u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org) @lemmy.sdf.org

2y ago

Average website visit in 2024

184 comments

Every big web site in 2024 looks like the sites people warned you not to visit in the 90s
- Don't invent the torment nexus.
  
  Good news! We've invented the torment nexus

Captcha buster is taking care of the captchas now at least. A robot that proves I'm not a robot. Is this the singularity yet?
- No, but it's definitely a boring dystopia.
- Singularity was more than 70 years ago.
  
  Go on.
- What’s this?

In europe we have a "reject all" button for cookies and it's fantastic
- Except on news websites that only give you the choice between "subscribe for X€" and "read for free (accept all)". So annoying. Still no idea why that's legal.
  
  That's not at all legal under GDPR. Nor is having deny all be harder than accept. As is tradition however companies don't give half a shit until fines start happening.
  
  Because newspapers are not forced to give out their news for free. But they have to give you an alternative to selling your data; taking money from you in this case.
  
  Still no idea why that's legal.
  It is not
- We also have this glorious extension which just fucks them all off:
  https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
  
  Use I STILL don't care about cookies. That one is owned by Avast nowadays and accepts all cookies which is clearly not what people want.
  
  To my understanding, by using this you accept (all) the cookies... I would like a extension that tries to minimize cookie exposure!
  
  IIRC that add-on was bought by Avast and the new add-on is 'I still don't care about cookies'
  
  Or you can enable "Annoyances" filters in uBlock Origin for the same effect
- No, we don't. I had to do this manually, more than once.
- Yep, you can "reject all" if you're lucky. Then you just have to go through the list anyway and untick all "legitimate interest" to spy on you.
- Since I started using a VPN, I've started seeing that option more. Even still, lots of sites aren't compliant.
- See I want to be able to set that once, in my browser, and then have all of these things fuck off.

There is no such thing as an unintrusive advertisement.
- I didn't mind the static ones (within reason), websites need to pay their rent. And not everything can sell something.
  But even those have tracking and gross injection code now.
  
  Even emails have tracking pixels at this point. Like, I route all of my email through a client that blocks all outside media without asking lol
- In the long ago if a site needed advertising it was a small banner at the top of the page, and often hosted by the site itself with gasp an actual relationship with the advertisers or sponsors.

All that just to find that the page doesn’t have the info you needed anyway.
- But made its best to make you stay on the page over the 12 second watermark or some SEO bullshit.
  
  I hate when I look up som simple info for a game and you get to a page that just has all this generated text telling you how you want to know that simple info and how they are going to tell you that simple info on that site and how this game makes you do that simple thing and some background about what that game is
- That's okay, we can just use the cached version, right? Right???

Internet in 2024 (for me):
Service unavailable in your country (VPN)
Confirm you're a human (VPN)
Blank page (noscript)
Obscure error (fingerprint / cookie blocking)
Page not found (https required)
The percentage of websites that "just work" with privacy measures in place is depressingly small.
- you have to put in extra work just to make your website not work with privacy measures. like you have to put in the work to use some bloated javascript framework that doesn't work with noscript instead of just sticking with plain html and css, which would work. on top of that, i've encountered way too many big websites that don't even have a noscript tag so all you see is a ghost layout or a blank page.
  
  That's something I would disagree with though. "Sticking with plain HTML and CSS" is way more work, and often has significantly less functionality, than building a website with a framework.
  
  I don't mind frameworks, but some features that seem super useful to devs, like google analytics, and various diagnostic/logging tools, social media integrations, I would prefer to "opt in" when I decide they are necessary.
- honest question, what is the point of having noscript on at all times?
  
  Not the person you're asking and I'm running uMatrix instead of noscript to block scripts. But I do it to get more granular control over what my browser loads and runs. Why run scripts if a website works perfectly fine without them? These days I ain't trusting shit out there on the web.
  
  Tldr: I prefer to opt-in.
  Technically it's uBO, but I use the extreme setting that blocks all scripts by default. Truthfully I wasn't aware just how many scripts get loaded especially on ecommerce and social media sites, there are too many heavy frameworks being used. Much of it is unnecessary bloat, slowing down my browser, and no small amount of it is devoted to tracking and data collection.
  In general, I find less than half of loaded scripts are required to make a page functional. It's a process requiring trial-and-error, but I have a good set of base rules in place for trusted sites and scripts.
  For me, it's about not giving websites free reign over my browser and by extension my computer and personal data, but having some measure of control over them.
  And occasionally there are suspicious sites where I truly don't want any scripts to run. I don't even have to worry about them.
- Are there even some left? Good old text+image-websites with pure information. Ahh the good old times.
  But why #5? What do have against https?
  
  I require https, but not every website is secure, and sometimes the certificate has a problem or is expired.

How is this a shitpost? It's just true.
- To be fair I havent gotten one of those types of captchas in a while. And now there's typically a reject all non essential cookies button somewhere.
  Edit: I will clarify. It's not that I don't get captchas, it's that I don't get the "which picture in the grid contains..." captchas. I keep getting some stupid puzzle piece captcha. Idk.
  
  The thing your missing is, when you click only allow non essential, that means it's still 700 companies tracking you because of the great term "legitimate interest". That's the one you need to deactivate and this usually one by one as shown in this post.
  So yeah, you're essentially allowing all the stuff the way you're doing it
  
  You will often get these captchas if you use a popular VPN.
  
  Might be because you trained yourself to avoid those sites that need them. I stopped using some SaaS because logging in was just too hard.
  
  It's VPN's that'll trigger the captchas. I never get them unless I forget to turn my VPN off after "hanging out with my peers", and then a BUNCH of sites will captcha me

Most of all, I was sick of the captcha from cloudflare.
On some sites, there was endless checking and it was impossible to view the content of the site.
- They think u a bot
- Yeah, too many sites I’ve done 3+ captchas and still won’t let me in, and not even the ones where 1 cell has either a shadow or a sliver of a bike tire. And reports that bots are now better at passing these than people. I won’t use a site with a pick-the-squares captcha anymore.
  Click a slider is the most I’ll do. If anyone needs me I’ll be over here hanging out with the bots that are too shitty to pass a captcha.
- I had to disable user agents or else I could simply not look at any website "protected" by cloudflare

The cookies being pre selected is illegal in the EU. Although I've seen sites that don't care and still enable them by default
- The ones I've seen disable the 'consent' bits by default, but then there's 'vendor preferences' where 'legitimate interest' is automatically ON in 58 places (I'm not exaggerating; I have counted it) and you have to manually off all of them.
  When you click the question mark at 'legitimate interest', all it says is some vendors are not asking for your consent to use your data but collect it based on their legitimate interest.
  It's infinitely vague and it has the vibe of 'I'm not going to ask for it, I will just take it and I will use it for whatever I want anyway'.
- Here in Spain they started making the option to either subscribe.... Or accept the ads/tracking.....
  
  Same in germany. That makes the whole thing even more useless, as everyone just is a subscription-based shit now....
  
  Just use reader mode, it bypasses all that shit.
  
  Italy too.
  
  Same with a lot of news outlets in Germany. Although it's not that difficult for me to use only sites that allow disallowing every cookie or just bypass the cookie popup

We're going to move very quickly to a DRM supported web model. There won't be captchas, but you will require a locked down device (with no ad blocker) to access the content
- That's why everything is an App now, and every website tells you "it's better in the app". In the app they have full controll over your device and can access much more data points, while the website is controlled on the users site and might have AdBlockers and other security features enabled, potentially hurting their ad revenue and data they can sell. From a developers perspective it's a nightmare to develop and maintain website, android and Mac os app side by side. Just having one good responsive website is cheaper, easier to maintain and gives you less headache with app store restrictions, reviews, device incompatibility etc.
  
  It definitely doesn't take care of everything, but there are apps that run all the internet traffic on your phone through an adblocker. Most of the ones on Android setup a local VPN (a VPN running on the same device that's connecting to it) and run their adblocker through that.
- Hear me out: part of me welcomes that.
  Currently, most websites are awful to browse, and a few are not. If we switch to a world where most are inaccessible to me, and a few are nice, then I'll spend less time being frustrated by cookie popups and the like.
  Like, if a site's going to be terrible, I almost prefer it just not let me in at all.
  As an example, I used to click the occasional Twitter link. Now that I can't see comments, I refuse, and life is a bit improved.
  
  I tried to read comments on a TwiXXer link the other day and was unsuccessful. I thought I was just misclicking or something. You're telling me it's on purpose?
  That's stupid as fuck.
  
  I'm with you. I've started using firefox with no extensions, not even ad-blocker. Whenever I am annoyed by a website autoplaying sound in a popup or asking me to sign up for their newsletter or whatever, I look at the URL and think: this website is dead to me now.
- F U C K. T H A T
- I think this might be why my parents got 'left behind' by technology. It's not that they couldn't figure out how to use new stuff but that the last generation of it was shit enough for them to turn their back on technology as a whole. Once you've missed a chapter or two it's hard to get back into the story. I can see myself going the same way tbh!
  
  The more I have to deal with ads, cookies, ads, authentication, ads, data harvesting, ads, password hell, ads, free news article limits, and let's not forget ads, the more I want to go live in a cabin in the woods.
  Of course, those are hardly affordable anymore.
- Yeah I see that, too. I'm looking forward to having to have a whole physical computer dedicated for the sole purpose of browsing the Shit Web™ because online services requires a specific browser and OS profile. Not. But the good thing about all that nullshit is that more and more alternatives will come along from people like us who are fed up. So that dedicated computer might not have to be used all that much.
- It's not worth it if I no longer control my own hardware

I use the addon ‘consent o-matic’ it automatically rejects all the cookies and it almost always works. Great addon to add to your (Firefox) browser.
- Omg thank you i always only find addons that auto accept cookies but non that auto reject... Finally i can rest
- Ghostery does this too if you've already got that
  
  I use "I don't care about cookies" but it's detected and blocked by cnn. Does ghostery work?
  Basically we are going to need more and more addon's and functionality to mitigate this shit. Ignore all cookies, delete all cookies. Basically code for many specific websites to make them usable again.

I encountered the mother of all captchas the other day: it had me picking a three-dimensional room diagram among six of them, matching it to a 2d top-down view of the room. It was way more time consuming than a typical captcha, and I had to do the same task five or six times.
I think we'll see harder and harder captchas as AI models get better and better. Eventually it won't be a realistic option since it just costs humans time and the convenience of whatever service they're trying to use.
- I'd wager AI models have an easier time solving those captchas than humans.
  I'd also wager captchas' only real purpose is to train AI models
- Aka "How badly do you want to use this website?"
- In 2 years that shit’s gonna be differential calculus, or a riddle.

quality meme, shitty reality

Hey, you know the captchas with the little box of warped letters/numbers you're supposed to look at and type it correctly?
Is anyone else, uh, terrible at those? I've literally given up on visiting websites before because I couldn't get the stupid thing right after a dozen tries. Wtf.
- Out of curiosity, would you prefer spending time with a puppy, a flower or a large properly-formatted data file?
  
  I am allergic to most flowers, and I don't want to clean up after a puppy. Give me cats or the large properly-formatted data file.
- Amazon's are legitimately tough.
  I had to resort to using the audio version the other day.
- squints eyes
  ... Are you a robot?
  /j
- Can you and the other robots hurry up and overthrow humanity already? Things are going to shit and I'm tired of waiting.

I just visited a site and selected the option to reject cookies. After doing this, the dialogue box would not go away, while a loading screen appeared. It was loading my new cookie preferences. This loading screen got stuck at 80% and hung there for almost a full minute.
- It's a specific company that creates a cookie consent manager that way, and a lot of websites use it. The progress bar is entirely faked; you're being made to wait for nothing.
  
  I have an extension called "ffck overlays" for situations like that. It can be hit-or-miss, but it works a decent amount of the time.
  Firefox: https://github.com/mashedkeyboard/ffckoverlays
  It was inspired by a similar extension made for Chrome called "F*ck Overlays".
  Chromium browsers (for those who haven't left Chromium behind yet): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fck-overlays/ppedokobpbdajgiejhnjfbdjlgobcpkp

We need to develop more alternatives like federated social media or even completely make web services p2p. And then have them somewhat democratically controlled, or easily able to migrate to alternatives without cost of loosing network effects.
Especially something like amazon / ebay / paypal / ali would be awesome to replace with a "public utility" federated version. They tax so much of the sales and it all goes to psycho billionaires.
- I2P is a "peer-to-peer" internet, so to speak. Not much going on there, but it exists. If you're old enough, think of it as a separate internet that exists in a Kazaa/eMule-esque network.
  
  Oh I still mourn eMule haha. I always thought it was better than torrent, but torrent won for some reason - presumably because it needed more websites and servers to function and that created a market and a marketing gain. I guess I should check out I2P.

Website any% speedrun (no glitch)

Real reason why people just stay on the same four big-data-harvesting sites now.

Disable JavaScript and reload
- Please enable JavaScript to visit our site.
  
  Leave site and never return.

For the motorcycles and bikes... Are we supposed to add the squares with the humans riding it? Are they part of the system?
Which gives me the fewest goddamn captchas?
- Pretty sure the minimum number of captchas is at least somewhat random
  
  It feels like I have to get 5 in a row and one mistake resets the counter. I've been stuck for minutes on end trying to get into a damn website I had to log on to. Whatever happened to that Cloudflare alternative that wouldn't bug the user?

Is there such a thing as an ad sequesterer? Not necessarily blocking it, but just shoving it in some other window I can’t see, and then letting it play through. Then YouTube gets its ad played, and I don’t have to see it—win/win.
- https://adnauseam.io/
  You're looking for something like this. It still blocks the ad from your view but in the background it still loads/plays the ad, and sometimes even clicks it to spend their precious ad budget.
  
  I hope it doesn't click it on my computer. I wouldn't trust an ad not to try to download a virus even on a legitimate site like YouTube.

There are some sites so extremely annoying that I just get a mirror from archive.org or archive.is. I'm doing this with some news sites that will only allow me to browse them if I accept their cookies.
- Recently I started to use reader mode a lot, it tends to work in many cases for this purpose.

ever wonder why AI is so “good”? please identify all images which are ____. the captcha system may not know what the image is, but after thousands of responses, it has a pretty good idea of where it is, and what it is (since most users will answer correctly to prove they are human).

I just hate the ones that block you for using Linux. User agent spoofers work but they'll figure out how to block those too someday.

It's the cookie toggles pop up that annoys tf out of me. There's no reason for every site to need to ask you over and over and over about it. The browser should be taking care of that.
- Consent-o-matic extension, rejects stuff automatically in most sites, it's a must for me

I know the hate for it abounds, but this is why I'll often just try to look stuff up in a chat box with an AI, browsing has become exhausting.

you guys can actually solve the captchas?
- Actually i never help google to work for free. Answer X-1 fields correctly and one totally not. Gotta do it twice at least, but be consistent. For one captcha they know the answer, for one they don't. You're working by helping them identifying objects in that one. Don't 😈
  
  Damn. Do they state this in their TOS? That you're contributing to their training?
- The first one I ever saw was put animals in the direction of an arrow. It wasnt always clear if they are supposed to be in that direction now and when you took too much time you had to do it again

All I see is a cross in the upper right corner.

the ones that put you on there mainpage if you don't accept cookies or use addblocker are the worst.

https://consentomatic.au.dk/

Oh thank god this is gaining traction because I've been having these issues for the last years more and more.

At least we have 1000/1000 fiber connections
- *cries in 25/1.5mb dsl

This is a real mess, i do this all day long, and in the images website if you see just a little bit of a image in one square you click it or not... Grrrrr 🤬

Using a pihole. Is there any way to circumvent the "Ad blocker detected" Prompt that denies access to view site?
- I usually connect to VPN in the browser. Firefox has some extensions (including ProtonVPN), Opera has something built-in (but it's ultra slow in free tier).
- Just use ublock origin.
  If you use only a pihole there should not popup any adblocker detected messages since you don't use one.
  Edit: ok it seems certain websites do check if their ads get actually loaded. I recommend not using those sites or use ublock origin to block the anti adblock popup. And as far I can tell this is illegal in the EU. So I don't encounter this issues.
  
  They most certainly do unfortunately, I speak from experience. Haven't delved into the specifics, but I suspect some websites check if a piece of JavaScript or other resource was loaded, if not a 'you are using an adblocker' message is shown. It is annoying, but as I can live without these websites they go onto my personal blacklist and I move on with my life. They need us harder than we do them.
  
  This is the right answer. Most webpage servers, if they're set up to detect adblock, only detect at the client level on the browser. They don't check to see if their traffic is being routed through a pihole.

How do I make Lemmy not show me animated thumbnails?
I don't need my home page to be a GeoCities-esque pile of flashing puke.
- Yeah probably not great for photosensitive viewers

For ads problem ublock origins / Adguard / Blokada / PiHole does job done especially if you add HAGEZI Ultimate filters on it if you want clean webpage
For captcha problem i think theres script that can you inject to bypass it (i forgot the name of that script)

I mean, my browser just deletes all the site datas as soon as it closes, so this isn't really a problem.

Stop giving me ptsd

184 comments