this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
111 points (89.9% liked)

Technology

59672 readers
2692 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
111
Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure | The Mozilla Blog (blog.mozilla.org)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

our expanded focus on online advertising won’t be embraced by everyone in our community

you don't say

all 31 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago

Targeted ads should be illegal.

Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I'm looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don't need to know I'm a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That's how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It's fine.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 month ago (2 children)

became the thing you were to destroy

They get (got?) millions in donations, maybe instead of giving it to their CEO and political activists they put it into the browser they could run their browser without ads. But instead they became the infinite growth (at least attempted anyway, not doing well in the growth department) funded by ads silicon valley company in a nonprofit's disguise.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Those millions will drain in a few months and at the end of the day they are a company and need to make money. Its not a fairy tale where Mozilla fight against the big tech and ends up winning because of their good will , be realistic we live on a capitalist society , companies need to make money. I prefer to still have them around rather than letting Google being another monopoly on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

While realistic - if nobody tries differently without getting just the massive bag of ceo tax money, it'll never ever change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Google actually regularly donates to Mozilla so expect enshitification to continue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Get was correct. For a long time the vast majority of Mozilla funding is provided by Google,and that will continue.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I'm honestly not against this. I know a lot of people will be furious with Mozilla about doing anything related to advertising, but as the article says:

And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

We may dislike ads, but the vast majority of internet users are not going to engage with content that requires you to pay up front. Creators and journalists need money to survive, and currently, ad-supported viewing is necessary for that to happen.

Instead of just hoping that advertising somehow goes away, I'm glad that Mozilla is working on ways for ads to exist without mass individual user tracking. I wish it wasn't necessary, but wishing won't change the world.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago

With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence... Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Creators and journalists need money to survive, and currently, ad-supported viewing is necessary for that to happen.

The only way out of this is to block advertising. I, personally, think that you should not have a website if you can't pay for it yourself, but the only acceptable kind of website income is a paywall. If you just have "better advertising", advertising will never go away. And I hate ads.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I, personally, think that you should not have a website if you can't pay for it yourself

You might want to consider how expensive web hosting can be, depending on the content and traffic. A belief like that can shut out a huge portion of the world from being able to even bother with a web site. Even a simple blog can get very expensive due to traffic. Maybe not expensive enough for your average 1st world individual... But that still excludes a large portion of the population with internet access.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So? Is anyone who can’t afford one legally obliged to have a website?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

No, but if its prohibitively impossible to do so, people with legitimate good ideas will never be able to do anything about it. Barriers to entry only serve the wealthy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Consider this: every website where you block ads is now inaccessible to you. How did that belief work out?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And if everyone blocked ads and couldn't see sites that insisted on advertising, how would that work out for the websites?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Totally fine. That website does not at all benefit from your presence if you're not paying them in any way (unless it's a social media website).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Why have content on the web at all if it can't be viewed by anyone? Even if generated with an intention to generate profit, there is no opportunity to do so if no one is looking at it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Plenty of sites operate on advertising or paywall based methods or additional services beyond what they publicly offer.

The web is a lot of things not just free "journalism" and personal blogs.

This argument that all websites should just be free content that the author not only takes the time to write but actively loses money to host is just not realistic.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

There was another model of sorts in "scroll" but they got acquired by Twitter and ... Who knows if that technology will ever get used again.

The scroll model was that you pay $5/mo or so and the Internet becomes ad free (at least for sites that had a relationship with scroll). The money you paid got shared with the sites you visited based on your relative usage (and of course scroll kept some for themselves too).

If Mozilla brought something like that back to the table, I could get on board.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't mind simple static ads on websites as a way to keep them free to use. The reason I use an ad blocker is because websites use ads that flash, play video/audio, and dynamically resize causing the text you are trying to read to jump around and change, making the site unusable. Even with an adblocker, sometimes the only way to use those sites is with reader mode. I disable the adblocker on sites that display reasonable, mostly static advertising. People putting in the work to make the content deserve to eat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The sane way is to allow all sites only to load the main HTML document. Sites that get return visits and have earned some trust get to have their CSS loaded.

You will never see another advertisement "jump around" again

I use uMatrix btw

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

So you browse the web without css? Now that’s old school!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Fuck you, Mozilla. I'll turn off any option you expose and run away to Librewolf or Fennec as soon as you cross the line. And the line is ublock origin, make no mistake about that. Here's a tip: Raymond Hill is the most valuable asset Mozilla has and, here's the kicker -- YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE HIM.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I've been wondering if it would be better if Hill (and friends) would just do an independent browser at this point.

Modern Firefox has to be kept in a cage and receive severe beatings just to keep it in line.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yup people saying run to Firefox yet they walk in line with Google every time as an illusion of choice.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

privacy-preserving infrastructure for data sharing between advertisers and publishers

I haven't received this copy of newspeak yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah screw these guys, I'm going back to chrome!

But really, relax guys. Ads are the only way to run a profitable browser business. Change my mind. Any paid solution won't get the scale to make the numbers work.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

LibreWolf works perfectly fine, it’s a great Firefox fork putting privacy first.