Behind the cynicism seems to be useful information. While negative attitudes are not helpful, they can often motivate people to speak up about things that normally would not be widely known. For instance, the gist of what this person is saying is that the released information probably has already been combed over. And that if you want to spend your time actually looking for something, there are better sets out there. But also be prepared to get behind entire teams doing the same thing. Not that you wouldn't find anything, but otherwise you get the impression that there's only a handful of researchers looking through this stuff. Therefore, I actually found the comment useful.
The percentage of visitors with an ad blocker depends on your site's audience. Outside of computer geeks and gamers, almost no one uses ad blockers. I wouldn't buy into the hype that the whole world is installing ad blockers.
We're seeing 30-50% of visitors blocking Google Analytics client side tracking at 80000hours.org. Target audience is university educated 18-30 year olds, ~100K unique visitors / month.
The folks at Segment.io warn their users to expect ~20%, with the caveat that blocking rates vary wildly between demographics [1].
I encourage friends and family to install ad blockers. I've been asked numerous times over the years to look at a computer that has either died or just isn't working well anymore. I always offer to install an adblocker after the actual problem is addressed and about everyone leaves with an adblocker.
Its not technically difficult at all. It takes a few clicks to install and one click to disable on the minority of sites that don't work with ad blockers.
You are right, but the number of ad-block users is significant now -- around 20% (accd. to the same PageFair report).
I have also personally seen around 30% users use ad-blockers, for a site with around 100,000 visitors a day. However, most of the audience for that site is people in twenties, so it's not surprising to see higher than average ad-blocker usage.
Reports are from 20-30% of desktop and mobile users make use of some sort of adblocker/privacy tool. That is a very large set of users, and in some industries and domains the numbers go much higher.
Purely for self-protection/anti-aggravation I absolutely recommend it to every casual user I advise.
Why not. Try sharing a link to ublock origin on facebook with text to the effect that installing the add on from the link will remove 90% of the annoying clutter from the web, make everything load faster, and protect their computers from malware.
Realize that the link in either the chrome or firefox case will be to the official addon site and in the mind of the user safe doubly so since it came from someone trusted.
What percentage of people who see it will spend the 3 clicks to install it?
* Note I know you have no incentive to actually do so its hypothetical many people are encouraging non techies to do so and have been doing so for a very long time the percentage that are aware of adblocking is increasing.
Is there any data on the number of people using ad blockers? I've personally seen a massive increase in the number of non-techy friends using them. A lot of people for example stream sports (illegally) and those sites are barely functional without a blocker.
I don't have those numbers. I know there have been some publications lately that suggest there is an increase, which make sense since I doubt the number would decrease, but like browser usage stats, those numbers are heavily dependent on the audience they were collected from.
My non-technical friends have never mentioned ads to me before in the context of the web. I doubt that means they appreciate ads on sites but I don't think it occurs to them that they need to find a way to remove them. I think they appreciate that Hulu lets you pay to remove them, or that Netflix doesn't have ads, but I never hear "this website sucks because of ads." They just assume it's the way of things.
Sometime ago I read an interesting interview[1] with the Economist deputy editor, Tom Standange, saying things like:
> The other thing about ads is that 41 percent of millennials are using ad block. My daughter has ad block and she goes around infecting every machine she gets to. She puts it on everything.
> But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads.
Digital privacy is an undeniable rising trend. Just stating the vast majority of people are not using adblock is, at minimum, shortsighted.
> But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads.
Do you have a source for this? Your statement doesn't carry any weight if you can't back it up. Anecdotally, I have seen a rise in non-tech-savvy people using ad blockers, but I'd be interested to see some hard data.
I've watched a lot of these protests-turned-riot and you don't see innocent people on the sidelines being hauled away. You hardly see any of the violent and destructive agitators being hauled away. I don't think the scenario you're describing is realistic whatsoever.
You've watched a lot of them, but you've never seen or heard of "kettling"? Odd. I have seen it and experienced it.
(I'm also curious what instances of protests-turned-riot you're referring to. The US hasn't had many riots, in any meaningful sense, recently. Do you mean someone smashing a window?)
There was one a couple of days ago at Berkeley where 150 or so masked people smashed windows and set things on fire in an attempt to block a conservative from speaking there. Causing $100k in damage to private property in order to curtail other's free speech isn't something that should be glossed over or minimized by calling it protesting.
There's the riot at NYU where more violent agitators showed up to prevent Gavin McInnes from speaking, where he was attacked with pepper spray.
On the night at Berkeley, a woman wearing a Trump hat was pepper sprayed while giving an interview for a news network.
These are the facts.
Call it what you want, but this is violence and destruction with the intent to silence people with an opposing point of view. It's not civil disobedience or protesting and more like terrorism.
As for your other question about whether or not I've heard of kettling, I have. The fact that it exists does not convince me that innocent bystanders need to fear that. In instances where you may have seen that, such as the inauguration of the president, charges were brought against some of those individuals. Which suggests the goal wasn't to arrest bystanders.
By the way, I don't know if you watched that one live or after it took place but there was a ton of chaos. People were throwing objects like glass bottles at the police in riot gear. Again, many of the people were dressed in all black with masks on. If you want a very real problem to attack, that's one to focus on.
Kettling is very typically used for mass arrests, even if charges are not filed against everyone arrested. This has happened in Oakland, where I live, multiple times in the last five years. And the fact that an arrest without a conviction can be reported to employers under this FBI program is one of the problems noted in the article.
Terrorism is quite a word for a situation in which nobody was seriously injured, as far as I know. And terrorism of the variety that involves killing people is already less likely to kill someone in the U.S. than a lightning strike. Picking the black bloc as the "very real problem... to focus on", in that context and with everything else going on in the world--including the serious damage done to many thousands of people by cruel and violent policies justified by reference to the threat of terrorism--strikes me as a very poor choice of priorities.
I was at that protest in Berkeley and your claims are exaggerated. I've written here extensively on what was objectionable about the speaker's visit there and why I think the protests were justified. You should consider that a supporter of that speaker shot someone at a similar event only days earlier. If you are concerned about violence as you claim then I think rather outranks some broken windows and a burnt-out generator.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you don't mean to downplay what actually happened, or to imply that two wrongs make a right, or to present your limited experience of the event as evidence that it was hardly worth bringing up in the first place. But at the same time, we both know arguing any other view point isn't going to matter. It is absolutely exhausting trying to have an effective debate about politics here. I'm wrong before I even hit reply.
It's important to listen to primary sources in this age of heavily propagandized events. Yes, some people acted illegally and dangerously, but to call it terrorism and the real threat to the united states smacks of partisan misdirection.
So, out of curiosity: why do you see this as a threat requiring immediate drop-everything intervention, as opposed to other things which -- even if we were to grant every single claim you've made -- still cause more deaths, injuries and property damage or pose greater threat to democratic processes and the rule of law? What causes it to jump immediately to the upper levels of your personal priority list?
Yes, I would say that. There are a lot of people who apply different labels to the man because of what he agrees with and disagrees with. I would imagine you already have your opinion on that. It is a small fraction of the argument I just presented and I don't think it should be the focus.
Which part of the conservative mindset does he represent? I suppose he could be some kind of nationalist/native sentiment, but he doesn't seem to speak about that much.
Hopefully you noticed that I didn't try to make my feelings on Mr Yiannopoulos obvious.
I appreciate your response but I want to respectfully decline to comment further. I don't feel comfortable expressing my political opinions here. That includes things that would be tangentially related.
Make no mistake, this was absolutely about shutting people up that they don't agree with. The harassment we're actually seeing in any tangible form is coming from the rioters.
Yes, but people are allowed to do that. I don't think "free speech" means what you think it means. It's a comforting idea that other people are too immature/emotional/dumb to consciously think about an opposing belief, but that wasn't the case here. There's no obligation to hear out a side that would do you harm given the choice. w/r/t letting people say unpopular things, the university did decide to host him in the first place, which represents the university's commitment to some form of free speech. Individual people should not be subject to scrutiny for protesting something they disagree with.
While I agree that protesting someone else's speech is protected speech, I'm not sure that hitting people with poles or pepper spraying them is the same.
No, they aren't. That's the point. We're not talking about yelling over someone while they're talking or even using a private publication to present only a set of opinions that fits with some agenda. The specific point being made was about using violence, destruction, hate, and fear as a means to silence people.
Calling me names (or other people) doesn't make what you're saying valid. It wasn't an effective tactic for the left during the election and it's not an effective tactic in this conversation.
At any rate, I don't think you're arguing against points that I've actually made. This sounds more like a response to some hypothetical response that you were anticipating before I responded.
Free speech is not the right to speak freely in any venue for any reason. Your comparison of Berkeley activists tactics to terrorists is weak; like comparing script kiddies to international bank hackers to drum up fear.
Is your intent here to justify the existence of this watch list?
The first amendment lists a specific purpose for free speech - for the public to redress grievances to the government.
Do you not think that this watch list will curtail free speech infinitely more than what you're complaining about? By monitoring protests and reporting legal political action to employees, you can implicit discourage political protest - which IS a legally protected form of free speech.
It's believable though. The most powerful military force on the planet chooses something your company makes to become the standard issue. It's hard to believe that wouldn't feel humbling. What a sense of pride that must give them. Do those two feelings cancel each other out? It's important to not try to frame everything you read based on whatever article was recently up-voted here.
>* It's hard to believe that wouldn't feel humbling.*
The parent's point is that it wouldn't feel humbling in any original meaning of the word. You wouldn't feel "lowered in stature" etc for being chosen, but the opposite.
But of course this ignores that the word has shifted in use.
Yeah you're right when you mention the shift in use. Reminds me of people who use "begs the question" incorrectly (basically everyone and all the time) but how most people think of it now. Very pedantic though. (Pedantic is the HN norm though, so, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.)
agreed. Everyone in that company knows the responsibility of quality as the product leaves their hands. They know that they are building for the United States military and that those weapons are now apart of history. So it is in fact bigger than they are as individuals. It's also a polite way of speaking of appreciation when you know that others companies that also produce things of great quality weren't chosen and you were. It means you feel a bigger responsiblity to take on. And that's humbling.
That's been the case for the most part on WrapBootstrap. Items that are very active are pushing out new BS4 versions while keeping the 3.x-based versions in the package. Some items that haven't seen an update to newer versions of the 3.x branch are jumping straight to 4.
The jump between 3 to 4 isn't as great as the jump from 2 to 3. With the jump from 2 to 3, many items never made the transition. I don't think that will be the case this time around.
Coincidences like that happen all the time. Attributing them to spying is a ticket to a level of paranoia that some people have a very hard time finding their way back from. It's healthier to deter them from such lines of thought when there is an absence of evidence that this is something that actually occurs.
Coincidences happen all the time, but targeted ads like those still differ from general audience ads. Just because instead of audio it is spying using metadata and keywords doesn't make seem any less invasive.
> Attributing them to spying is a ticket to a level of paranoia that some people have a very hard time finding their way back from.
I'll state again that I don't believe FB is actually listening in on phone conversations, but to the majority of their users, they may as well be doing just that. It is all just spying, only using different sources.
I know what you were saying. I just chimed in with my opinion. It's unexpected to have the reply to your comment not be in opposition to yours. The expectation is that I wanted to undermine your opinion.
That does not make much difference to CIA or NSA to my knowledge. There are many ways to correlate pseudonymous with your real identity: IP address, usage pattern, speech pattern, or even patterns in the photos that you posted.
That's way I never used pseudonyms, they are practically useless in hiding your real identity. Additionally they give you a false sense of anonymity.
I'm not worried about state-level attacks (unless I become famous). My opinions are not that scandalous (maybe 0.1% are; but that isn't on HN ;). Many (a small percentage, but a large number) people have similar ideas. If my real identity were released, people may disapprove of some ideas; but I'll be fine.
It's kind of like pictures of naked me. I don't want it to be public but it's not that severe either.
I think it is a social norm in the English speaking countries to not use real name on Internet forums. So I wouldn't call the use of nicknames or Internet handles examples of pseudonyms.
Also, I have no intention of using this nickname to hide my identity. You can Google it to find everything you need to know about me.
I kind of envy that. But years ago I cared a whole lot about HN and tied my personal self to it. I owe a lot to the community, too. For better or for worse, I'm stuck. I don't know of a community I'd rather be part of. It just is what it is.
Trying to explain this has failed an innumerable number of times here. Whenever this discussion pops up, there are die-hards who are against all advertising versus those who present a rational argument explaining how the content they willingly consume is supported by those ads. Like wrestling in the mud with a pig, you will come out of this unfulfilled while the other side comes out feeling like the winner. They're just a highly vocal minority.
I'm not a personal fan of ads but when it comes to things I find important enough and have the option, I pay to remove them. The difference however is that the die-hards tend to not accept paying or viewing ads as acceptable. If they did, this wouldn't keep coming up.
