The Internet is becoming genuinely unusable without an ad blocker
I don't know if it's just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It's getting to the point where adblocking isn't an optional luxury - it's a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.
Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.
Discounting temporary tech issues, I haven't browsed internet without an adblocker for a single day in my entire life. Nobody is entitled to abuse my attention; no guilt, no exceptions.
I have but only because in the late 90s and 2000s they didn’t really exist, partially because the problem wasn’t present that they were designed for. Been using once consistently since probably around ‘08 tho
Did you not use popup and redirect blockers and AV/AM programs, though? Sort of the same problem, just evolved to be embedded.
All those toolbars and “helpers”, man.
They don't, though! Pages of static HTML are tiny and cost almost nothing to serve; they bring the cost upon themselves by ballooning the page with multiple megabytes of ad-injection and tracking scripts. That claim is like 99% self-serving lie.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
I like how angry they is about this, because I relate to this.
I think I am in love with whoever wrote this site.
@thebarrytone. Don't tell his mom
Lmao
There's javascript and then there's Javascript. A page with a few dozen lines of inline script to do form validation is one thing; a page that wants to load the entirety of React because it has delusions of grandeur about being an "app" is entirely another!
Everything you described is static content which can be expensive with big videos.
The cost is way higher when you have accounts for your users and they can search/query for data.
Please don't. The advertisers "defected" decades ago with popup windows (and probably before that, but popups in the late 90s/early 2000s stand out in my mind). It's only gotten worse since then.
Fuck Fandom, find alternative wikis whenever possible.
Me and my homies HATE fandom
It's kind of a selfish feeling but I'm always so bummed to find the only wiki for an indie game on fandom. Yeah, I could put the work in to make a different one elsewhere....but I'll probably beat the game before I'm done copying the info over.
On the upside the forking process will likely continue to get streamlined.
Pretty sure they C&D or whatever, so you have to modify the content before using it on another website.
I'm not sure if they do, but that's some hypocritical shit since they blatantly rip off content from independent wiki's (you can see this whenever the Terraria wiki is updated).
They'll claim "we didn't do it, one of our users did it, and we aren't responsible for them".
Fuck Fandom
My bad if they don't, I'm regurgitating half remembered facts from a video I watched about it.
Fuck fandom.
I've recently witnessed people creating a new fandom wiki twice. Both times I warned them, sent them stuff explaining why Fandom is shit, they shrugged their arms and created it. People are dumb.
This a million times over.
Oh fuck yes. I've been looking for an extension exactly this a couple of times in the past. Never found anything. Probably because google is shit nowadays.
"Our studies have shown we can fill up to 80% of a user's visual field with ads before it induces seizures."
What a movie!
What movie?
Isn't that from Ready Player One?
Yep
It's been shitty for a long time now. I've been using adblockers since they exist. And I can not fathom how people don't realise how pathologically sick its become. The internet used to be a great place, everyone forgot.
You could write "click here" and people would just do it because that link would reliably go to something cool.
The ads were text on the top of the page, and ironically unblockable. But you could block the autoplay MIDIs.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
"Web search found no results" instead of just showing you a bunch of wrong results.
Becoming?
I've been using ad blockers since the early 2000's. Ads with noise is what did it for me. Pop-ups too were super annoying. There was also malware in some ads back in the day. So yes, ads poisoned the internet a long time ago and I absolutely refuse to browse the internet without one. Or two.
yeah that part confused me at well... never used the internet without ad blockers since popup ads were a thing.
Lol I was thinking the same thing.
Ive used ad blockers since 2011. And when mobile browsing got to shit, I got a pi-hole because fuck that noise.
The internet has always been unusable without an ad blocker. The difference now is that it's not really usable at all. Somehow major multi billion dollar companies have decided it's completely okay to have broken-ass websites that don't work. This is especially true if they're trying to push an app. The major websites like Facebook, Reddit, and TikTok actually go out of their way to break the fuck out of their mobile site to try to push people onto their app. The biggest fucking problem is that the strategy works. People are desperate, stupid, little animals, and they'll do whatever they're told to do to get their little hit of entertainment and dopamine. The internet is dead. Long live the internet!
I'm old enough (as are, I imagine, a good percentage of lemmings) to remember when you actually could use the web without an ad blocker. It didn't last long, but it was glorious. Those must be the halcyon days that everyone sits around the old folks' home reminiscing about.
What’s ironic is that the big players only got the mainstream attention by providing an ad free experience at first.
Back when Internet was just hitting critical mass, there were paid sites, free sites with ads, and big players. The big players didn’t rely on ads or pay to use their web services. They took money to provide their core service and the website was a “free management tool”.
Now that they have killed the ad only business model (can’t pay for a website with simple and ignorable ads), and convinced a lot of people you should pay for just digital services, they are finally free to enshitify everything, make people pay for digital only services now that it’s normal, and try to maximize ad revenue. Truly the enshitification model!
It would still be kinda tolerable if they stopped there, but they don't. They're tracking literally every single tiny detail that they're capable of, and then they're selling our information to companies that we never agreed to do business with. It should be extremely illegal, but our legislators don't even understand it, and the ones that do are getting kickbacks from it.
Oh I fully agree. The issue with capitalism is the never ending desire for more, I could easily handle static greed.
It wasn't always like this during my lifetime. It has become increasingly worse over the last couple of decades.
This.
And to all the germans, fuck Kleinanzeigen
And now the gas pumps blather at you while filling your car. Marketing ruins everything.
They fucking blather at my when I walk past on the footpath.
Second or third button down on the right side will sometimes mute it. (I always mute it before I start filling because FU advertisers!)
Of course now there are new pumps with full screen video that may or may not have a mute button. It would almost be too much to bear if not for the refreshing taste of an ice cold Coca-Cola.
Let me just step back here, away from the fact that they’re obtrusive, annoying, and waste your time you didn’t sign away.
Malvertising is a serious risk these days. Every week we see new malware kits, phishing and increasing complexity. Now, Google’s search algo source code has been leaked. You can bet your shiny ass that the attacks will get more dangerous and even harder to discern.
Block the fuck out of ads, JavaScript, frames, xhr. Use a secure browser that doesn’t have ad revenue at their forefront and use hardened configs where possible.
This isn’t tin foil hat, and it’s not hard. Plenty of people out here want you safe and for corpos to eat shit.
I can attest to this. I'm a security analyst / incident responder for a large organization. 9 out of 10 times we get a "malware domain" hit on our network sensors, it's due to malware being pushed in ads. It's real and it's dangerous. Our entire organization runs adblockers.
It’s gotten worse I feel like, I had a post in infosec somewhere talking about how hovering over google sponsored results don’t even show the first level url - they resolve them
Using a DNS for blocking some ads I've noticed often the first couple links on Google are unusable, literally won't pass me through lol
Yeeeeah, I find dns is hit or miss - so easy to stand up a new one or use an open resolver to skip around
Ultimately it’s up to preference but I find blocking at the browser level to be most effective
Yo hire me. I can't get a job because I don't have experience.. I can't get experience because I can't get a job.
employers hate this one simple trick: lying
It's deeply frustrating to see how easily someone can land a very technical job via a very unsophisticated HR process.
Hack your way to the goal - start small at a place that’s expanding their tech team and buckle up for a bumpy ride. Get that foot in the door
But like.. Life balance holds me back. I make more than an entry level and support my family, thus cannot dedicate the time for a second full time job.
I am destined to remain in role and climb a corporate ladder that I do not enjoy because money
Where there is a will, there is a way.
You might not be able to use the same beaten paths as everyone else, but you can always hack a new path.
At the end of the day, I can’t speak for the entire industry, but when I look for new employees, I care less about resume experience and more about education, drive, and creativity. Once they’re in the role, I can show them the ropes. We also (hopefully many others, if not a majority) invest in serious training and learning platforms to keep people updated.
Infosec is about continuous learning and curiosity. You don’t have the luxury of learning the skill and being done. Security, arguably, changes the most out of all the tech spaces and you need drive and curiosity above all else.
If you’re serious about infosec, you sometimes have to hack it to make it. A -> ? -> B
If you don’t mind me asking, what field are you in rn?
Thank you dude! I appreciate you.
I work retail right now as a manager and although I have a skillset for it, have made great strides, and have changed the company in a few ways for the better, it's not my desire to stay in this path.
P.s. You say the things I say to others. It's good to have it thrown back at me lol
Of course man - the world is your oyster. Not everyone is as privileged as me though, so I try to help out where I can to give ‘em a boost. Not everybody knows what they wanna do on the first shot and that can be tough
It's an escalating game. 95% of the shit is dealt with by a native browser feature or extension. But that last 5% can get very ugly very quickly.
And the longer the escalation game goes on, the more likely you are to make a casual mistake - clicking on the wrong part of a screen or getting fooled by a deceptive link or being sucked by an ad or just feeling curious/horny enough to finally see whether there's really pussy in that bio.
For folks who pirate, it can be even more dangerous, depending on how malicious some counter-piracy agency wants to get.
Fuck fandom
https://getindie.wiki and the Indie Wiki Buddy browser extension
I tried that, and for some reason it redirects me to an outdated version of the wiki I'm trying to browse.
Logopedia especially is one of my favorites, I just wish it moves out of Fandom. Using Indie Wiki Buddy, it pretends the current date is a few months back, which is kinda odd.
That is odd. Something must be broken for the wiki you tried. It's most useful when there is a real alternative like for the various minecraft wikis. Here is a full list of alternatives: https://getindie.wiki/listings/
Sometimes you just have to check
wikiafandom because they are the only ones with an up to date page. But I'd rather avoid it.It really sucks that I have to continue relying on Fandom for one of my most visited wikis.
This is verifiably just false.
How much does food cost you a day? Maybe $25, depending on what you buy.
How much does operating a 1000-user lemmy-instance cost for a day? Around $0.0003 per person per day.
Trust me I did the math on this one. Internet services are not expensive. Internet corporations just try to extract a lot of money out of you.
$25 a day for food? USD???
Yeah, seems high tbh.
Depends on where you are and what you're eating, tbh.
If my wife and I eat out once that's 20something right there for just that one meal that one day, for example
And how much time?
How many hours does it take to fill admin roles? How many hours does it take to fill mod roles?
What if you had to pay them?
Lemmy is currently at a scale that it can be sustained by volunteers only. That will change as it grows.
I run my servers for free on the always free tier of oracle cloud. (It feels like hell froze over, but for over a year I am using a free service provided by tech satan and my soul is still intact, I think.)
I use an ad blocker on my notebook, always have. When I browse on my phone I am often shocked by the amount of ads on websites. I clicked on a link from Lemmy yesterday and the website was 95% ads. It was one sentence of the story followed by one or two large ads, then another sentence of the story and another one or two ads. The whole site was like that. I don't want to read your story that badly. Unfortunately, many of the ads had already impressed by the time I left so the shitty website got their $0.001 of ad revenue from my visit.
This is why iPhones are an immediate nonstarter for me. Can't run Firefox with ublock origin on iPhone while you can on Android.
AdGuard has a good Safari plugin. There’s also stuff like Consent-o-Matic for cookie popups and Amplosion to get rid of AMP pages (if they’re still a thing - completely forgot about them after installing Amplosion).
I run uBlock Origin on my desktop in Chrome. I use the Chrome browser on my Pixel.
You're on borrowed time until the end of the month:
RIP uBlock Origin? Google Proceeds With Plan to Shake Up Chrome Extensions
Yup. The enshitification for profit of their stuff is proceeding apace. I suspect that they're going to get some push back from the EU given how utterly fucking shitty their ad vetting is but we'll see.
Why do you not adblock on your phone?
AdAway is good and has both root and non-root modes
Firefox now supports uBlock Origin on mobile too
No solution for Apple I'm aware of though, since it's forced to be a shitty reskin of Safari
iPhones have had AdGuard for years and it works on apps outside the web browser as well.
Plus you can configure to default to reader mode. Generally no ads, no stupid formatting, just what you want to read!
Unfortunately that’s why so many sites have their “click to continue” button, so I don’t see the full article unless I click to hide reader mode
And has for a few years now.
Yea, but doing it at the system level is WAY better. I'm always rooted, so I can't speak for how well it works on non-root phones. But my phone is like 99% ad-free even across apps, the Google news feed and browsers incl Chrome
Between that on my phone, network level ad blocking, and ad blocker browsing extensions I can go days or even weeks without seeing an ad. And when I do, it's usually because it was on a TV at a store or something and rarely the odd ad that somehow leaked through
Thank you! Had no idea this existed. Just downloaded and donated so you just helped the dev!
The last time I looked there wasn't anything worth running on my Pixel. I haven't looked since.
Oh...I thought they got a fraction of a cent for impressions and more for clicks.
https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Fallout_Wiki
Don't use Fandom
There's ads on the internet?
It blows my mind that it took mainstream users this long to figure out "hey this sucks, what can I do".
I haven't seen an ad in my browser for like... well over a decade.
I mean... AFAIK somebody just reposted a comment from a 2006 forum. Was it from /.?
A 40kb HTML page packaged with 450MB of JavaScript, AJAX, and streaming video costs a shitton for some reason.
I have always used ad blockers and whatnot. I used a friends phone to show them something and was blown away by the web. Wtf happened? I knew it was bad but damn. It's like playing a fucking minigame to use the web.
At home I'm hardcore. I use noscript to essentially white-list the things I want to see.
"We hate ads, too!" — some window asking me to turn off my adblocker
No, you don't. Otherwise, you wouldn't be showing me this notice asking me to turn off my adblocker. Either that or I hate ads way more than you do.
That's only partially true. "Simple" pages like a wiki are stupidly cheap in comparison of operational costs. This is not some online image editor, some huge social media outlet or whatever. From a content perspective, the traffic to be served is an absolute joke.
What drives costs for operations up is stupid design decisions (e.g. Cora) and bloating your own page using several ad providers, trackers and a metric fuck ton of additional services like disqus and whatever all of this idiotic shit is called.
And what drives "cost of operations" up the most is pure greed, because for most parts there is no longer an internet community, where someone wants to contribute something cool. Maybe that's where they started, but seeing their page hits climb obviously makes them think about monetizing them. Just add some non intrusive ads, page views still climb, and you see the money coming in - in the case of Fandom with mostly zero effort, since the content is brought by the editors, who even also generate ad views, while generating content. Add one more ad, income doubled. Add a potentially more intrusive ad bringing more money per view - maybe your income triples. It's all just a pump and dump until it becomes the ad-riddled trash, but you don't really need to care, since it's still high ranking in Google results and still brings in visitors.
Obviously this does not apply to all, but to a fucking lot if not most pages, and it's getting even worse with gen-AI content and "features".
Becoming? I think we are past that stage. What grinds my gears is how hostile the net is to adblockers where users are either barred from the site entirely or guilted into turning it off.
Worse yet is if you try to take back your privacy thru a VPN you are instantly deemed a bad actor or a downright threat!
“Becoming”? How about “became”?
I also worry this is breeding generations of scam victims. We all know people who don’t realize there are ad-blockers or for some reason can’t manage one. Part of that is elderly who aren’t comfortable with technology, but it includes many people of all ages. This knowledge gap means huge portions of the population see an unusable internet that can’t be responsive no matter how fast the connection. It means their data will be tracked and sold in all directions. It means every click will have hundreds of trackers. It means exposure to every ad, every scam. How can they not be victims?
Meanwhile we know enough to complain but also to use the tools to find a useable internet. We’re much less tracked, see faster responsiveness, even our data is less exploited. Most importantly, we never even see most of the pop up scams
Young people are being scammed even more frequently than elderly now FYI.
I think this figure is beginning to turn on its head. I never would have thought that the generations growing up today totally immersed in digital technology would have been so profoundly technically illiterate.
In fact, I'm beginning to think that baby boomers where, in an odd way, in fact better with computers than gen z and gen a. Even if only marginally.
What really pisses me off is when sites tell me to disable it. It's my computer, I'll choose what extensions I run. Fuck you.
I experienced a shock watching my much younger cousin play mobile games on his phone. It's just constant unskippable ads next to all the banners. Back when I was young, mobile games were actually playable and ads were at most a voluntary option to get some in-game currency. In general, though, I have grown so accustomed to my Pi-hole (+ automatically connecting to a VPN when I leave my house so Pi-hole is always there) that I've either forgotten what life without it was like or completely missed the downfall of the modern internet.
It’s what you’re used to. One reason I never started using YouTube was just this hostile behavior from the beginning. It’s really taken until now that I’ve been able to get enough out of YouTube to see if it’s worth finding a reasonable way to watch
Fandom is as trash as sites come. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
Yeah, no, fandom is dirt and has been dirt for a while now.
Don't feel bad for blocking their ads. The internet was never meant to have that much advertising in the first place. If websites can't afford to keep their site up then they probably don't need to be running it in the first place.
If your site has to host spammy bloated malicious third party advertising then I think there's a bigger issue at stake. Users shouldn't have to sacrifice their privacy and security to view content. Also greed isn't the same as "we need ads to keep our site running" when clearly they are making enough but want more.
It's honestly insane how tech illiterate people can't grasp this privacy concept and just learn to use a damn ad blocker. I don't mind justification but at some point you have to be the bad guy and fight back against cooperate greed.
Stay strong. Firefox+uBlock origin is the goat!
Speaking of gaming websites being goddam awful, you ever accidentally clicked on an IGN link? Goddamn that site is cancer.
I feel this. Sometimes I'm looking up something on a fresh browser and I say to myself 'I'm just looking up one thing, I don't need all the extensions'
Then the google results get buried and the article is clogged with ads. It could also be I'm so used to an as free internet I can't tolerate even the most innocuous banner ad
Becoming?
On top of that, ads pay to load first; so even if you've got a poor connection, guess what the first thing you'll see is?
Not only does my browser have an ad blocker, all of my devices use my PiHole via Tailscale (Headscale) as their DNS server.
i am at the point where i'm just letting this encourage me to use the internet less. my house is quieter, my mind is quieter.
At this point, it will take hostile confrontation to turn the tide if advertisements and click-bait on the internet. We need to make it more expensive for advertisers, with less return.
But they ads to pay for seo engineers to get more traffic to show more ads.
This is the current metagame of the web, only people profiting are SEO engineers and ad services.
As someone who never used an ad blocker, its always been like this.
I'm sorry for your loss (of lifetime, internet experience and bandwidth)
"Using the Internet for the 1st time" (YouTube)
Wonder if article sites are thinking about turning the text into an image and injecting advertisements in between sections. 😀 👍
It is since years. I use adblockers since 6+ years and it is crazy how people can just live without them.
Youtube as a platform is useless, completely useless. Take the raw video, use a normal feed. I understand why people use TikTok (even though the content often sucks), as Youtube is just bloat
Ads are too much that they significantly reduce usable screen area. No thanks. Meanwhile, I noticed YT now has fewer ads than it had few months ago.
search is dead. web is dead. apps are about to die. this is progress. i am looking forward for a web-free and app-free world. i cant even guess what mainstream websites are...i doubt you mean socialmediaplattforms which ask you to use their app. and even that will die as the smartphone will be replaced by assistants. neither my mother nor chinese citizens ever use websites.