• HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • Howdy@lemmy.zip
    3·
    2 months ago

    ublock and pihole here. Pihole is usually blocking 20-30% of all DNS queries for my home network. Smart TVs are the worst offender.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    3·
    2 months ago

    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!”
    • cordlesslamp@lemmy.today
      2·
      2 months ago

      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].”

    • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • Gakomi@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      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!

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      That sounds neat, but it means those ads are at least partially loaded on the background, which is also bad

      • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Mossy Feathers (They/Them)@pawb.social
        1·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • null@slrpnk.net
        0·
        2 months ago

        You get tracked based on how you interact. This obfuscates that beyond just “I block all of them”.

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          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”.

      • Darorad@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        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

          • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            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.

  • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

      • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
        11·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • voxel@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          2 months ago

          vanced did not “rebrand” into revanced.
          revanced is a whole new thing build from the ground up

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • Gerowen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • plz1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
    0·
    2 months 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…

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
        1·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.