Ad blocking has been a slow and steady revolution in the way the internet is consumed. 47% of all internet users now use ad blockers to improve their browsing experience. But there's an elephant in the ad blocking room: Built-in ads. Ad blockers hide , but they don't hide things like feeds, related content, and notifications of the site itself. These are . external ads built-in ads They are put there by a site's own product designers, because they increase the time users spend on the site, which leads to more advertising revenue. Built-in ads are part of the fabric of many tech products. They make big tech tick. A few examples: the Facebook News Feed, YouTube's recommended videos, Twitter's trending bar, and Buzzfeed's carousels and sidebars. They are a crucial part of our attention being stolen and sold. They are why we spend hours more browsing than we intend to. To give built-in ads a shorter name, let's call them bads. How to block bads The name is deceptive. Bads are not all bad, by any means. Sometimes you to see YouTube recommended videos. Other times you to view related content on Stack Overflow. want need That's why an important distinction needs to be made between bads appearing and bads being by default opt in. Currently bads appear . by default That's actually what makes them bad. They are always there, ready to take you down that rabbit hole. If they were instead , available whenever the user actively wanted them, they would be a whole lot less bad. opt in So . They need to hide bads, but they also need to let users show some bads when they want to. bad blockers need to work differently to ad blockers For instance, replace a Trending Sidebar with a button saying 'Show Trending Sidebar'. Let users choose their bads To avoid getting on users' nerves, bad blockers would let users decide: - Which bads they always want , e.g. the Facebook News Feed. completely hidden - Which bads they want to be e.g. the Trending Sidebar. opt in, - Which bads they , which they always want shown, e.g. Stack Overflow related content. don't consider bads To save users having to figure all this out, bad blockers would come loaded with smart profiles for different kinds of people who want different kinds of bads blocked. So to a degree that ad blockers don't need to be. bad blockers need to be customisable A bad database To hide bads, bad blockers will need a database of bads. This database will include information like: description; id of the bad's HTML element; URLs the bad appears on; tags to categorise the bad; perhaps some kind of rating of the bad according to how bad it is. This information will need to be created by analysing thousands of websites. And some of it - for instance the HTML element's id - will need to be frequently constantly updated. For that reason, it makes sense for there to be , maintained by bad blockers and other volunteers. one open-source bad database I am going to launch this database as part of my work on , so subscribe to the Nudge mailing list if you'd like to stay tuned. Nudge here Bad blockers are out there There are already tools that do some bad blocking. was a trailblazer in the space. It hides a single (massive) bad: the Facebook News Feed. News Feed Eradicator , a new Chrome extension that , has some bad blocking capabilities. Motion launched on Product Hunt last week But if you'd like to try a fully-fledged bad blocker, check out , the anti-distraction Chrome extension that I develop. Nudge Nudge's Hider feature is similar to the implementation of a bad blocker described above. Bads are hidden by default, but you can always show them when you need to. I'm soon going to be adding many more bads to the . Email me on louis [at] nudgeware [dot] io to suggest more. list of what Nudge currently hides Bad times People born today will spend most of their life looking at pixels. We’re going through a fundamental change in how humans experience reality. So it’s critical for us to figure out who gets to decide the pixels that we will spend so much time looking at. Will it be us, or will it be big tech? Bad blockers, and other forms of , will tilt the balance back to us. nudgeware So we should probably hurry up and make them. And not just for the desktop browser. Crucially, we need bad blockers on people's phones. As things stand, that's virtually impossible because of the way phone operating systems stop developers from having full control. But if enough people start using bad blockers in their desktop browsers, pressure will grow for phones to support them too. Billions of hours of human attention lie in the balance. Let's make the best out of a bad situation. Thanks for reading! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Try Nudge (2,800 users and 4.8 stars on Chrome Web Store ) Photo by on (thank you!) Marvin Meyer Unsplash
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