Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette
They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.
Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.
https://pressgazette.co.uk/marketing/adblockers-stop-publishers-serving-ads-to-or-even-seeing-1bn-web-users/Open linkView original on lemmy.today1201
Comments338
Lol. Fuck off.
Once the data enters my network it's my fucking data and I can do with it what I please.
Likewise, I can prevent anything from even entering my network that I don't want on it.
That's more to the point!
Unless it’s intellectual property that belongs to the movie industry. Then you better not touch it. Or that’s illegal.
But if it’s advertisements, then you have to watch it, or that’s illegal.
Mildly pedantic, but uBlock blocks the connection before it enters your network
Yeah. As if hacking into someone's mind is their right. Talk about entitlement...
What should be considered illegal circumvention is allowing articles behind a paywall to be included in search results.
And this is exactly why Google did away with Manifest v2 (what uBlock runs on) and why they wanted to introduce their “web integrity” standard. At that point the pages would be signed with ads and in the signature didn’t match the page wouldn’t even be shown.
They tried to play it off as “ensuring that you truly get the correct copy of the page and no bad hackers have intercepted it” but really it would have 100% forced ads.
Then I guess I'm not looking at those pages. No skin off my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of other ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.
That works until every website starts doing it.
:shrug: So be it.
Exactly. I'll go back to browsing the web with Lynx before I accept ads. If it breaks, it breaks...
Gladly go back to every site having an animated 'under construction' gif.
I use Mullvad's VPN and DNS on a router level. Every device on my network is blanketed by it. Some services don't work, but I am willing to sacrifice their profits for my integrity. Thus, to them I say 然らば fuckmothers.
To think that Google once had ads that I considered OK, just a bunch of text and links. How times have changed...
Advertisers will always keep pushing things trying to find the limit where people will just barely tolerate it. Then when they push it too far they cry "no fair!" When people stop putting up with it.
The O.G. add blocker.
The concept is close to the same, how could something like this be seen as “illegal circumvention technology”?
It just shows us how disconnected the people in these positions can be that are regulating these things.
Fuckers want to colonize my property (my computer). that's what's illegal!
They wont be happy until eye tracking technology makes sure we sit and watch their fucking ads before the actual content appears.
I mean, none of this is getting better. Its only going to become worse. I have ads in the fucking pause screen on my streaming tv app. So if I want to take a toilet break, I get an ad in my face. Its just so ridiculous.
What most of these people don't get is if they didn't get so invasive with those ads, people would not have to resort to ad blockers. Be it tho shut up the ads every few seconds on YouTube or having to play whack-a-mole every time I read an article, eventually you run out of patience and say "enough!"
Lol they will even say blocking phishing links are unethical
Say here’s a thought: can we sue ad companies for theft of electricity? They’re using my electricity to display their ads, without my consent.
Not to mention my internet fees.
I actually agree with that but the only other solution is subject yourself to deeply concerning levels of surveillance, not to mention surveillance pricing.
I use AdNauseum and they have a toggle for privacy-conscious ads and I leave that on. That's my best compromise.
Toggles like that are available in other adblockers too and they pose a problem. They ad a ransom to showing you ads. You don’t want the ads but if the advertisers pay the adblocker company they get whitelisted and you see the ads anyway.
Never use those toggles.
hhwat
sorry, fixed.
Do you have some evidence of this?
Okay, I'm assuming that you are asking for evidence of the paying of adblockers to allow some ads through, and not for evidence that he fixed the typo he thought you were actually posting about?
Do a quick search for why we all now use ublock origin rather than ublock plus, and then for why we were using ublock plus rather than ublock, and then for why we were using ublock instead of adblock. There might be some adblock plus in the middle of that somewhere as well.
All ad networks, even the less intrusive ones, can be abused to distribute malware. In this day and age not having an ad blocker is like rawdogging internet strangers.
You could say the same thing about the webpage itself.
That was for 12ft.io Bypassing a pay wall. Not blocking ads.
They can still fuck off.
I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.
Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.
Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.
Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.
the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads
Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit
But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post
Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).
The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened
The turning point for me is when banner ads added sounds. I would tolerate and ignore the flashing lights and the fake "games", but then I encountered one that any time my mouse went over top of it an emoji screamed "HELOOOOOOOOO!!!" at me and I couldn't download an ad blocker fast enough.
It's never enough for these assholes unless they have all of your attention all of the time.
The main clencher that got me running a blocker were the few sites whose payload was 90% ad related and as long as the page was open it kept feeding me more ads until a gigabyte of RAM and 5% of my CPU were dedicated to something I wasn't even looking at.
Ex was mad that my PiHole was blocking some FB stuff so I turned it off.
"The internet's slow."
Looked over her shoulder and pointed to her (still loading) screen:
"Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad..."
"FINE! Turn it back on!"
Don’t date stupid people. Incentivize intelligence.
I know surgeons who can’t start a zoom call. Being uneducated in a particular area is not stupidity. If you avoid dating someone over their lack of adtech knowledge, I would assume they are the one that dodged a bullet.
adtech is nothing new or exotic. We have been dealing with this shit for years. if they still do not have a very basic knowledge of it by now, that's not a great sign.
Unix and lawnmowers are nothing new or exotic either. I’m not stupid for not knowing how to repair a lawnmower, and I wouldn’t presume you’re stupid just because I can run circles around you at the command line.
I would, however, question your intelligence if you lack the ability to perceive the reasons behind different people knowing different things. It’s not that complicated.
Oh I’m fully aware people can specialize their intelligence, focusing so much on some areas they neglect others and fall behind. However, that’s also a choice they made. That unbalanced tech tree was their own doing.
Ads used to be static text in the sidebar that the site owner manually put there. They didn't have any tracking and didn't slow down the loading time. Once they started adding images, I started using an ad blocker. I was stuck on dial-up until 2008 and a single, small image could add 10 or more seconds to the page loading time.
2008! Bro I feel for you, retrospectively.
I was even okay with images. It’s when the images started moving, making it difficult and distracting to read text that I realized if they are willing to sacrifice the core purpose of the page for ads, it’s only going to get worse.
Remember the target that would move back and forth really quickly to try to get you to click it?
Preach!!!
Dont forget the ads that are straight scams or malware
The use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Cool quote, where did you get it from?
From Banksy's 2004 book Cut It Out. Banksy, in turn, 'got' it (in its original form) from Sean Tejaratchi's 1999 essay in his Crap Hound zine. 😅
From banksy's limited run "Cut it out" book apparently. Yours for only £310
Obligatory xkcd 624:
GitHer
I can clone her...
Step 4 - success - Attention aquired. 😅
Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.
A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company's fault.
The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it's the same thing.
Advertisers and websites have created the "dark traffic" mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.
Name and shame. Who's the link aggregator?
but it's icky to say its name 🥺🥺🥺
joking aside, I'd wager it's reddit
It’s happened directly on Google before. Advertisers aren’t vetted except in specific industries. It could happen on any site, trusted or not.
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.
Agreed left unchecked it is horrible, one of the darkest pervasive elements of capitalism, used in a manipulative manner. We've reached astounding understanding of human psyche and are using that knowledge with advertising to control people's subconscious. It's disgusting.
Reminds me of the bill hicks quote on advertising.
The sentiment is influenced by many.
While I definitely agree that most advertising these days is terrible, I do wonder how it should be done. How would you market a product you made? I genuinely want to know what you find acceptable.
Say that you invent a new type of ladder that is much more stable than normal ones, or maybe you start 3D printing a very cool figurine that you've designed. In either case, you realize you have a product that some people will probably want to buy, if only they knew about it.
You probably won't go to an ad network, I wouldn't. But do you make a post about it on Lemmy? That's advertising. Do you tell your friends about it? Most of them probably don't need a ladder, but maybe a couple would buy your figurine, though that is unlikely to be enough to kickstart your 3D design company.
I'm sorry to tell you but smoking is completely socially accepted.
Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception
For a few years, even the FBI officially recommended that everyone should use an adblocker. They recently removed that PSA from their website, I believe with the new administration:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-blocker-to-dodge-scammers
No
gloveblock, nolovebrowseAnd just like STDs, those malware-laden ads can infect your whole system before you even relaise what happened.
Perfection!
I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.
We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.
He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).
Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.
What we have now isn't that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don't let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
100% this and also, consider allow-listing specific sites which deserve your support, or better yet, contribute directly if you can – e.g. your local bike club forum, your local newspaper, a blogger whose work you enjoy, etc., assuming of course, the ads are reasonable.
Guilty? Hahahahahaha
They will never make me feel guilty because they are the guilty ones. Guilty of greed and of destroying our society. Fuck big advetisers. They would put billboards in outre space if they thought it would make them a tenth of a penny more in profit.
I dont even consider them human to be honest.
Website: "You appear to be using an ad blocker." Me: "You appear to be correct."
They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not "dark traffic", the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren't "brutal", the people without blockers are being brutalized.
"dark" as in "not visible". Adblock users can't be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. "Dark", in this instance, is not a derogatory term.
"Brutal" is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.
The way you word things matters. How many polls have shown the difference in opinion on 'obamacare' compared to 'affordable care act?'
That is not wrong. But interpreting "dark" as "evil" is just wrong in this context.
You may be right, technically, but based on the context, I'm quite sure the use of the word "dark" here is intended to frame the behavior as negative. It's just like when various media authors refer to TOR as the "dark web" even though it has countless valid uses that are not enabling illegal/immoral behaviors.
Yeah it makes sense from their point of view. I turned it around on them for the hell of it.
Almost 70. Spent way too many years watching cable shit tv. I hate ads. I fucking hate ads with a nuclear passion. I have ad blockers, pirated shit and some services that do not show ads so far. If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.
a nuclear passion. I like that. surprised I never came across this phrase before lol
"Son, are those ads in my house!?"
dad, please, it's only a little marketing!
"NO SON OF MINE! GET MY BELT!"
dad, no!
"What's our DNS address!?"
dad, I don't kno-
"Count the licks, boy! I'll teach you the hard way!"
Wow. That is pretty violent. I do not envy your son.
Alternate reality foss religions were not on my imagination list this morning but there ya go
Ah somehow I knew religion must be involved to be so violent. Luckily I am not religious and my son could not be happier.
I am overwhelmingly happy for both of you.
I was raised Baptist. Don't recommend it.
Jesus. How are you going to get to 8.8.8.8 belt licks?
(and please, for the love of god, don't use 8.8.8.8!)
Joke's on him, it's 100.99.99.99
Oh dear, don't ever forget your netmask.
Meow?
Nope, I did. Hmm, suffering from some stress? Confused a tad?
Your batting a thousand.
Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That's like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.
Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
It would have to be millenials since Gen z exist almost entirely in the walled garden of a phone app.
Most people now a days don't even use a desktop with a browser. I honestly expect that most of what they are "seeing" is just web scrapers for the LLM. Those are likely to "block" ads simply based on efficiency, since it shows down crawling.
Why would anyone use a desktop? That’s like a baby’s toy!
It honestly creeps me out that so many people don't curate what they watch and just consume whatever 'their feed' puts in front of them.
Ad BwOcKeRs ArE StEaLiNg FwOm Us!!!!
Meanwhile Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a billion AI web crawlers can hammer the fuck out of of your site and nobody cares.
The larger problem that is not discussed so much is the amount of Ai generated garbage that is put on the web now.
When these Ai web crawlers start to read that Ai garbage as source data, the models will start to become worse and worse, and as a result, our Ai clients will start to get worse and worse.
I dont think there is a way for the crawlers to understand what is Ai generated fluff and crap. The reasons the Ai responses are so good now is because people actually posted these solutions on the web. What happens when Ai crap overflows the web so much that good answers are drowned out?
Also, no ads in chat gpt yet. Thats going to change and it will become impossible to block those.
the web will die.
Maybe, but then who will supply the answers that Ai needs?
the AIs will just start their own circle jerks
While we talk about the Old Net beyond the Blackwall with our chooms.
Zombie internet!
If ad networks weren't the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn't slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn't be such an issue.
If your site can't exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.
Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.
Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone's time.
It's an interesting stance, but ask yourself, where is the line between advertising and promotion or sponsorship.
I think that requiring that advertising is factual might be a better way to address the issue.
Ultimately as a society we haven't come up with a better way to communicate the existence of products and services to each other, and we've been using advertising for 5,000 years or so.
https://tripandtravelblog.com/the-oldest-advertisement-in-the-world-found-in-thebes-egypt-did-you-know-that/
Here's how you make people aware of your products.
You sell a quality product for a reasonable price.
That's it.
Instead, capitolism has become this game of cat and mouse where the consumers ALWAYS lose. Just a game of shrinking product sizes, reducing quality, and raising prices. Little by little.
It's most obvious when you haven't had a product in a while, maybe years, and you grab it again. Only to realize they've gone through several iterations of enshitification.
When I was a kid, Andy Capps Cheese Fries used to be about as long as my pinky, and they were thick. Now it's like the length of my pinky until my second knockle, and it's like the same thickness as a pretzle stick. Sure, it's technically the same product, but everytime I buy them I realize why I was disappointed the last time I bought them. And I won't buy them for another 5 years. Maybe by then they'll be the length of my pinky nail and as thick as a sewing pin, but cost 8 dollars instead of the 25 cents it was when I was a kid.
They did a durability test on hammers. In one side was an old rusty hammer. It had a date of 1931 on it. In the other was a brand new hammer bought that same day from Home Depot.
The new hammer crumbled long before the 1931 hammer did. This test was done in 2017.
But I never buy products because they advertise. I buy them because I remember how good it was the last time.
Except now, you're advertising BAD memories. Because when I go in expecting this much, with this quality, and instead I get a fraction of it, with only a fraction of the quality.....congradulations. You saved money on production costs. You also pushed your customer away from being a repeat customer.
All this business schools, and all the data they have I'm sure shows that their way is better. So explain to me why it seems businesses these days struggle to make the line go up, but when I was a kid business was booming?
The thing is business is more booming than it's ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool's errand, at some point you'll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.
If you make a hammer that'll last 100 years, you'll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you'll be punished when sales fall because you've solved a problem for most people.
Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that's actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it's great, and you've spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it's good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it's profitable. And that's all they care about. It's basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they're told they're allowed to care about.
A lot of this comes from pressures exerted by shareholders. Get rid of the shareholders and you get rid of the pressures. Then you have people who chose to do the opposite noxious thing and people who chose not to. The market would then reward the less obnoxious people and the negative aspects would die out.
But we have shareholders so capitalism cannot possibly work the way we are promised it will.
Marketing is society's cancer.
When a company has a good product/idea, they grow organically. If I'm looking for something, it should be enough to have information available through manufacturers websites and customer opinions, there is ZERO need to shove ads down people's throats, which usually translates onto overconsumption and buying the best marketed (not the optimal) product.
So yeah, fuck marketing in general, big corporations greed and their entitlement to control the web.
Like "back in the day" on TV: turning the volume of the ads up to be louder than the program you are watching; bells, horns, alarms; extremely misleading ads (people doing things absolutely stupidly, but suddenly better with product)... Loud and abusive scams is too much of it!
Unfortunately I don't think you can just make it illegal. People/companies would still do it, just covertly. Then you end up in a situation where adverts are not marked as such and that's probably even worse than the current situation, where ads at least identify themselves as ads.
Yeah no, I have seen multiple businesses closing down due to poor marketing promotion/budget.
And then we all complain that we didn't know about a certain product/service because they didn't market it good enough (we have seen it a lot of times with movies for example, then they turn into obscure classics with the pass of time, but not really profitable), also some games that didn't really made themselves known while in critical selling weeks?
Who is gonna be the brave soul to release a game when GTA VI appears? That would be marketing suicide, no matter how good your game is.
Only because they were competing against businesses with possibly shittier products but certainly better marketing. Remove all the marketing, good and bad, and suddenly it's a real merit-based competition.
It is very idealist, but IMO worth considering. There can (or at least should) be less intrusive means of letting people know of a product.
Proud to be part of a growing tradition.
I feel like one thing doesn't get talked about enough is that websites feel the need to implement ad services that want to track the user in order to serve ads. Which I just find weird, the expectation to give up ones privacy, just to get served an ad.
Instead, the ads should just be relevant to the content of the page where an ad is embedded, which would automatically make it relevant to the reader, without tracking them.
Ad companies are getting butt-hurt because the pages you are referencing are being seen even less, due to AI scraping by search engines. So now they are going after:
I'm sorry for being a broken record in this thread but holy crap yes! Right now you can embed a static ad in a web page relevant to the page's content and adblockers will not block it!
I have said it before and I'll say it again.
Adblockers are a critical part of any modern computer's security suit, and everyone should use them.
I won't even consider removing mine unless the owners of a site with ads take full responsibility for any dammage to my computer coming from visiting their site with out an adblocker.
This is due to the fact that ads can be hijacked and infect your computer with malware just by accessing the site.
I have also experienced my browser being hijacked by clicking a link that was compromized, it redirected my browser in a loop, then opened a javascript password popup box that took all focus from the browser window and refused to go away, while the page below displayed a message that I needed to call tech support.
It was very annoying to resolve, Firefox would by default restore any pages that was open in a tab if the browser crashed, and since the password prompt was stealing focus from the browser window, I had to kill it through the Task manager, which restored the page on start up....
I had to create a new profile, then it it solved it
I don’t know if anyone reading this will ever have this problem (if you got this far without installing an adblocker, this is your wake up call - go get one now), but ctrl+W is the shortcut to kill a tab and that should work regardless site focus or popups
Unless the lovely javascript detects that you're trying to close the tab and hijacks that to ask you if you are sure you want to
forcefully tell them to fuck off and dieleave the page. It's only one extra click, sure, but I remember some from the old days that wouldn't let you close shit. Ugh, thank god for better modern standards and adblockers.The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much
Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks
“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”
"It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent."
They act like we don't know what we are doing and want the ads. People who block ads in browsers like ddg and brave choose those browsers for that reason.
Yeah, but bad ad choices cause people who would otherwise be fine with ads that fund content to block. Some will never go away, in the same way some will always pirate, but the ad landscape has become like the streaming landscape and pushed people towards these choices
Absolutely. Too bad that even unobtrusive ads still can't be trusted not to have trackers.
Without user consent? That’s exactly the opposite
The ad industry is an abusive ex that complains when you defend yourself.
They're not ex. They're serial rapist.
gasp you mean to tell me you DON'T like 20 million videos playing over the top of the recipe that you're trying to read while trying not to burn dinner? unbelievable.
smh these motherfuckers are so brazen
Looks like it hasn't been updated in a few years, but its open source so you could just fork the repo and add more. There are also quite a few forks already.
Some require spoons too
oooh i love this! thank you! FOSS cooking is indeed based af
I have my entire network running with a DNS that blocks all advertising by default. And then, just to make absolutely certain, I run browsers with UBlock Origin on them.
Any good guides you know of to set that up?
https://pi-hole.net/
Pi-hole. You’ll want to run two, because machines will use both a primary and a secondary server for their DNS requests. If you don’t want to buy a pair of raspberry pi’s, you can run it in Docker, which basically keeps it isolated to its own tiny virtual machine. So you’d just need to spin up a pair of docker containers to run the pair of pi-holes. If you’re using Docker, they’ll need a pair of volumes too, or else they’ll lose all of their data every time they reboot.
You’ll want this to be on a machine that is running 24/7, because any time it shuts down, your internet will essentially stop working. That’s why lots of people end up just throwing a few raspberry pis in a closet and forgetting about them.
Once it’s installed, you’ll need to load it with block lists. The default ones are pretty basic. I’d just google something like “pihole blocklists” and figure it out from there. Each list will be a URL, which allows the pihole to pull updates, (which you can tell it to do via the built-in web UI).
Machines will be fine with just one primary DNS server. The main reason for running two is so that you still have one working DNS server if either machine goes down, for example during maintenance.
Its actually not easy to run two of them since they are not designed for using a shared disk (you can get corrupted data). Its also not necessary, you can just leave the secondary dns server blank.
But if you want two because you want high availability in case one of your piholes goes down, you can rsync the settings between the two machines every 5 minutes or so. Its important to keep them in sync that way.
The secondary DNS isn’t for redundancy; machines will split requests across the two for load balancing. If you only have one running, you’ll end up with ads slipping through as the device still uses the default secondary DNS.
No point if you have a network in the 10.0.0.0/8 IP range. There is a bug where they will randomly stop serving DNS to IPs outside of their subnet
Unless I’m misunderstanding, that doesn’t sound like a bug at all. Outside of a few specific circumstances, devices shouldn’t communicate with anything outside of the given subnet mask. Rejecting traffic outside of that subnet mask is exactly what it should do. And why wouldn’t your pihole be in the same subnet (or at least be included in the subnet mask) for the LAN? You can have the pihole’s IP address be whatever you want, so give it an IP in the same subnet.
I use VLANs and different subnets for security. Having PiHole break randomly every few weeks and seeing the config is different when I didn’t change it was beyond frustrating, so I just gave up
Then change it?
My DNS is from controld.com.
What you do is you log into your router and on the local area network page there's generally a section to change the DNS settings of your router and you just put in the IP addresses that control D gives you.
You can also set it up on iOS and Android so that you are also protected when you leave your home network and are on the go on your cellular network.
As I said, along with Control-D, I also use U-Block Origin to catch anything that it might miss.
The other thing to do is use as many open source applications as you can possibly get away with.
Fair warning, using third-party DNS is a massive security issue; It basically allows that DNS provider to see all of the sites you’re visiting. Whenever possible, you should use a self-hosted DNS server like pi-hole.
Depends. Using some no-name dns server in Uzbekistan is likely not going to be easily reachable for your queries by your local government, if at all.
Then again, most of you don't have queries over encrypted protocols anyway, so it's an open book regardless of who your third-party is.
Best case if you're a luddite, run a very highly recommended(by the fediverse) VPN, like windscribe or mullvad, and use their dns servers. Wireguard will encrypt the queries, and the vpn being supposedly trustworthy would put any cork in it otherwise.
Thats true, i just didnt want to setup the reverse proxying for that. Also, its DoH ao my isp doesnt get my dns.
Besides Pi-hole, there's Adguard. The "home" version works just like Pi-hole on a device on your network (but is a little slicker in my opinion), and a DNS service where you just set your router's or devices DNS to their service (less private, but no dedicated device required). That's an option that is not ideal, but far better than not blocking at the DNS level for anyone uncomfortable configuring a device on their network.
It's not about blocking ads for me, that's a happy side-effect, it's about owning your computing and taking the necessary protection against tracking. Before "ad blockers" existed I spent a lot of time manually configuring my browser to block websites from connecting me to unnecessary, potentially intrusive third party servers, after all it's my browser and my internet connection. Now uBlock Origin does that for me, it's not an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum content blocker and the user should have the final say on what they connect to. I think we should stop calling them ad blockers.
Call them what they are. Internet condoms.
People don’t mind ads for the most part it’s the fact that they take over 3/4 of the screen and generally try to be as obnoxious as possible.
If we stuck with banner ads no one would care, but they just had to make ads as shitty as possible.
I absolutely do mind.
And I'm one or them. Every time I turn it off things become legitimately unusable.
I don't mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don't track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it's absurd.
It's far far worse than American TV. TV commercials are a scattershot hope that you show the ad to 2 million people and 10,000 see it and buy your product.
With Google fingerprint tracking, advertisers are selling hyper-targeted ads so a company buys only ads to show to the right 10,000 people over and over. It's a literal dream for advertisers. But it's a fucking dystopian nightmare for us.
What's become really disturbing in the past ten or so years is how they've applied ML to the targeting. Used to be it was just basic keywords and demographic stuff. Now the big platforms put your entire last decades' worth of history (often both web browsing and social media) through a bunch of filters and spot that people who are like you are more likely to buy this product or join this website.
The reason why it's fucked up is that "people who are like you" could mean things like anorexia, or addiction problems, or the kind of relationship trouble that makes you a soft target for incel indoctrination, or a bunch of other protected vulnerabilities that would get a company sued through the floor if they actually did it up front. But because it's all just a bunch of untagged probability distributions in a black box, it's impossible to "prove" that you deliberately and knowingly targeted a gambling addict to push a high interest credit card, or a recovering alcoholic with booze, even though that's exactly what happened inside the bundle of weights.
The hilarious thing is if you turn off your adblocker (or use a service/device that doesn't support it) and pay attention to what is being advertised to you, a lot of it is wildly irrelevant. They'd probably have better targeting by following the old TV Ad model than whatever the heck is happening with targeted web ads nowadays. My wife watches a lot of livestreams on twitch and any ads that aren't for a game just consistently seem to be wildly irrelevant despite being "targeted" or it's even worse when she's listening to Spotify and the ads are so consistently for products or services we would never have a desire to use
There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.
And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you "don't even mind" it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people's brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.
There is nothing like a free lunch.
You either have to directly pay for something or indirectly pay for it by selling your time or data.
Companies need to get their name out there and in the past you did that with a banner on your building, a space in the phone book and maybe your name on the side of the vans. Now we live in the digital world and we use digital advertisement. Heck a lot of companies sponsor certain event including charity events.
If we would totally remove advertisement, your local mom-and-pop shops will get more traffic, but in a lot of countries they would have basically a monopoly unless another competitor exists in the same region.
I don't really mind watching a bit of advertisement on something like a YouTube video or a banner ad on a site. Heck, buildings or vans with logos etc are fine as well in my opinion. My issue is more with the tracking and some forced advertisement (putting your logo on my clothing, vehicle etc).
We had advertising supported media for 100-ish years before surveillance capitalism, obtrusive pop-ups/overs, and ad-network distributed malware were a thing. No one cared about blocking ads on the Internet until those 3 things started either. Even today, if you put your mattress ad as a static on some mattress review website, adblockers won't block it. It's just that no one does that.
Ok, it's obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.
But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don't get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn't serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.
And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can't have democracy without free press, and currently we don't have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.
Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.
Independent reviews are a good thing yes and they shouldn't be sponsored by a related company to keep their integrity, that doesn't mean they can't get paid from a different form of advertising. Heck you can even check on the integrity of professionals differently. In the accountancy, we are paid by the clients who we need to audit or need to advice etc. Using things like third party audits and a high accountability for professionals.
Ratings aren't that great especially on platforms like Amazon/AliExpress and other crap offering dropshipping platforms from corrupt countries.
Corporations generally don't do anything for free, but a lot of companies do, but that is generally to get their name out there or because the owner wants to decuct his private life from his company profit ... Even governments can't spend money or personal all they want, in the end it is money from the people. People here in NL are pissed that the government spend money on things like getting the NATO here for the last meeting or for the royal family. The public broadcasting is also something that is under heat and not just here.
In most countries you have some kind of government funded press heck I think most press aren't even corporations, but more companies except some of the larger once maybe.
Almost nobody is going to work for free for the majority of their life. It would be better if all of us did more work for society, but most people aren't in the position I am in that they just can take an extra week off to do that.
I agree consumerism is killing our planet, but there is a huge difference between the crap a companies like Google are doing and your local plummer who has advertisement on the local radio on their van and make a slightly SEO optimised website. Advertising is often the only way to get your company visable if you are competing with a well established company. Same reason as that there is nuance between companies and corporations.
Yes we need to promote repairing, reusing, recycling and the circular economy I agree, but somebody like iFixit wouldn't really thrive without their advertisement. We also need more financial transparency by the company we buy from and just skip on companies from China, the US and other obvious corrupt countries.
Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it's in their owner's interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.
Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become "min maxed" by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.
For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent "forth estate" or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public's interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.
If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.
TLDR: We don't *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.
Well I agree we need a better structure to keep people in check I agree with that. Things like social media and a companies like RTL having a massive stake in private television will help to destroy the planet and keep the difference between the lower class, the middle class and the rich.
But I disagree that we should just get rid of all advertisement completely. Again there is nothing wrong with banner ads, websites, vans with logo's and other low stakes form of advertisement.
If governments would start to pay YouTubers instead of YouTubers earning money from adverts and sponsors it would not only allow the government to control the narrative, but people will still abuse the system. Same way as that social security or subsidies are abused currently.
Consdering I work in an accounting firm I do see the amount of cost some companies have with advertisment, but most of them with a lot of costs do it to get more customers. Some of them need to do it to keep their profit rising or the same.
There is an issue with misleading adverts including misleading prices (excluding tax), there is an issue with hidden ads (like logo's). But personally I think social media (including Lemmy) is just the bane of our existence. Yes a lot of that is funded by adverts, but also by selling your data and the like. Personally I believe that they are brainwashing people more with that, than with a lot of the advertisement. Ow and the people who keep on defending companies like they are their family are also a big part, people saying they are going to get Domino's instead of pizza f.e.
Before I used Firefox on Android, any search about a game I'm playing would result in a half page video ad in the top half of the screen, accompanied by the bottom half being a request to share your data with 1496 trusted data partners.
Now I use Firefox with add ons, and I get the results I requested. The modern web is basically unusable in it's raw form.
I am used to rejecting the cookies if they are not automatically blocked by Vivaldi or Firefox, but on my phone I use Safari, which still has a decent add blocker by default so most of the time it is just a cookie banner where I have to reject them. Or put the site in reader mode
SmartTube is so much better. Even the UI is intuitive and makes sense. You can hide shorts, actually find content you want to watch.
Sadly I don't believe I can use SmartTube. I was really limited in options for my TV box due to regional reasons and Googling blocking way more surrounding casting than Apple with airplay
What device? FireTV/Firestick/etc all support it (surprisingly).
Amazon is crap, so my only two real options where an NVIDIA shield or an Apple TV and since we are an Apple household I went with the Apple TV, which doesn't support it.
Maybe the problem is the advertisers and not the consumers. Jeeeesus.
More, if anything.
Malvertising has become pervasive enough that adblocking is starting to become a necessity from an IT perspective
I have an adblocker but not an antivirus
I also have a mobile Linux device.
News Media: "ADVERTISERS CAN'T DISTRIBUTE ADS BECAUSE OF YOUUUUUU"
g-good!
Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.
Ads are malware (software maliciously made to do something the user doesn't want), yes. :3
I personally am not bothered at ALL by the banner video ads overlayed on top of another banner ad that opens a new tab when you try to close the banner video then another one opens covering the original banner then the page scrolls all the way back to the top and shows you an email list sign up, why would I be?
Bottom line: if I'm forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!
I used my mother's laptop once 2 years ago, and i was like, how the fuck do you people browsing without an adblock?
Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.
I mean, basically yes? Do you think most people ever touched the addons button?
Well, no, but is that really the bar? It is a pretty low bar no matter how you dress it up. Now leave me alone with my schaedeghenayegh.
You think most people open settings or hamburger menus? You're more optimistic than I am.
These days the average caveman is used by his phone, not the other way around.
Sorry that's spelled jardoughneigh you uncultured swine. Give back that monocle at once!
And just like that, 200 redneck women said in unison "huh, that's a real pretty name. Schardonayegh. Ooooh, even better -Schardonayegh Lynn. I love it!"
In my head it was said with the voice of Jenna Maroney (30 Rock).
I still whitelist sites with sensible, unobtrusive ads. Axios for instance, which are mostly 1st party. But that’s increasingly the exception.
I had to rip APNews out when Google Ads tried to serve me malware.
I don’t even bother reporting ad network malware. No one gives a shit including site owners and network operators
What was the malware?
IDK, it was awhile ago and blocked in the page it auto opened. By Cromite maybe?
When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I'd just learned.
I haven't forgiven advertising since.
Can only imagine how f'd up kids' minds must be now
My kid hasn't ever seen an ad on any streaming service or any web page, ever. And I block ads via DNS. We don't have any kind of live TV service or cable so they literally have just never seen any ads, ever.
Sometimes if we're out at a restaurant, some TV is playing live content and an ad runs. My kid is shocked like it's the first time he ever ate sugar.
Glad I can keep that toxic trash out of my house and out of his life.
My daughter has become obsessed with watching videos about the game Wobbly Life. There's one YouTuber who seems to post extremely frequently and advertises in every video for a subscription mod platform. She is now always asking about that mod platform, and the best way we can explain it to her (because she's 5 and simply too young to understand what mods even are, has zero room for any nuance on her world views etc.) is we just give her a hard-line "we do not pay for mods"
i know this may go against the general attitude here but i gotta say this does make me a little sad when i think about it. and i use adblockers as well, but i never knew what the numbers were. when it's put into context like this it's hard not to be discouraged by the fact that this is still probably a minority of users. i mean what the hell, how are people still using the internet with ads turned on.
Seeing static banner ads on 2000s websites without popups or tracking: 🤷♂️
Blocking ads on Firefox after popups and other crap started: 😀
Browsing the internet on Android before I realised the browser supports addons: 🤮
Blocking ads and tracking on Android via uBlock origin and Privacy Badger: 😀👍
My feeling of guilt when scummy megacorporations miss out on ad revenue:
There are a couple of steps missing at the beginning. There was a time when we only blocked popups; other types of ad were fine, but popups were annoying enough that they needed special attention, and the popup-blocker was usually built-in to the browser without needing an extension. It took a couple of years for the non-popup types of ads to become obnoxious enough to warrant blocking.
Even better: system-wide DNS adblocking on Android. Get rid of in-app ads too.
Rethink DNS
Would you care to expand on that?
Link
Oh, haha. I thought you were telling me I should rethink using a DNS adblocker.
I see, hehehe 😄
I use a degoogled CalyxOS phone so all those apps that load ads via Google services don't even work, or they work and the ads don't load haha. One caveat is that I can't use paid apps either though, I'm not against those.
But yeah system wide blocking is definitely the most thorough method!
😛
Ads are out of control, they fill my day.
My home, my rules. Ads are not allowed on the devices i BOUGHT.
99% of the targeted ads i get tend to be targeted at someone who has a family and makes 3 times my wage, so you're wasting business resources for your own gain and wasting my time by serving them to me.
So fuck off outta my house.
Oh thats why that stopped working. Bunch of jerks.
Fuck yeah, advertiers are a cancer.
Are they trying to present it as if poor innocent users need to be protected from the vile ad blockers?
Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.
"We paid for the right to show you this!"
You paid for the opportunity not the right, but you didn't pay me, motherfucker -- and my price is everything you have or fuck off and die.
Edit: You know what? This is how I really feel about ads.
This is a consent issue, and I will not allow advertisers inside me. They hire psychologists in order to exploit humans' most vulnerable mental blind spots. They don't just brainwash us. They mindfuck the entire human species, and they do not recognize consent. We need to treat advertising as the collective mindr*pe that it is, otherwise they will never stop exploiting us, and we will never be able to build a bright future for humanity and this world. They are manipulating the trajectory of an entire species with zero regard to any future well-being. The butterfly effects are inconceivable. Our minds are sacred. The advertising industry is committing a crime against humanity that we have failed to recognize as such, because money is all that matters today. They must be stopped before Big Tech perfects brain-computer interfaces.
Adblockers the heroes we need.
Also, aren’t most folks using apps these days? I have elders and younger relatives that literally don’t know how to use a web browser.
I wouldn’t want to be a web publisher right now…
Whats not to know?
Step 1) Open the browser.
There is no step 2. Just go wherever you want, and read. Or watch videos. If you don't know where something is, search for it. The browser does all the work. That's like saying you don't know how to use a microwave.
A number of kids also don’t know “file system.” The filing cabinet is a foreign concept, as are many of the now-antiquated technologies referenced/adapted for desktop computing (the address card for your Rolodex, the floppy disk save icon). Tablets and phones are culturally moving us towards stuff being contained within its respective singular app, like all your word documents being within the word app rather than meticulously sorted through layers of folders (even though on the backend, it is). So returning to your first step: why have a browser as the first step when you could just skip having to search for anything because there’s an app? Plus, the delicious unskippable metrics.
I think you underestimate how techy many people are.
You need to know the concept links. URLs. Web pages, navigation, tabs and your browser controls. It’s like getting in a boat with no concept of boating.
I’ve spent years trying to teach my mom and grandma, and honestly if they aren’t super interested/engaged, they just can’t do it. It’s like teaching someone how to boat that hates boating unless it’s required.
I didn't mind having a couple of static ads on a page. But now it's so much. So many dynamic ads, autoplaying videos, popups asking you to sign up to a newsletter, etc. No thanks.
I wouldn't mind unobtrusive ads targeted to the content of the page being viewed -but that doesn't happen. Modern ad networks all work on surveillance, and are indistinguishable from what we used to call "spyware". I have avoided spyware since the 90s.
I honestly wouldn't care if you put your mattress ad on a web page I'm reading about mattresses. I might even click on it!
So this confirms that people have a negative reaction to ads, which every actual internet user knows in their bones already. This means they ALSO are not even doing their one job of persuading people to buy shit. Of course this won't lead to companies reducing investment for ad carrying or finding ways to make them more appealing, that costs money, instead they will use AI generators to produce WORSE ads and leverage their capital to have governments capitulate and force users to watch by banning blockers, probably VPNs too. Bill Hicks was the most correct about advertising, and remains undefeated.
When piholes go mainstream they are fully cooked. Even tech illiterate in your family won't get the ads
25 years of adblockers and that is the single most important thing that keeps me from cutting myself off the web. I've donated money to adblockers and will continue to do so until I die! I send emails to the web sites that ask me to remove the blocker to tell them I will not and that there are many other sites that welcome my adblocking ass!
Psychology has revealed that the ability to direct attention to and process stimulus is limited, and that it's more limited in the most vulnerable members of society, including those with autism and those with too much stress.
Stimulus engineered to capture attention must therefore be treated by the law as a form of violence.
Yo bro. Looks like you are looking at some information without 15 things popping up in your face. I see you are into the "dark traffic"
What's frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don't have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead "☝️🤓 actually you don't own it." Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that's my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
Let me know when you can't inject malware via ads....
AdBlocker is the one who should get the Nobel Peace prize.
Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.
It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don't do it.
Exactly, adblockers don't block a static on the page with some text, an image and a link. It's only the user-tracking, obtrusive ad-networks they block. Every old-school form of advertising didn't track users and did just fine. Even today, billboards are priced based on the amount of traffic on the highway, not based on checking inside each car and building a profile on each driver (though I wouldn't put it past them trying to figure out how to do that soonish).
God, I can just see the wet dreams of an advertising exec now. If an australian bloke can replicate million dollar systems with $100, the advertising companies can surely wank out the money for license plate readers a quarter mile ahead of their billboard with good identification. The new electronic billboards already switch what ad they're showing every half minute or so now, and I bet they could do what ze big boiz do with the auctioning of ads.
I think right now most of the US doesn't allow random API access to license plate and registration data, but I really have no idea... How much do you think companies would
bribepay for some laws to be changed about that?Sure, the gov may not allow random API access to license plate registration data, but who knows how many license plates and associated identity are somehow scooped up by some data broker somewhere? You know those parking lots that require an app where you pay parking by entering your licence plate, then logging in with Google/Apple ID, and paying with a credit card? Fuuuuu
Good 🖕🏻
Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.
[rant] The Internet is not FREE. Its just free at the point of use!
Just like ad funded websites aren’t free to use, they are also just free at the point of use!
People seem to forget where the all this ‘ad money’ comes from. It’s not growing on magic money trees, it’s coming from every product you buy and it’ll be interesting to see how much products have gone up against the sheer amount of ads that are shovelled everywhere now.
The reason the internet used to be great was because people shared information with no expectation of monetary gain. Just the love of what they knew and the joy of sharing information.
So the sooner everyone realises you’re all paying for the ads on every product/service to be shown already, and blocking them actually saves you money because the more ads that are shown, the more websites get paid, the more ad/tracking companies charge companies and yes, the more expensive you’re product and services get! [/rant]
I don't mean free from operating costs. I mean free for the person using it to experience it how they choose.
I'm wondering if Gopher should make a comeback ? Gemini is a thing so, well you know.....
For those who don't know, they're alternative internet protocols similar to HTTP
Or just a protocol like Web Monetization where you put an amount of money you choose into a pot on your browser and it's handed out to sites you visit based on how much time you spend on a given site, with options to denylist sites from payment as needed
Reminded me of Flattr😢 is it FOSS ?
Web Monetization is a proposed standard in W3C, so an open standard
Gemini looks cool, but I wonder if Gemtext isn't a bit too simple. I think the ideal format would be to go back to the idea of "hypertext", without the CSS and Javascript.
Okay I checked out Gemini. I love the vibes, but the amount of dead links just in the quick start guide makes it hard for me to even try to get into it
How about this link ?
https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
I'll have to try out those Gemini links later. Who knows, maybe I'll get super into it and submit updated links for the official getting started guide
I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you've voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.
Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.
One could only dream my friend. One day we will all help and care for each other.
Whatever number it is, it ain't big enough yet.
More power!
Good. Hopefully the advertisers will realize that it's not profitable to advertise online anymore, and then we'll be left the hell alone.
Damn people, enshitifying the internet for the advertisers.
I switched to GrapheneOS which uses Vanadium browser by default, which doesn't support any content blocking yet. I use ProtonVPN which seems to block everything.
The issue with extensions (including adblockers) is you are trusting someone with access to your shit and money buys bad behavior. So I dislike the lack of blocking there but I can understand why that decision was made.
This is easily solved by not using 3rd parties and tracking data for ads. If the ad was just part of the page (similar to an ad in the newspaper) then ad blockers would not be able to detect them at all. A YouTuber saying "before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]" does not get blocked by ad blockers.
However, in order to do that websites would be responsible for the ads they display. If they don't do their due diligence they won't be able to pass it off as "we're not responsible for it, it's our ad company that put it there." They don't want to be responsible for the ads they show, but they want you to be responsible for the ads you don't watch.
Praise be
We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)
Get the hell out with AI slop and constant dark marketing
Let the idiots live on Instagram and don't depend on their 'content'
You are probably not wrong, and we should be paying for a lot more things, but the genie is out of the bottle for many things here and it's difficult to roll that back.
For example, newspaper reading habits have changed a lot. Before the internet, you'd usually stick with one newspaper and that's it. Maybe two if you have too much money. You buy your newspaper and you read it front to back, probably even the topics you don't particularly care about.
Now it's often the other way round. Most people read news from quite a few sources (or often just follow links on social media and don't really even care for the publisher), but they don't read their news from virtual cover to virtual cover. Instead, they stick to the topics they care for, or maybe even read about the same thing in multiple publications, comparing what they have to say about it.
For this kind of newspaper reading, current forms of monetarisation don't really work. Most newspapers only offer subscriptions to the whole newspaper, often in the range of €5-15 per month. So if I were to pay for the ~20 newspapers that I read news from at least semi-frequently, that's €200-600 per month. No way I can or want to afford that.
Some allow you to pay per article, but that is usually pretty expensive too (€1-3 per article) and also I need to register to every single newspaper. That's not great either.
What I'd really like to see would be a industry-wide subscription. For example, I pay €10 per month and that allows me to read 100 articles per month across all newspapers. That would be really nice.
Would love to but a lot of them have shut down now since people didnt buy them.
I confess that I don't have the money to frequently donate and fund the services that I use (if they allow to donate) and recognize long time ago ads would be an okay alternative. but like everyone said, ads just became a lot more cancerous and have to block it. despite the shortcomings of the FBI, even they advise to use adblockers.
though I guess I just have to suck it up and donate once in a while as well.
If we could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I'm the mean time, fuck 'em, they're too rich as it is.
I just got cable again after not having it for... 13 years?
I don't even get the point of it. It's the exact same thing it was 13 years ago. Same shows and everything. Ads. I tried to watch it a few times and I think I've watched a total of 2 hours since I got it a month ago. It's awful.
I run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when I’m not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.
I switched to adguard home recently, much nicer user interface and I dont miss any features from pihole. :)
what is with p.i.p video everywhere. hate it. can't figure out how to block it. firefox
Well now, here's one that comes up under "other".
I started using an adblocker because I was using an elderly netbook for my studies. Ads junked up resource usage so much they used to freeze my laptop, and render most sites unusable.
Thanks to my adblock, I was able to finish my studies.
These days I use adblock because I object to virus-like code execution on my hardware. I tell others about adblock and get them set up to get free tea/coffee (and to watch their faces as sites become usable again).
The quiet mention of the 12ft.io being taken down is disturbing, it was a good tool for students to read article sources. This kind of change forces them to rely on AI (Gemini respects paywalks, Copilot just ignores them), which risks misinformation being spread!
“And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.
“Publishers already face an existential-level threat in the face of AI reducing referral traffic. This is another slice that publishers cannot afford to lose.””
https://youtu.be/ZTt-kfPvRks
"Without user consent" is a load of crap.
Honestly the scale makes me wonder how much is because it's fucking AI bots.
listen, if browsers just block ads as a matter of their existence and the average joe is unaware they are blocking ads, then all the better. this article references a poll that specifically asks if the users know they are hard blocking ads, and just under half say they were not. which is good news, as that is farther reach then what user competency rates would have got. i am just taking that poll at face value.
Good, I hope they go the way of the telegraph and whale oil salesman.
The quote is even worse when you take this snippet from above:
So they are trying to frame corporate security policies as "no consent". Which totally does not make sense as the contract the worker signed is consent for corporate IT to manage the computer and also to secure it against malware serves via ads. And to even suggest that users who are using a VPN with built in adblock or an alternative browser do not want to use the features the software they installed come with, is crap
And the good old guilt tripping at the end, with the usual "quality content".
Well no one ever had to sell me on how nice a fire smells.
Oh no. 🎻
Largest boycott in human history.
I actually don't mind ad but only if it is general ad, not targeted ones. Hence, why I hate web ads. I appreciate advertisements in more public spaces like radio and posters.
The only site I allow ads on is photopea.net because it's awesome and I use it regularly. Fuck ads otherwise
Only a billion. Need to quintuple that.
mostly desktop, android phone is mostly unusable with ads. use 'privacy badger', 'ublock origin', 'umatrix'.
Dark traffic?!?! LMAO. Can we start calling malicious ads dark advertising?