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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
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.
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.
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.
Proud to be part of a growing tradition.
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?
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.
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.
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
“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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
And I'm one or them. Every time I turn it off things become legitimately unusable.
News Media: "ADVERTISERS CAN'T DISTRIBUTE ADS BECAUSE OF YOUUUUUU"
g-good!
Maybe the problem is the advertisers and not the consumers. Jeeeesus.
The fbi suggests using an ad blocker. Guess what an ad blocker is as important as an antivirus.
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.
Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.
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.
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.
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:
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…
