Douglas_Knight comments on Positive Bias Test (C++ program) - Less Wrong

26 Post author: MBlume 19 May 2009 09:32PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 20 May 2009 05:45:43PM 0 points [-]

It's NoScript+interested+StumbleUpon. Is StumbleUpon a good way of promoting things? I bet that there is negative correlation between NoScript & StumbleUpon.

Anyhow, JGW's first claim, that it is a terrible failure mode to produce a blank screen in the absence of js, is true and very cheap to fix.

Comment author: pjeby 20 May 2009 08:00:39PM 4 points [-]

I bet that there is negative correlation between NoScript & StumbleUpon.

From StumbleUpon's advertiser FAQ:

A large portion of our Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls that the user doesn't approve of. Blocking javascript causes Urchin, Google Analytics, Webtrends, etc to not work. These tracking services never see the traffic because NoScipt blocks it.

You may see a larger difference in reported traffic than with other advertising services because StumbleUpon has a much higher proportion of Firefox users -- and in particular, a much larger proportion of people who use browser extensions -- than a typical audience. In essence, StumbleUpon's early-adopter user-base is much more privacy and security conscious than the typical internet user, and they block tracking services as a result.

Comment author: Alicorn 20 May 2009 06:05:03PM 0 points [-]

Nitpick: Such a negative correlation between two Firefox extensions probably only persists in the set of Firefox users, not over Internet users at large, since (inexplicably) Firefox is not overwhelmingly popular among Internet users in general. (It's possible that it is overwhelmingly popular in the set of people interested in this program, though.)

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