Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users

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.
- 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.
  
  Then I guess I'm not looking at those pages. No skin of my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.
  
  To think that Google once had ads that I considered OK, just a bunch of text and links. How times have changed...
- 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!"
- Lol they will even say blocking phishing links are unethical
- 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.
  
  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.
- That was for 12ft.io Bypassing a pay wall. Not blocking ads.

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!"
- 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?
- Preach!!!
- Dont forget the ads that are straight scams or malware

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
- Cool quote, where did you get it from?
  
  From Banksy's 2004 book Cut It Out. Banksy, in turn, 'got' it (in its original form) from Sean Tejaratchi's 1999 essay in his Crap Hound zine. 😅
  
  From banksy's limited run "Cut it out" book apparently. Yours for only £310

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.
- 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.
- 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?
- Goodput vs shitstream.

Obligatory xkcd 624:
- GitHer
  
  I can clone her...
- Step 4 - success - Attention aquired. 😅

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.
- 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.
- 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.

Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception
- For a few years, even the FBI officially recommended that everyone should use an adblocker. They recently removed that PSA from their website, I believe with the new administration:
  https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/
  https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-blocker-to-dodge-scammers
- No ~~glove~~ block, no ~~love~~ browse
- And just like STDs, those malware-laden ads can infect your whole system before you even relaise what happened.
- Perfection!

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.

Almost 70. Spent way too many years watching cable shit tv. I hate ads. I fucking hate ads with a nuclear passion. I have ad blockers, pirated shit and some services that do not show ads so far. If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.
- a nuclear passion. I like that. surprised I never came across this phrase before lol
- "Son, are those ads in my house!?"
  dad, please, it's only a little marketing!
  "NO SON OF MINE! GET MY BELT!"
  dad, no!
  "What's our DNS address!?"
  dad, I don't kno-
  "Count the licks, boy! I'll teach you the hard way!"
  
  Wow. That is pretty violent. I do not envy your son.
  
  Jesus. How are you going to get to 8.8.8.8 belt licks?
  (and please, for the love of god, don't use 8.8.8.8!)
- Wow that sounds really tough. You know, when I was dealing with similar stress, a friend told me to ask my doctor about Lexapro. Lexapro is a once daily anti-depressant which can help treat anxiety! I got my life back thanks to Lexapro. Ask your doctor about Lexapro
  
  Meow?

They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not "dark traffic", the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren't "brutal", the people without blockers are being brutalized.
- "dark" as in "not visible". Adblock users can't be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. "Dark", in this instance, is not a derogatory term.
  "Brutal" is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.
  
  The way you word things matters. How many polls have shown the difference in opinion on 'obamacare' compared to 'affordable care act?'

Ad BwOcKeRs ArE StEaLiNg FwOm Us!!!!
Meanwhile Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a billion AI web crawlers can hammer the fuck out of of your site and nobody cares.
- The larger problem that is not discussed so much is the amount of Ai generated garbage that is put on the web now.
  When these Ai web crawlers start to read that Ai garbage as source data, the models will start to become worse and worse, and as a result, our Ai clients will start to get worse and worse.
  I dont think there is a way for the crawlers to understand what is Ai generated fluff and crap. The reasons the Ai responses are so good now is because people actually posted these solutions on the web. What happens when Ai crap overflows the web so much that good answers are drowned out?
  Also, no ads in chat gpt yet. Thats going to change and it will become impossible to block those.
  
  the web will die.

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!

Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone's time.
- It's an interesting stance, but ask yourself, where is the line between advertising and promotion or sponsorship.
  I think that requiring that advertising is factual might be a better way to address the issue.
  Ultimately as a society we haven't come up with a better way to communicate the existence of products and services to each other, and we've been using advertising for 5,000 years or so.
  https://tripandtravelblog.com/the-oldest-advertisement-in-the-world-found-in-thebes-egypt-did-you-know-that/
  
  Here's how you make people aware of your products.
  You sell a quality product for a reasonable price.
  That's it.
  Instead, capitolism has become this game of cat and mouse where the consumers ALWAYS lose. Just a game of shrinking product sizes, reducing quality, and raising prices. Little by little.
  It's most obvious when you haven't had a product in a while, maybe years, and you grab it again. Only to realize they've gone through several iterations of enshitification.
  When I was a kid, Andy Capps Cheese Fries used to be about as long as my pinky, and they were thick. Now it's like the length of my pinky until my second knockle, and it's like the same thickness as a pretzle stick. Sure, it's technically the same product, but everytime I buy them I realize why I was disappointed the last time I bought them. And I won't buy them for another 5 years. Maybe by then they'll be the length of my pinky nail and as thick as a sewing pin, but cost 8 dollars instead of the 25 cents it was when I was a kid.
  They did a durability test on hammers. In one side was an old rusty hammer. It had a date of 1931 on it. In the other was a brand new hammer bought that same day from Home Depot.
  The new hammer crumbled long before the 1931 hammer did. This test was done in 2017.
  But I never buy products because they advertise. I buy them because I remember how good it was the last time.
  Except now, you're advertising BAD memories. Because when I go in expecting this much, with this quality, and instead I get a fraction of it, with only a fraction of the quality.....congradulations. You saved money on production costs. You also pushed your customer away from being a repeat customer.
  All this business schools, and all the data they have I'm sure shows that their way is better. So explain to me why it seems businesses these days struggle to make the line go up, but when I was a kid business was booming?
  
  Marketing is society's cancer.
  When a company has a good product/idea, they grow organically. If I'm looking for something, it should be enough to have information available through manufacturers websites and customer opinions, there is ZERO need to shove ads down people's throats, which usually translates onto overconsumption and buying the best marketed (not the optimal) product.
  So yeah, fuck marketing in general, big corporations greed and their entitlement to control the web.
- Like "back in the day" on TV: turning the volume of the ads up to be louder than the program you are watching; bells, horns, alarms; extremely misleading ads (people doing things absolutely stupidly, but suddenly better with product)... Loud and abusive scams is too much of it!
- Unfortunately I don't think you can just make it illegal. People/companies would still do it, just covertly. Then you end up in a situation where adverts are not marked as such and that's probably even worse than the current situation, where ads at least identify themselves as ads.
- Yeah no, I have seen multiple businesses closing down due to poor marketing promotion/budget.
  And then we all complain that we didn't know about a certain product/service because they didn't market it good enough (we have seen it a lot of times with movies for example, then they turn into obscure classics with the pass of time, but not really profitable), also some games that didn't really made themselves known while in critical selling weeks?
  Who is gonna be the brave soul to release a game when GTA VI appears? That would be marketing suicide, no matter how good your game is.
  
  I have seen multiple businesses closing down due to poor marketing promotion/budget.
  Only because they were competing against businesses with possibly shittier products but certainly better marketing. Remove all the marketing, good and bad, and suddenly it's a real merit-based competition.
  It is very idealist, but IMO worth considering. There can (or at least should) be less intrusive means of letting people know of a product.

Proud to be part of a growing tradition.

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
  
  Unless the lovely javascript detects that you're trying to close the tab and hijacks that to ask you if you are sure you want to ~~forcefully tell them to fuck off and die~~ leave the page. It's only one extra click, sure, but I remember some from the old days that wouldn't let you close shit. Ugh, thank god for better modern standards and adblockers.

I feel like one thing doesn't get talked about enough is that websites feel the need to implement ad services that want to track the user in order to serve ads. Which I just find weird, the expectation to give up ones privacy, just to get served an ad.
Instead, the ads should just be relevant to the content of the page where an ad is embedded, which would automatically make it relevant to the reader, without tracking them.
- Ad companies are getting butt-hurt because the pages you are referencing are being seen even less, due to AI scraping by search engines. So now they are going after:
  The consumer using an ad blocker. Last amount of protections/rights, easiest target to vilify.
  The search engines, for stealing content views where ads would be placed
  The publishers for allowing users that use ad blockers.
- I'm sorry for being a broken record in this thread but holy crap yes! Right now you can embed a static ad in a web page relevant to the page's content and adblockers will not block it!

“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”
"It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent."
They act like we don't know what we are doing and want the ads. People who block ads in browsers like ddg and brave choose those browsers for that reason.
- Yeah, but bad ad choices cause people who would otherwise be fine with ads that fund content to block. Some will never go away, in the same way some will always pirate, but the ad landscape has become like the streaming landscape and pushed people towards these choices
  
  Absolutely. Too bad that even unobtrusive ads still can't be trusted not to have trackers.
- Without user consent? That’s exactly the opposite

gasp you mean to tell me you DON'T like 20 million videos playing over the top of the recipe that you're trying to read while trying not to burn dinner? unbelievable.
smh these motherfuckers are so brazen
- Speaking of cooking and not wanting to see 20 videos playing over the recipe:
  https://based.cooking/
  No ad blockers needed
  
  Looks like it hasn't been updated in a few years, but its open source so you could just fork the repo and add more. There are also quite a few forks already.

The ad industry is an abusive ex that complains when you defend yourself.
- They're not ex. They're serial rapist.

It's not about blocking ads for me, that's a happy side-effect, it's about owning your computing and taking the necessary protection against tracking. Before "ad blockers" existed I spent a lot of time manually configuring my browser to block websites from connecting me to unnecessary, potentially intrusive third party servers, after all it's my browser and my internet connection. Now uBlock Origin does that for me, it's not an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum content blocker and the user should have the final say on what they connect to. I think we should stop calling them ad blockers.
- Call them what they are. Internet condoms.

I have my entire network running with a DNS that blocks all advertising by default. And then, just to make absolutely certain, I run browsers with UBlock Origin on them.
- Any good guides you know of to set that up?
  
  https://pi-hole.net/
  
  Pi-hole. You’ll want to run two, because machines will use both a primary and a secondary server for their DNS requests. If you don’t want to buy a pair of raspberry pi’s, you can run it in Docker, which basically keeps it isolated to its own tiny virtual machine. So you’d just need to spin up a pair of docker containers to run the pair of pi-holes. If you’re using Docker, they’ll need a pair of volumes too, or else they’ll lose all of their data every time they reboot.
  You’ll want this to be on a machine that is running 24/7, because any time it shuts down, your internet will essentially stop working. That’s why lots of people end up just throwing a few raspberry pis in a closet and forgetting about them.
  Once it’s installed, you’ll need to load it with block lists. The default ones are pretty basic. I’d just google something like “pihole blocklists” and figure it out from there. Each list will be a URL, which allows the pihole to pull updates, (which you can tell it to do via the built-in web UI).
  
  My DNS is from controld.com.
  What you do is you log into your router and on the local area network page there's generally a section to change the DNS settings of your router and you just put in the IP addresses that control D gives you.
  You can also set it up on iOS and Android so that you are also protected when you leave your home network and are on the go on your cellular network.
  As I said, along with Control-D, I also use U-Block Origin to catch anything that it might miss.
  The other thing to do is use as many open source applications as you can possibly get away with.
  
  Besides Pi-hole, there's Adguard. The "home" version works just like Pi-hole on a device on your network (but is a little slicker in my opinion), and a DNS service where you just set your router's or devices DNS to their service (less private, but no dedicated device required). That's an option that is not ideal, but far better than not blocking at the DNS level for anyone uncomfortable configuring a device on their network.

Website: "You appear to be using an ad blocker." Me: "You appear to be correct."
- 'disable ad block to contine'. no

People don’t mind ads for the most part it’s the fact that they take over 3/4 of the screen and generally try to be as obnoxious as possible.
If we stuck with banner ads no one would care, but they just had to make ads as shitty as possible.
- I absolutely do mind.

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.
- 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.
  
  Congratulations, you won
  
  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.
- 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.

And I'm one or them. Every time I turn it off things become legitimately unusable.

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 ?) ....

I don't mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don't track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it's absurd.
- It's far far worse than American TV. TV commercials are a scattershot hope that you show the ad to 2 million people and 10,000 see it and buy your product.
  With Google fingerprint tracking, advertisers are selling hyper-targeted ads so a company buys only ads to show to the right 10,000 people over and over. It's a literal dream for advertisers. But it's a fucking dystopian nightmare for us.
  
  What's become really disturbing in the past ten or so years is how they've applied ML to the targeting. Used to be it was just basic keywords and demographic stuff. Now the big platforms put your entire last decades' worth of history (often both web browsing and social media) through a bunch of filters and spot that people who are like you are more likely to buy this product or join this website.
  The reason why it's fucked up is that "people who are like you" could mean things like anorexia, or addiction problems, or the kind of relationship trouble that makes you a soft target for incel indoctrination, or a bunch of other protected vulnerabilities that would get a company sued through the floor if they actually did it up front. But because it's all just a bunch of untagged probability distributions in a black box, it's impossible to "prove" that you deliberately and knowingly targeted a gambling addict to push a high interest credit card, or a recovering alcoholic with booze, even though that's exactly what happened inside the bundle of weights.
  
  With Google fingerprint tracking, advertisers are selling hyper-targeted ads so a company buys only ads to show to the right 10,000 people over and over. It’s a literal dream for advertisers. But it’s a fucking dystopian nightmare for us.
  The hilarious thing is if you turn off your adblocker (or use a service/device that doesn't support it) and pay attention to what is being advertised to you, a lot of it is wildly irrelevant. They'd probably have better targeting by following the old TV Ad model than whatever the heck is happening with targeted web ads nowadays. My wife watches a lot of livestreams on twitch and any ads that aren't for a game just consistently seem to be wildly irrelevant despite being "targeted" or it's even worse when she's listening to Spotify and the ads are so consistently for products or services we would never have a desire to use
- There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.
  And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you "don't even mind" it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people's brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.
  
  There is nothing like a free lunch.
  You either have to directly pay for something or indirectly pay for it by selling your time or data.
  Companies need to get their name out there and in the past you did that with a banner on your building, a space in the phone book and maybe your name on the side of the vans. Now we live in the digital world and we use digital advertisement. Heck a lot of companies sponsor certain event including charity events.
  If we would totally remove advertisement, your local mom-and-pop shops will get more traffic, but in a lot of countries they would have basically a monopoly unless another competitor exists in the same region.
  I don't really mind watching a bit of advertisement on something like a YouTube video or a banner ad on a site. Heck, buildings or vans with logos etc are fine as well in my opinion. My issue is more with the tracking and some forced advertisement (putting your logo on my clothing, vehicle etc).
- Before I used Firefox on Android, any search about a game I'm playing would result in a half page video ad in the top half of the screen, accompanied by the bottom half being a request to share your data with 1496 trusted data partners.
  Now I use Firefox with add ons, and I get the results I requested. The modern web is basically unusable in it's raw form.
- SmartTube is so much better. Even the UI is intuitive and makes sense. You can hide shorts, actually find content you want to watch.
  
  Sadly I don't believe I can use SmartTube. I was really limited in options for my TV box due to regional reasons and Googling blocking way more surrounding casting than Apple with airplay

Maybe the problem is the advertisers and not the consumers. Jeeeesus.

News Media: "ADVERTISERS CAN'T DISTRIBUTE ADS BECAUSE OF YOUUUUUU"
g-good!

Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.
- Ads are malware (software maliciously made to do something the user doesn't want), yes. :3

The fbi suggests using an ad blocker. Guess what an ad blocker is as important as an antivirus.
- More, if anything.
- I have an adblocker but not an antivirus
  
  You either have a mobile, a Linux device or Windows, which has defender by default. The amount of virus fir Linux is relatively low, and mobile...most antivirus are redundant for mobile anyway, so you're set.
- Malvertising has become pervasive enough that adblocking is starting to become a necessity from an IT perspective

I still whitelist sites with sensible, unobtrusive ads. Axios for instance, which are mostly 1st party. But that’s increasingly the exception.
I had to rip APNews out when Google Ads tried to serve me malware.
- I don’t even bother reporting ad network malware. No one gives a shit including site owners and network operators
- What was the malware?
  
  IDK, it was awhile ago and blocked in the page it auto opened. By Cromite maybe?

Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.
- I mean, basically yes? Do you think most people ever touched the addons button?
  
  Well, no, but is that really the bar? It is a pretty low bar no matter how you dress it up. Now leave me alone with my schaedeghenayegh.
  
  You think most people open settings or hamburger menus? You're more optimistic than I am.
  These days the average caveman is used by his phone, not the other way around.
- Sorry that's spelled jardoughneigh you uncultured swine. Give back that monocle at once!
- And just like that, 200 redneck women said in unison "huh, that's a real pretty name. Schardonayegh. Ooooh, even better -Schardonayegh Lynn. I love it!"
- In my head it was said with the voice of Jenna Maroney (30 Rock).

I used my mother's laptop once 2 years ago, and i was like, how the fuck do you people browsing without an adblock?

When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I'd just learned.
I haven't forgiven advertising since.
- Can only imagine how f'd up kids' minds must be now
  
  Was so proud when my kid stated that ”If the thing is good enough, it does not need advertising. Only poor stuff needs that.”
  
  My kid hasn't ever seen an ad on any streaming service or any web page, ever. And I block ads via DNS. We don't have any kind of live TV service or cable so they literally have just never seen any ads, ever.
  Sometimes if we're out at a restaurant, some TV is playing live content and an ad runs. My kid is shocked like it's the first time he ever ate sugar.
  Glad I can keep that toxic trash out of my house and out of his life.
- My daughter has become obsessed with watching videos about the game Wobbly Life. There's one YouTuber who seems to post extremely frequently and advertises in every video for a subscription mod platform. She is now always asking about that mod platform, and the best way we can explain it to her (because she's 5 and simply too young to understand what mods even are, has zero room for any nuance on her world views etc.) is we just give her a hard-line "we do not pay for mods"

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.

i know this may go against the general attitude here but i gotta say this does make me a little sad when i think about it. and i use adblockers as well, but i never knew what the numbers were. when it's put into context like this it's hard not to be discouraged by the fact that this is still probably a minority of users. i mean what the hell, how are people still using the internet with ads turned on.

Seeing static banner ads on 2000s websites without popups or tracking: 🤷‍♂️
Blocking ads on Firefox after popups and other crap started: 😀
Browsing the internet on Android before I realised the browser supports addons: 🤮
Blocking ads and tracking on Android via uBlock origin and Privacy Badger: 😀👍
My feeling of guilt when scummy megacorporations miss out on ad revenue:
- My feeling of guilt when scummy megacorporations miss out on ad revenue:
  😛
- Even better: system-wide DNS adblocking on Android. Get rid of in-app ads too.
  
  Rethink DNS

Adblockers the heroes we need.

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.

Also, aren’t most folks using apps these days? I have elders and younger relatives that literally don’t know how to use a web browser.
I wouldn’t want to be a web publisher right now…
- Whats not to know?
  Step 1) Open the browser.
  There is no step 2. Just go wherever you want, and read. Or watch videos. If you don't know where something is, search for it. The browser does all the work. That's like saying you don't know how to use a microwave.
  
  A number of kids also don’t know “file system.” The filing cabinet is a foreign concept, as are many of the now-antiquated technologies referenced/adapted for desktop computing (the address card for your Rolodex, the floppy disk save icon). Tablets and phones are culturally moving us towards stuff being contained within its respective singular app, like all your word documents being within the word app rather than meticulously sorted through layers of folders (even though on the backend, it is). So returning to your first step: why have a browser as the first step when you could just skip having to search for anything because there’s an app? Plus, the delicious unskippable metrics.
  
  I think you underestimate how techy many people are.
  You need to know the concept links. URLs. Web pages, navigation, tabs and your browser controls. It’s like getting in a boat with no concept of boating.
  I’ve spent years trying to teach my mom and grandma, and honestly if they aren’t super interested/engaged, they just can’t do it. It’s like teaching someone how to boat that hates boating unless it’s required.

US trade association News/Media Alliance announced it had secured the takedown of 12ft.io
Oh thats why that stopped working. Bunch of jerks.

I didn't mind having a couple of static ads on a page. But now it's so much. So many dynamic ads, autoplaying videos, popups asking you to sign up to a newsletter, etc. No thanks.
- I wouldn't mind unobtrusive ads targeted to the content of the page being viewed -but that doesn't happen. Modern ad networks all work on surveillance, and are indistinguishable from what we used to call "spyware". I have avoided spyware since the 90s.
  I honestly wouldn't care if you put your mattress ad on a web page I'm reading about mattresses. I might even click on it!

Psychology has revealed that the ability to direct attention to and process stimulus is limited, and that it's more limited in the most vulnerable members of society, including those with autism and those with too much stress.
Stimulus engineered to capture attention must therefore be treated by the law as a form of violence.

Yo bro. Looks like you are looking at some information without 15 things popping up in your face. I see you are into the "dark traffic"

“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”
And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.
Are they trying to present it as if poor innocent users need to be protected from the vile ad blockers?
- They always care about us when they are losing money arent they...
- Definitely. They are likely laying the groundwork to make using an adblocker a criminal offense.

AdBlocker is the one who should get the Nobel Peace prize.

I personally am not bothered at ALL by the banner video ads overlayed on top of another banner ad that opens a new tab when you try to close the banner video then another one opens covering the original banner then the page scrolls all the way back to the top and shows you an email list sign up, why would I be?

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!
- I think about doing that except with sites that suggest me turning off my VPN. -If i turned it off, then that would defeat the purpose of me having a VPN.

Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.
- [rant] The Internet is not FREE. Its just free at the point of use!
  Just like ad funded websites aren’t free to use, they are also just free at the point of use!
  People seem to forget where the all this ‘ad money’ comes from. It’s not growing on magic money trees, it’s coming from every product you buy and it’ll be interesting to see how much products have gone up against the sheer amount of ads that are shovelled everywhere now.
  The reason the internet used to be great was because people shared information with no expectation of monetary gain. Just the love of what they knew and the joy of sharing information.
  So the sooner everyone realises you’re all paying for the ads on every product/service to be shown already, and blocking them actually saves you money because the more ads that are shown, the more websites get paid, the more ad/tracking companies charge companies and yes, the more expensive you’re product and services get! [/rant]
  
  I don't mean free from operating costs. I mean free for the person using it to experience it how they choose.

GOOD. most people wouldn't care about blocking ads if they werent so keen on shoving them down your throat ever harder.

Good 🖕🏻

Damn people, enshitifying the internet for the advertisers.
I switched to GrapheneOS which uses Vanadium browser by default, which doesn't support any content blocking yet. I use ProtonVPN which seems to block everything.
- The issue with extensions (including adblockers) is you are trusting someone with access to your shit and money buys bad behavior. So I dislike the lack of blocking there but I can understand why that decision was made.

Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.
It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don't do it.
- Exactly, adblockers don't block a static
  <div>
  on the page with some text, an image and a link. It's only the user-tracking, obtrusive ad-networks they block. Every old-school form of advertising didn't track users and did just fine. Even today, billboards are priced based on the amount of traffic on the highway, not based on checking inside each car and building a profile on each driver (though I wouldn't put it past them trying to figure out how to do that soonish).
  
  God, I can just see the wet dreams of an advertising exec now. If an australian bloke can replicate million dollar systems with $100, the advertising companies can surely wank out the money for license plate readers a quarter mile ahead of their billboard with good identification. The new electronic billboards already switch what ad they're showing every half minute or so now, and I bet they could do what ze big boiz do with the auctioning of ads.
  I think right now most of the US doesn't allow random API access to license plate and registration data, but I really have no idea... How much do you think companies would ~~bribe~~ pay for some laws to be changed about that?