Adnausem
It is built on top of unlock origin and will silently click on the ads in the background to mess with your digital footprint while costing advertisers money who use pay per click.
Google:
There are tools that allow people who buy ads to compare the performance of their ads with their own metrics.
The more ineffectual an ad platform is, the less likely ad purchasers are to purchase ads.
If 20% of American internet users used ad nauseam it would cause significant financial damage to ad companies across the globe.
Google might not care, but if enough people install it, their advertisers sure will.
That feature it uses to silently click ads increased the RAM usage of my browser by a lot on two separate systems (my android phone, and my PC) and since I really do not give an extra fuck about clicking ads in the background (Google still makes millions, and the plugin dev is also using the clicks to make money via affiliate) and I only care about blocking them, I went back to uBlock Origin.
and the plugin dev is also using the clicks to make money via affiliate
That’s actually kinda brilliant and I’m jealous. I might actually install it just to reward his intelligence. I can’t blame him for doing it, I’d do it too if I was in his shoes; I wish I’d thought of it first.
Ah, well. Still pretty smart, though I’m a bit less interested now.
Is that considered click fraud or is that only when an advertiser intentionally gets competitor ads clicked, and similar behaviors?
Not saying anybody [here] cares just curious (as a Ublock Origin user)
I think it is when a competitor does it in an attempt to make the advertiser lose money.
Adnausem
This is why I browse lemmy instead of reddit
what do you mean by ‘mess with digital footprint’
Basically tells advertisers and trackers that you click on every single ad (a common metric used to gauge interest), so it’s harder for them to tell what you’re interested in and build a profile of you
Seems like not clicking on any ads should have the same outcome…
Worse actually, since we usually visit a subset of the web, and by “fake clicking” all the ads of all the websites we visit, we actually give google a pretty good profile of the websites we visit, and that’s bad. Fake clicking is not as private as people think it is.
You get tracked based on how you interact. This obfuscates that beyond just “I block all of them”.
It still only clicks ads of the webpages you visit, which again is a pretty good tracking pattern. I prefer to be tracked as “blocks all of them” than “clicks all the ads of these webpages, which are about XYZ, so they must have interests in XZY, which is actually true since I did visit those websites”.
Google tracks everything you do so they can deliver targeted ads to you
By clicking every ad it is harder for them to build a profile
They also take these profiles and sell them so companies know what demographic to focus on
deleted by creator
I genuinely don’t know how people manage without ad-blockers and other declutterers. The amount of utter shit that gets in the way of what you’re trying to look at is mind boggling.
Do you want cookies? Do you want to share your details with 1049 trusted data partners? How about the top half of the screen taken by a video ad with a close button that isn’t going to work? How about a redirect to something else entirely? How about the back button not working unless you spam it really quick?
This is a war, and we didn’t start it.
There’s also the fact that on mobile ads use up your data. I’m not paying for a data plan so advertisers can use it to shove ads down my throat because I wanted to check the weather. I’ve used the mobile brave browser for a few years now and I will never go back. I don’t go through nearly as much mobile data as I did prior to using ad blockers.
Plus, putting ublock on my PC made youtube usable again. No more ads that are longer than the video I’m trying to watch.
I don’t know how people tolerate the constant ads either. It was driving me insane and genuinely pissed me off.
Do you want cookies? Do you want to share your details with 1049 trusted data partners?
They click this thing once. 1 time only for years of “not being bothered by it” (that they notice actively).
I agree it’s total shit but it is from a regular user point of view, easier to use the “i agree” button on most of that stuff once, than to try to avoid it. Constantly on the same few websites anyhow.
Still doesn’t explain the no ad-block for me though, it’s a whole lot easier on the mind to browse ad-free, it is well worth the tiny effort of using ff and activating ublock…
Ever seen the kind of messes most people drive around with inside their cars? I think that might explain a thing or two.
“…How old are these french fries…?”
🤢
deleted by creator
Do you want cookies? Do you want to share your details with 1049 trusted data partners? How about the top half of the screen taken by a video ad with a close button that isn’t going to work?
"Oh, you want to opt out? First click this tiny 4 pt text next to
>>> AGREE TO EVERYTHING <<<
[ⁿᵒ ᶜᵒᵒᵏᶦᵉˢ ᵖˡᵉᵃˢᵉ]
then uncheck what you don’t want us to track, then click “I don’t not want to be tracked across the Internet for marketing purposes forever and ever.”
We value your privacy!*
*(We just value it just a little more if you’re subject to GDPR or California law…)
And if you do manage to opt out, we’ll ask you again next time you visit.
Old guy checking in. When ad blockers first became a thing, my then-teenaged boys started using one and were trying to talk me into it. I was pretty dubious. I said my concern was that the model most of the web was built on was ad-supported. That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links. If everyone started using ad blockers, I said, that model would break down and either people would stop creating content or they’d go to a new model, like subscriptions. I figured few people would take time equivalent to a full time job to create content for free.
I think that largely came to pass. A lot of great online publications have closed their doors, and the are lots of paywalls now. The things is, the sites are just as much to blame. Most people wouldn’t have been driven to use ad blockers if the ads hadn’t gotten so untenable. A banner or a box here or there is one thing, but when there are a giant number of pop-up windows, autoplay videos, windows you can’t back out of, and all the other hellish stuff, people are going to be highly motivated to find a way to stop it.
That whole arms race was one of the things that ruined the internet, in my opinion.
I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.
And dear Jesus don’t forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.
Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.
If you’re not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.
Going to my parents house to help fix why their computer was “running slow” and like 6 inches of their browser was all toolbars that they had no idea how they got there nor knew what they did.
This is a thing of sheer beauty ❤️
Oooh a free lobster dinner!
Triggered!! 🤣
Yeah, and that’s what I mean when I say that the sites brought it on themselves. If the ads started reasonable, like what you’d see on the old Sunday newspaper, three wouldn’t have been much reason to block them.
You also have to add on the privacy issues with all the tracking, that also drove people to use them.
There was a sort of nice period.
In the wake of a bunch of BS, Google came along with rather nice and unobtrusive ads, and it seemed to catch on. Then over the last decade, it’s really gone way downhill again.
Yeah, I didn’t mind an ad on the side of the screen when all of the content was front and center. But the problem is is that when you make it so that a company’s livelihood depends on forcing users to do things they don’t want to do, and there’s no regulation on that whatsoever, it’s just going to go downhill very quickly and if you think this is bad it can get much much worse.
I’m kind of surprised that isps are not injecting ads into your browsing and forcing you to watch ads just to use the internet that you paid for.
They could even charge you like a $10 a month up charge fee for ad-free internet and say that we’re not going to block the ads on the rest of the internet you just won’t get additional ads from us.
I’m kind of surprised that isps are not injecting ads into your browsing and forcing you to watch ads just to use the internet that you paid for.
If I recall correctly, during one of the more recent public debates around Net Neutrality in the US, it came out that certain ISPs were doing just that. Some people were showing screenshots of ads showing up inside their steam client (which runs the storefront and community sections as webpages).
I think it is worth mentioning that patreon also surfaced as a means to provide income for creators. Whether this was a direct result of ad blockers may be debatable. However, patreon certainly provides creators with an avenue to generate income that is not dependent on ads services.
Then there are also creator focused platforms like nebula and curiosity stream, which aim to provide creators with a fair share of generated revenue.
All in all, my take on the developments over the past ten years or so is that ad revenue sharing (with creators) provided an important impulse to establish the field of online content creation, and that shortcomings of this model are now being addressed. Mainly to funnel more money to the content creators rather than platform owners.I think the last really big hurdle to an actually democratized internet is that we need to make it easier to host at home.
Asymmetrical download upload is such a fucking pain. I would rather have 100 down and 100 up then 400 down and 5 up like I currently do.
On top of that, there aren’t a lot of good systems in place to enable me to host a website from home. If IPv6 were common it would be easy for me to secure a static IP address and to point that to my DNS resolver and attach my domain, but since I’ve got to be on an ipv4 system since no provider in my area provides an on-ramp to IPv6 and even if they did the Grand majority of Internet users cannot resolve IPv6 addresses, it’s dead in the water.
If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home, we could get rid of the grand majority of the content provider and hosts and instead use democratized systems like bluesky and Kbin and Mastodon and free tube without having to worry about these multi trillion dollar companies’ bottom lines.
puts on tinfoil hat
The asymmetrical internet speeds are intended to keep hobbyists and small businesses from self-hosting, thereby driving traffic to larger companies. I wonder if ISPs get any kind of kickback from large companies like AWS, cloudflare, or digital ocean. Like, reduced hosting costs for their websites and internal cloud services.
Takes tinfoil hat off
The reality is that it’s probably a lot cheaper for ISPs to make connections asymmetrical because it effectively lets them pump up their download speed numbers for free. However, ISPs really should give customers the option to custom allocate bandwidth. Instead of saying X upload, Y download, you get X Mbps maximum and can choose the upload/download split.
That would definitely be fair. Like even limit the ratio between tears just give me the option to have the internet that I want at my house without paying for business internet prices.
I’m not asking for symmetrical gigabit with a static ipv4 address on a fiber line with unlimited bandwidth. I just want a decent amount of bandwidth, 50-100mb up, a static IP address that is IPv6, and I’m okay with a ipv4 address that changes.
They’ve had a really long time to simply flip the switch in the routers that they use to also transmit IPv6 addresses and they are not doing it.
Their hardware is not old enough in most cases to not have IPv6 available by default in the hardware and firmware, they are just intentionally choosing not to activate it.
Are there any benefits to having a static IP, aside from self-hosting purposes? Is it somehow faster or more responsive? I’d think dynamic IPs would be better (ignoring self-hosting) because at the very least, they’d allow you to dodge (d)dos attacks (which can happen with games, people sometimes get salty enough to attack other players IPs if their IP is exposed).
The only use or reason for having a static IP is to have a domain name that resolves to that IP and knowing that the domain register can set the IP address and it’s good until everything falls apart for lack of payment.
The other use of having a static IP is for a VPN, to remote back into your home network. Technically you can use both of these services with non-static vpns because most people’s home internet does not change their IP addresses that often and there are services called dynamic DNS resolvers that you can get to constantly update your rotating IP address to a specific domain name.
You will not see any speed increases or throughput increases from having a set ip, it just simplifies running a home domain or home network because then you don’t have to worry about ddns.
Dynamic IPs were primarily a way to get around a limited pool of IP addresses. That’s all. Local IP addresses (think 192.168.x.x) were created for the same reason.
The NAT your home internet modem uses in providing your local network IP does provide a hard firewall between your computer and the internet, but that is more a side effect of the technology than anything else.
If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home
I’ve got symmetrical gigabit and an IP address I can remember
Just because you are 1/8th immortal does not mean that you get to rub it in our faces.
My dream for the past 3-4 years is something like a raspberry pi that you could just plug into power+internet+a chunky hard drive at home to have your own kbin/masto/lemmy/peertube instance.
I don’t know how one can bring this about, though, in a more meaningful way than yet another hackaday.io post.
I feel like I have seen something like this. Just an all-in-one home server box.
I know you can make one but I get what you’re saying is that you want it to be an appliance.
I don’t know if “appliance” is how I would describe it but, yeah, something that’s as plug-and-play as possible. I guess in the sense that off the shelf, it would be as easy to use as a dishwasher or toaster.
Until I became aware of the fediverse and activitypub, I thought that any such project would be doomed to fail - like most of the smart home market, you’re tied to the manufacturer not only for compatible hardware but more crucially to talk with their servers.
Now I’m starting to think it is feasible, but still too many unknowns to bet a business on it.
Eh, I’m not sure it’s much improved. In the ad model, the content creator owned the site and got money from selling ads. The more traffic they got, the more they could charge. In the new model, a corporation owns the site and takes a cut of whatever the creator generates.
Not necessarily. For instance, YouTube uses the old ad model and is of course not creator owned.
Additionally, you can use patreon while also using (and capitalising on) your own content distribution systems.
This is all to say, I do think the ad model may stay somewhat relevant, however, I also think that other income avenues are helpful and enable content creators more flexibility in terms of the manner in which they think they can best reach their audiences while generating incomeWorth pointing out that ad blockers don’t work for ads that are inserted into a video stream, so there was no need to change that model there. Also, YouTube is an example of a site that’s not owned by the content creator. YouTube makes the money from the ads, then gives the significant creators a cut.
I wonder how stable the situation for in-stream ads really is. Paid sponsorships are nothing new, yet with browser extensions like sponsorblock becoming more and more popular I doubt the arms race will stop any time soon.
Not sure if arms race is the right way to put it when 1 side is deploying nukes and the other is only deploying shields. Money ruined the internet, ads is just one way how it did that.
That actually is a major facet of the military arms race. Side A develops a missile. Side B develops an anti-missile missile. So side A develops a missile with multiple warheads or builds more missiles so they won’t all be shot down, etc. The defensive systems spawn the development of more or more-devastating offensive systems.
I still see one party racing with arms and one party trying to survive.
I used to not care about ads in Google because they were minimal. I was OK with ABP “acceptable ads”.
But I’ve since gone full scorched earth. Fuck them all, their trackers, their fake news, the terrible products. I’m still OK with ads in my search results (no longer using Google) because they are often relevant to something I’m looking for. But for the rest, the Web stopped deserving my respect. I don’t consume that much content online, and I pay for most of the few things I do consume.
As a software and data guy, having my search results tainted by paid content is pretty infuriating. I wouldn’t care if there were ads to the side or something, but I find things like Amazon’s search results almost completely unusable. And early on I used to point out to people how amazing Amazon’s search engine really was. It was a marvel at getting you to exactly what you were looking to buy. Now it’s optimized for showing you what they want to sell.
It really doesn’t matter what the users did in response, because the MBAs’ greed is such that they would have eventually ruined everything anyway no matter how compliant or patient the users were. It doesn’t matter how much they get, it’s never enough.
I’m also old (well, middle-aged is the right word I guess), but having lived through the adpocalypse that was the early 2000s, when the majority of sites were rushing to demonstrate their lofty stock valuations and satisfy their debtors by bringing in as much revenue as possible no matter the cost to the user base, I never really had that much patience for this business model, especially not once they discovered the concept of pop-ups (or worse, pop-unders).
I’ve also personally worked for a site whose business model was entirely based on SEO and click funneling and that has further eroded my patience to pretty zero. Pretty much none of our developer meetings were ever about “how can we make the product more useful to our users so they’ll actually WANT to come back”, it was always “our numbers are declining, how can we jam in more ads in order to meet the quarterly revenue goals?”
Yes, there are some sites that DO work hard to make actual, original content in order to earn those clicks, but for the most part, it’s an amoral, downright parasitical industry that doesn’t deserve any sympathy or goodwill.
I doubt very much adblockers are to blame for that. They’re a convenient excuse for those trying to squeeze as much money as possible from their users… but they would have gone that route no matter what. It’s just the nature of the economic system we live in.
That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links.
No, that’s what ruined the web.
You’re right that ads supported the model, but the model was also generally anarcho-communist in nature. That people wanted to experience it without ads was expected, and considered fine. It is fine.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/majority-of-americans-now-use-ad-blockers/ar-BB1kEhis
That’s why ads are now being tested on the OS level.
The Censuswide report indicates that 66 percent of experienced advertisers use ad blockers.
lol
Time to learn how to Linux, I guess…
nowadays there’s not even that much to learn, probably biggest difference is just the file system, and getting out of the horrid habit of downloading programs from the browser.
Where do you download programs from?
primarily like on mobile, you just download from the “app store”.
This can either be done via terminal (something like “apt install blender”) or via a graphical program like Discover for the KDE desktop, in which case it’s literally just like a mobile app store where you search for the program, click “install” and that’s it.
There are some alternate ways of installing programs, which can involve downloading from a website, but that’s for getting the very freshest release of a program or for very niche projects that aren’t included in the distro’s software repository yet.
So if you’re an android power user it’s exactly like that, most apps come from the store, but some apps you have to download from the web.
The repository of the distro that you’re running or flathub. Sometimes also an AppImage from a GitHub/GitLab releases page if it’s an obscure program.
My man, 95% of people dont even know what a browser is and you expect those to know what an adblocker does or is? even now, all people using adblockers, or extensions in general are barely a drop in a desert dry bucket
Either that or they have 20 useless extensions.
Plot twist: they have extensions, but none are active.
Majority of society:
- “I don’t see a problem”
- “I don’t care, it’s not like my data is that valuable”
- “But I actually like these targeted ads! I find so much good stuff this way!”
every time I hear the 3rd one I lose a little bit more faith in humanity
It’s hard to comprehend their mindset
I can give you another one from my wife:
“I need to watch ads to get rewards or get lives for [whatever game she’s playing on her phone].”
To be fair targeted ads based on what I like I don’t find as a problem as long as they are not intrusive and very in your face! But due to how bad most ads are I don’t see even those as I always have adblock on!
Your the problem.
Remember in Futurama when Fry finally goes online in the future and get attacked by ads. Or similar in Altered Carbon with whatever that contact-lens-AR thing was and the character spins out.
We should be more grateful for these people. Our adblockers function because they don’t bother using them.
The moment that most of society starts using adblockers is the moment they become defunct when the big corporations begin actively fighting them. I’ve already witnessed this with YouTube Vanced/Revanced.
Because Ublock Origin is better than AdBlock in every way? Or maybe because they’re already using PiHole?
I doubt people are using better options as an argument for this. The Youtube stuff makes the news like every other for blocking people, yet I haven’t noticed any of it. If it weren’t for lemmy and reddit spamming it I wouldn’t have known it was possible and I’m not even doing anything crazy. Just Firefox and ublock. If people were using great options, it wouldn’t have even been making the news because no one would have noticed.
Firefox with ublock origin was impacted, however only a set of users get the change. This way Youtube can test what impact it has.
The fact you were unaffected means nothing.
When I see a person with no ad blockers use the web my brain breaks seeing all the ads. Advertising is a malevolent force. Anyone who works in marketing ranks just above people who join the armed forces, police, and weapons manufacturing in my book. I think of big tobacco as better people.
I think of big tobacco as better people.
Let’s not exaggerate either, marketing people don’t have their main motive of profit to make people addicted to a toxic and carcinogenic product.
Well those tobacco companies still have advertisements don’t they?
Kinda not? In many places is illegal to advertise tobacco, and the marketing people are the same who do the anti-tobacco campaigns and many other PSAs.
You could kinda say that marketing people were the ones who ended Pinochet dictatorship even, every tool can be used to do harm, but just as the tool a mugger uses to stab a victim is a knife, knife as well is the scalpel that a surgeon will use to save that person, a tool on it’s own rarely is good or bad, and marketing is a tool.
I’m not saying that they’re marketing is not annoying or many times bad, just that that is not inherently bad.
…?
The point of marketing is to make people buy stuff they wouldn’t have bought otherwise, through manipulation of the brain.
They are directly responsible for our overconsumption and by extension the huge amounts of plastic waste in the ocean, the destruction of ecology and climate change.
They are most definitely way worse than tobacco, at least they only damage the body and the people around the user.
I was already sick of all the freaking Taylor Swift ads but Roku announcing that video ads are coming to the home screen was the last straw for me. Finally set up a Pi-hole and Roku ads are gone. I know it’s an ongoing war and this is just one battle, but damn it’s nice right now. I even became a supporter on Patreon. ❤️
I still run uBlock Origin on all my browsers, though.
Yarr, this be the golden years for alternative home media platforms.
My dodgy friend, I have appealed to my wife not once or twice but three times that we should drop all our subs and return to those placid waters that I sailed in my younger days. She has yet to relent in her view that we should stay on the right side of the law. I look for any opportunity to press my advantage. Do you have a suggestion as to the perfect argument that will sway her?
My family was reluctant to watch movies from my jellyfin server until I told them I use a seed box to torrent and host the jellyfin server
Interesting! I didn’t know this was a thing.
Sonarr and radarr can automate torrent gathering. They can read a list of shows from places like Trakt, then ask torrent sites for the download once it becomes available.
Public torrent sites are less reliable and under relatively more surveillance. Private trackers are a good option, but it takes a bit of effort to gain entry and maintain membership.
There are also platforms like Seren or Fen, which are addons for a media program called Kodi. These programs can automate streaming from non-torrent sources. Free sources can have limited bandwidth, but it’s watchable usually. You’ll get the occasional gap in an episode. Paid services like Real Debrid can offer faster streaming and better coverage.
All of this should be behind a VPN.
Tell her that the scurvy money lubbars have formed a trade organization that hoards booty. Money be a terrible temptation for sin and removin temptation from them is the only Christian thing to do. Iffen yee fly the flag of a different country and only dock at exclusive ports they will never catch yee.
Yee can even rig yer ship to scuttle the moment yer actual flag is raised.
Solid suggestions! I’ll keep at it.
I think we don’t give gradual acclimatisation enough credit here. Most of my students have never heard of Firefox and tools like ublock origin because they’re acclimatised to the mobile ecosystem
“How do I install something? I use the app store.”
“Oh, but I already have the internet on my phone, why would I want a 3rd party app to use the internet” (think old people who mix up AOL with the internet in reverse!)
As soon as I show them, they convert in seconds - they’ve forgotten web pages without adverts can exist.
I don’t know why people evangelize others using adblock. The more mainstream it becomes, the more likely websites use effort to stifle their use.
Just let’s keep it on the dl so we benefit.
ublock does a good job of blocking ad block blockers at least on major sites.
That cat got out of the bag more than 10 years ago.
Y’all ever try NoScript too? Freaking wild how some sites need to use like 30 shady JavaScript modules just to function.
It’s a burden, but it blocks things like the “invisible facebook pixel” for instance…
I use noscript and ads don’t load unless I whitelist them. Videos won’t autoplay unless I whitelist them. I am the internet’s bouncer
I use it and by default I block everything
I like noscript. It’s pretty aggressive, but so are the trackers.
Well it’s really due to the fact that most people are ignorant about computer technology. I personally use pi-hole.
The difference in surfing the web on my phone with pi hole vs without it is stunning. It’s almost unusable without.
