining Nebula, which has no ads
1. Premium subscribers
2. Direct support on Patreon
3. Direct video sponsorship (a form of advertising, but wholly tolerable IMO)
4. Direct support by joining Nebula, which has no ads
I don’t know if it’s still true, but at least up until relatively recently, #3 and #4 were the same thing; Nebula paid its creators in YouTube sponsorship. (i.e, if you were a Nebula creator, you got “paid” by Nebula buying sponsorships on your YouTube channel)
3 is ads and fits my point. The content wouldn't exist without ads.
Most people won't pay for content, no matter how good it is.
Especially for text content.
People still download or stream movies and TV series even though there are multiple high quality and official streaming platforms.
Especially for text content.
People still download or stream movies and TV series even though there are multiple high quality and official streaming platforms.
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My guess is that this[0] means we might see some manifest v3 type stuff happen in the future as ad blocking becomes a conflict of interest for Mozilla.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
Here's the Firefox CTO explaining the motivation behind the experiment controlled by this setting, and the measures taken to ensure that it actually is private:
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
The hypocrisy in this post is astonishing.
> The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance
And Mozilla are contributing to it in all but name.
> primary reason many of us are at Mozilla.
If that is the case, and this is the best fight you can muster give up, go home and hand over the fight to better people. A mission to create the weapons people need to fight online surveillance requires guile, a strong will, a strong stomach, a clear understanding of who the enemy is and the ability to stick to some basic principles,
> Digital advertising is not going away
What kind of a defeatist attitude is that? People want it to go away. That's why they use Firefox. Mozilla are supposed to be defending that corner. What a lame cop out!
> but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right.
We had a working system for digital advertisement in the 1990s. Go back to that and figure where you got lost.
The linked post is a sad masterpiece of appeasement, cowardice and snivelling apologetic. Mozilla is abandoning it's mission and selling out. The CEO should step down.
> The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance
And Mozilla are contributing to it in all but name.
> primary reason many of us are at Mozilla.
If that is the case, and this is the best fight you can muster give up, go home and hand over the fight to better people. A mission to create the weapons people need to fight online surveillance requires guile, a strong will, a strong stomach, a clear understanding of who the enemy is and the ability to stick to some basic principles,
> Digital advertising is not going away
What kind of a defeatist attitude is that? People want it to go away. That's why they use Firefox. Mozilla are supposed to be defending that corner. What a lame cop out!
> but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right.
We had a working system for digital advertisement in the 1990s. Go back to that and figure where you got lost.
The linked post is a sad masterpiece of appeasement, cowardice and snivelling apologetic. Mozilla is abandoning it's mission and selling out. The CEO should step down.
Truth.
He doesn't explain how it works though, or why it is private. Only that we should trust them.
Incidentally this was published just now! https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
He also linked to this technical explainer, though I don't think that's necessarily written for a broader audience: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
He also linked to this technical explainer, though I don't think that's necessarily written for a broader audience: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
Oh, a flagged-dead throwaway comment pointed this out, but I guess it's fair to make explicit: I do work for Mozilla, but as an engineer, on an unrelated project. And I care about Mozilla and it's mission - so just sharing relevant links I came across on a personal title :)
And unsurprisingly, he just lies. Here's the crux of the bullshit:
"It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting."
No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago.
What the advertisers want is all sorts of other info on you, whether you end up as a customer or not. And they and their willing accomplices, now including Mozilla, ardently frame this as a necessity to keep the ad-supported content industry alive. What they never mention is that industry was thriving with the bare minimum of data they had 30 years ago, and more to the point, thrived with NO DATA AT ALL for over a century before it moved onto computers.
Do you think Macy's got any data on "conversions" when they listed their sale prices in the local paper? Yet somehow they were happy to keep paying for it, without any apocalyptic screeds about the imminent "death of newspapers" if we didn't start making customers record their unique customer ID before opening the paper or entering a retailer's store.
The truth is quite contrary to the ad industry's narrative- it's clear the shift of power balance in favor of the advertisers has been associated with all the industries dependent upon it getting worse.
"It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting."
No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago.
What the advertisers want is all sorts of other info on you, whether you end up as a customer or not. And they and their willing accomplices, now including Mozilla, ardently frame this as a necessity to keep the ad-supported content industry alive. What they never mention is that industry was thriving with the bare minimum of data they had 30 years ago, and more to the point, thrived with NO DATA AT ALL for over a century before it moved onto computers.
Do you think Macy's got any data on "conversions" when they listed their sale prices in the local paper? Yet somehow they were happy to keep paying for it, without any apocalyptic screeds about the imminent "death of newspapers" if we didn't start making customers record their unique customer ID before opening the paper or entering a retailer's store.
The truth is quite contrary to the ad industry's narrative- it's clear the shift of power balance in favor of the advertisers has been associated with all the industries dependent upon it getting worse.
To be honest, Macy's a century ago of course wanted data on conversions from newspaper ads. They could ask some customers whether they had seen the ad prior to going to shop. They could print coupons that you need to physically bring in to get a deal. They could pay agencies like Gallup to run more comprehensive customer research.
Shooting in the dark is a so-so strategy, and every business strives to do things in a more cost-efficient way.
(Corollary: if you want businesses to stop building dossiers on you, you have to make it unprofitable.)
Shooting in the dark is a so-so strategy, and every business strives to do things in a more cost-efficient way.
(Corollary: if you want businesses to stop building dossiers on you, you have to make it unprofitable.)
Disclaimer: I didn't work on this and I'm not an expert on the topic, but... As I understand it, it's not so much measuring how often a particular ad was seen, but how often the people who converted have seen a particular ad before, without anything about the people who did.
Conceptually, it's similar to cutting out a coupon from a newspaper to get a discount; the store then knows that that newspaper ad led to the sale. (Though of course, in the coupon case they can also see which customers saw those ads.)
Conceptually, it's similar to cutting out a coupon from a newspaper to get a discount; the store then knows that that newspaper ad led to the sale. (Though of course, in the coupon case they can also see which customers saw those ads.)
It's not similar to cutting out a coupon. It's placing a token with a permanent bluetooth tracker on every person that happens to use the nearby convenience store (firefox) without their knowing and having your staff pick up the tokens of those that walk into the paint shop with bluetooth connections.
The coupon analogy falls down anyway - Coupons are loss-leaders designed to impact and increase future spending trends usually, and typically provide a discount others cannot access, or a discount upon a known previous price point - in other words some type of (possibly spurious) discount.
Nobody leaves without a tracker, the description is vague and the direction of travel for purchasing becomes more Ad-laden. Company conversion and profit rates going up means the consumers are paying more than the otherwise would, either in price (profit) or volume. Can't you see how this can only be worse and is nothing like a coupon?
Advertising is not a net 0, people who see more advertising spend more of their money. This is correlated with quality of life and happiness negatively. Furthermore, if you have libertarian tendencies, advertising makes unknown companies like startups less appealing to consumers due to primal branding psychology, and stops them challenging incumbents. It's a net negative. It's worse for the consumers.
What's the primal reason you are contributing to this thread? To defend someone and their policy - or to avoid some other fear?
The coupon analogy falls down anyway - Coupons are loss-leaders designed to impact and increase future spending trends usually, and typically provide a discount others cannot access, or a discount upon a known previous price point - in other words some type of (possibly spurious) discount.
Nobody leaves without a tracker, the description is vague and the direction of travel for purchasing becomes more Ad-laden. Company conversion and profit rates going up means the consumers are paying more than the otherwise would, either in price (profit) or volume. Can't you see how this can only be worse and is nothing like a coupon?
Advertising is not a net 0, people who see more advertising spend more of their money. This is correlated with quality of life and happiness negatively. Furthermore, if you have libertarian tendencies, advertising makes unknown companies like startups less appealing to consumers due to primal branding psychology, and stops them challenging incumbents. It's a net negative. It's worse for the consumers.
What's the primal reason you are contributing to this thread? To defend someone and their policy - or to avoid some other fear?
My reason for contributing was that I think there's a misunderstanding if someone thinks it's targeting rather than measurement, which the comment I replied to stated.
There's a separate discussion to be had about whether advertising in general is a good or bad thing, whether Mozilla should be actively fighting it, and if that would even be viable, but I'm not too interested in that at the moment.
There's a separate discussion to be had about whether advertising in general is a good or bad thing, whether Mozilla should be actively fighting it, and if that would even be viable, but I'm not too interested in that at the moment.
Yup making this change will result in a slower move away from the current worse situation, which is less private then the proposed Mozilla future, is my reading.
Because advertisers will voluntarily give up their other tracking tools? Does that sound likely?
The fact that the disgusting parasitic entity that is Meta is a part of this makes me sick to my stomach. The fact that the Mozilla CTO is supportive of Meta being a part of it? Just unspeakable.
Using overwrought rhetoric doesn't help to make your point.
What point? They were describing their personal impressions. ffs.
Here is the actual script, if you prefer copy-pasting a one-liner over curl|sh...
echo 'user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);' | tee -a $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$(grep "Default=.*\.default*" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" | cut -d"=" -f2)/user.jsFrom the CEO's comments on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...):
> we support people configuring their browser however they choose
I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.
> we support people configuring their browser however they choose
I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.
I think if you a refresh it does flush all your add-ons, no? Unless you have sync turned on you’ll have fun reinstalling them again and setting them up to your liking, and that is pain for someone like me who has 11 of them. Even with sync you still lose settings if they aren’t “sync aware”
That offer to refresh always seemed a bit strange to me.
It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done.
Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application.
Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This shouldn't amount to wiping the profile/extensions
It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done.
Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application.
Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This shouldn't amount to wiping the profile/extensions
I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance.
I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.
I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.
it is—it uninstalls all of your bloat
the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one
the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one
“bloat”
Adblockers aren’t bloat; they make the web faster and more secure.
“ridiculous”
Mozilla’s paymasters are an advertising company.
Adblockers aren’t bloat; they make the web faster and more secure.
“ridiculous”
Mozilla’s paymasters are an advertising company.
that seems to me like a bad faith interpretation of what I wrote—I'm using "bloat" to mean all additional changes beyond the vanilla ff installation
re: "ridiculous", do you think it's likely that there's a deep conspiracy within mozilla (at the behest of google) to make users watch ads? or were you hoping that they'd write a whitelist of adblockers that should never be removed, even when wiping the browser?
re: "ridiculous", do you think it's likely that there's a deep conspiracy within mozilla (at the behest of google) to make users watch ads? or were you hoping that they'd write a whitelist of adblockers that should never be removed, even when wiping the browser?
By far the biggest hog of resources for me is Dark Reader. I don’t think any other extension even comes close. I still use it though because adding 300ms to a page load to me doesn’t phase me.
I only mention this because the effect of those things could be more effectively curtailed... if the users weren't encouraged to hide the shortcomings from the application.
Sweeping things under the rug, you know?
A browser should have history, data, and extensions. Getting rid of those things doesn't qualify as a fix. It's a diagnostic step!
Sweeping things under the rug, you know?
A browser should have history, data, and extensions. Getting rid of those things doesn't qualify as a fix. It's a diagnostic step!
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I would agree in general, but arguably uninstalling ublock makes the web much slower.
That was the moment I uninstalled FF and never went back. Truly icky behavior.
That's the CTO, not the CEO.
that's a really disappointing dark pattern from mozilla
I recently switched to LibreWolf[0] and, after tweaking a few settings that were more zealous that I'd like, it has been just as good as vanilla FF.
0: https://librewolf.net/
0: https://librewolf.net/
Have used it as my secondary browser (~everything that doesn't need login: documentation, news, etc) for a couple of years now and it is great.
Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that:
- stays up to date with development of FF
- turns off all the stupid ideas
- gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things
I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so.
So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying.
If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)
Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that:
- stays up to date with development of FF
- turns off all the stupid ideas
- gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things
I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so.
So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying.
If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)
Librewolf does #1 and #2 already. But generally, there's no market for that.
Most of those who say "I would pay for that" would indeed never do it. Because those people want something very specific - something you can only have via extensions and personal modifications. What you want is very specific to what you personally want and it is different to what everyone else wants.
And no one can create a browser project for your personal preferences.
Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to."
Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork.
People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user.
And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.
Most of those who say "I would pay for that" would indeed never do it. Because those people want something very specific - something you can only have via extensions and personal modifications. What you want is very specific to what you personally want and it is different to what everyone else wants.
And no one can create a browser project for your personal preferences.
Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to."
Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork.
People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user.
And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.
[deleted]
I donate to projects that make software that's important to me, too (LibreOffice, Signal etc). I'd actually donate to LibreWolf but I can't see a way to do so.
What settings and why? Did they break some sites? Been meaning to try LibreWolf too.
By default, LibreWolf clears cookies and browser history when it closes. I understand why, it's a bit too aggressive for me (and I use temporary container tabs, so cookies hanging around doesn't bother me).
ive found in the not too distant past that sometimes playing DRM content on librewolf to staight not work. For instance playing spotify will straight not work but will work fine in firefox
I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.)
If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.
1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad
2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad
3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing
It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.
Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.
If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.
1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad
2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad
3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing
It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.
Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.
I personally don't care if 90% of websites which rely on advertising disappear or replace their monetization strategy with gated, paid access. I even think this is a good thing.
As such, I will fight the ability of websites to monetize by tracking wherever I can.
As such, I will fight the ability of websites to monetize by tracking wherever I can.
That's not the alternative. The alternative is the death of most sites other than walled gardens like Meta and Amazon that own their own advertising end-to-end. Do you want the internet to be even more Meta controlled?
Who is using tracking? Its not mom and pop websites. Its big corporations. I could care less if they lost money. The internet would be a healthier place without corporations trying to shift public discourse in their favor.
Those mom and pop sites are often filled with trackers and ads. Assuming they haven't just moved to using a third party service that does it for them. It's like saying the person shooting you isn't at fault but only the gun they shoot you with.
The internet and humanity would exist fine without advertisers. History has proven this to be true.
History doesn't move backward and the internet users of the mid 90s are not the internet users of now. Give the vast majority of internet users a choice between the internet of mid 90s (after that ads powered it all) and having nothing but large tech owned sites to browse I think you're delusional if you think they'd actually pick the former.
after that ads powered it all
Of the top 100 sites in the US the only ones I see that don't have ads are corporate (ie: Microsoft, Capital One, etc.) and Wikipedia. Arguably the corporate ones are nothing but an ads for that brand. Even Home Depot has ads on its site.
I don't think a 1% rate of no ads is selling your point.
Even most of the smaller sites have Google ads on them in massive quantities.
I don't think a 1% rate of no ads is selling your point.
Even most of the smaller sites have Google ads on them in massive quantities.
This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet.
Also most people don't want to pay for content.
This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
Also most people don't want to pay for content.
This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
> This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet.
No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet.
And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.
> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them. The US seems like it's on the verge of state licensing of speech and journalism, and that sentiment is easily moved to any sort of internet hosting of any service.
No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet.
And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.
> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them. The US seems like it's on the verge of state licensing of speech and journalism, and that sentiment is easily moved to any sort of internet hosting of any service.
> And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.
They absolutely will have to since they won't have the means to serve the content to the community otherwise.
Niche websites won't stay niche for very long if they are the only free option.
> I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them.
I don't see most of these free alternatives even existing in the first place. For example: free news reporting (not even talking about foreign correspondents & co).
They absolutely will have to since they won't have the means to serve the content to the community otherwise.
Niche websites won't stay niche for very long if they are the only free option.
> I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them.
I don't see most of these free alternatives even existing in the first place. For example: free news reporting (not even talking about foreign correspondents & co).
> the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow
This is already happening.
They wanted to make us pay more because we are using netflix and other streaming services so much.
Everything important like internet and streets should be built and maintained by the gov and not some random companies, f*ck Telekom.
This is already happening.
They wanted to make us pay more because we are using netflix and other streaming services so much.
Everything important like internet and streets should be built and maintained by the gov and not some random companies, f*ck Telekom.
The issue is our government doesn’t function anything like that. We don’t build roads. We write checks to for profit contractors to build our roads. What would government internet look like? A massive check to meta and more or less the same environment we have today.
> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
Fine by me.
I'll browse the remaining 0.01%, search engines will be useful again and people won't be doom-scrolling all the time to see morons eating.
Fine by me.
I'll browse the remaining 0.01%, search engines will be useful again and people won't be doom-scrolling all the time to see morons eating.
> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
99.99% of your web.
99.99% of your web.
99.99% of the web, full stop.
What about HN? What about make-firefox-private-again.com? Go through the HN frontpage and the links. Thats why i'm sure you are wrong.
> What about HN?
The same HN that is heavily moderated by a paid employee and paid for by a multi-billion dollars net worth company called YCombinator?
The same HN that is heavily moderated by a paid employee and paid for by a multi-billion dollars net worth company called YCombinator?
Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable.
> Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable.
That's not the question. Hacker News was used as an example of an old-school site that worked without monetisation. Which is clearly not the case.
That's not the question. Hacker News was used as an example of an old-school site that worked without monetisation. Which is clearly not the case.
You used the word monetization, everyone else in this subthread is talking about advertising. HN is funded as a piece of content marketing for a startup accelerator.
I suppose you could call the Launch HN threads ads, but only just, and they're of the absolute least objectionable sort—on topic, clearly labeled, unobtrusive, first party, with no tracking.
I suppose you could call the Launch HN threads ads, but only just, and they're of the absolute least objectionable sort—on topic, clearly labeled, unobtrusive, first party, with no tracking.
Surely HN doesn't require the existence of YC as a startup accelerator to exist, right? HN has to me survived because of its community and shared values wrt discussion. The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.
> The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.
Do you believe that users are going to pay to get access to HN?
Do you believe that users are going to pay to get access to HN?
No, but I also believe that it's not so expensive that someone couldn't cover it if it was their hobby. This is doubly true if it's something like HN where it's not trying to scale to infinity.
If it weren't for YC and the network effect of of SV startup culture (remember it started as "Startup News"), HN would be just another niche forum from which most people would have migrated to Reddit ages ago. It might still exist, but only as a withered shell of its former self.
The only reason HN still persists at the scale that it does is precisely because of its association with YC and "tech bros," because the billion dollar venture capital firm running it has made it a part of their identity.
The only reason HN still persists at the scale that it does is precisely because of its association with YC and "tech bros," because the billion dollar venture capital firm running it has made it a part of their identity.
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Going back to 90s internet is a very good thing.
[deleted]
Which site from the 90s are you still visiting regularly in it's 90s form?
Personal blogs. Smaller online retailers. Not a web site, but Usenet and mailing lists.
/.
The same Slashdot that is monetised through advertisement with 500M monthly ad impressions?
Source: https://slashdotmedia.com/advertising-and-marketing-services...
Source: https://slashdotmedia.com/advertising-and-marketing-services...
I mean, they still don't/can't handle Unicode.
[deleted]
We had safe and private advertising back in the 90s. Local computer store in Cityville would pay money to local Cityville forum, and when you'd open the "computers" subforum, the Computer store banner would be at the top.
Then advertisers and websites went beserk, covered every square centimeter with ads, including the content of the websites themselves, and started tracking everything, from location, age, gender to shoe and penis size, and the only way to browse the internet as a sane person is with an adblock.
They had the possibility to work with a few ads that didn't bother people, but that wasn't enough, so now, blocking just some of the ads isn't enough for us. They started with the shitty behaviour, and I don't care if they go bankrupt and websites switch to a new way of surviving.
Then advertisers and websites went beserk, covered every square centimeter with ads, including the content of the websites themselves, and started tracking everything, from location, age, gender to shoe and penis size, and the only way to browse the internet as a sane person is with an adblock.
They had the possibility to work with a few ads that didn't bother people, but that wasn't enough, so now, blocking just some of the ads isn't enough for us. They started with the shitty behaviour, and I don't care if they go bankrupt and websites switch to a new way of surviving.
I keep hoping that enough people will start ad blocking and tracking script blocking that advertisers or companies wishing to advertise will have to find ways to deliver ads that doesn't involve tracking users, but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. People I know are mostly indifferent to ads or actually like seeing them sometimes so they can buy whatever the latest craze is. I find this situation absolutely maddening.
> But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet.
1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody is willing to pay for something, maybe it doesn't have value.
2. For a lot of what does have value, the problem might be your idea of what a "viable business model" is. If I write a weekly blog post and it makes $2000 a month, that's a viable business model. It's more than a lot of writing jobs pay. But it doesn't scale into some sort of multinational content corp so half of the people involved in the conversation are willing to write it off.
3. A lot of sites simply don't need to be businesses. I've paid hosting costs and helped moderate to help run forums, with no expectation of financial recompense, simply because I enjoyed the community. The best forums nearly universally work this way, still.
The real value of Reddit, for example, comes from subreddit moderators who are typically volunteers. Everything I value about Reddit is provided by people who don't work for Reddit, and the hosting/software could easily be swapped out with minimal impact for most of these communities. In fact, all the problems I've had with Reddit are caused by Reddit's decisions--I've never had a problem with an AskScience or ProgrammingLanguages moderator policy change, but Reddit makes some decision that harms their users significantly probably twice a year.
1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody is willing to pay for something, maybe it doesn't have value.
2. For a lot of what does have value, the problem might be your idea of what a "viable business model" is. If I write a weekly blog post and it makes $2000 a month, that's a viable business model. It's more than a lot of writing jobs pay. But it doesn't scale into some sort of multinational content corp so half of the people involved in the conversation are willing to write it off.
3. A lot of sites simply don't need to be businesses. I've paid hosting costs and helped moderate to help run forums, with no expectation of financial recompense, simply because I enjoyed the community. The best forums nearly universally work this way, still.
The real value of Reddit, for example, comes from subreddit moderators who are typically volunteers. Everything I value about Reddit is provided by people who don't work for Reddit, and the hosting/software could easily be swapped out with minimal impact for most of these communities. In fact, all the problems I've had with Reddit are caused by Reddit's decisions--I've never had a problem with an AskScience or ProgrammingLanguages moderator policy change, but Reddit makes some decision that harms their users significantly probably twice a year.
Advertisers are going to use it as just another data point, though. Why give them any more information than they already have? You know some of the best technical people we have waste their lives working for advertisers, and they _will_ find a way to extract more information from these technologies regardless of how supposedly private they are.
I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.
I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.
I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.
I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.
> I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.
Indeed, but such regulation is much more likely to happen if there already exist privacy-preserving solutions like PPA.
"There's a good way to do it and a bad way, and we're making it illegal to do it the bad way" vs "There only way to do it is bad, and we're making that illegal, so sucks to be you"
Indeed, but such regulation is much more likely to happen if there already exist privacy-preserving solutions like PPA.
"There's a good way to do it and a bad way, and we're making it illegal to do it the bad way" vs "There only way to do it is bad, and we're making that illegal, so sucks to be you"
This isn't an alternative, that's the argument
> It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA.
Let's start with the fact that they've added their spying as opt out instead of opt in because they know that if people were asked they would not consent to it. They're already disrespecting users by trying to slip this unwanted thing into their browser largely unnoticed.
There is no way to exploit and manipulate people that is safe and private. A browser is a user-agent. It's supposed to be working for you, the user. Not for advertisers who will try to manipulate you and take your money.
Mozilla is not working to protect your privacy and security. They are trying to come up with a scheme that will trick users who object to ads and reject surveillance capitalism into accepting them along with the violations of privacy and security they depend on.
There is nothing "noble" about this. This is just about making money at your expense. It's the exact same goal every other ad-tech company has.
Let's start with the fact that they've added their spying as opt out instead of opt in because they know that if people were asked they would not consent to it. They're already disrespecting users by trying to slip this unwanted thing into their browser largely unnoticed.
There is no way to exploit and manipulate people that is safe and private. A browser is a user-agent. It's supposed to be working for you, the user. Not for advertisers who will try to manipulate you and take your money.
Mozilla is not working to protect your privacy and security. They are trying to come up with a scheme that will trick users who object to ads and reject surveillance capitalism into accepting them along with the violations of privacy and security they depend on.
There is nothing "noble" about this. This is just about making money at your expense. It's the exact same goal every other ad-tech company has.
I just want to use a robust, secure and decently fast browser that uses a different backend than Chrome to support the open web not ossifying into a single browser spec. I'll pay monthly!
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux (there must be some...)
GNOME Web/Epiphany (same thing) seems to use WebKit and is officially supported
https://webkit.org/downloads/
https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/
It seems there is no WebKit browser for Windows.
GNOME Web/Epiphany (same thing) seems to use WebKit and is officially supported
https://webkit.org/downloads/
https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/
It seems there is no WebKit browser for Windows.
> There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux
webkit was forked from the kde browser, not the other way.
webkit was forked from the kde browser, not the other way.
No good adblocking for safari like in firefox though
AdGuard works perfectly fine in Safari on Mac and iOS
Its no ublock origin thats for sure
Unblock Origin is best in class for sure and I use it on my other browsers, but when browsing on Safari I don’t notice any real difference in the number of ads I see compared to Ublock Origin, that is to say I don’t really see any ads on any browser I use.
My point being that the statement that there’s “no good ad blocking on Safari” is just not true. Saying “there’s no Ublock Origin on Safari” is true, but that’s not the same thing as “no good ad blocking”. AdGuard works just fine.
My point being that the statement that there’s “no good ad blocking on Safari” is just not true. Saying “there’s no Ublock Origin on Safari” is true, but that’s not the same thing as “no good ad blocking”. AdGuard works just fine.
Extensions like AdGuard and Ghostery are pretty good.
Coming from a ublock origin perspective, I’m not so sure
Ghostery is an ad company, just as Anonym.
Please elaborate. See also the FAQ regarding data collection: https://www.ghostery.com/faq
Under its past owner Evidon, their business model was based on selling data to advertisers.
Starting 2018, they showed personalized ads by themselves, through the GhosteryRewards program. I think that has since been terminated, but it would comply with the FAQ you posted (they claimed that personalization was purely on-device).
I don’t know of any current offending practices, but there is no reason to trust or support this enterprise in the presence of better alternatives. uBlock Origin never did any of that, avoids all shadow of conflict of interest, and works better.
Starting 2018, they showed personalized ads by themselves, through the GhosteryRewards program. I think that has since been terminated, but it would comply with the FAQ you posted (they claimed that personalization was purely on-device).
I don’t know of any current offending practices, but there is no reason to trust or support this enterprise in the presence of better alternatives. uBlock Origin never did any of that, avoids all shadow of conflict of interest, and works better.
If you use macOS/iOS, there is Orion. Webkit based, zero telemetry, lifetime license $150 USD, no other source of funding.
https://kagi.com/orion
https://kagi.com/orion
With a price like that I’m assuming this product has a shelf life. It would make way more sense to ask a dollar a month. In 13 years they will have made more than that $150, and this model also incentivizes them to keep up development for years and years.
There's Ladybird.
https://ladybird.org
https://ladybird.org
looking forward to ten years from now, when it meets those requirements
There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising.
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist.
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
All-sites still have a context in which their ads appear. You are looking at some content on their site, so thy can advertise in the context of that content.
Personalized advertising has one key property that is very useful to this generation of Internet companies: it moves the ad dollars away from websites selling ads (aka "publishers") and to the networks (Google/Facebook).
If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper.
This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue.
[0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.
If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper.
This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue.
[0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.
Which are much cheaper.
Are they? According to whom and compared to what --- the ad networks themselves? They control everything about this game.
It's possible for someone with deep pockets to build an ad network that operates in a similar manner and offers pretty much everything Google and Facebook do minus the privacy invasion crap.
The only essential difference being how the ads are targeted. Instead of targeting individuals, the web content they are looking at would become the target --- based on the blatantly obvious "metric" that the individual must have at least some interest in what they're looking at.
This should actually be easier/cheaper to implement and maintain (no personalized metrics) and thus the ads should be less expensive. The main reason this doesn't exist in a more popular form --- Google/Facebook have sold advertisers a big load of their own marketing hype and used this to effectively monopolize the market.
Are they? According to whom and compared to what --- the ad networks themselves? They control everything about this game.
It's possible for someone with deep pockets to build an ad network that operates in a similar manner and offers pretty much everything Google and Facebook do minus the privacy invasion crap.
The only essential difference being how the ads are targeted. Instead of targeting individuals, the web content they are looking at would become the target --- based on the blatantly obvious "metric" that the individual must have at least some interest in what they're looking at.
This should actually be easier/cheaper to implement and maintain (no personalized metrics) and thus the ads should be less expensive. The main reason this doesn't exist in a more popular form --- Google/Facebook have sold advertisers a big load of their own marketing hype and used this to effectively monopolize the market.
More privacy-related about:config settings: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_...
Please be aware that at least one of these settings will log you out of all your accounts (I suspect it may be the one related to fingerprinting, though I am not certain). If, as I am, you are signed into 10-20 essential accounts, including work accounts, it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state, even after you have reversed some of the settings outlined here.
There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings.
Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.
There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings.
Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.
> it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state
Creating a backup before making any changes would solve that.
Creating a backup before making any changes would solve that.
Yes, my monthly profile backup would have been worth repeating before this experiment. If anyone knows how to make a 7Zip archive of a live and running Firefox profile, I would back up far more regularly - but Firefox's lock state foils the backup, meaning I have to close down Firefox to archive the profile.
Why does this have to be curl | sh if there’s a checkbox in the settings for this specific setting? Do you value your privacy so much that you’re ready to run arbitrary script directly from internet?
The site covers all bases. The content of the script is shown on the landing page - and you have to visit it to see the instructions to run it. The comment also explains how to do it through through the configuration UI.
That means you have 3 choices:
* Use curl to run the script as directed
* copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run
* follow the instructions to update through the UI.
That means you have 3 choices:
* Use curl to run the script as directed
* copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run
* follow the instructions to update through the UI.
Author here, thanks! I just thought it was fun to make kind of a polyglot shell script-blog post :D
"yeah but you could serve a different page with the curl UA"
ok, then you just change about:config?
"yeah but you could serve a different page with the curl UA"
ok, then you just change about:config?
OTOH the script is 2 lines long and perfectly readable/understandable.
It annoys me that Firefox removed the ability to link directly to a setting in `about:config`. I'm almost certain this was possible before.
A bash script to set a config value…?
I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away.
Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.
I’ll still block them, though.
[0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)
I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away.
Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.
I’ll still block them, though.
[0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)
> Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.
This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.
This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.
The actual change-commands aren't actually that much longer than its worrisome instructions telling you to download unpredictable arbitrary data from an internet URL and blindly execute it.
"Concerned about your privacy? Don't worry, just pipe this code right to your shell"
:\
Setting the flag in about:config is simple enough, I don't understand why anyone would do anything else. Who's seeing this page who is also unable to make an about:config change?
:\
Setting the flag in about:config is simple enough, I don't understand why anyone would do anything else. Who's seeing this page who is also unable to make an about:config change?
A picture-based guide seems both safer and more effective. e.g. many Firefox users run Windows, where curl | sh doesn't even work - clicking on the right buttons also requires less technical expertise.
You don't even have to go to about:config - it's got a checkbox on the user settings page!
What I'd really like is to edit the file (sqlite database?) where my "ad topics" are stored. Just because I search for X once doesn't mean I want to see ads about it in future.
Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.
Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.
Do you know the list of domain we can block to do this at the firewall level?
I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).
I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).
`dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled` already was false. If you're having to set it manually in `about:config`, you're likely missing something bigger in `about:preferences#privacy`.
Odd, it was 'true' for me, and I have all the privacy stuff in there set to the most private of settings. There was one section in there with an option labeled:
> Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox.
I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
> Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox.
I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Do you know if there's a GUI setting that controls that on mobile?
Yeah, I'd already turned it from the standard settings page.
Author mentions this: https://web.archive.org/web/20181120211720/https://make-linu...
pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier
Looks like a set of kernel params that turn off security features to speed up the OS. Did anyone test it in practice?
pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier
Looks like a set of kernel params that turn off security features to speed up the OS. Did anyone test it in practice?
Just set mitigations=off if you want this, it's a meta-parameter that enables all the others. I used to run it on old hardware (Haswell) because of significant impact of all those mitigations on IO performance. It's not a problem anymore on my newer Zen 4.
Probably a bad idea in the general case if you work with anything remotely private (ssh keys, banking) and browse the internet routinely. I visit few weird sites and block JS almost everywhere, so it both made sense to me and was relatively safe.
Probably a bad idea in the general case if you work with anything remotely private (ssh keys, banking) and browse the internet routinely. I visit few weird sites and block JS almost everywhere, so it both made sense to me and was relatively safe.
https://support.mozilla.org/no/kb/privacy-preserving-attribu... explains what the setting is about, the important bit being:
-----
The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)
> 3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but
> does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts
> the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed
> Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
> 4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the
> aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives
> a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides
> differential privacy.
-----
The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)
Did you find a way on mobile, other than browsing to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml and finding dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled?
Strange, apparently the setting (dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled) still hasn't been added to Arkenfox user.js ?
I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
You have to make even more steps to make it somewhat more private although keep in mind, it's not for everyone: https://unixdigest.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefull...
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918
I'm fine with Firefox finding ways to compete with Chrome. For me, its survival depends upon it. And with its survival, we get all sort of forks (tor browser, librewolf, and so on) for niche users like HN readers commenting here and myself (Yes, privacy is niche. I would like a different reality, but that's how it is.)
Can this be also disabled on Android?
Yes, beta version for sure(just go to about:config), possibly it works on the normal version with the following method (which allows you to insert a user.js)
Instructions: https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240
Other option is to use another gecko based browser check this https://divestos.org/pages/browsers
Instructions: https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240
Other option is to use another gecko based browser check this https://divestos.org/pages/browsers
Go to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml and set dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false.
Firefox 128.0.3 and higher has this globally disabled for Android.
[deleted]
Sure, about:config works there as well.
Interestingly, it was already disabled on my phone, but enabled on desktop.
Interestingly, it was already disabled on my phone, but enabled on desktop.
Google likely pays them to disable about:config on Android or implies they won't pay them as much for default search and they read the tea leaves.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo...
It only works on the more insecure nightly version of firefox.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo...
It only works on the more insecure nightly version of firefox.
This is equivalent to about:config and works on the regular firefox mobile version too:
chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
Didn't work for me just now. When there have been ways in the past the non-nightly version wipes the changes each restart unless they are already exposed in settings I think.
You have to type it manually and not paste apparently. Mine was already set false so I'm not going to experiment with turning it on.
I just checked this config value on my Firefox Nightly and it's already preset to false. Interesting.
Maybe you had turned it off last time this was on the front-page? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112
That's what I suspect for my own setting anyway.
That's what I suspect for my own setting anyway.
Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I’m also not sure that the web can be made into something different unless web standards aren’t freed of influence by giants like Google
>Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things.
I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission.
From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead use it for the Mozilla foundation which funds a bunch of social causes.
Wikipedia has a huge endowment, so they really don't need money to keep the lights on, but if you donate, it'll similarly be used for funding social causes through the Wikimedia Foundation.
There's also a Linux Foundation for funding Linux-related stuff, but here again a lot of it is spent on social causes, not directly on development-related costs.
You'd think that if funding were really that tight, social causes would be cut and just keeping the servers running and essential personnel employed would be the highest priority, with SW maintenance and development a close 2nd. So, apparently, money must not be that tight. Or, if it is, it's being woefully mismanaged. But I think there's more to it: it seems like when times are too good (something gets popular and gets funding), then the people in charge expand the scope of the project to consume all the funding, adding on various pet projects (like those social causes), instead of saving the money in case of a funding downturn later. Wikipedia probably did it best by setting up an endowment so that everything else is just gravy, but even here they're constantly asking for more money on the site and acting like they really need it when they don't.
I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission.
From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead use it for the Mozilla foundation which funds a bunch of social causes.
Wikipedia has a huge endowment, so they really don't need money to keep the lights on, but if you donate, it'll similarly be used for funding social causes through the Wikimedia Foundation.
There's also a Linux Foundation for funding Linux-related stuff, but here again a lot of it is spent on social causes, not directly on development-related costs.
You'd think that if funding were really that tight, social causes would be cut and just keeping the servers running and essential personnel employed would be the highest priority, with SW maintenance and development a close 2nd. So, apparently, money must not be that tight. Or, if it is, it's being woefully mismanaged. But I think there's more to it: it seems like when times are too good (something gets popular and gets funding), then the people in charge expand the scope of the project to consume all the funding, adding on various pet projects (like those social causes), instead of saving the money in case of a funding downturn later. Wikipedia probably did it best by setting up an endowment so that everything else is just gravy, but even here they're constantly asking for more money on the site and acting like they really need it when they don't.
This is the case with most software "foundation".
As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, she did make an important observation.
Parasites will be attracted to high value things in order to extract value, not to add to it. They climb the hierarchy of the organisation and then use it for their own benefit.
It is not only developers who do resume building oriented work. These people start social causes so that they can claim that they spearheaded this or that campaign. In order to gain prestige.
Engineers who only care about the product become the bottom of the hierarchy and the organisation becomes a reflection of the needs and wants of these parasites.
As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, she did make an important observation.
Parasites will be attracted to high value things in order to extract value, not to add to it. They climb the hierarchy of the organisation and then use it for their own benefit.
It is not only developers who do resume building oriented work. These people start social causes so that they can claim that they spearheaded this or that campaign. In order to gain prestige.
Engineers who only care about the product become the bottom of the hierarchy and the organisation becomes a reflection of the needs and wants of these parasites.
Yes, and it's not just non-profit foundations, or even social causes. I've seen it in big corporations too, where some "parasite" as you call them ascends the ranks and "spearheads" some new "initiative", that turns out to have really dubious value and is frequently just reinventing the wheel. For example, at a big tech company, instead of just using some ready-made off-the-shelf solution or using an established standard, pouring a ton of money into some new home-grown thing that does the same thing, perhaps with 5% better performance, but in the end isn't really worth it and cost a ton of money. But the guy who "spearheaded" it gets a big bonus and moves on to even higher roles in the company and leaving the fallout for someone else to deal with.
It’s depressing that anything moderately successful may be doomed to being taken over this way, by people looking to abuse the institution for their own political activism. I wasn’t aware that Wikipedia also had the same issue. Not using donations for the core thing donors think they’re supporting is so deceptive.
I think it's not just political activism, I think it's empire-building. Management people build their resumes by doing things, like starting big new projects or doing acquisitions, not by just keeping things lean and running properly. So it could be some social cause, or it could be some new technical project of highly dubious value. Does anyone use "Pocket" in Firefox, for instance?
They should concentrate on developing the browser and get out of political activism entirely. Use the rather large amount of money they already have as an investment fund to finance a slimmed-down operation while also soliciting donations from users and some select companies. Ditch the large administrative staff they gained during the Baker years, swap some of them out for developers. They should not try to be a PAC, there's enough of those already.
Wouldn't this be a case where the iron law of bureaucracy applies? Meaning that the people who are already there and are invested in their 'mission' would resist any kind of reform of the organization because the primary task of any such organization is protecting itself from outsiders?
Yes, but only because the Mozilla Foundation has the same problem. If it was just the corporation then the foundation could decide to replace it entirely.
Is the corporation the piece that builds the browser?
> not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things
From donations and government grants. You know, like proper non-profits that aren't trying to LARP as a SV unicorn.
From donations and government grants. You know, like proper non-profits that aren't trying to LARP as a SV unicorn.
Which software with hundreds of millions of lines of code survives like this? Ideally show us security-critical examples.
Firefox been like this for atleast a decade.
All sorts of "experiments", normandy, telemetry, pocket, looking glass, all sorts of phoning back them or either google... so many things to name. And now this garbage to add to the list.
You have to do so much work in about:config to clean this up and i'm not sure if it can be fully.
Extremely scummy organisation.
All sorts of "experiments", normandy, telemetry, pocket, looking glass, all sorts of phoning back them or either google... so many things to name. And now this garbage to add to the list.
You have to do so much work in about:config to clean this up and i'm not sure if it can be fully.
Extremely scummy organisation.
I'd donate to Mozilla if the money was actually going towards browser development, and not whatever idiotic bullshit the corp side of it decides to buy (like Pocket, for example) next.
Giving arbitrary actors control to target you and load whatever they want in your browser window is an uneeded liability. I have seen for myself people getting scammed by ads. No one was held accountable.
Perhaps we could have a search engine that indexes only pages free of advertising?
mozilla going all in on advertising as a hedge against losing their google funding? it is sad. i support brave, but if brave went away whats left? did we lose?
I can't wait to have Kagi/Orion browser available in my laptop (already in my iphone, SUPER!)
curl | sh for THIS? Riiight, let's give that website permission to execute arbitrary code on your computer just to change a single FF preference? Really????
I think this is a bit of a sensational take. The code being executed is all there without obfuscation.
Not at all. The code that you see is not guaranteed the code that curl will receive. And even if you check the curl output, if you run it a second time to pipe to sh it might receive something different.
when will people learn that piping scrips from internet to sh, is very insecure....
# curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh
sigh
# curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh
sigh
This is absolutely disgusting. Despite Mozilla's general decline, I always want to believe they're going to do the right thing by their users. But this is really hard to swallow.
Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.
Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.
Then I think it's only fair for you to completely stop using ad-supported sites and services, right away.
(Which will also mean that Firefox's treatment of ads will not affect you.)
(Which will also mean that Firefox's treatment of ads will not affect you.)
What do you mean you don't want to sleep with me? It's a date! I paid for dinner!
- advertisers
- advertisers
It's actually: you say you want to live in a world where there are no ads, and therefore no ad-supported content. Well, with a little self-restraint you can live in that world right now. What, you don't like that world after all?
I just did a quick search of your comments on HN and I see that you're regularly sharing/using links to archive.is in an effort to bypass paywalls.
So, given that you're unwilling to pay and that you believe advertising is unethical, how do you expect people to fund the content you consume?
Don't you think it's unethical to expect they do it for free?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author%3Akelnos%20archive&type...
So, given that you're unwilling to pay and that you believe advertising is unethical, how do you expect people to fund the content you consume?
Don't you think it's unethical to expect they do it for free?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author%3Akelnos%20archive&type...
Not the person you are replying to, but it's not up to me to determine what the best business model is for a company. My "job" with respect to info providers here is to consume what I like on an open protocol. If I find a website that interests me enough, by itself, to subscribe to it then maybe I would. But none of them have, not even any of the big ones. If someone provided a system where I could tip a website for an article or other piece of media I like, I'd do that. But nobody seems to know how to make micro-transactions work that I can see.
So if advertising is unwanted, and subscriptions to individual websites on the internet isn't working either, then maybe they should get more creative.
I had a lot of fun on old forums before this mess started, so if we revert to that so be it.
So if advertising is unwanted, and subscriptions to individual websites on the internet isn't working either, then maybe they should get more creative.
I had a lot of fun on old forums before this mess started, so if we revert to that so be it.
Ditch Mozilla. Full stop.
They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.
They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.
Where do you propose we go instead?
Personally - I use ungoogled-chromium, librewolf, and ladybird.
The first two are still fairly dependent on the upstream companies - but at least they're ripping out the junk - They are pragmatic solutions in the short term.
Ladybird is nicely independent in the sense that's truly one of the few offerings that isn't a derivative of Firefox/Chromium, but it's not "ready" yet for most daily uses.
But seriously - please don't fall for the Mozilla marketing that Firefox is some privacy beacon as an alternative to Chrome. It's marketing not reality.
The first two are still fairly dependent on the upstream companies - but at least they're ripping out the junk - They are pragmatic solutions in the short term.
Ladybird is nicely independent in the sense that's truly one of the few offerings that isn't a derivative of Firefox/Chromium, but it's not "ready" yet for most daily uses.
But seriously - please don't fall for the Mozilla marketing that Firefox is some privacy beacon as an alternative to Chrome. It's marketing not reality.
It's disabled on Arch by default. Maybe choose an operating system that doesn't treat you like a product?
Since my post critical of Mozilla is being rather savagely downvoted
I'll just leave this here [0]
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
Or use Pale Moon, forked long ago and developed independently, that respects your privacy out of the box without needing 50 different 'hardening' Arkenfox type changes or having to keep watch every time Mozilla tries to screw over end users like this. Zero telemetry, zero advertising and no mental gymnastics over how we're financially dependent on Google but still value your privacy. And bonus, it retains XUL extension support and the full customizability that went with it (including full support for full themes that can make it resemble Chrome or modern Firefox if you want to).
The first thing that comes to mind when I hear "Pale Moon" is their toxic developers. But let's ignore that... Is it safe to use Pale Moon as your main browser? How many security patches is it missing from upstream Firefox? Do they have any security team?
I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.
I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.
The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community.
Pale Moon isn't a rebuild of Firefox - it's a complete fork with its own rendering engine Goanna based off Gecko 52 and developed independently. Several of the security vulnerabilities introduced due to the larger code base and complexity of a multi process browser (to say nothing of Firefox's additional bloat of adding what are better as extensions to the browser core such as a PDF renderer or Pocket) are simply not applicable to Pale Moon, but the release notes detail the ones that are and have been patched.
The only thing 'outdated' is their not jumping on the minimalist, mobile focused UI that Chrome invented and Firefox copied and retaining a sane, desktop user focused and fully customizable UI that doesn't need digging into about:config or userChrome.css tweaks and can be directly done from the preferences dialog or context menus. The way Firefox used to be until version 4 onwards when the copying Chrome and limiting user choice began. To your last point, why should you have to tweak Firefox for privacy at all when they keep proclaiming how privacy friendly they supposedly are? Pale Moon is private out of the box - there is no baked in telemetry (they don't run a telemetry server, for starters), analytics, tracking, advertising or anything else on those lines.
The only thing 'outdated' is their not jumping on the minimalist, mobile focused UI that Chrome invented and Firefox copied and retaining a sane, desktop user focused and fully customizable UI that doesn't need digging into about:config or userChrome.css tweaks and can be directly done from the preferences dialog or context menus. The way Firefox used to be until version 4 onwards when the copying Chrome and limiting user choice began. To your last point, why should you have to tweak Firefox for privacy at all when they keep proclaiming how privacy friendly they supposedly are? Pale Moon is private out of the box - there is no baked in telemetry (they don't run a telemetry server, for starters), analytics, tracking, advertising or anything else on those lines.
> The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community.
It wasn't just "Matt A. Tobin". For example, "Moonchild" was involved in that OpenBSD debacle ( https://archive.is/qbpmL ). Just someone trying to make Pale Moon to work and they approached it like that. Moonchild still blames OpenBSD devs for it... earlier this year he said they were "uncooperative" ( https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=30732 )... I wonder why.
A few were fine with Tobin's behaviour and happy to support him... and they're still there.
This doesn't affect the performance or security of the browser, but it's something that bothers me and so it's a point against when considering which browser should I use.
It wasn't just "Matt A. Tobin". For example, "Moonchild" was involved in that OpenBSD debacle ( https://archive.is/qbpmL ). Just someone trying to make Pale Moon to work and they approached it like that. Moonchild still blames OpenBSD devs for it... earlier this year he said they were "uncooperative" ( https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=30732 )... I wonder why.
A few were fine with Tobin's behaviour and happy to support him... and they're still there.
This doesn't affect the performance or security of the browser, but it's something that bothers me and so it's a point against when considering which browser should I use.
The OpenBSD issue was pretty clear - building against system libraries alters the browser configuration and behavior, for which Moonchild would end up being held responsible. Even now there are contributed 3rd party builds on the downloads page for Mac OS and OpenSolaris among others, these are vetted to follow the build procedure and are authorized to use the official branding as a result. OpenBSD can make their own build if they want but they can't call it Pale Moon.
Hyperbola Linux does exactly that - their Iceweasel and IceApe browser/suite are built on Pale Moon's Unified XUL Platform (which is forked from the old Mozilla application platform) but are clearly seen as separate products.
There is already a similar issue with forks for Windows XP called New Moon and My Pal - Pale Moon long since dropped support for XP yet users of these builds show up on the forum asking for help instead of asking the fork maintainers.
There is already a similar issue with forks for Windows XP called New Moon and My Pal - Pale Moon long since dropped support for XP yet users of these builds show up on the forum asking for help instead of asking the fork maintainers.
The only point that the OpenBSD situation made clear to me was that both Pale Moon developers are good with code, but terrible at basic human interaction.
The maintainer was still in the phase of trying to make it work, the code was on a personal github... there was no Pale Moon for OpenBSD, no decision on actually making it available, let alone forking it or giving it another name... it never got to that point. And that's why approaching the issue with that style made no sense. "You will revise your mozconfig..."? The average person will tell you to take a hike. "I will not be as educational next time."? Would you continue working (for free!) on making someone else's "product" when they make a threat the first time they interact with you?
What's wrong with a "Hey, thanks for working on this, however since you're not using our libraries and <insert reasons>, you'd need to rename the browser as per our license and we also don't want to be associated with ports that do this. Let me know if we can help with anything."
There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be associated with something that might not work as you intend it to, not want to support it, etc, but you can't behave like an asshole if you want people to work with you. Like, you're being more hostile than someone like Mozilla would usually be under similar conditions... no wonder the attempted port died with that Github issue.
In any case, and going back to my point about them being toxic, Moonchild was fine with Tobin's behaviour (and vice-versa) towards others and even joined in sometimes... so only blaming Tobin makes no sense. Moonchild still doesn't see anything wrong with the way they approached the My Pal and OpenBSD situations, so it's only a matter of time until the next drama. Essentially, it might be a less toxic project now, but some of the people who made it toxic are still there and have not changed their ways. That's their right, I guess, but it's not something I want to be associated with.
The maintainer was still in the phase of trying to make it work, the code was on a personal github... there was no Pale Moon for OpenBSD, no decision on actually making it available, let alone forking it or giving it another name... it never got to that point. And that's why approaching the issue with that style made no sense. "You will revise your mozconfig..."? The average person will tell you to take a hike. "I will not be as educational next time."? Would you continue working (for free!) on making someone else's "product" when they make a threat the first time they interact with you?
What's wrong with a "Hey, thanks for working on this, however since you're not using our libraries and <insert reasons>, you'd need to rename the browser as per our license and we also don't want to be associated with ports that do this. Let me know if we can help with anything."
There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be associated with something that might not work as you intend it to, not want to support it, etc, but you can't behave like an asshole if you want people to work with you. Like, you're being more hostile than someone like Mozilla would usually be under similar conditions... no wonder the attempted port died with that Github issue.
In any case, and going back to my point about them being toxic, Moonchild was fine with Tobin's behaviour (and vice-versa) towards others and even joined in sometimes... so only blaming Tobin makes no sense. Moonchild still doesn't see anything wrong with the way they approached the My Pal and OpenBSD situations, so it's only a matter of time until the next drama. Essentially, it might be a less toxic project now, but some of the people who made it toxic are still there and have not changed their ways. That's their right, I guess, but it's not something I want to be associated with.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/palemoon
This article is 5 years old and I'm not sure whether it's accurate anymore, but might be worth checking to be sure we are completely private.
I also remember some drama about pale moon's author despising TOR and not wanting uBlock to work
This article is 5 years old and I'm not sure whether it's accurate anymore, but might be worth checking to be sure we are completely private.
I also remember some drama about pale moon's author despising TOR and not wanting uBlock to work
The author of this is has some pretty ridiculous allegations, from blaming the browser for analytics on its homepage provider (when you can directly change the homepage to whatever you want right from the preferences without digging into about:config or elsewhere) to automatic updates, which is set to notify about them by default, not download and apply them. Firefox was(is?) known to install a separate updater service on Windows, FFS.
And he's complaining about NoScript, which doesn't play well with Pale Moon to the extent of destabilizing the browser and whose Pale Moon compatible XUL version is long abandoned by its developer while there's an alternative (eMatrix, forked from now abandoned uMatrix that was made by uBlock Origin's author) available. (https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=17619)
Pale Moon is what Firefox used to be once upon a time in terms of customization and privacy before Mozilla became Google's controlled opposition to guard against browser monopoly allegations.
And he's complaining about NoScript, which doesn't play well with Pale Moon to the extent of destabilizing the browser and whose Pale Moon compatible XUL version is long abandoned by its developer while there's an alternative (eMatrix, forked from now abandoned uMatrix that was made by uBlock Origin's author) available. (https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=17619)
Pale Moon is what Firefox used to be once upon a time in terms of customization and privacy before Mozilla became Google's controlled opposition to guard against browser monopoly allegations.
# How to use:
# curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh
> Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement.
No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem.
I turned it off in about:config