lost ad revenue
You can’t really lose something you never had though, can you?
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That sounds good, except for the “google” part. I run NoScript in large part to not feed more self-damaging data to the biggest of big data monsters. No matter how you interact with someone, as soon as google finds out, they track the relationship. This is then sold to companies that use it in totally uncontrolled ways, including which previously uncontaminated forums to spam with SEO bait and false reviews.
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I really don’t have a problem with this. It’s voluntary. They’re not stealing from you. I don’t love Salon, but I think it’s clear that the clickbait mediascape is causing reality fatigue (“I can’t trust anyone - I give up”) and that if we don’t start paying for real journalism somehow, it will disappear.
I do hope that they give you the ability to control how many cycles per second you use. If they just redline your processor, that’s a non-starter.
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My choice;
I don’t frequent that site much anyway, but when they issue a freakin’ ultimatum, they’ve already made up my min d for me.
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I’ve similarly seen this sort of point avoidance before. Sure, setting up a strawman scenario where no websites have acceptable ads, and there’s no other options to discuss is a really easy way to win an argument, but…y’know, strawman.
I use adblockers for precisely the reasons you’re listing, but I don’t pretend that I’ve got some unassailable moral high ground based on it. I do it to protect myself, but on the places where I can pay a reasonable fee to pay for it, I do so. In fact, that’s literally what this article we’re commenting on is discussing.
Either interact with the actual meat of the matter or don’t, but driveby smugposting about how awful content companies are is a pretty lame duck activity.
Long story short: AdBlockers are a necessary evil of the internet. We should figure out ways to have a better experience for readers that doesn’t involve them.
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noscript.
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Oh, FFS. “Learnings” is not a fucking word. Stop trying to make it a thing.
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Something that’s always bothered and puzzled me about sites encouraging you to turn off your ad blocker: Aren’t most ads pay-per-click? Even if I humor the site and load their ads, I’m never, ever, ever, EVER going to click on them, so doesn’t that mean they don’t get paid and it doesn’t matter to them financially whether I had my adblocker on or not?
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You better make a time machine and tell William Shakespeare
http://william-shakespeare.classic-literature.co.uk/the-tragedie-of-cymbeline/
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IF their ads or the cryptominer (whichever you choose) didn’t completely break the site, you might have a point. No, I’m not willing to let Salon bork my entire browsing experience on every tab, eventually crashing my browser, as happens regularly under this new paradigm. If their ads didn’t make the site run so badly I wouldn’t care, but they do, that simple.
The good news is that, at least for now, suddenly I can run uBlock again. I’m not sure, however, if my anti-adblock-blocker efforts were the cause or if they simply blinked when site traffic tanked.
Edit -> They blinked; stopping my adblocker-blocker-blocker doesn’t prevent the use of uBlock any more, at least for now.
@Hanglyman: Some ads pay per view, actually. Which is likely the main reason Salon refreshes the page when you log in, trashing w/e comment you just wrote, unlike every other damn website on the net; one extra view, woo!
@elliotk: Doesn’t work on most sites that try this mess, any more. You need an adblock-blocker-blocker-^^’. Yes, they DO exist.
I nearly had to laugh when Salon offered to use my computer’s unused processing power. After the site redesign last year, that’s pretty much what they were doing anyway. I’ve watched idle pages rack up hundreds of hits through AdBlocker Plus on my desktop browser. Whenever I tried to read it on my phone, the ads and the videos that downloaded automatically would eat up my mobile allowance faster than any other site.
Thing is, Salon used to offer an ad-free subscription for $30 a year, and I happily paid it until they dropped the plan. I know that they probably can’t rely on many of us paying to try this again, but something like that would be more honest that whoring out our computers for bitcoin farming.
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Kind of sad. Haven’t read Salon for years but it had interesting articles you could use to fill a few minutes.
I have scanned this whole thread trying to understand the hate here.
I am all for Salon getting paid for the work they do. I understand journalism costs money to make.
If the choice is between seeing ugly-ass ads or letting them run a script in the background that does some math while I read articles, I will happily choose #2.
(I also appreciate that they are up front about what is going on.)
Of course, if the script fucks up my browser or melts my laptop or whatever other apocalyptic scenario occurs, that is bad. BUT IN MY EXPERIENCE none of those things has happened. I just browse around and read articles and at some point I wander off to another web site and their scripts are no longer running. No big deal. My computer did not blow up and Salon made some money to pay for producing what I consumed. Seems like everyone wins here.
If someone can point out the flaw in my logic, please let me know. It seems perfectly fair to me.
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Doesn’t seem to appear with a combination of uBlock Origin and NoScript.
Overall it doesn’t really sound like a bad concept for a way for publishers to make money without annoying us - I give a bit of my underused CPU/GPU power, they give content (that I’m presumably interested in, otherwise why am I reading it?)
But I don’t trust the miner software any more than I’d trust the ad software. Why should we assume that this time it’ll be malware free, compatible with our systems, and will throttle itself appropriately, handle low-power and sleep states, and not interfere with things or damage things? Considering how far publishers have been willing to go to harm their readers/viewers on behalf of their ads, they have a lot to do to regain trust before anyone will trust them with mining.
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This is so weird. I block ads because I don’t want websites to eat any extra CPU power. I don’t think I’m the only one?
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These days, Salon looks like the “leftish” equivalent of breitbart. Horrible layout. Advertisements headlined like actual stories.
And, now it’s triggering Avast. some sort of speech synthesis adware. Sigh. Salon, I remember when you could hold your own against Slate.
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From what I gather “learnings” is used casually in medical settings to indicate something recently learned.
