Submitted 10 months ago by 1984@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
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.
US trade association News/Media Alliance announced it had secured the takedown of 12ft.io
Oh thats why that stopped working. Bunch of jerks.
Largest boycott in human history.
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.
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.
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. Your local bike club forum, your local newspaper, a blogger whose work you enjoy, etc., assuming of course, the ads are reasonable.
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.
I used my mother’s lapton once 2 years ago, and i was like, how the fuck do you people browsing without an adblock?
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.
Good. Hopefully the advertisers will realize that it’s not profitable to advertise online anymore, and then we’ll be left the hell alone.
News Media: “ADVERTISERS CAN’T DISTRIBUTE ADS BECAUSE OF YOUUUUUU”
g-good!
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’
We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)
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.
And the good old guilt tripping at the end.
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.
Yeah it makes sense from their point of view. I turned it around on them for the hell of it.
The way you word things matters. How many polls have shown the difference in opinion on ‘obamacare’ compared to ‘affordable care act?’
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.
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.
My feeling of guilt when scummy megacorporations miss out on ad revenue:
😛
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!
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!
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.
The fbi suggests using an ad blocker. Guess what an ad blocker is as important as an antivirus.
Malvertising has become pervasive enough that adblocking is starting to become a necessity from an IT perspective
More, if anything.
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 <div> 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 bribe pay for some laws to be changed about that?
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe the problem is the advertisers and not the consumers. Jeeeesus.
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 givw up pnes piracy, 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.
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!
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:
Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.
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!”
Sorry that’s spelled jardoughneigh you uncultured swine. Give back that monocle at once!
I mean, basically yes? Do you think most people ever touched the addons button?
You think most people open settings? You’re more optimistic than I am.
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.
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.
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 limited run “Cut it out” book apparently. Yours for only £310
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. 😅
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.
I actually don’t mind add but only if it is general ad, not targeted ones.
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.
Whatever number it is, it ain’t big enough yet.
More power!
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
AdBlocker is the one who should get the Nobel Peace prize.