What we break when we fix ad blocking - <AUTHOR> http://www.tonyhaile.com/2015/09/18/what-we-break-when-we-fix-for-ad-blocking/ <comment><USER2> I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying.

It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.

More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

<comment><USER3> If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical.

I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?

<comment><USER4> > _If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained > advertising you 'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your > preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be > legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical._

What you're saying here is that, if you don't like advertising, your only ethical option is to _never use the Web again._ (Well, I suppose I can read the comments on Hacker News. None of the articles, though.) That is not reasonable. I have actually gone out of my way to configure my adblocker to un-block as many inoffensive ad providers as possible, because I want to support the sites I use, but when those sites are knowingly degrading not just my browsing experience but _the functioning of my computer,_ measures need to be taken.

> _I 'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was > around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the > industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if > that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists > using a new model?_

Because there weren't any new models yet. Which is why the downloaders wanted people to come up with one.

<comment><USER3> There were options. You could go to concerts, you could listen to the radio. You could go to free concerts in the park. What you couldn't do was listen to the latest Britney album when and wherever you wanted without going and buying the CD or unethically downloading it off of Napster.

You could tell yourself that you were perfectly justified in doing so. In fact it was Britney's fault for not coming up with easy way for you to pay her and get 128mbit mp3s from your pajamas in your room. But I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.

<comment><USER5> But now there is Spotify, and it's getting more money than I'd spend on buying CD's I haven't downloaded any music in years

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article, like all the ones before it complaining about AdBlock, seem to conflate all kinds of contents like they're all the same.

Yet, they aren't. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and/or cable, etc. etc.

The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not for long.

Paywalls work for high quality content (eg, The Economist); but not for low quality content.

Low quality content cannot survive behind a paywall, because nobody will pay for it; what will happen is that low quality content made for profit will die/disappear, and we'll all be better for it.

What will survive is high quality content made for profit or for free, and low quality content made for free (which we can ignore).

This whole debate exists only because current producers of low quality content have somehow convinced everyone that their content is in fact worthwhile, and that it's an accident and a crime that they'd be robbed of revenue, and that users are fools not wanting to pay for it.

This is rubbish. Users are not fools, and they are always right. What they will not pay for is _worthless_ , literally.

<comment><USER7> Well said.

Maybe some of these individuals forget that many of us were on the Internet well before it became as "commercial" as it is now. The bulk of the content came from users that didn't expect or receive any payment for their writing...much like many of the biggest sites today: Reddit, etc. What wasn't around was shitty, click-bait junk written for no reason other than to drive ad impressions.

If 70% of what's on the web died due to lack of ad revenue, I don't think society would suffer some huge loss. Stating that ads are required to support content is begging the question; if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with.

<comment><USER8> > if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to > begin with

That isn't entirely true as the content is technically worth whatever the sponsors are willing to pay to make it happen. The university in my town puts on a summer series of movies in the park and Lynda.com has sponsored a number of the seasons. There is even a short ad played on the screen before the movie.

I wouldn't pay to go to the event, but am 100% happy letting Lynda.com pay for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just like if 95% of my cable channels disappeared overnight, I'm actually pretty OK with a bunch of websites going out of business, and I end up paying for the few services I'm not already paying for but would wish to keep. It's sad that people lose their jobs, especially those that can no longer make a living doing what they love, but from a product standpoint: whatever.

I was around before the commercialization of the web exploded, and I might miss all the light entertainment that it provides, but going back wouldn't be the worst. The parts of the internet that are most special to me are some combination of not funded by ads in the first place, a labor of love, open source, or I already pay for anyway.

The increasingly desperate, increasingly gross business models that pop up as publishers go down with the ship is going to suck though.

<comment><USER10> I kinda get the feeling a lot of the content on semi-large websites is curated to bring in more views, playing on their main demographic's idea of what they find interesting instead of what the author is actually interested in. I'd rather listen to someone talk about something that they love than something they think I should love. I feel like that all got lost in the rush to bring in a profit and websites that haven't updated to that style get pushed back because they don't artificially raise interest in what they have to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My issue is with advertisements that break web pages, or slow them down dramatically. Or even worse, take up real estate on my phone, and just plain break my mobile experience further. Sometimes I forget to install an adblocker whenever I do a fresh OS install and forget just how bad things can be without an adblocker (well really my biggest peeve is pop ups, just why are they still around?) and they get worse when someone buys ads to distribute an exploit to Java or something (was once in my lifetime a victim to a Java 0-day through advertisements - never again will I enable Java as a browser plugin).

<comment><USER12> There is a sports related web site I often read (friends link to it from facebook, and other sites I visit).. When reading it on mobile, almost the entire page will load, then my whole phone (LG G4) freezes up completely for about 8 seconds, then a full page add appears over the screen. Sometimes the "X" is in the upper right, sometimes below, etc, and if you are off even the slightest amount, you get a new chrome tab opened, to a site that also freezes up your whole phone again for a few seconds..

If it wasn't for adds the cover the whole text, I would probably not run an ad blocker (and really need to find one for android that doesn't suck)

<comment><USER13> One thing is for certain, publishers aren't using cohorts for how browser- breaking advertising is influencing their user retention and overall revenue. Fuck, some of the JS just for news site UI makes it clear no one is even testing their mobile sites on an actual mobile device.

If the ad block rate gets high enough, and if the CPMs do not increase in the face of dwindling supply, publishers will just make content available only in their own apps. Fake crises averted, things change, markets and businesses adapt.

<comment><USER14> I think they're ok with the clicks it brings from naive/confused smartphone users, which is exactly how wicked it is.

<comment><USER13> It depends if the visitor is both interested and prepared to purchase whatever is being advertised. Someone who doesn't own a vehicle can click on auto insurance ads all day. Now matter how optimized the ads and insurance product is they will never buy. Because of the way ad buys & targeting works you really do not want unrelated users clicking through.

Do the publishers want more clicks to ads? If they look at a short period of revenue, yes, they will see a boost in their CPMs. Over the long term, as more and more advertisers block the publishers domain due to receiving worthless clicks the publisher's advertising auction prices will begin to collapse. If all of their outgoing clicks are bad eventually they will be left with advertisers who measure nothing (or measure the wrong thing, like if a video ad plays to completion) and advertisers pushing junk like adware/spyware.

Like I said before, we are talking about publishers who are not even testing out their own site on a real mobile device. Why not? May be they are still drunk on the typhoon of free traffic they've been getting from Facebook for the past couple of years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is an alternative to adverts. Its real, it's here, it works. That alternative is Patreon.

In the Patreon model, you can support the creator directly, and their ability to produce content scales with that support. It's like a subscription, except you allow anyone else to free ride.

A Patreon supported site could run _no ads at all_ and still make a stable income. It would no longer be fighting its readers to force them to view manipulative nonsense. It would no longer be answerable to pushy, content- controlling advertisers. It would have more editorial freedom, bounded only by the willingness of people to pay.

IMO the Patreon model answers all the problems of the advertising model and I'd like to see it becoming the norm.

<comment><USER16> It seems that in the Patreon model, the creator is the central element, and not the content itself. This seems a bit weird, because it is the content I'm after, not the artist. It may be nice for fans who will buy anything from a particular artist, even if it is worthless when considering just the content.

Also, this seems a lot like "branding & marketing" version 2.0. I don't like branding. And I don't want to like what people write just because of what they have written before. I want to read or listen to work, and _then_ decide if I pay for it.

Do you have a better way of viewing this?

<comment><USER17> I'm paying for creation, that is what is valuable, _not_ content, content is worthless. Content has infinite supply. Creation is what is limited.

This dissonance has been, and (it seems) will always be, the primary stumbling block in the discussion of the information economy.

Why are pirates immoral? Why are they not immoral? Why is DRM immoral? Why is DRM not immoral? Who owns the copyright? what is fair use?

All to do with information. All fighting this central dissonance.

This is why the Patreon model should be advocated when it comes to information. Because as a tool, the market is utterly unfit to operate in this arena.

<comment><USER15> Now that's an interesting point.

And it's one reason why I support Basic Income as an idea. I feel like the potential prevalence of creation is _huge_. But everybody is wasting away their life in "day jobs".

It's interesting to consider in fact, that Patreon is kind of like a one- person basic income.

<comment><USER17> Well, day jobs create new content as well, right?

Really I'm not sure basic income enters into this. Patreon is a pretty aggressive arena, only the people that generate public interest get funded, that's not everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article assumes that advertisers can get more sophisticated than blockers - I don't agree. With good enough technology, any logo can be snipped out or scribbled over. Any inline, self hosted image can be recognized and removed. Perhaps in future, adblockers will comb through the text of pages and the frames of video and your hero will be drinking "soda" instead of <brand name>.

Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking glasses. So I can walk down the street and NO LOGOS.

It would almost be like humans owned the public space, then.

<comment><USER18> Ads tend to be in private spaces though. You can just see it from public space.

Another way to achieve your goal is for the glasses to render giant walls around all private spaces. All cities would look like Manhattan then.

<comment><USER15> I was thinking more like: detect an advert, draw a grey box over it. Or kittens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sorry content makers, you don't have the rights to resell my eyeballs. I truly am sorry that for many of you this represents a loss of what would otherwise be an easy income stream, but I will apologize for blocking ads no more than I would for unsubscribing from spam/newsletters or for not clicking ads or buying advertised goods, which is to say, not at all.

Much like newspapers, you've hitched your wagons to problematic revenue streams. I wish it were easier, but as content creators you are also businesses, and you need to work on better ways to support yourselves. That's your responsibility, not mine. I do support content creators directly quite often and quite a lot in many different ways (merch, crowdfunding, direct support such as patreon, volunteer labour, etc). If you can't survive in a world full of "me"s, well I suspect you weren't trying very hard.

</comment><comment><USER20> The condescending attitude of "users don't understand the consequences of their actions" \-- which I've also seen from several other people raising red flags about the consequences of ad-blocking -- really bugs me a lot.

A different way of looking at it is that many users _do_ understand the consequences and either disagree with the author about the likely outcomes or have a different set of priorities than the author.

</comment><comment><USER21> There's a great short book called 'Who moved my Cheese?' which tackles the impermanence of any particular means of income stream.

Putting aside the morality/ethics discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the 'cheese' is moving for content publishers and so they are left with a choice, change and find new cheese - or stay and starve. Either way, the current gnashing of teeth will have little effect.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ad blocking is interesting in that it shows what happens when something that probably should be regulated has not. And because of this the public trust has eroded and then the answer has become an arms race of ad blockers vs ads. Resulting in a downward spiral resulting in less quality content.

The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.

<comment><USER23> Well, or it's a powerful illustration of a market finding a solution to a new, novel problem.

After all, what solution would the government put in place? Ban ads? Regulate their content? How would that be more optimal than allowing people in the market to find the right solutions?

The reality is, ad supported content with lots and lots and lots of content providers may simply not be tenable, due to the fragmentation in both content and ad delivery vectors.

That requires the market to find new solutions, like paywalls, micropayments, different styles of ads, mixed pay/free models, good ol' fashioned consolidation, etc.

Now, to be clear, I'm about as far from a free market dogmatist as you can get... I'm no communist, but I'm Canadian, so...

But I honestly don't believe this is a case where regulation is appropriate. Where the market is likely to settle on a highly non-optimal solution (like, say, healthcare, due to information asymmetries, or broadband, due to enormous barriers of entry, or manufacturing pollution, thanks to negative externalities), absolutely I think the government has to get involved.

But in this case, I don't see any reason for that kind of heavy-handed intervention.

<comment><USER24> I don't think that the government should be involved in regulating advertising beyond things like banning ads for jumping off of bridges and other legitimately harmful things.

Where I think regulations do make sense is for advertising by-product: the enormous treasure trove of data about users that is collected and stored who- knows-where and has who-knows-what done to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They are not ad-blockers so much as HTML firewalls.

I use a firewall to protect my home network from the wilds of the internet. I use an HTML firewall to protect my browser (and in turn, my home network) from the wilds of the web.

Incredibly slow loading, large assets that are inconsequential to the functionality I need, malware, unwanted visual clutter that creates a negative cognitive load I want to protect myself from.

The reality that advertisements are the main targets is indicative that they have perhaps been the worst offenders. I'm sure there are many good advertisers out there. I'm sure it is only the 99% that make the rest of them look bad.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use.

If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.

<comment><USER27> I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) Other awesome ad-free content is created to promote retail within the same company, like sparkfun.com. It seems to me the ease of monetization with ad-networks drive ultra-low quality content like about.com, though even I must admit that there are also good sites out there that are supported by ads.

edit: I just discovered that dr-iguana.com does have ads. I stick by my assertion that there is a lot of great content out there made strictly as a hobby, though.

<comment><USER28> > I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the > best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, > like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.)

I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source.

I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field.

It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works.

When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how _few_ novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book.

There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people _observing the poor from a distance_. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell.

You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life.

The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness.

This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story.

The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems _causing_ increased economic disparity.

If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, _we need to hear their stories_. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them.

[1]: [http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/) [2]: [http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/)

<comment><USER27> Wow, I hadn't considered it that way. Thank you for broadening my perspective on the matter. This puts services like Facebook in a much more positive light than the way I'd considered before.

I haven't seen "This is 40", but I personally know many poor people who drive very fancy new cars and spend on extravagant things, while simultaneously being overwhelmed by stress from lack of money. I haven't figured out how to understand that yet, but these are intelligent, rational people, who make monetary decisions that are impossible (so far) for me to understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the original sin of the web > was to disconnect the value of ads from the users experience on the page. > The data is clear: the better the user experience = > the more attention you > can capture while an ad may be in view => the greater impact on recall and > recognition. Ad-supported pages that prioritise user experience are more > effective, but we set up our systems to care about page loads not > performance._

I'm curious why, in all the outrage and handwringing about ad blockers and the future of the Web, _nobody_ ever seriously suggests making ads less annoying.

We don't need a new monetization model. We need content providers, and by extension advertising providers, to refuse to carry ads that are wildly intrusive, CPU-intensive, or outright fraudulent ("one weird trick"). Seriously, why are major national news outlets carrying advertisements that are as sketchy as those X-Ray Specs ads from old Boy's Life magazines?

</comment><comment><USER29> Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers/publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire.

It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through constantly.

<comment><USER30> Oh but it is. The publishers went to the networks because they paid better, and never wondered where they were getting their advantages from.

<comment><USER31> Couldn't agree more. The fault for the state of web advertising these days lies squarely on advertising networks that do not vet their content.

For a long time I used but did not recommend adblock to my trogladite friends and family. Sadly its gotten so bad that I've begun installing it on their machines on their behalf when they ask me for help with their computer because ad blockers are today what antivirus was 10 years ago. They're how you keep yourself safe online.

Adblock usage won't change until the networks do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The irony is that the biggest player here, Google, was also the most aggressive in placing ads. I had the pleasure of working with various AdSense and DFP Specialists. Basically it was all about how and where to place ads in the most eye-catching ways, and as many as possible, without breaking AdSense rules. Bigger ads = usually better (in particular those large rectangles, yuck). Higher up the fold = better (funny enough the Google Search team later penalitzed you when you replaced your up-the-fold content with non-content ad stuff - which shows that there are Chinese walls separating various Google teams).

</comment><comment><USER33> If ad blocking is a matter of right and wrong, then so is the invisible hand of _any_ demand/supply driven system.

Blocking web-based ads is no different from TV viewers who walk out of the room, or record shows then skip over ads on playback, or mute the TV during ads. AFAIK, no TV advertisers have bemoaned that venerable practice.

If web ad purveyors want folks to browse differently then they must 1) improve their spam so people choose not to block it, or 2) change the physical way it's distributed.

To volubly complain is to sleight the invisible hand, which as you know, in the Land of the Free, is akin to giving olde Mr Smith the finger.

<comment><USER34> The adblocking : DVR analogy is broken. TV ads are interstitial. Online ads are, for the most part, native. You can consume the content and the ad simultaneously. So online ads really are already, in some sense, product placements. Are you're arguing in favor of blocking out all product placements?

<comment><USER33> Yes, block all product placement. All advertising is a curse not a blessing. Look at the state of its progeny: TV and radio. Hopeless.

The little bit of good content on TV is... only from sources without ads (HBO, PBS, Netflix).

The advertising model of content underwriting should be dead. Let ad blockers be the stake through its vampire heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I use Adblock and I don't mind disabling it for sites that provide quality content or reading materials. There has to be a balance which is sometimes abused by the sites.

For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don't make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don't mind watching a small commercial if it was 5-10 minutes highlight of a game. If the balance was reasonable I am sure Adblock would not have been this popular.

<comment><USER36> nfl.com was actually the site that turned me into a "default to blocking" person. The severity of ads on their site is pretty ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment> grey-area This flood of articles about blocking ads are all predicated on the assumption that making money with ads supports quality content, and that the internet as we know it would not exist without ads. Both of these assumptions are false - the internet didn't begin by being driven by ads, and it won't end that way, and ad-driven content is degraded by the ads when it starts to exist because of them.

The intrusive ads which are being blocked do not lead to quality content, on the contrary they intrude on it both in an immediate sense by distracting readers from the content, and in editorial terms, by driving a constant demand for more clicks, more views, and more unique visits, whatever the cost. The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers. The result is media sites which see the success of Buzzfeed not as a warning but as inspiration, which use services like outbrain to try to keep users clicking in a circle of despair through endless shocking headlines which promise much but offer nothing of substance.

I won't mourn that web as it passes, and I won't be starting to read the Facebook News app or other corporate feeds instead - native apps are subject to the same pressures and the same inexorable creep of advertising around and into the content. This will be a blow for Google though, and I'm quite sure behind Apple's rhetoric about user choice lies a calculation that this will limit Google's bottom line.

The Mona Lisa is an interesting example to use, as it was neither produced in order to display with advertising, nor with advertising within the picture (the two choices offered in the article). It and pictures like it were commissioned privately by a patron who valued the services of that painter but thereafter was displayed for free to the world - maybe there's a model there for online content - commissioned via something like kickstarter for its value but thereafter displayed for free to the public. It also wasn't valued as much at the time as it is now.

 _We should reject false dichotomies which offer the choice between one sort of advertising or another._ The best places for discussion, content and news on the web are often advertising free, or have advertising which is unobtrusive and targeted and therefore not likely to be blocked by users, given the choice (as with HN for example). I honestly wouldn't mourn the loss of most of the so-called news services we currently have, and the rise of other services which request payment from a patron, subscription payments from loyal users, or find other ways of making ends meet (selling related services, bundled content, making money on related transactions like bookings etc). There are lots more ways to make money in the world than advertising, and most of them less degrading.

<comment><USER37> Wholeheartedly agree.

<comment><USER6> Me too! Just said much of the same thing in another comment.

All content is not created equal; content supported by ads is the worst kind, and there's a good chance it'll simply be killed by adblocking.

This is all very good news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > If the content that best informs our thinking is increasingly only available > to those willing to pay then it has troubling impacts for those living in > poverty or countries for whom a $9.95 monthly subscription is out of reach.

...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read

<comment><USER39> You prefer targeted advertising to and data collection from children and teenagers to having them get parental approval for what they do online?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Magazines & newspapers shot themselves in the foot when they ran out to produce free content to "stay in the game" like everyone else.

Their original product was never free, but they didn't think that through. They made most money through ads & classified, but they still charged for the product.

Now they need to figure out how to make each visitor be worth 50 cents or whatever, and they are trying to do it in a way that people were already growing sick of when they started.

\---

They should create a system of micropayments where people can have a instantly accessible purse & a page can charge a few cents to few, ranked by content, author, whatever.

they need to start selling their content again.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think a lot of the recent pushback against adverts is driven by video and specifically autoplaying video ads.

As an advertiser I might well be tempted to stop displaying video ads if I was convinced that a big proportion of users were blocking video but not text ads.

Sadly most blockers are all or nothing. Most users are not going to go to the trouble of whitelisting individual sites so a better middle ground would be global AD blocker settings:

Off - Block nothing Low - Block popups Medium - Block popups and video High - Block everything

If that was a common model it would encourage some reasonable behaviour on both sides.

</comment><comment><USER42> Kudos to Apple for drawing the line like they did with Flash. Advertisers were degrading their product and irritating their users by going too far, so Apple did the right thing.

</comment><comment><USER43> In the future everyone will be producing content - not just the people that currently do it for a living. Brand-name publishers simply will not be able to compete against the masses. It began with TypePad blogging, and now platforms like Medium are taking social publishing even more mainstream.

Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?

</comment><comment><USER44> Web publishers should get together to make a "Reader's Charter" that pledges to stop annoying ads. It's not that complicated. Here's mine: [http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website- with-o...](http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-one- weird-trick/)

</comment><comment><USER45> _in trying to be more private we may be more transparent_

I think that's one thing people don't account for. once most content is behind paywalls you leave much more of a trace than on the ad-ridden web now

<comment><USER31> I don't disagree but I think an important distinction is that when you provide your credit card there is an expectation that they will be able to track you based on that.

A big problem with ad tracking these days is that its entirely out-of-site- out-of-mind, nontechy people don't expect to be tracked across the internet as much as when they buy something online with a credit card.

<comment><USER46> No it's also just that once the user is the customer, there's a requirement to actually pay them some respect. An annoyed paying customer is directly lost revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> My understanding is that adblockers work by removing known third party app sites from loading items on a page.

If that's true, what would stop a website from proxying ads, so they appear to come from the website rather than the third party?

I guess that would involve more bandwidth and so less money for the site, but high-bandwidth items are the ones people complain about anyway. I don't see why text based ads would be impossible under that scheme, for example.

</comment><comment><USER48> Just to throw an idea out, surely not original...Http has a payment/advertising system added to the headers. Users decide if they will make a micropayment, view advertising or do a subscription to view a page/site if the site requests payment. The user can have a default setting and also settings for specific sites. Along with this there is some management that limits information the site can get about the user.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm curious now after reading the mobile gaming post that's also on the front page. If everyone paid for the content on the big news sites, would it even be more profitable than selling ads and mining user data?

How much would sites have to charge to make up for the loss of ads and user data?

Also what are the chances publishers to ever get rid of tracking and mining data?

</comment><comment><USER50> This reminds me of a concert experience back in the days. The venue had curtain in front of the stage where they shot a projector and somebody had forgot to full-screen the slide show and the entire audience could see napster running in the task bar.

</comment><comment><USER51> I almost don't understand why people are still paying the prices they pay to put ads out on the internet. There are some exceptions but name the last "ad" you clicked on? It probably resembles the last spam you followed.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm just going to re-quote one of my comments from a previous topic that was flagged to death:

>Back in the early internet era, the best content was available for free of charge. If anything, that's still the case even today. Try to google on some technical topics like Ohm's law or something and you'll find very old websites built with good ole' HTML tables providing the information you need crisp and clear.

>Actually, I disagree. This is 2015. If I want to start a website on a certain topic, say about cars or electronics, I can find some really good free hosts who will support me without any sneazy catches. As a real example, I go to blogger.com, setup a new blog with my own custom theme, (with all the attribution to blogger removed if I want to) and start producing content. Not cool with blogspot? Then, how about Github pages? Not so technical? How about using a free shared web host (there are plenty, Google them)?

>If your objective is to spread information and knowledge, you will do that no matter what. It is when your objective is guised as spreading information when you really want to make money and scale up doing so, then you run into a problem. The problem with this kind of appeal against ad-blocking is the same old argument of "How much is too much?" "We need money to support our website to keep it up and running". But, never do these authors disclose how much they really need as long as they're making a killer profit. The problem with mixing ads with content is that introduces a conflict of interest - Are you writing that content because you like writing, or are you writing that content to get more eyeballs to serve your advertisers? And it's very hard to convince your readers that you don't intend to make money from them although you have ads on your site.

>For your reference, I do own a blog myself without any ads whatsoever and I think this is the future we're heading towards. I am a proud user of adblock software and I refused to be shamed for that. As would any user, I am concerned about the content first, which is the logical reason why I go to a site. But, if the site tries hard to ruin my experience to make it difficult for me to consume that content, then of course, I'll find a way to circumvent it. But, that doesn't mean I don't support the authors of the site, just that as everyone else, I have my own way of supporting them. Just like how I've been donating to Wikipedia all these years. There have been too many sites abusing the slogan of "We need to place ads so we can support ads" to buy back our lost trust. Sure, there will be a lot of content weeded out because they can't support themselves, but I am confident that the ones whose objectives are to spread information will do so no matter what.

>We built the internet ourselves when no one gave us ads to support our efforts back then. And we'll find a way to do it again. Just takes time and patience.

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe scaling native advertising might hire more people than robotizing the whole affair the way it is now.

<comment><USER54> Are you implying that native advertisements aren't ads, or are more acceptable kind of ad, or are impossible to block? Because none of those things are true.

Native advertising is probably the worst kind of advertising. If I see a website or magazine publish an "advertorial", I'm never going to trust anything they publish from then on. It completely undermines credibility and only makes sense as a last-ditch moneygrab. It's not even worth blocking because it's a useful red flag.

<comment><USER53> There doesn't have to be a single way of doing things for every situation. For some things I'm interested in a native ad is just fine. For other things not.

You make interesting points even though you are unnecessarily aggressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If you use an ad blocker and consume content supported by ads, you are a thief. It may be the best case scenario for your security, time, etc and there are cases where thievery is justified, but you are a thief nonetheless.

<comment><USER56> That's foolishness. There's nothing in the world that compels me to use your content the way you intended. I can read it or not, store it on my backup drive, print it out and use it for the bottom of my birdcage.

I understand that content providers are frustrated. But lashing out and calling names is pointless and silly.

<comment><USER55> I'm not calling names. I'm classifying the act of deliberately circumventing the method of revenue generation baked into the presentation of content by publishers.

It boggles my mind that people cannot understand this. Of course time is your to do with as you see fit. If you want to download the ads and bypass them after the content is presented, in the spirit of TiVo, by all means do, but don't selectively choose to download what you want. Instead you should just not visit the site.

Alternatively if you'd like to install an extension (if one were to exist) that warns you that ads are attempting to load before you are given a chance to consume the content and then gives you an option to return to where you came from, that is fine too.

But to deliberately reject the advertising adjacent to content is an act of thievery.

<comment><USER56> On my machine, in my home, with my electricity and bandwidth, I'll do anything I like with the bytes that are delivered to me. Don't pretend to tell me what I must do or not do. That's like the salesman with his foot in the door as I try to close it. I have a shotgun at home for that particular problem. I have ad-blockers for the other one.

I buy the sunday paper at the local mart, I dump the ads in the trash before I go out the door. Nobody jumps out and tries to arrest me for that - its my paper, I'll do as I please.

And yes its simple name-calling to say 'thievery' without proving the case, or even attempting to justify it. That word has meaning, and it isn't what's happening. Not going to just take anybody's word for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> It's pretty clear to me that the endgame for this is ad-blocking-blockers: You run an ad blocker, then you either pay to visit my site or you disable your ad blocker for my site.

That's going to slow down sites even more, but that's the tragedy of the commons: some sites will be obnoxious in the ads they show it forces people to use ad-blockers. That destroys the livelihood of so many people that countermeasures will be developed.

<comment><USER58> Unless the way the web works fundamentally changes, it will always be easier to block ads than to detect and block adblockers.

<comment><USER57> Yes, but arguably there is more financial motivation for the publishers. You end up in an arms race.

<comment><USER58> More like cat and mouse. The publishers are at an extreme technical disadvantage.

<comment><USER59> How so? It's extremely trivial to make an inline script that detects if the client is blocking ad network requests, then act accordingly. Possible actions range from blowing up the page to redirecting the user away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Advertising is paying for goods with attention. It's a novel type of currency. It's a wealth generator. And it's contributed to a more diverse Internet.

If you don't want to pay with attention that's fine. If you believe the Internet should be an ad-free Utopia, that's fine too. But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.

<comment><USER60> I'm really curious whenever people say such things though: what about (thought experiment) the situation where i let my computer run whatever code websites throw at me, but that come hell or high water, i'm 100% sure i would never click on any ad or be swayed in my opinions regarding what to purchase? Is that 'attention' still worth any nonzero value? Or what about the situation where some technical gizmo forces me to look and listen to the advert (see Black Mirror S01E02) before receiving the article text. Say i do all that, but still am 100% uninterested in what's being offered—wouldn't it be in everyone's best interests to _not_ show that ad?

On a lighter note, this is how i feel about ads: [https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s](https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s) (Black Books – "just browsing")

<comment><USER34> At least today even fraudulent impressions are valuable because ad buyers are willing to pay for them. They're smartening up though, as Tony Haile (author of the linked article & Chartbeat CEO) is aware. Viewability & attention metrics are the future of ad performance tracking. (and that link gave me a good laugh)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Boeing decided not to tell airlines a safety alert on Max didn't work - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1612370/why-boeing-decided-not-to-tell-airlines-a-safety-alert-on-max-didnt-work/ <comment><USER2> But if they put in a warning light, then they would have had to add an item to the emergency checklist for what to do when the warning light came on. This would entail explaining about MCAS. Which would have led to discussing how a single AOA sensor could control the horizontal stabilizer of the plane.</comment>


My two favourite (underused) HTML5 media features - <AUTHOR> http://daniemon.com/blog/two-favourite-underused-html5-media-features/

<comment><USER2>
      I'd love to see this added to the many HTML media players
      out there because it's so useful to be able to slow down
      complex educational explanations or speech where the
      listener is a non-native speaker. Similarly, it's helpful
      to speed up media when you're in a rush or simply bored.

I work in a research lab studying & developing software for teaching languages, and this is one of the major reasons we decided to focus on HTML5 playback for annotated videos[1], which we've currently got piloted in several college-level French and German classes. When watching / listening to lecture material in a language they are familiar with, students tend to fast-forward and consume the material between 1.5 and 2x faster than real-time speed; meanwhile, when watching difficult sections of dialog, they'll slow it down and listen over and over[2] to make sure they hear it right. Unfortunately, not all the resources we use are available in HTML5-compatible form (i.e., we don't have access to a file, we're just embedding a YouTube video or something), and so we provide a wrapper around a bunch of different services' embeddable players to make them all look the same to the student, but most of them don't support changing playback rate, and it's a sufficiently popular feature that we get bug reports saying it broke whenever it has to be disabled because of the underlying service not providing a suitable API.

[1] Real-world (i.e., not made specifically for pedagogical use) media featuring real natural language usage that's been marked up with captions, glosses, commentary, etc., to make it accessible to lower-level language learners. There are several interesting start-ups in this space right now, like MovieMouth, which produces auxiliary content for Disney films to teach English to Spanish speakers (you must provide the actual Disney film yourself).

[2] Which brings up another killer feature of HTML5 media: arbitrary seeking. Makes it really easy to implement auto-repeat, which is great both for students wanting to listen to a few seconds over and over, and for transcribers who need to produce the annotations we use. It is so _freaking_ annoying when Brightcove or YouTube or whatever other player will jump around whole seconds before or after where the users _tells_ them to seek, or just refuse to seek at all sometimes. Another major source of bug reports from students who get used to HTML5 just working.

</comment><comment><USER3> For playbackRate attribute, following is interesting:

>The cool thing is the audio pitch stays the same so human voices don't go higher or lower and sound silly.

What algorithm would achieve that?

<comment> Evan-Purkhiser This kind of feature can often be found on professional DJ equipment and is usually called "key lock" or "pitch lock". On Wikipedia its referred to as "Time Stretching" [1]

[1] [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_time- scale/pitch_modifi...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_time- scale/pitch_modification)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome, both features that I wish would be available in all video players. The questions that naturally arise:

1) How does one expose all these features without UI overload? You need a widget for the playback speed, and a widget to turn auto-pause off (in case I want to play a song in a background tab). More thought on this is needed.

2) Can we retroactively add these features to HTML media everywhere through a browser extension? This might address problem 1 by letting you choose an extension that only exposes the features you personally are most interested in.

(Note: The auto-pause seems to work if switch to another tab or minimize the Chrome window, but not if you switch to another window (Chrome or not) by clicking the taskbar button. But hey, still better than nothing. And combined with the speaker icon shown on sound-emitting tabs, this could go a long way towards preventing that annoying situation of not knowing which tab has begun auto-playing in the background)

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree about the risk of UI overload. You could add them to a settings dialog but then features risk being missed by non-techie users.

The extension idea is good and one I've been looking into for Page Visibility but again, it needs to be configurable for times when background playing is wanted. But as you say, better than nothing.

<comment><USER5> "You could add them to a settings dialog but then features risk being missed by non-techie users."

Well, at least in that case the addition is a strict improvement: some users will find it useful, and some won't, but no one will find it harmful. With any other solution that exposes the functionality, there's the possibility that some users will find it confusing or offputting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Those are really awesome features! HTML5 is really great with these features such as geolocation, media, localStorage, camera and the great mobile APIs like tapping into sensors, vibrate, even battery, all with very simple javascript.

Haha, anything said at half-speed sounds hilarious.

Go to 1:20 of the OPs demo ([http://daniemon.com/tech/html5/playbackRate/](http://daniemon.com/tech/html5/playbackRate/)) and set the playback rate to 0.5, "It's like they're like time machines............ you can get from here to Montana in about 3 hours........... you can go as fast as you want........ hahahaha..... and nobody can say anything." Very similar to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSHNyppwS5w](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSHNyppwS5w)

</comment><comment><USER7> Funny you should pick those two, since if the page "helpfully" uses the visibility feature to pause a video that I'm not staring at, it doesn't matter that I was using playbackRate to listen to it at 2x speed because it'll be at 0x speed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, the visibility API is only of very limited use. The document will report itself to be still shown even if the window is minimized or in the background (or on iOS if I switched to another App!). It only reports the document as hidden if you switch to another tab. So if you want to use it to e.g. pause animation if the window isn't shown you will still burn unnecessary CPU cycles (ok, on iOS any timer is paused automatically if you switch to another App, so it kinda works out there - but not on the Desktop).

<comment><USER9> The more people use it, the more likely it is that mobile browsers will optimize for power consumption by doing things like toggling visibility if you've registered a state change event handler.

<comment><USER8> It's not that it doesn't call the event handler. It's about in which situations it's called and in which it isn't. And because the situation is the same on iOS Safari, Desktop Firefox and Desktop Chrome I guess it is meant to be like that? Anyway, as I said because timers are paused for background apps it isn't really a problem on iOS, but it is on the Desktop (or Laptop).

<comment><USER9> > It's about in which situations it's called and in which it isn't

My point was that those situations are not fixed forever. It'd be very easy to imagine e.g. MobileSafari starting to trigger visibility hidden when you switch to another app.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Population-weighted chart of economic output over time - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/06/growth <comment><USER2> "It looks like history is experiencing a bubble." - made me laugh</comment>


Why Dropbox is more popular than other tools with similar functionality - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-tools-with-similar-functionality <comment><USER2> The remaining question (posed in the top-rated answer) is: Why didn't anyone else build Dropbox first?

At the risk of shameless karma whoring, I hypothesize that the problem had to be attacked by a company of the correct size. Most bigger companies can't build Dropbox because to release a product like Dropbox one has to run a gauntlet of middle managers, and it's hard to get a roomful of software professionals to sign on to something that (a) is difficult to build and requires a lot of painstaking attention to detail, yet (b) can be described in three sentences.

It's just hard to talk about a simple, elegant mission in those ubiquitous meetings. People ask how the project is going, and you have three things you can say:

A) "No, the folder doesn't sync yet."

B) "Yes, the folder syncs."

C) "No, the folder doesn't sync because of this particular small issue with this obscure API call in this obscure library on this obscure version of Linux blah blah blah TECH TECH TECH yes I'm so sorry too much detail I will shut up now."

So pretty much all you can do is smile serenely. This is a big strategic disadvantage. Even a medium-sized company features multiple projects. The projects fight for resources: people, budget, management attention. They may fight in a very friendly and even above-board way, the way siblings fight for attention, but they do fight. And the project that tacks on more and more requirements gets to claim more and more resources, because, hey, requirements are hard! Bigger checklists require bigger teams, and bigger teams require bigger budgets, and more management attention. Add features! Attach a marketing campaign! Bolt it on to a much larger brand!

I need to go read _Parkinson's Law_ again. A work of genius.

Anyway, Dropbox succeeded by designing a company where the mission of "building Dropbox and making it succeed" was both necessary and sufficient.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you used StumbleUpon to market? - <AUTHOR>

I'm really curious to know if any of you use SU for marketing and have these questions:
1. What conversion rate would be considered average?
2. Did you experiment with budget/target audience, etc. and was did you find a meaningful difference?
I would appreciate if you could share your experience. <comment><USER2> My site, Correlated (<http://www.correlated.org>) has gotten >100K hits from StumbleUpon (all organic), and in my experience, it's crappy traffic.

I've looked at my site stats, and only a tiny fraction of those hits -- less than 1 percent -- results in any sort of action on the site.

Compared with traffic from practically every other referrer, that's markedly less engagement.

There are some sites, for instances, whose referral traffic results in engagement in up to 50 percent of cases, and those aren't all necessarily highly targeted audiences.

What can I infer from this?

My guess is that a lot of this StumbleUpon traffic is coming from people who are only passively using the service, as opposed to actively using it.

I would describe an active user of the service as someone who says, "Hey, I'm bored. I'll go to StumbleUpon and look for some interesting websites."

I would describe a passive user of the service as someone who, say, has it set as their homepage, so it opens up whenever they open their browser, whether or not they're actually in the mood to check out new websites.

Whatever the reason, StumbleUpon referrals are traffic that I have largely written off.

<comment><USER3> As someone who was a university student recently, I can tell you that the standard stumbleupon usage pattern goes like this:

        1) Click stumble button
        2) Look at page for 0.5-2 seconds
        3) Stay on page if it's the kind of thing you're looking for (usually novel flash
           games or funny videos,) otherwise go back to 1.

The mouse pointer typically never leaves the stumble button during this process, we used to flick through dozens and dozens of pages like we were doing a psychoanalytic free association excercise until we found something we liked.

So yeah, not exactly high quality traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our site, NoSweaters (<http://nosweaters.com>) started marketing on Stumbleupon's lowest click rate ($0.05/click) right after the Black Friday weekend. The start was slow. We garnered essentially the clicks we paid for and nothing more. Further, there were a lot of hiccups in the process, as we waited for approval for the campaign, which seemed to take much, much longer than other venues (read: Adwords).

Our target market, we decided, was women aged 15-30. From our exhaustive studies (aka, friends and family cajoling) we gathered they were the most enthusiastic users. We set up a custom front page for Stumble users to introduce them to the site.

We did this for Monday, Nov. 28th, Tues. the 29th and on Wednesday, we got caught up again in an approval issue, yelled at SU on Twitter, and all of a sudden we got blasted with organic traffic late Wednesday night (the 30th). Our daily visits went from 100 paid to ~20k unpaid hits a day for a solid week. After that, the traffic dropped off like a stone.

In that time, however, our bounce rate was only about 48%. We believe several factors account for this:

1) The main page was little more than an enticement with easy click through to the meat of the site.

2) The site was very appropriate for the time of year (a gift help site in the holiday buying months)

3) Our target happened to be spot on (we think).

We were also running a contest at the time to help drum up users and usage. Top users would receive Amazon gift cards.

All of these efforts yielded over 300 new users and more than 2,500 new "questions" (our site is a Q&A site for gift ideas; "asking a question" currently requires nothing but an email address).

From a purely return-on-investment perspective, we can say we were quite happy with the results we got from Stumbleupon. We're definitely suspicious of their methods of how they deliver organic vs. paid traffic (seems they've got their hands on spigots). We paid about $40 for the equivalent of 160K visits, and we got a ton of new content, and some very focused and dedicated users.

We've got a ton of test and usage data that we can now mine through to figure out what our next changes should be. We have very active involved, non-friend- or-family users that have given us very valuable feedback on what they want to see from the site. All in all, it's a great utility for a site trying to build itself, but I question its value for an established site (vs. blog posts or other SEO efforts).

If you have any questions about our experience, please don't hesitate to chuck them my way.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I was still working on it, my site ThatHigh.com would consistently get more than 100k visitors per month from SU. That started out from paid traffic, but since the site got good ratings on SU the organic traffic continued.

However, I only think it worked because of the site's niche (cough). If you have a site that needs high quality traffic, it might not work very well.

<comment><USER6> I remember reading about thathigh soon after you guys launched, I think on reddit. It sounds like you are no longer working on it. Could you give a summary of the site in terms of how it started/ended with growth/revenue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only way to make Stumbleupon profitable is to put a high-paying clickthrough ad underneath the Stumble button.

It seems to me that once you pay for traffic on Stumbleupon, they turn off your organic traffic, since by paying for traffic you've proven yourself to be a rube.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not used the paid option (didn't know there was one), but tried using it for a few (non-tech) small businesses about 2 years ago. Lots of traffic, no conversions, high bounce rate.

The demographic appears to be "bored people looking for free stimulation".

</comment><comment><USER9> I've spent about $50 on stumble upon for my site, at $0.05 a click. As others have said it's very poor quality traffic. I don't sell anything on the site so conversions is not meaningful, but I did not get any lasting traffic from the campaign. Because my site is about beer, it was nice that I could target very specifically (males, 21-35 in california). One thing i noticed is that after you run a paid campaign, you're more likely to get organic stumble upon traffic - I've probably gotten twice the amount organically then I've paid for.

</comment><comment><USER10> Stumbleupon clicks convert at near zero rates. The value, if there is one, is in promoting linkbait. If you can get a genuinely interesting piece of content in front of enough people to attract some links, Stumble can be worth it. But to use it like you would AdWords (i.e. to directly generate sales/leads) is like burning money, only less fun - the CPA is astronomical.

</comment><comment><USER11> I used it some years ago to bring traffic to trendgal.com and I was disappointed for the quality of the traffic even if it was targeted to our niche. There was a lot of visits but little stickiness. I guess it is based on the web surfer pattern and the tacit promise that maybe there is a cooler site on the next click.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> That has been my experience as well... very few conversions but... I'm wrestling with the idea that it is similar to impressions of an ad ... maybe a 'bad' ad?</comment>


The Procrastination Doom Loop — and How to Break It - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/the-procrastination-loop-and-how-to-break-it/379142/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> >Finally, procrastinators are more likely to complete a piece of work if they're persuaded that it's not actually work. In one study reviewed by Jaffe, students were asked to complete a puzzle, but first they were given a few minutes to play Tetris. "Chronic procrastinators only delayed practice on the puzzle when it was described as a cognitive evaluation," he wrote. When scientists described the puzzle as a game, they were just as likely to practice as anybody else.

I'll commence gamifying all my tasks, after fueling up with a big cup of coffee and breakfast. ;-)</comment>


Deploy to AppHarbor from GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/961-deploy-to-appharbor-from-github

<comment><USER2> Is it me or does it seem like adding the AppHarbor user to your project seem like the wrong way to be doing this? Isn't this what SSH keys / API access are for?</comment>


A Junkyard Billionaire - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-19/junkyard-billionaire-thriving-on-car-wrecks-expands-his-empire <comment><USER2> Want to see the inside of a Copart yard? There's a guy I follow on YouTube who buys and repairs cars purchased at Copart and then sells them. He does three 'walk arounds' each week and comments on the cars he finds.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGGsYirSZhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGGsYirSZhw)

What's interesting is that he ends up making very little on his repaired cars. But he's so fascinating as he repairs them in his suburban driveway that he's making $250,000 a year off YouTube. Talk about failing upward! The key is that he manages to be very entertaining doing it.

<comment><USER3> I really wanted to do the opposite one day:

Part-out a car. The numbers actually looked pretty good. Not for the hours, but I would learn about every part of a car, outside-in while making money.

I think there's a sweetspot for parting out though: probably 5 year old cars because they are worth repairing. May 6-8 year old cars for more luxury models.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Context:

Copart specializes in online auctions of cars that are too damaged for insurance companies to justify paying the price of repairing them; buyers include scrap yards and companies like LKQ Corp., which dismantles old cars and reconditions their parts to be sold in collision-repair shops. The insurance companies get what's recovered in the auction, minus fees due to Copart that in some cases will increase proportionally with the value of a vehicle.

"There was a lot of concern that safety technology would reduce accidents and so there'd be less cars for auction -- good for society, bad for Copart," said Craig Kennison, a senior research analyst at Baird. But that didn't account for the spread of smartphones, he added. "Cars may be safer, but drivers are more distracted."

Another article from Bloomberg, with more info - [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-08/junk-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-08/junk- car-dealer-copart-is-pricier-than-apple-and-microsoft-k2qkdw2k)

<comment><USER4> A lot of that safety technology -- crumple zones, reinforced passenger cages, airbags, rear view cameras -- make things safer for _people_ but contribute to increasing the dollar value of vehicle damage. I'd say that the concern was overstated, quite aside from a supposed increase in smartphone-induced accidents.

<comment><USER3> And those proximity sensors are expensive.

... but the remaining working ones retain their value really well in the parts market making the carcass more valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://outline.com/zXFL9s](https://outline.com/zXFL9s)

</comment><comment><USER6> As we move to electric over the next few decades, I wonder what we're going to do with all the ICE vehicles that are on the road now? There's going to be a tipping point where finding a gasoline station will be hard. There are a lot of gas stations, so this is going to be pretty huge by itself. Some states may go as far as banning ICE vehicles all together.

I guess we already churn through a huge amount of cars yearly as it is... I don't see many 1979 Plymouths on the road. They must have been all chopped up at some point, so this is probably a non issue. That said, I can't imagine the transition will be without pain for lots of people...

<comment><USER7> Off topic but why does hn use the term ICE vehicle rather than gas vehicle? It comes across as forced like when a non tech person is trying to impress me with buzz words and I'm just like no one talks like that in the industry.

<comment><USER8> Coming from a country that refers to 'gas' as 'petrol', 'gas vehicle' sounds far more awkward than 'ICE vehicle' - makes me think of a car running on LPG

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get why the article is treating this as an exciting new business. It's as old as automobiles are -- every town has a junkyard or two that buys junked cars for a pittance. If you've had the displeasure of trying to keep a 15 year old junker running on a limited budget you may have even gone to one of these yards to source some parts.

What's the innovation here? He has an online platform? He may be really good at running his junkyards but the article does a terrible job accounting for his success.

<comment><USER10> > trying to keep a 15 year old junker running on a limited budget

My daily driver is 30 years old. My weekly driver is nearly 50 years old. 15 is a new car!

<comment><USER11> It's awesome that you're able to maintain your cars well enough to keep them going that long, but obviously yours are not even close to a normal use case. 200k miles or 12-15 years is average [1] longevity.

[1] [https://www.aarp.org/auto/trends-lifestyle/info-2018/how- lon...](https://www.aarp.org/auto/trends-lifestyle/info-2018/how-long-do-cars- last.html)

<comment><USER10> > It's awesome that you're able to maintain your cars well enough to keep them > going that long,

I actually do very little. I'm pretty easy on my cars. A mechanic once told me he couldn't believe how little wear there was on the clutch for the miles. (I habitually approximate the right engine speed before letting the clutch out.)

Also, most car mechanical failures come from neglecting lubricating things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The American dream.

I'm a car nut, I really like this guy's story. Lucky dog.</comment>


Georges Perec's Lost Novel - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/08/georges-perec-lost-novel/

<comment><USER2> Perec's _Life, a User's Manual_ is an inspiration. Meticulously structured, continually mysterious, always several steps ahead of you, and yet it doesn't beat you over the head with how "clever" it is. Highly recommended.</comment>


Python Packaging: Hate, hate, hate everywhere - <AUTHOR> http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/6/22/hate-hate-hate-everywhere/ <comment><USER2> _sigh_ If you want to _help_ , check out the Python-dev thread where this is being hashed out ad-infinitum rather than flamed to death: [http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2012-June/120430...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2012-June/120430.html) \- for the tl;dr crowd - yeah, things have problems, want to fix.

<comment><USER3> > check out the Python-dev thread where this is being hashed out ad-infinitum > rather than flamed to death

Where am I flaming anything to death here? The sole purpose of the post was to point out that certain things worked in setuptools that broke with the introduction of pip. That's neither bashing setuptools or pip, just stating something that you can observe yourself.

It's an observation of an unfortunate effect of someone else taking the work of someone else to make a new tool and missing a usecase that the old tool supported with the end result of having two tools with overlapping usecases, but neither is a superset of the other.

With some modifications virtualenv + pip works perfectly fine for us. It just takes some extra work and it's unfortunate that it had to happen. Personal lesson learned: try not to replace tools in the future without understanding all the usecases of the old tool first.

> If you want to help

I think that's one of the big fallacies of open source: that you should fix it yourself rather than saying that something is not working. I reserve the right to feel unhappy when something does not work and I reserve the right to share my experiences with others without having to feel guilty about not helping out.

I tried patching pip to be able to install binary eggs but it turned out to be impossible without replicating all the logic in easy_install because pip by design does not follow it. Rather than making pip2 I decided against it and looked at what the problem actually is: we want to have fast builds. So we could solve the problem by copying over virtualenvs and fixing the paths. Perfect? No! But it's a simple fix and solves our problem.

<comment><USER4> I didn't put binary support into pip because (a) it didn't work well on some systems, and (b) I didn't use the other systems. I am not aware of rejected patches to support binary packages on Windows (where it would be nice to include), or even rejected patches on other systems (where I think it would be misguided).

That this functionality still doesn't exist years later I think is due in part to the problem domain – people find it easier to change parts of their workflow than to add this functionality, and the whole problemspace is kind of hairy which makes it hard to advance without causing regressions in somebody else's weird workflow. (And admittedly the code is hairy too – but who wants to fix that? I don't! No one does!)

<comment><USER3> > I didn't put binary support into pip because (a) it didn't work well on some > systems, and (b) I didn't use the other systems. I am not aware of rejected > patches to support binary packages on Windows (where it would be nice to > include), or even rejected patches on other systems (where I think it would > be misguided).

I did not even manage to come up with a patch that adds binary support. I looked into it one or two months ago and the way pip finds and installs packages is very different from how easy_install does it. It looked like too big of a task for me to do in the time I allocated for it.

Until two months ago I did not care at all about binary distributions. It never was an issue for me. Suddenly a requirement change and I was presented with a problem that turned out to be tricky to fix with pip but easy as pie with easy_install.

This is not a criticism on either pip or you as a person, just an observation of how easy it is to miss something because it does not fit ones personal requirements. I certainly did not care about binary eggs until I had to deploy code to more than one machine and wanted to have the ability to quickly switch between releases.

> And admittedly the code is hairy too – but who wants to fix that? I don't! > No one does!

Yes. And now it's getting replaced with a new system and I hope that's not going to make the same mistakes. I certainly don't feel like I'm up to the task of making a replacement for distutils/setuptools.

<comment><USER4> I think you are confusing "missing a requirement" with "not prioritizing a few other people's requirements". That pip is missing this feature has always been documented, I always knew it was a missing requirement, but I did not have any personal motivation to resolve that.

<comment> j-kidd Pip is great for many many use cases, but I think it kind of get overhyped as a replacement for easy_install. People just get upset when they encounter situation where it doesn't live up to the hype.

<comment><USER5> What hype? pip can uninstall packages. This is a very hard feature to live without for everyone. Binary eggs seem to have a devoted following but are not a universal need.

<comment><USER3> > This is a very hard feature to live without for everyone.

I never ever uninstalled a package since I started using virtualenv. I always just trash the venv every once in a while and recreate it from a requirements.txt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a sysadmin pip and its ilk annoy me as well, although for a reason which is not mentioned in the article: It creates an entire package management system which _is not the distribution's package manager_. Ruby's gems tick me off for the same reason. As a sysadmin you need to decide to either manage Python and Ruby entirely outside of the OS's native package management or try and wrap every single Python egg and Ruby gem in an RPM/DPKG/whatever. Mixing the management between two packaging systems is just going to cause trouble.

There's a similar problem with Perl's CPAN, which is what I think all of these projects are aiming to emulate, but the nice thing about CPAN is that repositories like rpmforge or EPEL already have a large number of commonly used CPAN packages all wrapped up in RPMs already. It would be nice to see similar community efforts centered around Python and Ruby packages. Perhaps one day I will have enough free time to start one.

<comment><USER7> The problem is the _distributions_ packages are often horrendously out of date. I have stopped using them entirely even for things like Numpy and Scipy which I would really rather use them for (as they take a long time to compile and rely on several C libraries and a fortran compiler). It isn't my favorite thing to have my fabric task compile all the dependencies but there isn't really an easy way around it.[1]

In general I think pip has drastically improved my work flow and code structures. For instance: I no longer use submodules for my library code, I pip install the git repositories. Huge improvement, way easier to manage.

[1] Obviously, you can get around it if you do things like copy the virtualenv and fix the paths as in the OPs post. However, I wouldn't call that "easy".

<comment><USER6> It's true that the distro's packages can often be out of date: particularly with "Enterprise" releases like RHEL/CentOS. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't use the package manager, though. Building custom packages to backport updates and tracking the upstream for security and bug fixes isn't the funnest thing in the world, but it is often a necessary evil. It's certainly better than a "compile from source then dump everything into a tarball" approach which leaves you with no good way to track what versions of which software are installed on which nodes.

<comment><USER5> It isn't a necessary evil when it isn't necessary. If you have isolation (like virtualenv) then each app gets exactly what it needs. Life is too short to waste it trying to make every single bit of Python use the same versions of dependencies, pinning the version in the package manager, etc.

The universe does not revolve around lazy sysadmins

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would have liked to see a rationale for using virtualenv and all this python-only stuff, when rpm/apt/msi had more mature tools and would have given sysadmins a unified sanely manageable view of what's deployed and their cross- language dependencies.

<comment><USER5> I am going to guess you are coming at this entirely from the perspective of a sysadmin who doesn't do a lot with python.

virtualenv allows you to easily isolate dependencies so that multiple versions can coexist in different projects without fighting. If you sysadmin significant amounts of Python stuff then you would have already seen that benefit. It also allows you to control PYTHONPATH more elegantly than setting it in every script. This lets you write clean sensible imports rather than using fragile path tricks or wrestling with relative imports.

Your project dependencies are often not exactly the same as what the distribution gives. On one hand, distributions can be mind-bogglingly slow about releasing updates to python libraries. On the other hand, you may not want to force your project to use a new update of something because it may introduce bugs. It is pretty essential to have some lead time to port if your app is anything important. So you need control of the versions of your dependencies.

So if your project dependencies are not exactly the same as what the distribution uses, then you will need some kind of isolation mechanism in order to allow your project to work as a distribution package. You could do that, but you could also save time and just use virtualenv.

Creating platform-specific packages is nontrivial, also it is platform- specific. If I write a library for Python I only want to specify the packaging metadata/scripts once. I am certainly not interested in trying to get it accepted in repos for every distribution.

<comment><USER9> > Creating platform-specific packages is nontrivial, also it is platform- > specific.

Unfortunately, Python-specific packages are Python-specific. I don't want to manage one package manager for Python, one for Ruby, one for Perl and yet another one for system libraries. And I'd prefer to have to trust only one vendor for security updates for everything.

And anything that is not Python depends on system libraries, which are supplied by apt or yum and live in an distro-specific namespace. How does setuptools declare and pull in a dependency on a system library?

I understand the need for Python, Ruby etc. to have their own packaging for cross-platform use, including on non-Unix. But system packaging tools have their uses too. There is no easy answer, and certainly no One True Answer.

<comment><USER5> I never even implied that system packages do not have their uses, or that python packages are free-standing of libc. That is just a straw man.

In fact, I agree with you for system libraries or tools which happen to use Python and really do not need virtualenv because they are really system- global.

Where I don't agree with you is with use cases you clearly don't understand, where you are developing and/or running multiple python apps in which you NEED isolation or you NEED to manage the versions of your dependencies. Your package manager is not helping with that at all.

And if you don't understand these tools and configuration management tools, then you should not be a sysadmin for projects which involve significant amounts of Python or Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Non-python programmer here. The author refers to "Python's idiotic import system" - can someone explain why it's idiotic? How does it differ from Ruby or Perl (both of which I am familiar with)?

<comment><USER11> I'd say the biggest difference between Python and Ruby's is that Python's has a syntax, whereas Ruby's is a function call, this makes Ruby's more flexible since you can always replace it, add new arguments, or in other ways manipulate it. I'm not sure if that's what Armin is referring to though.

<comment><USER12> > I'd say the biggest difference between Python and Ruby's is that Python's > has a syntax, whereas Ruby's is a function call

This is not true on two fronts.

First, the import statement is a convenient, hookable wrapper around the __import__ function. It's quite customizable already. See PEP302 which references and allows implementation of PEP273 (importing modules from Zip archives). Other points of reference include [0], [1] and [2]

Also, the biggest difference is that when you 'require', you require a filename (i.e the arbitrary content of a file in the filesystem), but when you 'import', you import objects from a namespace into a scope. The namespace is resolved as an item living in the filesystem. In Ruby I could require 'foo/bar' and it could create the constants Foo::Bar and Qux::Quux. I have no way to require Qux::Quux. Rails for example tries to autoload constants based on their names, but for all I know, the second I reference Foo::Bar, it could actually define Qux::Quux. Ruby encourages this style of programming, spreading extendable classes and modules around in multiple files, while Python decides that things should be contained and well-behaving, and not trivially pollute unrelated module namespaces.

My analysis is that by definition you just can't have both, and that either one has a set of benefits and drawbacks.

[0] [http://docs.python.org/library/importlib.html#importlib.impo...](http://docs.python.org/library/importlib.html#importlib.import_module)

[1] <http://docs.python.org/library/imputil.html>

[2] [http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/importlib.html?highlight...](http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/importlib.html?highlight=importlib#importlib)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, setuptools is broken. Proposal: don't use setuptools!

It's funny that the author doesn't make any mention of this, which is not new news: <http://docs.python.org/dev/library/packaging.html>

Maybe not every use case anyone ever proposed needs to be standardized.

<comment><USER13> That isn't the takeaway I got. It was that Setuptools is broken, but so is pip and distutils2. Pip lost very worthwhile functionality that exists in setuptools, namely binary eggs.

<comment><USER5> Binary eggs aren't a good reason to trash pip, which otherwise works great. He really didn't say how distutils2 was broken, just expressed some sort of prejudice against it.

<comment><USER14> > aren't a good reason to trash pip

Good thing that never happened then.

<comment><USER5> pip isn't broken just because it doesn't support a particular use case from setuptools.

<comment><USER14> Again, it would be nice if you stopped making shit up on the spot, TFA didn't say _anywhere_ that pip is "broken" or anything even remotely close to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know if namespace packages actually work?

I've been wanting to put up a few utility libraries on Github. I don't think they're good enough for PyPI, and I mostly just want to be able to pip install them and have access to a few minor functions that I use periodically. However, I don't think they deserve their own top level library name, ideally, they'd all be under "socratic.*" or similar. However, there seems to be some sort of mess with init in the top level of the package, some pkgutil fix, some sort of incomplete PEP (maybe 402?), etc. Should I just give up and name my internal libraries "socratic_{name}" and be done with it? Or does having multiple packages with the same namespace work?

<comment><USER16> it has some rough edges, sometimes when I try to build the docs for one it has a hard time importing both packages until I kick it a few times, but they work. I'm doing it for these two modules:

<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dogpile.core/> <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dogpile.cache/>

edit: also they work fine with pip so not sure what armin's issue here is.

<comment><USER3> > edit: also they work fine with pip so not sure what armin's issue here is.

See this issue which ultimately made me ditch them: <https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hate, hate, hate on specific platform, not everywhere! All that trouble that he complains about is only on *nix. For Windows is quite simple. Install Phyton, then look here for other packages: <http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/>

Edit: I should have said "For Windows and ReactOS"

<comment><USER18> Programmatic deployment on Windows is still a massive problem (especially for extension modules-- e.g. the entire scientific Python ecosystem).

<comment><USER19> I have used Pip, Virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper-win on windows with very little trouble... except for anything that isn't pure Python.

In order to install PIL in a virtualenv on windows I ultimately ended up downloading the PIL windows installer, extracting the required files and placing them in the virtualenvs site packages directory.

This is what needs fixing! Pip with access to compiled windows binaries.

Install Pip on windows: <http://stackoverflow.com/a/4921215>

Virtualenv Win: <https://github.com/davidmarble/virtualenvwrapper-win>

<comment><USER3> > This is what needs fixing! Pip with access to compiled windows binaries.

That's the same issue really. Pip can't install (by design) binary distributions. Neither eggs nor .exes. So you are limited to easy_install on windows in many cases.

<comment> j-kidd Self hosted PyPI (with eggbasket or even a static dir listing), combined with easy_install, is an old and unsexy solution that just works. Instead of saying we are limited to easy_install on Windows, I say we are embraced by setuptools on all platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most languages are in the same boat. PHP, Java, C, etc...

</comment><comment><USER21> Another post on the same subject written a few years ago: <http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/14/packaging/>

</comment><comment><USER22> Ugh...python packaging, it makes my head hurt every time I have to figure out how it works again. This is something that Ruby got very right, how could Python be such a mess?

I wish it was just a simple 3-step process to fix <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR_5QFZ-kbk>

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm using bento, which keeps backward compatibility with setuptools/distribute, but aims at fixing the traditional Python packaging tools:

<http://cournape.github.com/Bento/>

It is stable and usable.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a python-learning guy who uses npm and homebrew.

Comparing to npm and homebrew, it seems to me python's package manager is quite tricky.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's all baby stuff compared to autotools.

</comment><comment><USER26> Title of the post reminds me of the Player Hater's Ball.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why doesn't the Python world just copy CPAN and update it for Python? You can e.g. literally find stuff in CPAN with hundreds of dependencies -- which is a pain, but even that works.

At least CPAN testers? Please...

If Python people insist that there is only one way to do it -- and the answer is Python, then rewrite CPAN in Python. Copy stuff that works...

<comment><USER5> "Only one way to do it" is a point of language design, not an assertion that Python is the one true way.

Python does have PyPI. Works fine. Use pip to install and uninstall packages. Use virtualenv to isolate dependencies/PYTHONPATH, as needed.

Can you be specific about what aspect of CPAN you think should be ported?

<comment><USER27> Specific? I already mentioned CPAN Testers. And that CPAN works... (I've seen people with years of Python experience that had problem doing simple things. Edit: Including uninstall of packages, which you mention.)

Edit: Here you see a result of CPAN Testers for a module with complex dependencies. Note statistics on where/how dependencies are run. Also click on a dependency icon to see the matrix of perl/os versions.

<http://deps.cpantesters.org/?module=Catalyst;perl=latest>

<comment><USER5> I don't have any problem doing uninstall of packages. Use pip rather than easy_install. You are done.

I'm not convinced that CPAN is better

<comment><USER27> Good for you, re uninstall...

(I really didn't expect Python users to admit that anything in _any_ other environment could be better... :-) E.g. running tests at install by default is obviously bad? :-) )

So no comment about CPAN Testers -- automatically installing dependencies, running the test suites on different perl/os versions and then getting neat reports? What is the better way in Python?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Despite all the hate, Maven solves a lot of problems in the Java land and I couldn't be more happier.

<comment><USER29> There is really no exact equivalent, but you could give buildout[1] a go if you find yourself in need of a maven-like tool in Python land.

[1] <http://www.buildout.org/>

<comment><USER28> Sweet, thanks for pointing out that BO is closer to Maven!

I've heard a few Python SCM tools (setuptools, distutils, fabric, scons, buildout) but haven't gone deep into the Python land yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Wordpress Plugin Ordering - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone, Quick (and I'm sure easy) question, but I couldn't find an answer that worked for me on Google. In the posts of my Wordpress site, I use two plugins that show up at the bottom of my article. The current order they show up in is backwards. I'd like the plugin that currently shows up on top to be switched with the one showing up on the bottom. Does anyone know a way to switch the order of these plugins?<p>Thank you, Wes <comment><USER2> try [http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/](http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/) You'll need to specify what the two plugins are that you are using. Most likely it will involve removing and re-adding a filter hook (typically 'the_content' filter hook) and setting it with a different priority to account for the order.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is more of a stackoverflow question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, but I know there's a bunch of savvy people here as well who use WordPress. Doesn't hurt to ask - I'll try asking there as well.</comment></comment>


Want to meet in Cologne? - <AUTHOR>

You are located near Cologne, Germany and want to meet other HN Readers?
Join our Google Group and help us plan a night for hackernews readers in the Cologne area :)
http://groups.google.com/group/hackernews-cologne <comment><USER2> I might share a maß at the Wiesn in Munich if I can get all my projects done on schedule...!

<comment><USER3> A meetup at the oktoberfest would be fun. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sigh. I can taste the Koelsch now.</comment>


Lettering.js: a jQuery plugin for web typography - <AUTHOR> http://letteringjs.com/

<comment><USER2> For most uses, fine-grained kerning is overkill. The following will work well enough in browsers that support it (Firefox often turns this on by default):

      text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

Scripts like Lettering.js are best for typographically interesting headers. Trent Walton (<http://trentwalton.com>) makes great use of this (of course, he's one of the creators of Lettering.js).</comment>


Facebook Hires A Pixar Animator - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fg%2Fa%2F2011%2F06%2F07%2Fbusinessinsider-what-facebook-hires-a-pixar-animator-2011-6.DTL

<comment><USER2> Now what does Facebook need from a Pixar Animator? I wonder what his Linkedin connections are to Facebook employees?</comment>