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.
Ads are out of control, they fill my day.
My home, my rules. Ads are not allowed on the devices i BOUGHT.
99% of the targeted ads i get tend to be targeted at someone who has a family and makes 3 times my wage, so you’re wasting business resources for your own gain and wasting my time by serving them to me.
So fuck off outta my house.
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.
Well, “dark traffic” sounds SCARY. You wouldn’t want to do anything scary, would you? Like, use the computer you paid for to control the content you want to see? /s
Goodput vs shitstream.
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?
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.
The tech community is pacified into not taking action against the polluters by our adblockers because we don’t see the egregious ads and so we don’t fight the good fight for the user.
Ad blockers are the fight. Those users who can’t be bothered to learn a bit about the devices they spend so much time on aren’t owed anything.
What does “fighting the good fight” even look like to you in this context, anyways?
those users who can’t be bothered to learn
snooty tech elitismWhat does “fighting the good fight” even look like to you in this context, anyways?
We built the entire infrastucture, we can poison it’s business model.When the first banner ad appeared on the web, the condemnation was not loud enough and it was allowed to fester.
At this points these entities have become large enough that the evil practice that could have been snuffed out, is now being accepted.
Now every slimey thing on the internet is due for the mother of all crackdowns. Something like the GDPR times 911.I’m not in the mood for centrist technocratic measured solution at the moment.
If it makes more than a million a year and it’s using any kind of psychological tactics,
that’s advertising, sponsored search, dark patterns, then BURN IT ALL DOWNThe tech community came up with a technical solution to the ad problem. If the solution you’re looking for isn’t technical, why is your focus on the tech community?
Anyone can learn this shit. Use any search engine, type “how to block internet ads”, and you’ll see results with “firefox” and “ublock origin”, that can then be put into “how to get” follow up searches.
The current state of ads is being accepted by those who don’t block them. Everyone who does block them (or refuses to visit ad cancer sites) has cut off that source of revenue, but those who just choose to accept the default option enable them by not just seeing the ads but even sometimes clicking them and buying shit.
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.
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.
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.
Clean traffic, smooth traffic, able-to-get-to-where-you’re-going traffic
Maybe we could turn it around: adblockers are tools that block ads and other kinds of dark traffic such as trackers and malicious scripts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Or just a protocol like Web Monetization where you put an amount of money you choose into a pot on your browser and it’s handed out to sites you visit based on how much time you spend on a given site, with options to denylist sites from payment as needed
Reminded me of Flattr😢 is it FOSS ?
Okay I checked out Gemini. I love the vibes, but the amount of dead links just in the quick start guide makes it hard for me to even try to get into it
How about this link ?
Gemini looks cool, but I wonder if Gemtext isn’t a bit too simple. I think the ideal format would be to go back to the idea of “hypertext”, without the CSS and Javascript.
25 years of adblockers and that is the single most important thing that keeps me from cutting myself off the web. I’ve donated money to adblockers and will continue to do so until I die! I send emails to the web sites that ask me to remove the blocker to tell them I will not and that there are many other sites that welcome my adblocking ass!
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?
It’s happened directly on Google before. Advertisers aren’t vetted except in specific industries. It could happen on any site, trusted or not.
but it’s icky to say its name 🥺🥺🥺
joking aside, I’d wager it’s reddit
I have said it before and I’ll say it again.
Adblockers are a critical part of any modern computer’s security suit, and everyone should use them.
I won’t even consider removing mine unless the owners of a site with ads take full responsibility for any dammage to my computer coming from visiting their site with out an adblocker.
This is due to the fact that ads can be hijacked and infect your computer with malware just by accessing the site.
I have also experienced my browser being hijacked by clicking a link that was compromized, it redirected my browser in a loop, then opened a javascript password popup box that took all focus from the browser window and refused to go away, while the page below displayed a message that I needed to call tech support.
It was very annoying to resolve, Firefox would by default restore any pages that was open in a tab if the browser crashed, and since the password prompt was stealing focus from the browser window, I had to kill it through the Task manager, which restored the page on start up…
I had to create a new profile, then it it solved it
I don’t know if anyone reading this will ever have this problem (if you got this far without installing an adblocker, this is your wake up call - go get one now), but ctrl+W is the shortcut to kill a tab and that should work regardless site focus or popups
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.
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.
Reminds me of the bill hicks quote on advertising.
The sentiment is influenced by many.
Agreed left unchecked it is horrible, one of the darkest pervasive elements of capitalism, used in a manipulative manner. We’ve reached astounding understanding of human psyche and are using that knowledge with advertising to control people’s subconscious. It’s disgusting.
US trade association News/Media Alliance announced it had secured the takedown of 12ft.io
Oh thats why that stopped working. Bunch of jerks.
GOOD. most people wouldn’t care about blocking ads if they werent so keen on shoving them down your throat ever harder.
An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.
More necessary than that, really.
That entirely depends on the quality of your water.
Tangentially related but britta filters actually suck as far as I know; they’re like the worst water filter for removing materials. Did a test myself with a fresh filter - 105 ppm tap to around 72 ppm vs 0 ppm for zero water pitchers and around 30ish for epic, it’s been a bit so the numbers are rough for the britta and epic but I test my tap and ZW pitcher routinely.
I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you’ve voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.
Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.
One could only dream my friend. One day we will all help and care for each other.
This is easily solved by not using 3rd parties and tracking data for ads. If the ad was just part of the page (similar to an ad in the newspaper) then ad blockers would not be able to detect them at all. A YouTuber saying “before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]” does not get blocked by ad blockers.
However, in order to do that websites would be responsible for the ads they display. If they don’t do their due diligence they won’t be able to pass it off as “we’re not responsible for it, it’s our ad company that put it there.” They don’t want to be responsible for the ads they show, but they want you to be responsible for the ads you don’t watch.
A YouTuber saying “before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]” does not get blocked by ad blockers.
Well, there’s sponsor block which uses crowd sourced timestamps to skip those segments, but yeah you’re right.
I personally feel no need to get sponser block because:
- The sponsership is not annoying as fuck.
- I can fast forward through it.
Everything the ads do to force you to pay attention it to (like not being able to fast forward) makes it easier for ad blockers to detect and block.
Everything the ads do to demand your attention (by being annoying as fuck) drives people to block them.
