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.
Proud to be part of a growing tradition.
And I’m one or them. Every time I turn it off things become legitimately unusable.
Praise be
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.
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.
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 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.
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!!!
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.
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.
Dont forget the ads that are straight scams or malware
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.
What was the malware?
IDK, it was awhile ago and blocked in the page it auto opened. By Cromite maybe?
I don’t even bother reporting ad network malware. No one gives a shit including site owners and network operators
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 usuall translates in 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 traffic.
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.
I have seen multiple businesses closing down due to poor marketing promotion/budget.
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.
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.
The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”
Lol. Fuck off.
Yeah. As if hacking into someone’s mind is their right. Talk about entitlement…
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.
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.
Toggles like that are available in other adblockers too and they pose a problem. They ad a random 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.
They ad a random to showing you ads
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.
That was for 12ft.io Bypassing a pay wall. Not blocking ads.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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 of my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.
Then I guess I’m not looking at those pages. No skin of my nose.
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.
Lol they will even say blocking phishing links are unethical
Obligatory xkcd 624:
Step 4 - success - Attention aquired. 😅
GitHer
I can clone her…
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.
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
And just like STDs, those malware-laden ads can infect your whole system before you even relaise what happened.
No
gloveblock, nolovebrowsePerfection!
Adblockers the heroes we need.
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.
Good 🖕🏻
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
