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.

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!"

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.

The fbi suggests using an ad blocker. Guess what an ad blocker is as important as an antivirus.

No point if you have a network in the 10.0.0.0/8 IP range. There is a bug where they will randomly stop serving DNS to IPs outside of their subnet

I don’t even bother reporting ad network malware. No one gives a shit including site owners and network operators

[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]

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.

More, if anything.

Cool quote, where did you get it from?

Well now, here's one that comes up under "other".

I started using an adblocker because I was using an elderly netbook for my studies. Ads junked up resource usage so much they used to freeze my laptop, and render most sites unusable.

Thanks to my adblock, I was able to finish my studies.

These days I use adblock because I object to virus-like code execution on my hardware. I tell others about adblock and get them set up to get free tea/coffee (and to watch their faces as sites become usable again).

The quiet mention of the 12ft.io being taken down is disturbing, it was a good tool for students to read article sources. This kind of change forces them to rely on AI (Gemini respects paywalks, Copilot just ignores them), which risks misinformation being spread!

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.

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.

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:

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.

I don't mean free from operating costs. I mean free for the person using it to experience it how they choose.

SmartTube is so much better. Even the UI is intuitive and makes sense. You can hide shorts, actually find content you want to watch.

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.

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.

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.