Anyone got the list of sites HN currently blocks/penalizes/rewards? I'd love to tweak those options, and add marco.org and buzzfeed to my personal blocklist.

Seems genius to me.

I learned about the deck from daringfireball.

Curate your ads and serve them statically.

The first are overtly refusing to accept users' terms. The second are trying to have their cake and eat it too: viral content propogation whilst refusing to present content to those who come at it via link aggregators and discussion sites such as Reddit.

Both actively thwart Reddit's intended aim: informed discussion of an article _by having read it_. If they don't want to participate, then don't participate.

Moreover, advertising, the advertising infrastructure, and multiple aspects of it are creating a seriously problematic WWW information structure: crap content, user-hostile design, hugely excessive bandwidth usage, slow browser response, and privacy and security risks galore. At the same time, the actual creative producers and journalists responsible for primary content are hugely undercompensated.

Eliminating the existing advertising regime would allow all of these to be addressed.

That said, high-quality information has a very serious revenue problem, and I'd like to highlight that.

It's a topic I've explored in some depth, "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_info...). Or if you prefer a real economist, Hal Varian's "Markets for Information Goods" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.h...).

A frequently proposed solution is micropayments. I don't see those as viable, Clay Shirkey, Nick Szabo, and Andrew Odlyzko have all written at length on why not.

Rather, a universal content tax or broadband tax seems an alternative. Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation have suggested this, I'd made my own universal content proposal some time back (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...)

I've also done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on amounts. _Total_ global ad spend in 2013 was $500 billion, online was $100 billion. If _only_ the world's richest 1 billion (roughly: US, EU, Japan, Australia) were to contribute to this, the tax would be $100/year to eliminate _all_ online adverts, and $500/year for _all advertising entirely_. The money could fund existing creatives -- writers, editors, film producers, journalists, and musicians -- at roughly _twice_ today's compensation.

It's worth a thought.

But you have me wrong on paywalls: I'd fully support them going paywalled. In fact, I fully support them going off the Web onto their own proprietary network (like the Compuserve and AOL of old) and charging thousands (if not millions) of $CURRENCY a year for access. That would be great.

This is an opinion. It sounds like your your mechanism of dealing with the opposing opinion is to censor it?

That seems bad ... Why not say: "let them do what they want, and let me convince people they are wrong on the merits?"

The solution is dead simple: Don't allow embedded scripts in ads. Period. End of story. Problem no longer a problem. "We're all done here."

>Send me your automoderator rule once it's done, we'll add it our sub as well.

Seems likely to spread pretty quickly.

I have no idea under what context I made my iPhone learn that word.

We have an incredible abundance of content.

Do they? Isn't being coated in ads a normal condition of clickbait? Is clickbait high quality content?

Is Moore law against this?

A possible future scenario could be one were technology becomes so cheap that Apple/Google/Facebook .et all, starts "lending" their own hardware for free so people can access their _open_ walled-garden flavored internet.

Projects like of RPi/Arduino bring me hope that this wont ever happen, at least to us.

It's already at a point where I have to add Anti-Adblock Killer to prevent them from turning off ad blockers. Please don't ask to make it worse.

The real problem is very simple. The advertising companies need to stop publishing non-vetted media files (which means they can also no longer do a http referral to a site they don't control to save "bandwidth costs"). Many of them are not doing that because they're foolishly assuming a "deposit" or any other such arbitrary monetary penalty is going to be cost-prohibitive to a criminal organization. To the criminal organization, it's no different than any other bribe.

If you don't want advertising and refuse to pay for content, I don't see how that's anything less than expecting free journalism.

    reddit.com##.promotedlink

"dishonest" may be too strong, perhaps just misleading - paywalled articles are often designed to appear as free articles. With a proper preview the reader would know as soon as they arrive that they will be expected to pay to read. I understand why sites prefer to hook you with partial content first, but that practice can appear deceptive.

>The problem with posting paywalled content isn't posting paywalled content. It's the entitled people who can't even be bothered to use well-known workarounds and instead completely derail discussions on political grounds.

I agree with you there - no one can post content from Wired anymore without someone starting a thread about the paywall. If you're not willing to read the article you should just not participate in the discussion about it.

While HN has a single stream of stories being voted on, the guidelines for story submissions limits the scope for what can be submitted. The people who read HN are pretty much all technically astute, so when they see an article behind a paywall they don't vote it up - heck, many probably just flag it on principle.

If the article is chock full of intrusive advertising, it gets flagged pretty fast. If it is an interesting article that gets to the front page I guarantee you that there will be vocal complaints about the advertising. But most of us here, I would hazard to guess, have installed uBlock Plus of some sort of ad blocker so we probably largely miss it. And the things we find interesting are usually from sources clueful enough not to be so stupid as to employ anti-adblockers.

It should be obvious before I click the front-page link on HN that it's about /r/technology only, not reddit as a whole. That means there's still room for admin improvement here on HN.

You made me say it!

We'd be better off with only static image/text ads, yes, but malware distribution by means of poorly vetted advertising wouldn't totally vanish.

So, don't do that.

> It's not that simple.

It is absolutely that simple.

Your argument is basically, "Their process is so complicated they can't avoid serving up malware." But that's not a justification for serving up malware. If your process is too complicated to avoid serving malware, then you need to simplify your process until you can avoid serving up malware.

You don't get a free pass on ethics just because ethics are inconvenient for your business model.

An innocent gets malware from an advertisement. The publisher blames the ad-network who in turn blames the criminal. The ad-network claims that they can't curate the advertisements or the margins becomes to small. In the end, the innocent has to take the full fallout of the crime.

An innocent gets mistreated by a fake doctor. The hospital blames the hiring agency, who in turn blames the criminal. The hiring agency claims that they can't do background checks and verify CVs of applicants or the margins becomes to small. In the end, the innocent has to take the full fallout of the crime?

Why is there such discrepancy between the two cases? Why can one agency do curation and still function, while the other can't? Why can the publisher get away with using a bad ad-network while a hospital is fully legally responsible for using a bad hiring agency? Those seem to be very simple questions, ones that should have very simple answers.

And just as a computer reseller/free-computers-for-everyone-distributor has an obligation not to send bombs to people who asked for computers, a website owner has an obligation not to serve malware to people who asked for content.

It is not black and white but it is pretty close.

Edit: I have to give Firefox credit here. It actually just prompted me whether I'd like to save the file. I did and uploaded it to virus total. Probably not a good idea if you do anything sensitive on your computer.

In any case, even in a commercial transaction, there is an element of reasonableness to what is expected. If I buy a $50,000 car and it breaks down on the second day of having it, that's obviously well below a reasonable standard. If I buy a $10 toaster and it breaks after a couple of years because the crumb tray didn't quite fit? Maybe that's more reasonable. If I buy a $10 toaster and it catches fire and burns my house down after a couple of years because of a design flaw that the manufacturer knew about but didn't fix? Again, not so reasonable.

In this case, we have a content provider who is making at best a tiny amount of ad revenue from a visitor, yet some people here seem to think there is an ethical obligation on that content provider to provide a literally impossible standard of monitoring of the behaviour of the ad networks anyway. As I've mentioned elsewhere, even the argument that they just shouldn't use an ad network in the first place doesn't really work, because logically you'd also have to apply the same ethics and accept responsibility in the same way for any other third party content, such as scripts hosted on CDNs. By the time you've finished knocking out any sort of third party hosting just in case a rare instance of malicious content slipped through the net, the web would be a much worse place.

>Today, the U.S. and Canada have less than 25 doctors and 30 hospital beds (per 10,000 population), compared to over 35 and 50, respectively, in most countries in continental Western Europe. Mark Pearson, head of Division on Health Policy at The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), discussed possible reasons the U.S. spends more than two-and-a-half times per person more than most developed nations in the world, including relatively rich European countries: “The U.S. has fewer physicians and fewer physician consultations relative to its population. The U.S. also has fewer hospital beds for its population size and shorter average stays in hospital relative to other countries. Indeed, the lower numbers of physicians could help explain why they cost more; there is less competition for patients.”

Are the specific things pointed to there as a cause of a US doctor shortage all found in other countries, but without a shortage?

Definitely tort law which increases malpractice costs is far more of a factor in the US market.

Ultimately, it's just not realistic to expect every little store and niche blogger to either monitor every third party service they depend on full-time just to protect the users who are giving them little if anything in return or to discontinue using any third party services that are technically capable of distributing malware. The former is demonstrably impossible anyway, and if you take the latter to its logical conclusion you undermine substantial parts of what has made the modern web so successful, far beyond using ads as a revenue stream.

Put another way, malware writers themselves may be the scum of the earth, but I don't see why someone writing a blog about how to bake cakes and using a well-known and generally reputable ad network to fund the hosting costs is any more ethically responsible for the consequences of a malware incident than, say, a browser developer whose also freely offered product had a vulnerability that could be exploited in the first place. I don't see anyone calling for any browser with a track record of serious security vulnerabilities (which is all of them, of course) to be banned to protect users from malware, though.

Exploits in jpg/png are very rare.

At worst, all you have to do is make the ad network [re]compress the image.

For businesses running large enough sites to operate their own scheme, sure. Facebook ads are pretty safe, for example. Unfortunately, this isn't a realistic option for smaller sites, and neither are any of the other things you mentioned in most cases. Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. That's why ad-funded web sites are still so common!

I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere useful. You're objecting to a behaviour that is widely useful -- incorporating content served by third parties as part of a site -- on the basis that site operators with little if any revenue aren't operating to an impossibly high standard of safety checking at their own expense to prevent a small risk of third party malware being served by their site without their knowledge or consent. Furthermore, you have offered no plausible better alternatives for most of those site operators. In a world complying with your rules, most of the modern web doesn't exist, because no-one would "ethically" be allowed to contribute to it without falling short of your standards.

But if you look at this from the opposite direction, you're essentially arguing that we should only use technologies that are known, or at least reasonably expected, to be extremely safe.

Given that in general humanity hasn't yet figured out how to create such technologies, and that numerous formats we use every day on the web to great overall benefit would not qualify, that seems a tall order.

Of course now you're not only prohibiting third party resources except images, you're even prohibiting modern image formats like SVG, which is a little ironic since SVG-based ads might be smaller and/or look cleaner than equivalent bitmaps.

I think very few websites allow one person to embed arbitrary scripts that will be shown to another person.

You keep saying they usually don't, but billions of harmless ads are served every day while only a tiny fraction of the served ads are malicious. I just don't see how it's reasonable to assume depending on a third party ad network for content is fundamentally risky yet depending on some other third party service is not. CDNs and other hosting services get hacked and serve malicious content sometimes too, but that is also very rare and also usually gets fixed very quickly if it does happen.