> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers.

This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect to find in modern browser fingerprinting code. I’m not deeply familiar with what APIs are available for detecting extensions, but the fact that it scans for specific extensions sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch) vs. something inherently sinister (e.g. “they’re checking to see if you’re a Muslim”).

I’m certainly not endorsing it, do think it’s pretty problematic, and I’m glad it’s getting some visibility. But I do take some issue with the alarmist framing of what’s going on.

I’ve come to mostly expect this behavior from most websites that run advertising code and this is why I run ad blockers.

Calling the title misleading because they didn't breach the browser sandbox is wrong when this is clearly a scenario most people didn't think was possible. Chrome added extensionId randomization with the change to V3, so it's clearly not an intended scenario.

> vs. something inherently sinister (e.g. “they’re checking to see if you’re a Muslim”)

They chose to put that particular extension in their target list, how is it not sinister? If the list had only extensions to affect LinkedIn page directly (a good chunk seem to be LinkedIn productivity tools) they would have some plausible deniability, but that's not the case. You're just "nothing ever happens"ing this.

I think most people would interpret “scanning your computer” as breaking out of the confines the browser and gathering information from the computer itself. If this was happening, the magnitude of the scandal would be hard to overstate.

But this is not happening. What actually is happening is still a problem. But the hyperbole undermines what they’re trying to communicate and this is why I objected to the title.

> They chose to put that particular extension in their target list, how is it not sinister?

Alongside thousands of other extensions. If they were scanning for a dozen things and this was one of them, I’d tend to agree with you. But this sounds more like they enumerated known extension IDs for a large number of extensions because getting all installed extensions isn’t possible.

If we step back for a moment and ask the question: “I’ve been tasked with building a unique fingerprint capability to combat (bots/scrapers/known bad actors, etc), how would I leverage installed extensions as part of that fingerprint?”

What the article describes sounds like what many devs would land on given the browser APIs available.

To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed.

But the authors have chosen to frame this in language that is hyperbolic and alarmist, and in doing so I thing they’re making people focus on the wrong things and actually obscuring the severity of the problem, which is certainly not limited to LinkedIn.

> To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed.

These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What the article describes should not be "what many devs would land on" naturally. What many devs should land on is "scanning the user's browser in order to try to fingerprint him without consent is wrong and we cannot do it."

To put it more extreme: If a developer's boss said "We need to build software for a drone that will autonomously fly around and kill infants," The developer's natural reaction should not be: "OK, interesting problem. First we'll need a source of map data, and vision algorithm that identifies infants...." Yet, our industry is full of this "OK, interesting technology!" attitude.

Unfortunately, for every developer who is willing to draw the line on ethical grounds, there's another developer waiting in the recruiting pipeline more than willing to throw away "doing the right thing" if it lands him a six figure salary.

Fighting against these kinds of directives was a large factor in my own major burnout and ultimately quitting big tech. I was successful for awhile, but it takes a serious toll if you’re an IC constantly fighting against directors and VPs just concerned about solving some perceived business problem regardless of the technical barriers.

Part of the problem is that these projects often address a legitimate issue that has no “good” solution, and that makes pushing back/saying no very difficult if you don’t have enough standing within the company or aren’t willing to put your career on the line.

I’d be willing to bet good money that this LinkedIn thing was framed as an anti-bot/anti-abuse initiative. And those are real issues.

But too many people fail to consider the broader implications of the requested technical implementation.

Edit: typos

One reason your boss is eager to replace everyone with language models, they won’t have any “ethical backbone” :’)

Does something like running the duckduckgo extension not help?

No, yes

Yes, giving these people short (or long, mēh) prison sentences is the only thing that will stop this.

No, the obvious grassroots response is to not use LinkedIn or Chrome. (You mean developers not consumers, I think. The developers in the trenches should obey if they need their jobs, they are not to blame. It is the evil swine getting the big money and writing the big cheque's...)

Cory Doctorow, if he is to believed, states 50% of web users use ad blockers. So maybe?

That involves integrating with tracking providers to best recognize whether a purchase is being made by a bot or not, whether it matches "Normal" signals for that kind of order, and importantly, whether the credit card is being used by the normal tracking identity that uses it.

Even the GDPR gives us enormous leeway to do literally this, but it requires participating in tracking networks that have what amounts to a total knowledge of purchases and browsing you do on the internet. That's the only way they work at all. And they work very well.

Is it Ethical?

It is a huge portion of the reason why ecommerce is possible, and significantly reduces credit card fraud, and in our specific case, drastically limits the ability of a criminal to profit off of stolen credit cards.

Are people better off from my work? If you do not visit our platforms, you are not tracked by us specifically, but the providers we work with are tracking you all over the web, and definitely not just on ecommerce.

Should this be allowed?

Based on their privacy policy, it looks like Sift (major anti-fraud vendor) collects only "number of plugins" and "plugins hash". No one can accuse them of collecting the plugins for some dual-use purpose beyond fingerprinting, but LinkedIn has opened themselves up to this based on the specific implementation details described.

This includes things like the motion of your mouse pointer, typing events including dwell times, fingerprints. If our providers are scanning the list of extensions you have installed, they aren't sharing that with us. That seems overkill IMO for what they are selling, but their business is spyware so...

On the backend, we generally get the results and some signals. We do not get the massive pack of data they have collected on you. That is the tracking company's prime asset. They sell you conclusions using that data, though most sell you vague signals and you get to make your own conclusions.

Frankly, most of these providers work extremely well.

Sometimes, one of our tracking vendors gets default blackholed by Firefox's anti-tracking policy. I don't know how they manage to "Fix" that but sometimes they do.

Again, to make that clear, I don't care what you think Firefox's incentives are, they objectively are doing things that reduce how tracked you are, and making it harder for these companies to operate and sell their services. Use Firefox.

In terms of "Is there a way to do this while preserving privacy?", it requires very strict regulation about who is allowed to collect what. Lots of data should be collected and forwarded to the payment network, who would have sole legal right to collect and use such data, and would be strictly regulated in how they can use such data, and the way payment networks handle fraud might change. That's the only way to maintain strong credit card fraud prevention in ecommerce, privacy, status quo of use for customers, and generally easy to use ecommerce. It would have the added benefit of essentially banning Google's tracking. It would ban "Fraud prevention as a service" though, except as sold by payment networks.

Is this good? I don't know.

I'm not convinced tracking is the only or even a very good way to go about this though. Mandating chip use would largely solve the issue as it currently stands (at least AFAIK). The card provider doing 2FA on their end prior to payment approval seems like it works just as well in practice.

At this point my expectation is that I have to do 2FA when first adding a new card to a platform. I'm not clear why they should need to track me at that point.

That data sounds like it would be very valuable.

But I think if I sell widgets and a prospective customer browsers my site, telling my competitors (via a data broker) that customer is in the market for widgets is not a smart move.

How do such tracking networks get the cooperation of retailers, when it’s against the retailers interests to have their customers tracked?

I think using LinkedIn is pretty much agreeing to participate in “fingerprinting” (essentially identifying yourself) to that system. There might be a blurry line somewhere around “I was just visiting a page hosted on LinkedIn.com and was not myself browsing anyone else’s personal information”, but otherwise LinkedIn exists as a social network/credit bureau-type system. I’m not sure how we navigate this need to have our privacy while simultaneously needing to establish our priors to others, which requires sharing information about ourselves. The ethics here is not black and white.

Will you do the same for your kids ? WOuld you let the government decide for you whats right, and what's wrong ?

That is the deal in a state based society. There are alternatives, but are you ready for Council Communism and it's ilk?

> WOuld you let the government decide for you whats right, and what's wrong ?

Yes, in a state based society

In a state based society fight for democracy and civil rights. Freedom must be defended

Yes, but I also think that most people would interpret "Getting a full list of all the Chrome extensions you have installed" as a meaningful escape/violation of the browser's privacy sandbox. The fact that there's no getAllExtensions API is deliberate. The fact that you can work around this with scanning for extension IDs is not something most people know about, and the Chrome developers patched it when it became common. So I don't think describing it as something everybody would expect is totally fine and normal for browsers to allow is correct.

I think that’s a far more reasonable framing of the issue.

> I don't think describing it as something everybody would expect is totally fine and normal for browsers to allow is correct.

I agree that most people would not expect their extensions to be visible. I agree that browsers shouldn’t allow this. I, and most privacy/security focused people I know have been sounding the alarm about Chrome itself as unsafe if you care about privacy for awhile now.

This is still a drastically different thing than what the title implies.

I don't think so, because most people understand that extensions necessarily work inside of the sandbox. Accessing your filesystem is a meaningful escape. Accessing extensions means they have identification mechanisms unfortunately exposed inside the sandbox. No escape needed.

It's extremely unfortunate that the sandbox exposes this in some way.

Microsoft should be sued, but browsers should also figure out how to mitigate revealing installed extensions.

In my experience, most people - even most tech people - are unaware of just how much information a bit of script on a website can snag without triggering so much as a mild warning in the browser UI. And tend toward shock and horror on those occasions where they encounter evidence of reality.

The widespread "Facebook is listening to me" belief is my favorite proxy for this ... Because, it sorta is - just... Not in the way folks think. Don't need ears if you see everything!

Getting folks to install “like” and “share” widgets all over their websites was a genius move.

That is exactly how I interpreted it, and that is why I clicked the link. When I skimmed the article and realized that wasn't the case, I immediately thought "Ugh, clickbait" and came to the HN comments section.

> To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed.

100% Agree.

So, in summary: what they are doing is awful. Yes, they are collecting a ton of data about you. But, when you post with a headline that makes me think they are scouring my hard drive for data about me... and I realize that's not the case... your credibility suffers.

Also, I think the article would be better served by pointing out that LinkedIn is BY FAR not the only company doing this...

I don't care about how much spying is going on in ESPN. I can ditch it at the shadow of a suspicion. Not so with LinkedIn.

This is very alarming, and pretending it's not because everyone else does it sounds disingenuous to me.

For myself, I agree with you: one should quit (and I will)

Like everyone else on this thread, I’m not condoning it or saying it’s a good thing, but this post is an exaggeration.

it is a different angle of looking at this issue, and kind of shifts responsibility from their shitty practices over to us users

slippery slope approach, as we can see everywhere, this leads to more and more of such

I don't know I just started mocking everything and anything in there, its wall of shite and AI slop predominantly anyways, so why bother

To take a step back further: what you're saying here is that gathering more data makes it less sinister. The gathering not being targeted is not an excuse for gathering the data in the first place.

It's likely that the 'naive developer tasked with fingerprinting' scenario is close to the reality of how this happened. But that doesn't change the fact that sensitive data -- associated with real identities -- is now in the hands of MS and a slew of other companies, likely illegally.

> But the authors have chosen to frame this in language that is hyperbolic and alarmist, and in doing so I thing they’re making people focus on the wrong things and actually obscuring the severity of the problem, which is certainly not limited to LinkedIn.

The article is not hyperbolizing by exploring the ramifications of this; and it's true that this sort of tracking is going on everywhere, but neither is it alarmist to draw attention to a particularly egregious case. What wrong things does it focus on?

I’m not saying it is. My point is that they appear to be trying to accomplish something like getInstalledExcentions(), which is meaningfully different from a small and targeted list like isInstalled([“Indeed.com”, “DailyBibleVerse”, “ADHD Helper”]).

One could be reasonably interpreted as targeting specific kinds of users. What they’re actually doing to your point looks more like a naive implementation of a fingerprinting strategy that uses installed extensions as one set of indicators.

Both are problematic. I’m not arguing in favor of invasive fingerprinting. But what one might infer about the intent of one vs. the other is quite different, and I think that matters.

Here are two paragraphs that illustrate my point:

> “Microsoft reduces malicious traffic to their websites by employing an anti-bot/anti-abuse system that builds a browser fingerprint consisting of <n> categories of identifiers, including Browser/OS version, installed fonts, screen resolution, installed extensions, etc. and using that fingerprint to ban known offenders. While this approach is effective, it raises major privacy concerns due to the amount of information collected during the fingerprinting process and the risk that this data could be misused to profile users”.

vs.

> “Microsoft secretly scans every user’s computer software to determine if they’re a Christian or Muslim, have learning disabilities, are looking for jobs, are working for a competitor, etc.”

The second paragraph is what the article is effectively communicating, when in reality the first paragraph is almost certainly closer to the truth.

The implications inherent to the first paragraph are still critical and a discussion should be had about them. Collecting that much data is still a major privacy issue and makes it possible for bad things to happen.

But I would maintain that it is hyperbole and alarmism to present the information in the form of the second paragraph. And by calling this alarmism I’m not saying there isn’t a valid alarm to raise. But it’s important not to pull the fire alarm when there’s a tornado inbound.

That's where we disagree: intent doesn't matter here, because the intent of the person gathering the data is not the same as those who have access to the data. I don't care if the team tasked with implementing this believed they were saving the world, because once this data is in the hands of a big corporation, in perpetuity, and the thousands of people that entails, and it diffuses across advertisers and governments, be it through leaks, backroom deals, or perfectly above-board operations, it makes no difference how it got there.

The two paragraphs given:

> “Microsoft reduces malicious traffic to their websites by employing an anti-bot/anti-abuse system that builds a browser fingerprint consisting of <n> categories of identifiers, including Browser/OS version, installed fonts, screen resolution, installed extensions, etc. and using that fingerprint to ban known offenders. While this approach is effective, it raises major privacy concerns due to the amount of information collected during the fingerprinting process and the risk that this data could be misused to profile users”.

vs.

> “Microsoft secretly scans every user’s computer software to determine if they’re a Christian or Muslim, have learning disabilities, are looking for jobs, are working for a competitor, etc.”

The latter is the tangible effect of the former. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and considering the former has long gone unaddressed in its most charitable form, it only makes sense to use a particularly egregious example of it taken to its natural conclusion to address in courts and the public consciousness.

As I’ve stated clearly throughout this thread, the fingerprinting they’re doing is a problem.

Calling it “searching your computer” is also a problem.

> Defending that action is

Nowhere have I defended what LinkedIn is doing.

> Nowhere have I defended what LinkedIn is doing.

Yep. You feel the same taste of your own. You are accusing the site being hyperbole and alarmism. I'm accusing you being defendant of linkedin.

Which they would, if they could.

They are scanning users' computers to the maximum extent possible.

But at the end of the day, the browser is likely where your most sensitive data is.

If it has the ability to scan your bookmarks, or visited site history, that would lend more credence to using the term "computer".

The title ought to have said "linkedIn illegally scans your browser", and that would make clear what is being done without being sensationalist.

I’m not defending the act of scanning for these extensions, and I’m of the opinion that such an API shouldn’t even exist, but just pointing out that there are perfectly legitimate APIs that reveal information that could be framed as “files installed on your computer” that are clearly not “searching your computer” like the title implies.

Having sensationalist titles should be called out at every opportunity.

How'd that work? If it's in memory, the extensions would vanish everytime I shutdown Chrome? I'll have to reinstall all my extensions again everytime I restart Chrome?

Have you seen any browser that keeps extension in memory? Where they ask the user to reinstall their extensions everytime they start the browser?

The point is to call out the sensationalism in the title.

Like OP, I don't consider behavior confined to the browser to be my computer. "Scans your browser" is both technically correct and less misleading. "Scans your computer" was chosen instead, to get more clicks.

Eg, someone could use the phrase "Won't someone think of the children?" to describe a legitimately bad thing like bank fraud, but the solutions that flow from the problem that "children are in danger" are significantly different from the solutions that flow from "phishing attacks are rampant".

The two issues in this case aren't quite as different as child-endangerment and bank fraud. But if the problem was as the original title describes, the solution is quite different (better sandboxing) than what the actual solution is. Which I don't know, but better sandboxing ain't it.

'ignore the facts! ENEMY!!!' generally doesn't end well for anybody

all of the browser extensions I'm aware of are on planet earth, so i guess you'd have it linkedin is searching the planet for your browser extensions?

By this logic we could also say that LinkedIn scans your home network.

>Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm.

When I read that, I think they have escaped the browser and checking which applications I have installed on my computer. Not which plugins the browser has in it. Just my 2cents.

The same way taking a photo of a house from the street is not the same as investigating the contents of your pantry.

While "scanning your browser" would be more accurate and would exclude the interpretation that it scans your files.

The reason the latter is not used is that, even though more precise and more communicative, it would get less clicks.

Checking for extensions is barely anything when you consider the amount of system data a browser exposes in various APIs, and you can identify someone just by checking what's supported by their hardware, their screen res, what quirks the rendering pipeline has, etc. It's borderline trivial and impossible to avoid if you want a working browser, and if you don't the likes of Anubis will block you from every site cause they'll think you're a VM running scraper bot.

Your browser is a subset of your computer and lives inside a sandbox. Breaching that sandbox is certainly a much more interesting topic than breaking GDPR by browser fingerprinting.

Expecting and accepting this kind of thing is why everyone feels the need to run an ad-blocker.

An ad-blocker also isn’t full protection. It’s a cat and mouse game. Novel ideas on how to extract information about you, and influence behavior, will never be handled by ad-blockers until it becomes known. And even then, it’s a question of if it’s worth the dev time for the maker of the ad-blocker you happen to be using and if that filter list gets enabled… and how much of the web enabling it breaks.

The point was more that the headline frames this as some major revelation about LinkedIn, while the reality is that we’re getting probed and profiled by far more sites than most people realize.

They're scanning your extensions to make sure you aren't using third party tools to scrape LinkedIn.

It's stupid, but they're trying to stop people from making money on LinkedIn when they feel like they're the only ones that should be able to do that.

I don't: never have and never will. I don't notice the ads, they don't bother or distract me: I'm online 4-8 hours/day.

diaphimisticophobia: fear of advertisements or commercials

I would bet HN has the highest proportion of people with diaphimisticophobia of any group on the planet.

Studies show most people who don’t think they’re impacted by advertisements are wrong. Advertisements don’t just drive you to buy something, they can also be used to create brand recognition, positive feeling associations and force the brand to front of mind.

They introduced ads like a frog into tepid water. The water is now boiling and many still think everything is fine, because at this point it’s all they know.

It’s not a fear, it’s annoyance and a resentment. I’m annoyed that the ads make web pages so much worse. I resent that everything being “free” with ads has made it next to impossible for other business models to take hold and that new companies need burden themselves with investors, because the expectation is that things online should be free. I’m annoyed that a profile of who I am has been built and sold without my consent and without giving me a cut of the profit. I resent the companies that do this and have no respect for them or their leadership. It’s most certainly not fear of advertisements.

The fear is what will happen to that data, or what may already be happening, if it is controlled by some deceitful individuals or groups.

The fear doesn’t come from the ads, it comes from the invasive data collection that increases the profit of the ads. It’s compounded by the extremely frequent hacks and data leaks that have made it very clear that most of these companies cannot keep the data they collect secure. As such, they have no business collecting and storing it in the first place.

A billboard is an advertisement, so is a magazine ad. The world would be a more aesthetically pleasing place without them, sure, but I don’t go out of my way to avoid them like with the online ads. Billboards and magazines aren’t monitoring me and using hyper-targeted ads. A knitting magazine is going to show ads for knitting stuff. A billboard in Orlando is going to point a driver toward Disney. That’s just fine. Those ads meet people where they are, they don’t follow them around.

I don’t like shopping at Target due to what I’ve read about their data collection and how it’s used. I don’t fear big box stores, I just don’t want to be part of their data set. A store should be a store that profits from the margins of the products they sell. Now, the retail arm is just the front of their advertising or credit card arm of the business, where all the real money is. I don’t want to play that game. I’m a simple man, I want things to be what they are and that’s it.

Excuse the rant.

When I look up diaphimisticophobia, it seems specific about the commercial and their content being the fear. I think most people on HN have an issue with the data collection and use, not the content of the ads themselves.

It's pretty wild that we live in a world where the actual FBI has recommended we use ad blockers to protect ourselves, and if everyone actually listened, much of the Internet (and economy) as we know it would disappear. The FBI is like "you should protect yourself from the way that the third largest company in the world does business", and the average person's response is "nah, that would take at least a couple of minutes of my time, I'll just go ahead and continue to suffer with invasive ads and make sure $GOOG keeps going up".

As a data point I, a technical person who tweaks his computer a lot, was against adblocking for moral reasons (as a part of perceived social contract, where internet is free because of ads). Only later I changed mi mind on this because I became more privacy aware.

But ads are all of those things now, so I feel no obligation. I only got an ad blocker around the time ads were becoming excessively irritating.

Most people, including folks on here, think cookie banners are a problem, but they are just an annoying attempt to phish your agreement. As long as these privacy loopholes exist, we will keep hearing such stories even from large corporations with much to loose, which means the current privacy regulations do not go far enough.

When I first started out on the internet, ads were banners. Literally just images and a link that you could click on to go see some product. That was just fine.

However, that wasn't good enough for advertisers. They needed animations, they needed sounds, they needed popups, they needed some way to stop the user from just skimming past and ignoring the ad. They wanted an assurance that the user was staring at their ad for a minimum amount of time.

And, to get all those awful annoying capabilities, they needed the ability to run code in the browser. And that is what has opened the floodgate of malware in advertisement.

Take away the ability for ads to be bundled with some executable and they become fine again. Turn them back into just images, even gifs, and all the sudden I'd be much more amenable to leaving my ad blocker off.

Even back in the 1990s the internet was awash with popups, popunders and animated punch-the-monkey banner ads. And with the speed of dial up, hefty images slows down page loads too.

You must be a true Internet veteran if you remember a time ads weren’t annoying!

I'm not trying to be mean I'm just trying to historically parse your sentence/belief.

Because for me this is a simplified analogy of what happened on the internet:

a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs

b) a few years later a new guy called commercial business turned up and started using our club house and fucking around with our stuff

c) commercial business started going around our club house rearranging the furniture and putting graffiti everywhere saying the internet is here and free because of it. We're pretty sure it might have even pissed in the hallway rather than use the toilet and the whole place is smelling awful.

d) the rest of us started breaking out the scrubbing brushes and mops (ad blockers, extensions, VPNs, etc) trying to clean up after it

e) some of its friends turned up and started repeating something about social contracts and how business and ads built this internet place

f) the rest of us keep crying into our hands just trying to meet up, break out the slop buckets to clean up the vomit in the kitchen and some of us now have to wear gloves and condoms just to share things with our friends and stop the whole place collapsing

Quantity is a quality in itself. Your BBS was never going to support a million users. Once people figured out the network effect it was over for the masses. They went where the people are, and we've all suffered since.

"we" is doing a lot of work here. No clubhouse got optical switching working and all that fiber in the ground for example. Beyond POC, the Internet was all commercial interests.

This is sort of like arguing cutlery is a military enterprise. Like yes, that’s where knives came from. But that’s disconnected enough from modern design, governance and other fundamental concerns as to be irrelevant. The internet—and less ambiguously, the World Wide Web—are more commercial than military.

Source? Not doubting. But I have a friend who was buying airline tickets through CompuServe in the late 80s/early 90s.

Such as news and magazine sites, many of which are actively dying due to a lack of revenue.

I personally wish these sites could all switch to paid models, because I also don’t like ads.

But absent that, I’d like to support the sites I use so that they don’t go out of business.

Most publishers of content online are ad supported and struggling, and I want to make sure I’m contributing to their revenue somehow.

I don’t feel bad about blocking ads on sites I pay for though.

I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month.

Why does YouTube premium cost, like, 19 dollars a month then? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.

Point is, you wouldn't be paying 5.99. You could probably pay a dollar or two across ALL the websites you visit and you'd actually be giving them more money than you do today.

I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.

- do these people understand the principles of making good products?

- is anyone clearly working towards a microtransaction system that could replace advertising and subscription models?

After attending two conferences, hundreds of conversations and hours spent researching, my conclusion to both questions was no. The community felt more like an ouroboros. It was disappointing.

I don't want to pay NYT a subscription fee, I want to pay them some fraction of a cent per paragraph of article that I load in. Same goes for seconds of video on YouTube, etc.

Apparently I'm alone in this vision, or at least very rare...

I looked at crypto currency because it seems like the obvious naive solution. it doesnt work. the cost of the transaction itself far outweighs the value of the transaction when dealing with fractions of a cent. you want an entire network to be updating ledgers with ~millions of records per ~$1000 moved. the fundamental tech of crypto leans towards slower, higher value transactions than high volume, small transactions. Lots of efforts have been made with some coins to bring down the bar of "high value, low volume" to meet everyday consumer usage rates and values - but a transaction history at the scale of every ad impression for every person is a tough ask and would perpetually be in an uphill battle against energy costs.

Ultimately, the conclusion I came to is that the service would need to be centralized, and likely treated as cash by not keeping track of history. Centralized company creates "web credits", user spends $5 for 10,000 credits, these credits are consumed when they visit websites. Websites collect a few credits from each user, and cash out with the centralized company. The issue is that since it would cost more to track and store all the transactions than the value of the transactions themselves, you have to fully trust the company to properly manage the balances.

I started building it and since I would be handling, exchanging, and storing real currency - it seemed subject to a lot of regulations. It is like a combination bank and casino.

i've thought about finishing the project and using disclaimers that buying credits legally owes the user nothing, and collecting credits legally owes the websites nothing, and operating on a trust system - but any smart person would see the potential for a rug pull on that and i figured there would not be much interest.

The alternative route of adhering to all the banking regulations to get the proper insurances needed to make the commitments necessary to users and websites to guarantee exchange between credits and $ seemed like too much for 1 person to take on as a side project for free

A typical credit is getting paid in, transacted once, and cashed out. And a transaction with a user ID, destination ID, and timestamp only needs 16 bytes to store. So if you want to track every hundredth of a penny individually, then processing a million dollars generates 0.16 terabytes of data. You want to keep that around for five years? Okay, that's around $100 in cost. If you're taking a 1% fee then the storage cost is 1% of your fee.

If your credits are worth 1/20th of a penny, and you store history for 18 months, then that drops the amount of data 17x.

(And any criticisms of these numbers based on database overhead get countered by the fact that you would not store a 10 credit transaction as 10 separate database entries.)

I wasn't fully envisioning credits only being transacted once before cashout either. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to create something that goes viral, a lot of people use it and you rack up a bunch of credits, and then you can sit on those credits and spend them as you use the internet without ever having to connect to a bank yourself. So people who are contributing more than they are consuming would rack up credits. they could use those credits to enrich their contributions, maybe pay for cloud services, etc.

the credits could form its own mini web economy if it got popular enough. As cool as this would all be if done honestly, I know that if i saw a company telling me to buy web credits to use anywhere on the internet and the websites get to decide how much to charge and they charge it automatically when i visit the website, and if the company i buy the credits from goes out of business then i may not be able to cash out or get my money back, then I likely wouldnt be buying those credits... so idk

And was this assuming you'd only take a cut on the cash going in and out? Because even a 0.1% cut of the transactions would mean you have $1000 to handle the amount of data I described in the last comment.

I think fee needs to be per transaction, maybe not cash flowed per transaction but accrued per transaction.

Say we both self-host a website for our favorite daily game, and I use yours about as much as you use mine. We would transfer roughly the same amount of credits back and forth to each other ad-infinitum. but the credit service provider is accumulating only expenses with each transaction.

Say someone make a lot of bot accounts to simulate user traffic, and it sends each of them credits to use to visit their own site. the host collects the credits from the bots and transfers them back to the bots to keep them running.

Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.

And has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users. This means the average YouTube user brings in around $1.23 per month. When you consider that CPM's can easily swing by 20X based on how wealthy the user demographic is, and willingness to pay a subscription is a strong signal for purchasing power, I would not be at all subscribed if a YouTube premium subscription was revenue-neutral for Google.

There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.

  > distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking

You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.

Really though, I am not worried about 3 letter agencies performing legitimate law enforcement duties. I am worried about corporations hovering up more data about me than I'd want to reveal, and either using that as a basis to charge me more, or worse, they get hacked, and that data is used by bad actors to target me.

But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.

The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.

people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to

that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked

at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person

publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well

having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round

Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.

The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?

Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads.

Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...

Not sure on that. It was far, far better before what drives ads today. I've gotten more value from random people's static HTML pages in 1999, than I ever have from something in the last 25 years.

This just led me to think of news sites, and how they've turned mostly into click-bait farms in the last decade to 15.

Gives me pause. Didn't the king of "doing it online" buy a newspaper, but the end result wasn't an improvement on its fate? If there is any way to make cash from news, shouldn't Bezos have been able to do it??

I would pay money for that.

We literally had all of this. We had regular, affordable, high quality printed media for every hobby and interest and industry, that you could get delivered to your home address and collect in your own archive if you want, and your local library could do the same.

Those pieces of paper could not track anything about you. They tried, selling their subscriber lists, but that was the best tracking they could provide! You could easily ignore ads, and in return they had to make ads interesting enough in various ways that you might look at them anyway, or they had to make their ads directed at people who went looking for whatever you were selling.

It was an objectively better system in every way.

The Sears catalog was worlds better than Amazon. You weren't going to buy a fraudulent item for one.

Tech is a failure. It has made so much worse. It has only served to allow businesses to cut costs while extracting money from every single local community that used to allow such cash to circulate locally.

We should ban all internet advertising.

What if we limited advertising to images which don't set tracking cookies, so you would get something sort of like banner headlines. Maybe say the image had to be served from the same place as the rest of the content so you don't get to track readers with image trackers

Hardly. I'm the guy upthread, lamenting the current state of things.

But with e-ink, you can be detached. Knowing someone buys a newspaper is hardly a surprising thing. To put it in perspective, a large number of people subscribed to the paper, and it was delivered daily. The same was true of magazines subscriptions. As long as the media is offline (eg, PDF, epub, similar), and the reader OSS, then the tracking and ads aren't an issue still.

--

I don't disagree with how poor things are, but one issue is government moves slowly. Laws being passed today, are the result of trends 20 years ago. For example, in my legal jurisdiction, vendors (eg, Best Buy, big box stores) are responsible for the thing they sell. It's not just "ship it back to manufacturer", for obvious reasons.

Eventually the issues with e-trade will be dealt with, just as issues with shoddy sellers were deal with a century ago. Here's an example...

Back in the 50s people would send items through the mail, then demand people pay for them, or pay for return shipping. I'm not kidding. Even when it wasn't easily defensible in civil court, all the legal threats would scare some into paying.

So laws were passed. If you receive something in the mail you didn't order? It's yours. Period.

But this took a decade to happen, if not more.

This is the sort of thing which will happen in this new market.

And yes, Amazon sucks as it is now.

It's really quite fascinating to me how a lot of new markets aren't about novel, but instead about not having terrible behaviour regulated. For example, Amazon has the worst customer service in all existence. It used to be good, but they now take immense pains to hide all support channels, and where I live, it's a maze of incomprehensible clicks to even attempt to get a chat.

So... I have to call now. Every time. And now they have the same wall of "noise" on the phone, so it's harder to get through there. In the past, I've done chargebacks when I can never reach a company, and that will be the inevitable conclusion here too.

Which shows how incredibly stupid Amazon is, when this household buys $4k of stuff a month from them, and just has edge-case returns sometimes. I'm sure they'll cancel my account first time, and, well, who cares.

When companies get to this level of "screw the consumer", they're at the edge of all ability to improve profits. There's no where left to go. I expect Amazon to have issues due to things like this, and the squeeze on foreign imports, and crash and burn on its side.

But back to your point? Yes, we should. Or, we should just pass laws which make centralized advertising, that is, the collection of Pii impossible.

Ban all Pii? Ban all transactions of Pii? And you end advertising as it is.

News only made money when the newspapers could leverage their circulation numbers to run their own ads network. The classifieds section was a money machine. I remember full-page ads in the Washington Post from local car dealerships showing every model they were selling. They likely ran different ads for distribution in other regions, probably 10Xing their money. Google and Facebook killed that.

What Bezos bought was a corpse of a business, but one with strong journalistic credibility known for historic investigative analyses such as the Watergate cover-up that earned public goodwill. He was buying that goodwill and slowly asphyxiating it to align with his own interests.

If websites could charge 5.99/month, they would.

If a website was charging 5.99/month, they would not stop spying on you.

Ads are a weird game. People say you're ripping off the website if you adblock, but aren't you ripping off the advertiser if you don't buy the product? If I leave YouTube music playing on a muted PC, someone is losing.

Ads won't go away. They'll just move from infesting websites to infesting AI chatbots.

Ads are a symptom of the problem that people want human generated content for free; they either do not value the content enough to pay for it, or cannot afford it. Ads do not solve for those problems.

No disagreement there, except the early web was not about scale. The sites you visited may have been created by someone as a hobby, a university professor outlining their courses or research, a government funded organization opening up their resources to the public, a non-profit organization providing information to the public or other professionals, or companies providing information and support for their products (in the way they rarely do today).

> people need to eat, pay for rent

Those people were either creating small sites in their spare time, or were paid to work on larger sites by their employer.

There were undoubtedly gaps in the non-commercial web. On the other hand, I'm not sure that commercializing the web filled those gaps. If anything, it is so "loud" that the web of today feels smaller and less diverse than the web of the 1990's.

How does HN exist? Wealthy benefactors. Do I appreciate it any less? I do not, I am very grateful. But solutions are needed where a wealthy benefactor has not stepped in or does not exist, a commercial business model is untenable, the government does not or will not fund it, and the scale is beyond a single person spending a few hours a week on it for free.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

I'm not signing up for a subscription for that journal, but paying a small amount for access to that one article is a no brainer. I don't subscribe to a newspaper either, but I'll happily buy one.

The New European did this a decade ago using "agate" (named after the smallest font you'd get in a newspaper), top up with a few quid, then pay for each article.

Sadly didn't catch on. TNE dropped it in 2019[0]. Agate still exists, having been renamed to "axate", but consumers aren't willing to pay with anything other than their time.

[0] https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/new-european-drops-micro-pay...

In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons found that, as coal became more readily and easily available, demand for it went up. This was counter to the theories of others, and the principle became known as Jevons Paradox.

Jevons Paradox (a concept that is widely misunderstood, especially when it comes to tech and finance bros talking about AI) demonstrates that, a resource becomes more abundant and easily accessible, demand for that resource rises. As the web took off, people hungered more and more for digital content -- especially as internet accessibility became faster and cheaper.

To keep up -- and to pay for being able to keep up -- increasingly sophisticated monetization models were introduced.

In any case, ad models are one thing. But it's the data brokering that's even more insidious.

The irony is that if internet content were harder to access, the population on the whole wouldn't want it as much.

Now, the culmination of Jevons Paradox has spun itself around a bit in this case. We now live in a world where those profiting off of ad models and data brokering actively try to get people to demand internet content more. (Look no further than the recent social-media-addiction lawsuits.)

> Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders

Citation needed.

> who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay

Why is this relevant? People try to get free stuff all over the place and I don't find it makes my life difficult.

> Citation needed.

I think we need to agree upon a definition of freeloader before citing sources to support the claim. I've found that many people who use the word have a much more transactional view of the world than I do.

I do not think that this is a workable model. Firstly, because it leads inevitably to monopolization, because you don't want to pay 50,000 people for content, you want to pay 10 people for content. Secondly, because most content is bad and a waste of time and you don't find out until after you've bought it. Thirdly, and most importantly, is that there's no actual, clear separation between "news" and "advertising."

Content is generated because people who want that content generated sponsor it beforehand, and dictate the conditions under which the delivery of that content will be accepted as a fulfillment of that sponsorship. The people sponsoring that content can have any number of reasons for doing it; it can make them money directly (i.e. I have articles about cats, people who like cats subscribe to my cat website), which if you're a linear thinker you think is the only way, or it can make them money indirectly, maybe by leading consumers to particular products or political stances that they have a stake in.

This is simply the truth. Your preferences don't matter, and it's not a moral question. If you pay for content, you're more valuable to advertise to, not less. A lot of work is put into producing trash that you regret having read or watched, and was really intended to make you support Uganda's intervention in a Zambian election (or whatever.) If you "value" reading it, you've failed an intelligence test. Its value is elsewhere for the people to paid for it to be written.

What's recently shown itself to scale is small groups of people sponsoring journalists and outlets who put out tons of content for free. The motivation of those sponsors is usually to spread the points of view of the journalists they sponsor widely, because they believe them to be good.

There was never a pay model that supported things that people didn't feel passionate about or entertained by. Newspapers cost less than the paper they were written on. Television news was always a huge money loser that was invested in to raise the social status and respectability of the network. If you feel passionately about anything, you're far better off paying people to listen, to give you a chance, than to lock away content. Journalism as a luxury good can work, but only for Bloomberg terminals and Stratfor, when it is used to make other lucrative decisions by its buyers.

> orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them

This is simply sponsorships by governments and billionaires. Never ever been any significant shortage of that (the patron saint of this is King Alfonso X.*) All of those people have wide interests that can often be served by paying for media to be produced or distributed. It's where we got our first public libraries from.

For me, the fact that Substack and Patreon almost work is more important, and is something that wouldn't have been as easy without the benefits that the internet brings for the collaboration of distant strangers.

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[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile#Court_cul...

Something Awful is a one time fee of ten bucks (a few bucks more to get rid of ads).

I wouldn’t really mind a one-time fee for a lot of sites if it meant that they didn’t have to do a bunch of advertising bullshit,

Still, I would be willing to pay a bit more for a website that I actually like if it's a one-time fee; I actually paid for the "Platinum" membership for Something Awful so that I would have access to search, and a custom icon, so I think the total damage was around $30.

Dunno, I guess I just feel like people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think the fact that the only way that companies can really compete for people's time is giving it away for free [1] is a testament that most stuff on the internet is actually kind of shit.

[1] yeah I know something something you are the product something something.

ETA: I hate self-promotion but a friend of mine told me I should mention that I did write a blog post talking about this very specific example: https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...

Please explain this term. Google was not useful.

But the gist of it is, companies do free to play systems that support themselves by a very small portion of their user base spending a very large amount of money. The free/low paying users find themselves with poor/no service as the companies do anything to attract more whales.

K based economies are somewhat related as you see a very small portion of the participants in an economy make a huge amount of money while everyone else gets poor.

This is highly debateable. I wouldn't mind paying a bit for the websites I am using as there are just a few platforms and some blogs that I would be happy to pay a small amount for.

No, I won't. I'll just stop using them. So will almost everyone. I don't think there's a single ad-supported product that would survive by converting to a paid subscription, because they're all so profoundly unnecessary.

There is a story of this PlentyOfFish founder (who exited to Match.com for 500m cash) that in the beginning he got 3-4 USD per click

This isn’t Nielsen ratings informing cable networks where to throw up which commercials in certain regions. This is far more dangerous and intense. So the conversation needs to be framed differently than the implied bar of “intrusive/annoying/incessant ads.”

We used to have "static" banners on sites, that would just loop through a predefined list on every refresh, same for every user, and it worked. Not for millions of revenue, but enough to pay for that phpbb hosting.

The advertisers started with intrusive tracking, and the sites started with putting 50 ads around a maybe paragraph of usable text. They started with the enshittification, and now they have to deal with the consequences.

There was a time when Boing Boing was a decent little print magazine. And the web site went a decade before turning into... whatever the heck it is now.

And Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000 were "guaranteed unreadable," but they were on the bleeding edge of desktop publishing style and technology.

I'm old enough to remember typing BASIC games from COMPUTE! into my C64 and reading about the latest Star Trek film in Starlog.

I sing the praises of Omni, even though it was clear they were probably snorting a lot of cocaine in their offices.

I can't be the only one who remembers Computer Shopper, but I have to admit it was years before I realized they had a bit of content and were more than just an ad sheet for Micro Center.

PC World wasn't my jam, but I respected the role it played. UnixWorld and Info World were more my thing.

And I even read the stories and articles in Playboy in the 70s. Believe it or not, they had some amazing authors publish stories there.

Hands-up... it was still pretty sexy.

Sure we had that in the print times, but we had a lot more "slow" content that you could sit with and contemplate over a day, week or month.

One of my favorite uses of AI is to ask it, "what are today's headlines?" You completely bypass all of the sensational nonsense.

PayPal, Spotify, Stripe, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Facebook, ResearchGate, Flexport, Nubank, Rippling, Asana, Luft, Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX

You can’t trust anything these days!

Being the VC to a company’s round B, C, and D (adding up to maybe 40% ownership/control) is VERY different from simply throwing some money at a trillion dollar company to see some returns.

If all Android users did this, something would change.

Firefox runs great 99.99% of the time. It’s easy to add extensions. So we should be pushing people to adopt it.

If you're on Android, Firefox supports many full desktop extensions, including uBlock Origin.

There's also been other adblock apps for a long while, though (adguard comes to mind).

Last time I tried firefox on the iphone it was rubbish compared with safari. Same with some ad blocking app I had back in the day

I get why Chrome doesn't, and that's why you should not use it. But Netscape? Edge? What is stopping them?

Browsing the web without an ad blocker is a miserable experience. Users who have never tried or don't know how to set one up would be delighted.

That is your experience. Mine is the opposite.

>Users who have never tried or don't know how to set one up would be delighted.

Perhaps.

"I would prefer not to." — Bartleby, The Scrivener

https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/bartleby.pdf

And I don't think Google would lightly give up being the default search engine on the dominant mobile platform in the USA, and significantly more dominant among upper-income users.