I vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a form of malicious brainwashing.
But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use.
So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or make sure they get paid in other ways (and usually willingly donate more than they'd get from showing me ads).
I agree with your position. I'm trying to figure out how to limit my kid from seeing any ads at all. Where can I get more information for this beyond adblock and host file manipulation?
I'm not sure if complete abstinence is good. I see my parents struggle with ads sometimes. They grew up as farmers in a rural enviroment with only a black and white TV (with 2 state channels). They seem unable to distinguish ads from proper content (unless it's obviously an ad), or they see ads as a kind of honest product documentation.
Just make sure your kids are media savvy. If you train critical thought into them, then ads can be much less harmful. I tend to agree in general but I think the way ads infect non ad content is the danger and you can’t block that.
Let’s be honest, the kids of hacker news commenters are probably going to be fine. It’s the way ads influence the unwashed masses that becomes problematic.
I have Pi-Hole on the network that every device in the house runs through, with extra blocklists and a year or so of manual tweaking, that covers most stuff. I also run ad block plugins just in case, don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app), and that pretty much covers everything for our family.
It's also just a thing we keep in mind and work around in life. We won't use any service that has ads, or any site that finds ways around the Pi Hole, or watch shows/movies with heavy product placement, etc etc. It's just part of mine and my wife's core beliefs (privacy in general) so we just guide our kids towards "good" content and taught them from the minute they could understand, that "ads are bad, we don't like ads".
What does the virtual/physical network configuration look like? Are you routing all traffic into a physical server, then through a vnet/VM, and back out some other physical interface on the server?
To be clear: not all traffic has to be routed through it, just DNS.
All that I had to do was assign a static IP address to the MAC address of the VM network interface, and configure my router's DHCP to hand out that static IP for DNS.
It's all done over a singular ethernet connection between my router and the server; the amount of traffic is very minimal.
I'm not sure this is realistic in our modern society. Online, there is some flexibility: you can pay to remove ads for some things, and use ad-block on the ones that don't provide such an option. But in the offline world, I'm not sure what you're going to do. Physical ads are hard to block, you just have to avoid them when you can.
Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads. As I've said before in some of my comments, it's not just about paying for things you use. It's about paying more than the people who are willing to put up with ads, because otherwise companies will just do both: charge, and use ads. That's what we see in TV, in addition to many other places, and there's no reason to expect that not to continue unless there were widespread backlash, and I just don't see that happening. I don't like ads, but most of my friends don't seem to see things the way I do.
> Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads.
Why? Was there no human economic activity before they were ads?
If spaceships appeared in the sky, and shot lasers at all ads, and anyone making new ones, would we find no way to make and sell and buy things regardless? That seems less likely to me than said spaceships.
> I just don't see that happening.
True, and saying "it should be possible" is not the same as knowing how to get from here to there. But I wouldn't say "never ever" in this context.
Correct. I would definitely prefer to always just pay for services that I use so that 1) I know for sure I am the customer and 2) the service that I value has a stable revenue - ad revenue can be extremely volatile. I don't want the service I like to be at risk because of changes to ad-network pay rates or anything like that.
unlike another in this reply thread, I do not "disagree with advertising in general" - however I disagree with much of the online advertising industry. I wrote a comprimise suggestion post sometime ago, turn adblock into fairblock and I'll see your ads without a grudge.
I think end users should have more fine grained control over what they share and see when getting served ads.
I feel some basic defaults are in order which can be sliders and checkboxes for more control, relinquish of control for more trusted sources.
I don't want to see ads about alcohol or gambling, or games that profit from it. I don't want to see ads that move if I am not hovering on them. I only want ads that are self hosted, not third party injected. (don't punt the malware liability to third party, serve it yourself and be more responsible)
things like this are important for security and privacy, and not an issue with ads, but types of ads. If certain publications run certain ads I may not purchase them, or lose faith in them, they can't punt the blame for yesterday's ads.
Some things are limited by laws for billboards and such, I don't agree with all those regualtions, but indeed this is something that is important - and with the web it's easy enough to fine grain limit certain things from appearing in front of children, or people struggling with divorce, or all kinds of things -
So we have the ability to make ads better, in some cases I would gladly share more info than google allows to be shared currently (I don't care if most web sites get the page and keywords I used to find them, it may help them help me.
I do care if third party beacons and trackers share that info with lots of other people I don't know. I should be able to control this on a site by site basis with sane defaults.
Yep - and that leads to potentially unpredictable revenue, especially when there are disruptions in the ad-network revenue models and they force down pay rates. This puts sites/services at risk. I would much rather just pay for the service I value.
