They call it “dark traffic” - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.
Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.
The use of the term “Dark traffic” here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don’t use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms “clean traffic”, for ad-blocked website traffic, and “dogshit traffic” for everything else.
Maybe we could turn it around: adblockers are tools that block ads and other kinds of dark traffic such as trackers and malicious scripts.
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depending on your household’s browsing habits, it can be downright insane how much traffic goes through ones network (and the web at large), that is just nothing but dog shit.
I monitored my pihole at my place and my own traffic is usually no more than 15% garbage with about 750,000 domains blocked, but the second grandma or grandpa starts doomscrolling boomer things on their phones and ipads. I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them “what the fuck are you doing on your phone?”
also set up a Region exemption or whatever, blocking russian, chinese, and a whole bunch of other untrustworthy TLDs and im literally showing my grandmother the repeated attempts to communicate with something in fucking China in real time whilst she’s playing some solitare game she downloaded.
I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them “what the fuck are you doing on your phone?”
Be careful of the answer. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
rhetorical question, I know what she’s doing, clicking on random shit and then blaming other people for her problems.
every intrusive advertisement or popup. “I got hacked” every wrong website she goes to “this is a scam”
You shouldn’t say that to your Grandma or Grandpa. :)
both of them shield, coddle, and enable a 53 year old man who is an overt Nazi and purge/mass death obsessed eugenicist freak, (my uncle), a lot more needs to be said to them honestly.
They are so short sighted to. Ad blocker help advertizers. It allows sites to fill up sites with ads to the point of being unusable while not losing 100% of traffic. That keeps these site relevant enough that old people who don’t have ad blockers end up there too when they follow links or google ranks a site high because it has traffic.
If they got rid of all ad block somehow they would have to decrease the ads because I wouldn’t use the web. Or online communities would be way more conscious of the ad level of the things they link to.
Something simple that people would ask why you want it. Also needs to be non-aggressive. Like non-content traffic. Why would you want something that is not the content?
Clean traffic, smooth traffic, able-to-get-to-where-you’re-going traffic
Goodput vs shitstream.
The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.
Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That’s like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.
The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”
Lol. Fuck off.
Once the data enters my network it’s my fucking data and I can do with it what I please.
Likewise, I can prevent anything from even entering my network that I don’t want on it.
That’s more to the point!
Unless it’s intellectual property that belongs to the movie industry. Then you better not touch it. Or that’s illegal.
But if it’s advertisements, then you have to watch it, or that’s illegal.
Mildly pedantic, but uBlock blocks the connection before it enters your network
Yeah. As if hacking into someone’s mind is their right. Talk about entitlement…
What should be considered illegal circumvention is allowing articles behind a paywall to be included in search results.
And this is exactly why Google did away with Manifest v2 (what uBlock runs on) and why they wanted to introduce their “web integrity” standard. At that point the pages would be signed with ads and in the signature didn’t match the page wouldn’t even be shown.
They tried to play it off as “ensuring that you truly get the correct copy of the page and no bad hackers have intercepted it” but really it would have 100% forced ads.
To think that Google once had ads that I considered OK, just a bunch of text and links. How times have changed…
Advertisers will always keep pushing things trying to find the limit where people will just barely tolerate it. Then when they push it too far they cry “no fair!” When people stop putting up with it.
Then I guess I’m not looking at those pages. No skin off my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of other ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.
Then I guess I’m not looking at those pages. No skin of my nose.
That works until every website starts doing it.
:shrug: So be it.
Exactly. I’ll go back to browsing the web with Lynx before I accept ads. If it breaks, it breaks…
Gladly go back to every site having an animated ‘under construction’ gif.
I use Mullvad’s VPN and DNS on a router level. Every device on my network is blanketed by it. Some services don’t work, but I am willing to sacrifice their profits for my integrity. Thus, to them I say 然らば fuckmothers.
The O.G. add blocker.
The concept is close to the same, how could something like this be seen as “illegal circumvention technology”?
It just shows us how disconnected the people in these positions can be that are regulating these things.
Fuckers want to colonize my property (my computer). that’s what’s illegal!
They wont be happy until eye tracking technology makes sure we sit and watch their fucking ads before the actual content appears.
I mean, none of this is getting better. Its only going to become worse. I have ads in the fucking pause screen on my streaming tv app. So if I want to take a toilet break, I get an ad in my face. Its just so ridiculous.
What most of these people don’t get is if they didn’t get so invasive with those ads, people would not have to resort to ad blockers. Be it tho shut up the ads every few seconds on YouTube or having to play whack-a-mole every time I read an article, eventually you run out of patience and say “enough!”
Say here’s a thought: can we sue ad companies for theft of electricity? They’re using my electricity to display their ads, without my consent.
Not to mention my internet fees.
Lol they will even say blocking phishing links are unethical
That was for 12ft.io Bypassing a pay wall. Not blocking ads.
They can still fuck off.
I actually agree with that but the only other solution is subject yourself to deeply concerning levels of surveillance, not to mention surveillance pricing.
I use AdNauseum and they have a toggle for privacy-conscious ads and I leave that on. That’s my best compromise.
Toggles like that are available in other adblockers too and they pose a problem. They ad a ransom to showing you ads. You don’t want the ads but if the advertisers pay the adblocker company they get whitelisted and you see the ads anyway.
Never use those toggles.
They ad a random to showing you ads
hhwat
sorry, fixed.
Do you have some evidence of this?
Okay, I’m assuming that you are asking for evidence of the paying of adblockers to allow some ads through, and not for evidence that he fixed the typo he thought you were actually posting about?
Do a quick search for why we all now use ublock origin rather than ublock plus, and then for why we were using ublock plus rather than ublock, and then for why we were using ublock instead of adblock. There might be some adblock plus in the middle of that somewhere as well.
All ad networks, even the less intrusive ones, can be abused to distribute malware. In this day and age not having an ad blocker is like rawdogging internet strangers.
You could say the same thing about the webpage itself.
I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn’t good enough for the advertisers. They weren’t happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That’s when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.
Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.
Advertisers couldn’t just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don’t even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.
Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can’t even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.
the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads
Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit
But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post
Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).
The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened
The turning point for me is when banner ads added sounds. I would tolerate and ignore the flashing lights and the fake “games”, but then I encountered one that any time my mouse went over top of it an emoji screamed “HELOOOOOOOOO!!!” at me and I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.
It’s never enough for these assholes unless they have all of your attention all of the time.
The main clencher that got me running a blocker were the few sites whose payload was 90% ad related and as long as the page was open it kept feeding me more ads until a gigabyte of RAM and 5% of my CPU were dedicated to something I wasn’t even looking at.
Ex was mad that my PiHole was blocking some FB stuff so I turned it off.
“The internet’s slow.”
Looked over her shoulder and pointed to her (still loading) screen:
“Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad…”
“FINE! Turn it back on!”
Don’t date stupid people. Incentivize intelligence.
I know surgeons who can’t start a zoom call. Being uneducated in a particular area is not stupidity. If you avoid dating someone over their lack of adtech knowledge, I would assume they are the one that dodged a bullet.
adtech is nothing new or exotic. We have been dealing with this shit for years. if they still do not have a very basic knowledge of it by now, that’s not a great sign.
Unix and lawnmowers are nothing new or exotic either. I’m not stupid for not knowing how to repair a lawnmower, and I wouldn’t presume you’re stupid just because I can run circles around you at the command line.
I would, however, question your intelligence if you lack the ability to perceive the reasons behind different people knowing different things. It’s not that complicated.
Oh I’m fully aware people can specialize their intelligence, focusing so much on some areas they neglect others and fall behind. However, that’s also a choice they made. That unbalanced tech tree was their own doing.
Ads used to be static text in the sidebar that the site owner manually put there. They didn’t have any tracking and didn’t slow down the loading time. Once they started adding images, I started using an ad blocker. I was stuck on dial-up until 2008 and a single, small image could add 10 or more seconds to the page loading time.
2008! Bro I feel for you, retrospectively.
I was even okay with images. It’s when the images started moving, making it difficult and distracting to read text that I realized if they are willing to sacrifice the core purpose of the page for ads, it’s only going to get worse.
Remember the target that would move back and forth really quickly to try to get you to click it?
Dont forget the ads that are straight scams or malware
Preach!!!
An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.
Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.
“We paid for the right to show you this!”
You paid for the opportunity not the right, but you didn’t pay me, motherfucker – and my price is everything you have or fuck off and die.
Edit: You know what? This is how I really feel about ads.
This is a consent issue, and I will not allow advertisers inside me. They hire psychologists in order to exploit humans’ most vulnerable mental blind spots. They don’t just brainwash us. They mindfuck the entire human species, and they do not recognize consent. We need to treat advertising as the collective mindr*pe that it is, otherwise they will never stop exploiting us, and we will never be able to build a bright future for humanity and this world. They are manipulating the trajectory of an entire species with zero regard to any future well-being. The butterfly effects are inconceivable. Our minds are sacred. The advertising industry is committing a crime against humanity that we have failed to recognize as such, because money is all that matters today. They must be stopped before Big Tech perfects brain-computer interfaces.
I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.
We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.
He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).
Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.
What we have now isn’t that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
100% this and also, consider allow-listing specific sites which deserve your support, or better yet, contribute directly if you can – e.g. your local bike club forum, your local newspaper, a blogger whose work you enjoy, etc., assuming of course, the ads are reasonable.
Guilty? Hahahahahaha
They will never make me feel guilty because they are the guilty ones. Guilty of greed and of destroying our society. Fuck big advetisers. They would put billboards in outre space if they thought it would make them a tenth of a penny more in profit.
I dont even consider them human to be honest.
If ad networks weren’t the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn’t slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn’t be such an issue.
If your site can’t exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.
Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.
Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
It would have to be millenials since Gen z exist almost entirely in the walled garden of a phone app.
Most people now a days don’t even use a desktop with a browser. I honestly expect that most of what they are “seeing” is just web scrapers for the LLM. Those are likely to “block” ads simply based on efficiency, since it shows down crawling.
Why would anyone use a desktop? That’s like a baby’s toy!
It honestly creeps me out that so many people don’t curate what they watch and just consume whatever ‘their feed’ puts in front of them.
Shrinkage does not mean industry death but I think we all know that.
Bottom line: if I’m forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!
Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much
Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks
@DarkSideOfTheMoon @1984 and all this additional JavaScript and Elements and makes the side’s just horrible slow. Compare this with CSS+HTML only sides omg how good they can feel … I also prefer nowadays text mode browsers again, cause a good readable font + focus on what is important … the content itself. I really get pissed if websites with public content can’t be run anymore without javascript (wtf is up with you guys ?) …
And the button to close it is usually tiny and mapped poorly. Which is in and of itself shitty.
What’s frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don’t have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead “☝️🤓 actually you don’t own it.” Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that’s my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.
A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company’s fault.
The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it’s the same thing.
Advertisers and websites have created the “dark traffic” mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.
Name and shame. Who’s the link aggregator?
but it’s icky to say its name 🥺🥺🥺
joking aside, I’d wager it’s reddit
It’s happened directly on Google before. Advertisers aren’t vetted except in specific industries. It could happen on any site, trusted or not.
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.
Reminds me of the bill hicks quote on advertising.
The sentiment is influenced by many.
While I definitely agree that most advertising these days is terrible, I do wonder how it should be done. How would you market a product you made? I genuinely want to know what you find acceptable.
Say that you invent a new type of ladder that is much more stable than normal ones, or maybe you start 3D printing a very cool figurine that you’ve designed. In either case, you realize you have a product that some people will probably want to buy, if only they knew about it.
You probably won’t go to an ad network, I wouldn’t. But do you make a post about it on Lemmy? That’s advertising. Do you tell your friends about it? Most of them probably don’t need a ladder, but maybe a couple would buy your figurine, though that is unlikely to be enough to kickstart your 3D design company.
I’m sorry to tell you but smoking is completely socially accepted.
The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you’ll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don’t fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
There was a time in the 90’s where ads were mostly banners, and that was fine; google’s text-only ads were completely acceptable.
But that didn’t last long - it went downhill with the proliferation of popups, especially the nefarious kind which created even more popups or tried to stop the user from closing them, and usage of dialog boxes.
And whoever was the first person to add sound to an ad, i wish you and your entire family tree that your genitalia translocate to your forehead.
Ads in the 90’s and 00’s would just layer toolbars onto your browser. Is still have a a nervous twitch when I see a thick toolbars or animated cursors.
The toolbars came from scam software on the '90s. Ads being able to install things came well into the '00s.
yeah, there was quite a long time where useful software was bundled with toolbars or, the worse option, malware that hijacked your browser, which was a pain in the ass to remove. I was the techie in the family, and i got pretty good with tools like hijackthis and knowing by heart what services and background programs should start on a standard win98 or xp installation. (in this time i also was THE guy to ask at my job when issues with 56k modems came up, diagnosing a lot of issues by listening to the dial-up tones)
the shocking sound stunts were fun to spring on people. well, for a couple days. recall ads referred to as ‘death of the internet’. adblock to the rescue.
Congratulations, you won
Ads don’t fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
I believe this to be true.
Ads today are less malicious
I disagree, ads today are way more malicious than they used to be, ads are the biggest vector for malware today, they are used to stalk users to an insane level and most ads are porn, gambling, drugs or fascist propaganda.
At least back in the day you would only get sketchy ads on sketchy websites.
My view is that if we can’t have the things we want without ads, then we need a new business model. I’m not super into the whole kindness and donations model. If we need it to be state funded, so be it.
The insidious ads are still there.
You store your credit card in your computer? If browser credit card management isn’t secure enough to avoid that attack you shouldn’t be using it.
