Popular animated gifs hosting service gfycat.com is shutting down on September 1, 2023 and all hosted content will no longer be accessible at that point.
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. "If you build it, he/they will come."
The places I used to hang out with PHPBB or similar forums never really had problems with bots. And I'm at least pretty sure they were popular places. Penny-Arcade, Something Awful, NewGrounds, eBaums World...
They also weren't a problem for small users either. Not only was there no incentive, they didn't necessarily get discovered by web crawlers. I remember wondering why my websites never showed up on search engines when I first started fucking around with webpages, web hosting, networks, etc. I hosted the server, I had a domain name, I was online and could access my site from other computers solely through the internet; but it never came up on Yahoo or Dogpile and I didn't know why. The first time I ever found my own site on a search engine, it was using a hosting site like Geocities. And that was after Google came out and I was getting archived versions of the first website I ever made.
Sadly public self hosting comes with a lot of legalities. And sure, I can hide behind cloudflare ( and I do) but that still puts all of my eggs into Cloudflare's basket
I expect adblockers will find a way around that. If nothing else, AdNauseam should work, as it tells the site that you clicked all of the ads it's blocking (making it much harder for them to build a profile on you).
I don't really understand AdNauseam. Can't they also not build a profile with a normal ad blocker, but you also completely avoid interacting with the trackers (so better for performance, data usage, etc)?
Yes and no. It's harder, but even with an adblocker, your internet signature (things like browser size, are you blocking ads, did you send a "do not track" header, etc) is enough to identify you in a lot of cases. AdNauseam goes the opposite direction, instead of hiding your data, it fills their data collection with so much garbage that they'll have a hard time figuring anything out about you. From what I understand, it doesn't actually load the ads, just sees where the ad points to, and tells the ad provider that you clicked it while at the same time blocking it. So it would be very slightly worse in terms of performance and data usage compared to uBlock Origin, but not in any noticeable way, since the stuff it sends is much smaller than any actual content.
There's just too damn much of it, and the people accessing it generally aren't stopping to be advertised to. That's a lot of storage and bandwidth costs with very little ability to make money back.
That and the desire to make money while being at the mercy of two card processors who set the rules. If you want MasterCard or Visa support then remove porn.
The best way to destroy the establishment is from within. The sleeper cells have been activated, ushering us into the new uncensorable decentralized era.