The Awl

Taboola is one of the companies that paid Adblock Plus millions of dollars to not block their ads[0]. Taboola is the billion dollar company shoveling the "mom's $5 wrinkle tip, doctors hate her" trash[1].

Adblock Plus plainly acknowledge that those aren't "acceptable ads"[2], but unfortunately they've handed over the whitelist to a completely, 100% independent committee. It's out of their hands now and they're "hopeful" that those people will remove Taboola soon. There's a thread from 2015 asking them to remove it[3]. Convenient.

We both know most people don't spend time reading the options page of their browser extensions. If you download an ad blocker it should block ads. Having to check a check box to get the functionality you paid for is unexpected. Adblock is able to make millions of dollars because most don't know to check it. Most people just want to not see ads, a "selective" ad blocker happens to be the most famous because it was the first popular ad blocker that pivoted into a lucrative rent-seeking operation after becoming a household name. I've heard the euphemism "default opt-in".

According to the author of uBlock Origin it uses less resources[4].

Unless you work for Adblock or Adblock Plus or the companies that paid the bribe there is no reason to recommend it.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboola-pay-adblock-plus-to-stop-blocking-their-ads-2015-2

[1] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/

[2]…

>Fraud? Malware? What does this have to do with adtech?

A lot, actually. There are many vectors in which adtech and fraud/malware intermingle:

> XSS Attacks:

When your website loads HTML into a page without encoding it first, someone can insert HTML script tags that your browser will parse successfully, allowing arbitrary Javascript to execute in your browser. Malicious actors will then usually redirect you to further unsafe pages that will initiate more downloads or (depending on circumstances) compromise your active user session or credentials. All you need is an ad network that didn't take precautions for a malicious ad and you're serving malware to all downstream users.

>True Clickbait with a malware payload:

Less common nowadays in the sense I mean: Ads that are literally designed for you to click on them, giving the same result as above. We're talking things like "Punch out Osama Bin Laden!" from the early 2000s or "Click here to win a prize!" affairs, where there's no reason a user ought to be clicking on the ad except that they were, quite literally, baited into doing so.

>Normal Clickbait with a malware payload

Create some "interesting content", that just happens to also do all of the above. Miracle cures, "BIG cost savings", poorly vetted porn-ads, and so on. A lot of internet chum is of this type, and there's a great article analyzing it [1]

>Literal Scams:

Many ads presented on websites prey on low information individuals, the elderly, or the young, all…

I recently watched the "Helvetica" documentary that was posted here a few days ago [0], where they briefly mention "Grunge Typography" [1], a seemingly dead-end branch of typography that, for some strange reason, became pretty popular for a short period of time.

After some years however, consensus amongst designers formed that what they've created was a pile of illegible garbage, and realized that there was no other way than completely dismiss that branch, go back to the roots, and evolve from a few steps back.

I feel the same kind of consensus is slowly forming around ideas like SPAs, client-side rendering and things like CSS-in-JS.

We saw the same happen with NoSQL and many other ideas before that.

We recently deployed an entire SaaS only using server-side rendering and htmx [2] to give it an SPA-like feel and immediate interactivity where needed. It was a pleasure to develop, it's snappy and we could actually rely on the Browser doing the heavy lifting for things like history, middle click, and not break stuff. I personally highly recommend it and see myself using this approach in many upcoming projects.

[0] https://www.hustwit.com/helvetica/

[1] https://www.theawl.com/2012/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-grunge-typography/

[2] https://htmx.org/ (formerly "Intercooler")

Thank you, that was an ear-opening video--I had no idea.

I do remember this Awl article from a while back:

Some men shoot tigers. Some men love bears. Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Major in the Yeomanry, Conservative MP for Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, heir to one of the greatest banking fortunes in history, and collector of the largest zoological collection ever amassed in private hands, had a specific and incurable addiction to cassowaries. He bred them. He stuffed them. He gathered living representatives of every known species and sub-species at his parents’ manor house in Hertfordshire. Bewitched by their beautiful and highly variable neck wattles, he identified new species where there were none. He wrote a book, A Monograph of the Genus Casuarius, about them and made excuses for them, and he could never get enough.

https://www.theawl.com/2016/04/a-natural-history-of-walter-rothschild/

Note that this text is in some cases censored. See Cameron Todd Willingham's statement:

"Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man - convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return - so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby. [Remaining portion of statement omitted due to profanity.]"

The full text is in fact pretty profane; see http://www.theawl.com/2009/12/cameron-todd-willinghams-real-last-words .

The New Yorker article which lays out the case for Willingham's innocence omits the latter half of the statement entirely — see last paragraph of http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann .

The chumbox (https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/) used to be a good barometer of the spamminess of a site's content.

It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming difficult.

It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume.

Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect finally wearing off:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect