> unblockable ads delivered through first party and using obfuscated techniques like canvas or webassembly
When I said basically the same thing 4 years ago[1], most people seemed to think it wasn't a serious concern or could be easily bypassed. However, after observing how certain types of businesses use the World Wide Web over the past 3 decades, it's obvious what they want: to send an opaque binary blob to the user that nobody can investigate or modify, that gives them full control over what the user sees and is allowed to do. Just like TV.
The only safe response to this is to stop allowing documents (or docs with 3270-styole forms) to embed software in a Turing complete language. Add functionality that is used declaritively, or the answer to "should this be blocked" is undecidable. Give them the ability to run a Turing complete language that renders to a canvas, and adblocking becomes a hard image recognition problem (or requires solving the Halting Problem).
I'm not saying no one will try to do this, but YouTube had the technical option of splicing ads directly into the video stream and simply not sending the actual video content for the duration of the ad for several years now. They chose not to do it. Potentially the lost revenue from people not using YouTube as much anymore / migrating to a different platform would be bigger here than the increase in ad traffic.
People who don't want to see ads (i.e. a large part of adblock users) are also more likely to engage in toxic (to advertisers and YouTube) behavior, such as intentionally clicking on ads but never buying anything (or even writing scripts to do that), or intentionally avoiding the advertised product, etc.
Twitch does do this with its SureStream ads and its much worse for a livestream than a video since with a video you can resume where you left off after the ad finished whereas for a livestream you just lose what was happening during the ad.
Twitch also removed the ad-free benefit from twitch prime.
Such poor behavior creates gaps in the canopy, providing sunlight for other services to grow. If you don't like how a service is treating you, switch to a better one and make the case to your peers why they should do likewise.
A healthy internet is ultimately up to us to build and maintain.
The issue is that an alternate service can only grow in the gaps if it has a viable business model: so far, monetizing internet services for the general public without advertising and tracking is a mostly-unsolved problem, despite interesting efforts like Brave.
> monetizing internet services for the general public without advertising and tracking is a mostly-unsolved problem
I feel like that's not a real problem. Or, maybe only a problem for services that care more about having a ton of users than being profitable and sustainable.
There are quite a few services (SmugMug, Vimeo, NetFlix, etc.) that charge money, don't have advertisements, and are doing just fine.
It's weird that so many web companies decide to go the sleazy advertisement/tracking/malware route rather than just charge money for the services they provide.
> It's weird that so many web companies decide to go the sleazy advertisement/tracking/malware route rather than just charge money for the services they provide.
You will find very quickly how reluctant people are to pay for anything despite a few cultural-phenomenon-level exceptions like Netflix.
I'm amazed how many people, like my own coworkers making $100k+, listen to Spotify all day every day yet will endure advertisement after advertisement in their stream of music instead of paying $10/month. If someone isn't even going to pay for Spotify despite it being a central part of their day to day experience, GG to your little service.
I think advertising has played a major hand in shepherding us into this position that divorced us from the idea of paying for content we enjoy. There is going to have to be a major cultural change to bring us back into a healthy relationship with content.
One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content. We both benefit: I get to enjoy more content. Depending on hobby work doesn't get us there.
> You will find very quickly how reluctant people are to pay for anything despite a few cultural-phenomenon-level exceptions like Netflix.
That's absolutely not true, though. People buy stuff all the time. Clothing, shoes, sporting goods, dishes, food, housewares, books, DVDs, etc.
The "freemium" approach Spotify takes is a poor example because they're not charging for their real service of music streaming, but instead to get rid of advertisements. They've moved their own goalposts, and the question isn't "Is streaming music worth $10 a month?" but "Is it worth $10 a month to get rid of this commercial?" If the options were "Pay $10 to stream music" or "Listen to nothing," the results might be a lot different.
> One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content. We both benefit: I get to enjoy more content. Depending on hobby work doesn't get us there.
I'm not making that argument, and you're setting up a false dichotomy. There's no reason content creators need to use advertisements and can't charge for their content instead. It worked fine for music and movies for over a hundred years, and books have been using that model for hundreds of years before that.
I think the world of consumption has changed though. People expect things (music, games, etc) to be free and balk at paying for them. Why would they when there is likely someone offering something comparable for free but supported by ads?
Maybe you could ship them a real item as part of the service somehow
I'd never pay $10 for a character in a game, but I'd happily pay $15 for a plastic toy that coincidentally unlocks something in a game I was enjoying anyway
That's not what Spotify is doing. The choice is pay us cash or pay us with your attention by watching ads.
Why go to work, earn cash with your attention, and pay for Spotify when you can directly monetize your attention on-demand in real-time at the rate you consume? That's what advertising allows.
That's a very good observation. I think it's true that having the free option changes the context very much.
There are people who pay for paid password managers when free alternative products available. I myself pay for a number of services (very reasonably priced) when I could have used free alternatives. The difference is the guys I pay don't offer a free edition without ads and nonsense like that. They just build a great software and ask to pay for their effort.
It's not just removing advertisements. Spotify Premium lets you listen to any song they have anytime you want. I thought the free version only let you listen to their pregenerated stations?
> One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content.
If you do it as a hobby, it's not toiling. It becomes toiling when you do it as work, especially if you have to please advertisers instead of making the content you love.
The distribution of content might be quite different - but remember that ads aren't free - they're just another middleman that has to be paid, priced in in the cost of goods, a net drain from the point of view of the consumers (on first approximation at least).
Vimeo was so well positioned to beat out youtube back in the day. Stage6 had just shut down and vimeo was offering HD while youtube was stuck with low res. But then they made the mistake of banning video game content for not being artsy enough which led to youtube jumping in popularity.
This is actually interesting right now because Microsoft, Google and Facebook all seem to be trying to get into streaming. I would definitely like to see more competition in this space so that Twitch doesn't get complacent.
It's hard to know until they perform the bait and switch. It's certainly not the only reason that brand loyalty is dead, but it's one that's often on my mind. I don't have any confidence that my trust in a brand will mean anything in the long term. A new service exists? Well, it might be nice right now, but if I let myself rely on it the service will become slightly worse over the years.
It's the streamer who decides when the ads should show (this is because those ads hide the stream, so they should be used when nothing is happening). If they never tell Twitch to show ads, SureStream ads won't appear.
I watch at least one streamer who runs ads in her breaks, she is a partner. So does she have a to specifically select those surestream ads? Maybe they only show in certain geographic locations?
Twitch is running two kinds of ads, one type is "normal" and can be blocked by ublock, the other one is weird - it's definitely not just spliced into the video stream either, as far as I remember (I have Amazon Prime so I don't see ads), but ublock also wasn't able to block it.
However, I would argue that it is not actually worse for several reasons. For one, the streamer decides exactly when and how to play ads - so if the ad timing bothers you, you're going to start watching someone else, which in turn creates an incentive to keep streams ad-free or at least run ads at specific times.
The second reason is that the usage pattern of Twitch is different. I go to twitch (if it's a livestream) to actually watch the content, whereas I use YouTube in many cases like I would use an article, skipping through videos and back and forth looking for a specific part or specific information, and if the information isn't there quickly trying the next video. This workflow gets completely destroyed by ads. To the point where if YouTube would somehow force me to watch ads, I would simply stop using it except for the 2-3 weekly videos I actually plan to watch beforehand.
I don't think Twitch Prime has the ad-free benefit anymore, they moved that into Twitch Turbo. The ads are also definitely stitched into the HLS playlist as segments, so even if you were to block them you would see a black screen for the duration of the ad, although Twitch does seem to be doing something where if a segment fails to load it tries to load the next one a few seconds later, so you might only see the black screen for 5s or so.
You may be ad-free for another reason such as a grandfathered twitch prime that will expire when it next renews, twitch turbo, or a subscription to a channel that opts-in to the ad-free sub benefit. You might also just be in a region or demographic where ads aren't being bought, so you wouldn't get any then.
Weird, I saw the ads get through for a few days but then they stopped again. I watch twitch vods pretty regularly still, but I guess I stick to a few channels and don't jump around; maybe the specific channels I watch didn't enable this type of ad.
Maybe uMatrix is blocking them somehow? I've never seen an ad, even on channels I don't follow or subscribe to. My rulesets are very strict, but you're right, if they really come through the video stream I don't know how I'm blocking it.
Maybe you buy a lot of subscriptions and currency? I bet they avoid annoying their most profitable users. While it might have been coincidental, I never got ads until I unsubbed from the vast majority of streamers I follow. Same for other things like gifted subs. I used to receive a ton of gifted subs until I started lowering my sub count. They are obsessed with performance metrics. Big spenders have a very different experience.
Now, whenever I get an ad, I immediately close twitch and find something on YT/Mixer to watch. I'm training their algorithms to leave me alone.
I get no ads on Twitch, and I currently don’t have Twitch Prime or any subscriptions. I’ve spent maybe 50 bucks on Twitch in the 3-4 year lifespan of my account. I’m running Vivaldi (which uses Chromium) with uBlock Origin, Ghostery (I know), and HTTPS Everywhere, on MacOS.
I get ads when I use Twitch, with the same account, on a stock installation of Chrome (which I use as my backup browser for when I don’t want to figure out which extension is breaking a website). So it’s not related to my account, ___location, etc.
This. This is the solution. AdNausium will destroy the ad market. Adblocking users will engage in toxic behaviors if you force them to.
The problem is that sites trying some insane techniques is a bad arms race.
Sites like the wallsteet journal made a adblock-wall, see ads or don't use the site. That's fine. They can do that. And they lost lots of traffic. But they can decide if they like that.
Websites want a have-your-cake-and-eat-it option -- forcibly show ads, no opt out.
Nothing stops google from banning your account if you are using AdNausium, not only from youtube, but from gmail and all other properties. Joys of SSO. Maybe a TOC change or two. Few public cases like that and AdNausium is dead in the water.
That's why I'm not using it personally, even though I'd love to...
Engaging with these threads for a couple of years. I will say though that there seem to be more people here in the biz of tracking than there used to be.
That would be extremely counterintuitive. Ads are visible; they give people reason to object to them even without knowing much about them, because their existence is intentionally intrusive.
Why ask a vague winky-face question when you can make your assertion instead? Now I have to wait for you to respond just for you to clarify what you were trying to say.
This link is very vague: they only talk about a “global data panel” without saying how it’s constructed. You can’t build a representative sample if you don’t have an idea of what the global traffic might be like. See also https://blog.alexa.com/alexa-panel-increase/:
> our traffic estimates are based on data from our global panel, which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of many different browser extensions. However, we don’t just rely on browser extensions. We also gather much of our traffic data from direct sources, including sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script and certify their metrics. It is this unique combination of data from our global panel, plus data from directly measured sources, filtered through our advanced statistical models that allow us to provide you with robust and comprehensive metrics.
I remember the first software I tried that automatically removed ads while recording a video stream. It was back in the previous century and then required an SGI workstation, but I suppose the same sort of ad-detection tech could be included into youtube-dl in about 5 minutes....
Possibly it's also self-preservation by the people involved. I imagine that even the YouTube developers and project managers hate watching ads. A solution only for them would probably look bad to the outside.
> but YouTube had the technical option of splicing ads directly into the video stream and simply not sending the actual video content for the duration of the ad for several years now
I don't think that's true, video encoding is expensive. This is not trivial to do without investment in hardware.
Google doesn't just sell ads, they sell targeted ads. Yes, YouTube currently does some processing on every video uploaded. But they only do that once.
It's trivial to send a different stream, though, and stop sending content for the primary stream for the duration. I believe a comment elsewhere says Twitch is doing this with HLS
I think this is an unstable equilibrium. YouTube is incentivized to continually recalculate this equation or find new approaches that maximize the number of ad-blocking users forced to give up the ad-blocker without leaving the website. Potentially the new terms of service allow them to use your other Google accounts as leverage to prevent users from using a malicious "Ad-Nauseam" style retaliation.
I've been thinking about this too: it's odd that YouTube doesn't try harder to stop ad blocking. Maybe the low amount of users with adblockers just make it not worth it?
It's far more likely that the data obtained about what videos you watch is far more valuable than the cash value of the ads you're not being served. Youtube videos are a very good early interest indicator for advertising.
Is paying to remove the ads a big deal? Presumably the content creator wants to earn something for putting the effort into creating something. Ads are one way to support content creation. Directly paying is another. Many advocates to remove ads say they want a direct pay model.
You mean like cable TV, where you paid for premium, commercial free content for years until they realized that they could charge you AND put ads in? Or Twitch Prime? Or any of the dozen other paid services that have done this..
Twitch prime doesn't affect the content at all anymore. It gets you a monthly channel subscription and a bunch of video games. Also I'd guess that the vast majority of people with twitch prime didn't go out and buy it either, Amazon just gave it to them.
The thing you can buy a la carte is twitch turbo, and that still removes all ads.
Netflix has TONS of ads in the form of product placement.
HBO does product placement too, though they sometimes pretend they don't or pretend it doesn't count when they do it because they do it "pro bono" (The Pope only drinks Coca Cola™ brand Coca Cola Zero™ for purely narrative reasons, and we're going to mention the brand Coca Cola™ explicitly several times by name to drive home the point that the character you enjoy watching enjoys the cool refreshing taste of Coca Cola™ brand Coca Cola Zero™. Don't worry Coca Cola™ hasn't paid us to shill their sugar water, we do it for free! Drink Coca Cola Zero™!)
Then the solution is to stop consuming things with unacceptable levels of advertisements. Unfortunately, given what the situation is on television channels, movies, and social media these days, that level is extremely high for most people.
The thing is, that solution will only work if enough people do it, and apparently as it stands not very many people are willing to give up their favorite content to avoid ads.
I can only control what I do, and if I must give up consuming media that will give me a temporary high (but it won't since I'll be annoyed by the ads), then so be it.
We have fire tv and Amazon has added more and more advertising to the point it’s nauseating (an ad for Shameless in the middle of a bunch of baby pictures is jarring).
I’d be happy to pay an extra dollar / month to amazon to not see ads there. Actively looking at htpcs that I can put Adblockers on (pihole doesn’t work since ads and content come from same places, I think)
Pihole helps with native ads and ads in apps, though. Not as much as a real blocker, but you can't really use one of those in native apps with webviews (if you use bromite webview on android, it might be possible, not sure, but that still doesn't help with true native trackers or with your tv)
It is not only about the adds. Even if you pay, they will still spy on you and sell/use this data to show you adds somewhere else on the internet. I will start paying only if they treat me as customer and not as product.
The original content creators made their content for the love of whatever they're making content about. Giving CCs an easy avenue to getting paid is what got us into this whole mess in the first place.
I don't totally follow what you're saying. Are you suggesting content creators should have no expectation of ever earning anything, let alone a living, from creating content?
I agree, as long as no ads means really no ads I think premium is something they are doing correctly. If the take downs, demonitizing, and political deplatforming weren't an issue they would be all set. Also, the horrible compression. I takes the same data to binge wath a series on Netflix as to watch a few short computer security or safe firearm maintenance videos, er well it did until those videos all disappeared.
I'm far from an expert, but isn't this what WebAssembly gives them? My understanding is that webassembly is a binary file that is an opaque binary. Why not have webassembly build out the entire page dynamically?
It doesn't need to. Don't think about it as documents being delivered to the browser anymore. Think of it as a binary executing inside the browser. You're not going to have HTTP requests to block, apart from the one that downloads the binary.
Absolutely. I'm not railing against WASM. WASM just has better marketing and tooling than straight Javascript.
Putting a VM into our browsers, along with sufficient API support to make that VM useful, is what spells the eventual end of the document-based web. I think that future arrived a few years ago and it's just not evenly distributed yet.
That sounds like the worst future possible. I love the fact that I can go to any web page and look at all of the HTML, CSS, JS (even if I need to use a tool to un-obfuscate it). Have you never wondered how someone did something and then looked at their code to find out how they did it? I love being able to use curl and wget to grab a web page. How would that work in a non document-based web? I really think this would be a terrible thing if it actually came to fruition. I truly hope I'm retired or dead before it occurs.
WASM doesn't need DOM access. You can just implement a browser in WASM and target canvas. I'm really surprised somebody hasn't done this already and marketed it as an unblockable ad delivery platform.
You can be certain that, when this does happen, these considerations will be dealt with. I feel very strongly that this is going to happen. The chance to execute arbitrary code on clients will be too alluring for adtech companies to ignore.
For accessibility compliance, you _need_ text and a DOM. Screen readers rely on HTML element semantics, ARIA attributes, and text content. The only way to make a canvas element (which is what you'd typically need to render custom UI) accessible is to have a textual fallback.
Outside accessibility there's also the issue of responsive design, huge SEO impacts, rendering performance... I'm probably missing a bunch.
Lifting a sedan with my bare hands is obviously easier than lifting a 10 wheeler, but it's still a massive problem. Rendering stuff is not the biggest issue.
Embed a browser with all that stuff into a page. Whatever APIs are missing to make the "inner browser" unable to fulfill all the requirements that the "outer browser" will eventually be filled-in by well-meaning developers who want the Javascript VM in the "outer browser" to be able to host general purpose applications.
You won't be able to block the binary, because the binary will be what renders the content. Your browser is going to act as a VM to run a browser that will display the content. The "inner" browser will be running on your computer, but short of binary reverse engineering, you won't be able to control it.
> Your browser is going to act as a VM to run a browser that will display the content.
Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript"[1] was an ominous portent of a terrifying future. Unfortunately, some people apparently saw it as development roadmap.
Functionally, nothing. WASM being a compiler target just lowers the bar (although we've had Emscripten for years). The browser developers are working hard to make it performant, too. Sufficiently obfuscated Javascript is as difficult to reverse engineer as a binary, though.
I don't do web, but I imagine there must be some webpack plugins that make an obfuscated mess out of your code, so the barrier to entry must already be quite low.
WASM at least is standardized, so there will be a whole ecosystem dedicated to it. Think IDA Pro for WASM.
> although we've had Emscripten for years
We did. And I didn't see the "asm.js apocalypse" you seem to fear.
I don't "fear" an "asm.js apocalypse". It's just the next step in the arms race between those who would have the Internet be like television, and those who would prefer it not. I'm one of the people who would have rather had the web stay more like Gopher and less like Java, but that's not the predominant opinion. We're going to lose the document-oriented declarative web because the web is financed by advertising. The spice must flow-- the ads must not be allowed to be blocked.
WASM is different between Emscripten was always a fun curiosity, and WASM is being "marketed" to developers as "get native app performance in a browser". "Modern" Javascript has been able to deliver this future for a few years now, but it lacked the marketing and tooling to make it mainstream. Flash and Java were attempts to move to that future that didn't pan out.
Having IDA Pro for WASM is all well and good, but doing binary reverse engineering on every single website isn't practical.
The web, as it has been, was nice. We're not going to get to keep it. I'm unhappy with it, but I'm resigned to it.
Take Facebook or Gmail. Last time I looked -- a couple of years ago -- Facebook served some 18 MB of JavaScript. I imagine it's not hand-written, but compiled from ReasonML and whatever other languages they're using. There's nothing nice in that, it's a mess. You can't crack open Developer Tools and figure out how the timeline updates when you scroll. You can't figure out where the ads are inserted into the DOM.
So WASM doesn't take away anything from us, because we haven't had the "nice" you mention for 10 or 15 years. Sites like HN will stay like this, sites like Facebook will get even bigger. It will happen with or without WASM.
But yes, I do see where you're coming from. You want a less bloated Web, and you're worried that WASM is not going to lead to that, which I pretty much agree with. While I'm saying that cat is already out of the bag and WASM at least has the potential to bring performance improvements over JavaScript (which will be promptly negated by the sites getting even more bloated).
The cat absolutely is out of the bag. It has been. I'm not railing against WASM.
I want a declarative web. I wish there wasn't a VM in my browser. I want a web where my user agent, under my control, dictates how documents are interpreted and displayed.
So much of information security relies on not letting third parties execute arbitrary code on your computer. The price to view "mainstream" websites is increasingly becoming "allow third parties to execute arbitrary code on your computer". I can sandbox that code and perhaps limit the impact to my privacy (though thanks to processor microarchitecture "features" that's increasingly difficult), but I lose virtually all ability to control the presentation experience.
To be blunt: The kind of assholes that delighted in using Javascript to block opening context menus, blocking "Paste" into password fields, etc, have won. That pisses me off. Developers with good intentions who wanted to make something "cool" end up being the architects of the tools that will be used turn the web into cable TV.
TVs allow the user to mute the audio, switch channels and fast forward past ads in recorded video. What publishers are doing to the web is like sending a control message that reconfigured the TV and disabled some of its functions. "You can't mute the audio, you're obligated to listen to this. Also, we're turning the volume all the way up in order to reach you even if you leave. You can't turn it off either."
Publishers simply don't want users to have any control over the experience. It's their way or the highway.
People sometimes leave the room during commercial breaks. Advertisers realized this and started increasing transmitting much louder audio to make sure the audience can't get away. So I use the mute button and the problem is solved.
What if broadcasting companies sent signals during commercials that told the TV to disable these features? "They've enjoyed the movie, now it's time to make them pay. Don't let them change the channel, mute the audio or lower the volume". How long would it take before TVs that didn't follow these intructions entered the market?
Browsers have features publishers don't want people to have. We can download copies of "their" content. We can delete their ads. We can filter out their user tracking malware. This is possible because the browser serves us, not them.
One other thing that's tangentially related to this: Region restrictions on DVD players, and gaming consoles. Those were built right into the hardware/firmware of some of these devices.
When I said basically the same thing 4 years ago[1], most people seemed to think it wasn't a serious concern or could be easily bypassed. However, after observing how certain types of businesses use the World Wide Web over the past 3 decades, it's obvious what they want: to send an opaque binary blob to the user that nobody can investigate or modify, that gives them full control over what the user sees and is allowed to do. Just like TV.
The only safe response to this is to stop allowing documents (or docs with 3270-styole forms) to embed software in a Turing complete language. Add functionality that is used declaritively, or the answer to "should this be blocked" is undecidable. Give them the ability to run a Turing complete language that renders to a canvas, and adblocking becomes a hard image recognition problem (or requires solving the Halting Problem).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211050