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 sounds neat, but it means those ads are at least partially loaded on the background, which is also bad
only the URL is loaded.
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnauseam-click-ads
How does AdNauseam "click Ads"?
AdNauseam 'clicks' Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions the is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a 'click' on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads. Although it is completely safe, AdNauseam's clicking behaviour can be de-activated in the settings panel.It just sends a request to the ads
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.
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.
what do you mean by 'mess with digital footprint'
google (and other ad companies) keep a digital profile (or footprint) of all your clicks. so, for example, if you click on an ad for a fantasy book, they will save that you are at least interested on fantasy books, giving you more ads for that. in theory that might not sound so bad ("hey, at least the ads will be more relevant") but in reality the amount of data that they store is incredibly invasive.
by clicking random ads, the quality of that profile would go down, as it will no longer be your true interests, thus "messing with digital footprint"
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
Adnausem
This is why I browse lemmy instead of reddit
I don't suppose it can run in ublock's hard mode?
by the look of it, yes it can.
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...
People just got used to having ads shoved down their throats? I am not one of them though, I use uBlock Origin with pride. But most people simply deal with the baggage.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It was already being enshittified, adblockers had fuck all to do with it since even today they represent a fraction of all users.
The jack wagons who decided to push web 2.0 as a money making gig are to blame, not the users.
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.
I'm perfectly happy to pay for things I value, especially if the alternative is being forced to pay with my time and attention. The evidence also doesn't entirely support your argument, since plenty of places that you pay for still try to show ads.
The evidence also doesn’t entirely support your argument, since plenty of places that you pay for still try to show ads.
Where was it ever said that a site could only use one model? The same is/was true of newspapers that cost you a subscription but also sold ads. Without the ads, the subscription would be much more expensive.
I personally am unlikely to pay for a huge variety of news sites and other publications, but I really appreciated having access to all that content for free. Sure, I might pay for one or two especially valuable sites, but my personal opinion is that it was better when the sites were making enough money to make it worthwhile for them by selling a reasonable amount of advertising, and the content was free to the users.
He didn't write a multi page thesis covering every single use case, quick tell him he's wrong!
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.
The more popular ad blocking gets, the more I worry about the ad industry lobbying to criminalize blocking ads as "theft of revenue" or some insane concept along that line.
And you just know the burden of that new criminalization won't come with the expensive and long legal procedures needed to bad all the ad blockers but instead will just be a piecemeal tax charged to consumers
I feel like a big setup for this is all the "forced binding arbitration" TOSs that are quietly being pushed for EVERY service.
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
https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and-adblockers
Straight from the source.
And a funny quote I found from Cory Doctorow a year ago: "One in four web users has installed a blocker, making it (in the words of Doc Searls) the largest consumer boycott in history".
All sorts of people are fed up with this shit.
The other 33 are lying.
I refused to use adblockers on principle - not because I thought multibillion corpos needed more money, but because I recognized that sites using ads to sustain their business model needed views to maintain their viability in our fucked capitalist system.
Then Youtube swapped to three unskippable fucking ads after every video.
Now I just whitelist decent sites and let Adblock take care of the rest.
I wish I could semi-whitelist (graylist?) many websites, like allowing only "acceptable ads" so that the website can pay for costs and make a small profit while not blowing up my screen with ads. At the same time, many websites (Reddit, most recipe sites, and any text site with an autoplaying video) absolutely deserves a full ad blacklist for disrespecting their users so much. Still other websites deserve a full whitelist.
Yeah I whitelist as much as I can, but the default is to block because there will be sites that I visit once that would be unusable otherwise. If I find myself visiting more than once, I turn off the ad blocker to see if the site is still usable. If it's not, sorry, no ad revenue for you, shitty site.
I block all ads, everywhere, period. No whitelists, no nothing.
Because I got sick of ending up with malware infected ads and having to clean up my computer (back when I was on windows, I'm sure the days not far off where linux will have the same problem)
All these companies crying about ad revenues and shit? If they ever policed the ads they force down our throats for content, So they didnt serve malware, or obnoxiously loud or long ads, or any other bullshit, then people wouldnt have to need ad blocking tools.
I block ads specifically so websites that rely on ads as revenue die.
You do you
Although I pity you
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.
What's wrong with youtube vanced? It works just fine for me.
How long have you been using it?
I've been using it for years. About six months ago or somewhere around that, YouTube started a small campaign against adblockers though. In that campaign, they actually forced Vanced to rebrand to Revanced due to a lawsuit. It was in this time that through the campaign more people became aware of adblockers.
This actually sucked for users like me. The amount of times I'd have to repatch Revanced due to the constant updates was awful. It's more stable now, but if this ever happens again it will be annoying.
If people bring attention back to adblockers, then it will be like this again. Sites will be threatening legal action and restructuring themselves to break adblockers, while adblockers will have to constantly update in order to stay functional.
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.
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.
I enjoy manipulating the advertising targeting algorithm to give me advertisements for industrial machinery, cloud computing, surveys, targeted advertisements, and other things I am not remotely in the market for.
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.
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.
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.
...?
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 have no less than a dozen plugins in my browser to make the Internet usable. More than half is just for YouTube.
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?
Because they're not the "default". Most folks stick with whatever comes on their device by default; Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, Chrome on Android, etc. Anything beyond just picking it up and turning it on requires forethought and effort, which most users don't care about.
Well it's really due to the fact that most people are ignorant about computer technology. I personally use pi-hole.
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 used to use it all the time, but after a few years I got tired of constantly playing a game of "which blocked script is breaking everything this time" every time I visit a new website.
I wish I could remember the discussion (ADHD), but I remember someone pointing out to me a few years back that Ublock Origin makes NoScript redundant. It does have the ability to block scripts, it just enables them by default instead of blocking them. Don't quote me on this but I believe the reason was because it only blocks malicious Javascript.
I like noscript. It's pretty aggressive, but so are the trackers.
I use it and by default I block everything
You are drastically overestimating the average persons technical competency.
Google being the default on Apple devices was literally all they needed to do for the vast majority of web searches on iOS devices. And it’s a baked in setting, no need to install anything.
"The door is there, for anyone with a sincere, passionate desire to learn. Which sounds really nice, 'anyone with a sincere and passionate desire to learn.' I just eliminated 90% of the world. 90% of the world wants to sit at home and watch Honey Boo Boo." --Chris Boden.
Sophisticated, powerful technology able to revolutionize the world becomes not only available but cheap, half the world's population carries around a supercomputer in their pocket with an always-on connection to the sumtotal of all human knowledge, and that device's user interface is designed to express little more than "Dat wun daddy watch me dat video dat wun now!" Because that's the level at which nearly everyone is willing to approach computers.
Why people pay for adblocker these day ? Adguard ?
Because for many (including me) it's by far the best one. I get a system-wide adblocker and vpn on my phone and computer with really good apps. Nothing else has been both so good and easy so I'm more than happy to pay for it, it's also only $30 per year. I really like their telegram group too, they post news and articles both from them and others about anything related to privacy and so on. They recently wrote about Microsofts addition of ads in Windows and released an update that disabled those.
$30 per year is a lot
And 30$ is subscription.
I would like to buy $30 once and for good. I don't want subscription app.
I learned recently that banner ads on websites and apps track your physical location, which is then sold to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.
ublock and pihole here. Pihole is usually blocking 20-30% of all DNS queries for my home network. Smart TVs are the worst offender.
Same, only I use AdGuard Home instead of PiHole
Pihole checking in
Pi-hole with unbound
Pihole, the IT nerd way to get it done!
Checking in too lol.
pfsense with blockering
The hell diju say about my hole!
DNS based blocking only goes so far, it certainly isn't enough
What's private DNS and how do I use it?
I have Adguard and I believe it's using Google DNS.
Thanks.
All you do is set your DNS servers to dns.adguard-dns.com, and now ads are blocked system-wide. Even works on Android.
Hey thanks, I found it in the settings.
Lookup nextdns. They have guides
I use mullvad dns
Alphabet's cracking down on blocking YouTube ads - nothing works at the moment that I've found. So, no YouTube, cause that shit's a dumpster fire without functional adblock. I mean, it's a dumpster fire anyway, but it's at least trash I can sort through.
Ublock origin + Firefox works and if you're on android there's YouTube Revanced
Thank you, I'll give that a shot!
e: Worked, even on a Chromebook.
Unlock origin on Firefox on my devices haven't seen an ad yet
Throw in sponsor block and you miss in video ads too. Unless the vid was released like 5 mins ago
I have Adblock and uBlock Origin on Chrome and never see YouTube ads. I assume uBlock Origin does the trick alone. (I know I should switch back to Firefox, but I'm too lazy if it's working.)
Hah, you're right, works in Chrome too. Thanks!
I watch youtube daily and haven't seen an ad in I don't know how long. I use only firefox with ublock origin for adblocking.
Adblock Plus still works for me on YouTube. I click a video, and when it loads there's a quick flash where the ad would have played then the video starts. So it looks like it's just autoskipping them quickly without displaying anything. Not even the 5 second thing happens.
The built-in ad block for my browser seems to work for me.
ReVanced for me
Probably because they were never told they were a thing, let alone, how to install them
Is AdBlock plus actually open source?
I had to force my wife to install one, like bish how can you even handle the amount of ads you get spammed with.
Unpopular opinion incoming:
You know when you were playing hide and seek, found the perfect hiding place, and you reject anyone else who tries to hide in that place?
DON'T TELL ANYONE ABOUT ADBLOCKERS!
Seriously, corpos will crack down hard. I mean, real hard on adblockers. This is an arms race that corporations have not yet realised because not enough people are using ad blockers. However, if more and more people are using it, then corporations will also be trying to catch up and that is something they will win because of greater resources.
This will be like with VPN; as many VPN IP addresses have been flagged and blocked as the service became more popular. And some of these VPNs have not updated the IP addresses making access to many websites nigh impossible or awkward-- unless you want to trawl through countless addresses. I'm afraid the same thing will happen with adblockers. This is something that open source adblockers could not easily win-- if they could win.
they will try to crack down on it either way, might as well go out with a fight. The more popular it is to use adblocking and the less niche weirdo psycho, the less "normal" it is for whatever shit they wanna do, however far they want to go to literally force bullshit into your brain wether you want it or not.
Amigo - the corpos already know. They also know that anyone who hates ads enough to install and maintain ad blockers is also not going to click on ads. They're wasted impressions. The amount an advertiser pays to put an ad in front of you is a rounding error compared to the amount they pay when you click.
When I worked at G I had a Linux laptop. It came pre-installed with Firefox and uBlock origin in addition to Chrome.
If Google is distributing Firefox with uBlock internally to employees they know about ad blockers.
It's similar to how scam emails always have egregious spelling errors: they're trying to select out the people that won't fall for the scam.
No idea what adguard is, I used adblock plus before thought I'm not using it now as for why I'm not using it I have no idea but I think some ads were getting through otherwise I would not have switched form it. For a few years now I use Ublock and never had a problem with it, in fact it's the first thing I install on any machine after I finish install an os on it.
There should should be an ad manager that wont actually block ads but let them load into a fake page that the user does not see
Isn't that what Adnauseam does?
Whitelist firewall - I have become adpocalypse, destroyer of bad sequels, lover of Web One.
I've used adblockers so long, when we got a DVR cable box, I would always keep everything rewound by 10 minutes specifically to skip all the commercials so I wouldn't have any on TV, either.
I would imagine it boils down to the ads don't bother them.
brave has a one built in 🙏
I don't use adblock because it increase my browser fingerprint I just disable all JavaScript , no cookies and block tracker requests by my DNS server.
Is this a joke? All those things are going to make you stand out more than using adblocker
not exactly, JavaScript is the most important piece that sites uses to track users . Not the only but the most important
I don't use an ad blocker. What sites do you visit that you need one?
At work when I am googling for help some of the sites are obnoxious but not too bad.
What sites do you visit that you need one?
A good portion of the news sites I read. If I divide the total area that goes for text and ads, it's around 35-65. Then there's taboola ads that show at the bottom, before the related articles. uBlock also stops the majority of stupid "WAIT, SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER" modal that shows up as soon as the mouse exits the window
Any shopping sites is chock full of trackers and external ads, too. Lemme browse shit in peace.
You're getting down votes, which is just silly.
Back in the day, a man wasn't really a man unless he changed his own oil and tuned up the car himself. That mentality has reemerged in the 21st century.
Lots of unpopular opinions in here and I'm willing to add mine to the mix.
I'm well aware of ad blockers, and use them occasionally. I also block trackers like pendo through DNS entries on my router. I pay for YouTube.
But I also allow ads and welcome them.
I remember when you couldn't get email unless you were in a school or paid for it. I remember a time when the fastest Internet loaded images line by line. I remember an Internet without videos, or even GIFs.
Services cost money. You use the service, you are the commodity. I've accepted this. A few ads don't kill me and it helps to support providers. I'm quite numb to ads.
Yes they are tracking me and selling my data, but what does that actually mean? I get more targeted offers. More targeted ads.
We've become scared of being tracked by corporations, but for what reason?
Providing content costs money. The days of the free Internet will quickly come to an end without advertisers.
"We've become scared of being tracked by corporations, but for what reason?" The line between corporations and government is increasingly blurring. The amount and types of data and the ease and lack of any restrictions on the data corporations collect. To make a statement like this in the wake of project Nimbus is an indicator of naivety permissible to you by a fortunate and comfortable life. Situations within this world can turn on a dime ; I emplore you to think of the worst case scenarios with corporate data sharing if not for the future well being of yourself, than at least to minimize the support of these practices which are currently and will continue to negatively affect others. What was once considered fringe paranoia with use of these "free" services is now clear and present danger.
My problem main problem with ads is that websites like YouTube and SoundCloud are locking content they don't own behind ads. But they'll remove those ads if you pay them money. I know some creators allow monetization on their channels, but I've watched plenty of videos and streamed several albums that were uploaded by people who didn't own the content and it's still locked behind ads.
Lol are you moral grandstanding against adblockers, fuckin weirdo
Yeah I value my mental wellbeing more than these companies.
Constant exposure to ads is not good for your health, literally..
