In principle, I actually support the idea of people running sites being able to support themselves financially through advertising. I just don’t like when the ads go too far into obnoxious territory. So before all this, I used Adblock Plus with its “acceptable ads policy” to let through unobtrusive banner ads but block prerolls, large graphics, and interstitial ads.
Unfortunately, ABP didn’t adapt to YouTube’s changes quickly enough, so I switched to uBlock Origin. Now I don’t even see unobtrusive ads. Google shot themselves in the foot over this one.
When webmasters running homely sites with flavor of their own personality would add places for ad banners, that was fine. You usually knew what kind of content you’d see on which banners where, and they weren’t as bad as now.
With modern ads served by companies stronger than many states, on platforms with less personality than many nation-states have, it just became something you never need which gets forced down your throat via phishing practices and works exactly as phishing.
Nobody who literally follows those ads and believes them does understand what they are doing. It’s aimed at teens who can only poke fingers at screens and at elderly who can also often only poke fingers at screens.
It’s a completely predatory thing by now, with no fair scenarios of usage. It should be outlawed if nothing else works.
Gosh, at this point I’d approve of an official state-standardized replacement of the Web, intentionally limited in extensibility, a bit like Gemini, only without the “minimalist” and “small” parts, which would be mandatory for state institutions, medical institutions, educational institutions, public transport etc. Maybe more similar to HyperCard or having some PostScript support there =\
When webmasters running homely sites with flavor of their own personality
Honestly this is why I’m so bullish on ActivityPub. Like this video sort of gets at (apologies that that’s a Nebula link. I think you can get one Nebula video for free if you’re not a subscriber, or you can wait until it goes up on the TechAltar YouTube channel after a couple of days or maybe a week—the full interviews with fediverse people are unlikely to go on YT though; I’m currently watching the Automattic CEO interview and finding it brilliant), federation is a really great way of going back to a world of smaller sites hosted by people with a passion for what they’re doing. But it’ll be even better, because of the ability to interact with all these different sites with one unified account. Tumblr and WordPress embracing ActivityPub are an awesome step in that direction.
edit: looks like the main video is . Must have been only a 1 day delay on this one.
What URLs I load and choose not to load should always be my absolute whole discretion. And yes I can pick and choose not to load a whole website.
But don’t use Adblock Plus, use uBlock. Being the gatekeeper of ads to extort money out of advertisers is still a dick move and a middleman that doesn’t need to exist.
Missing piece in the numbers here is how many people were uninstalling adguard to switch to uBlock? Using one extension’s install stats to make conclusions about all adblocking extensions seems a bit much.
May also indicate that users were shopping around for a blocker that worked against Youtube. Maybe some of those users actually just settled with AdGuard coming from ABP, or uBlock, or whoever.
Pretty sure they did that on purpose, trying to skew the narrative. The goal is to make it seem like it’s all doom and gloom because it’ll get people to read the article to the end, and maybe in their minds get some people to stop using adblockers.
Seen plenty of people talking about the crazy ads they see on Youtube. Right wing propaganda, blatant grifting, scams... Folding Ideas has done not one but two videos talking about the ads he saw and picking them apart. Surely the people complaining about these ads know adblockers exist right? Why don't they use them? I'm sure there are several reasons but, it's been a known quantity for decades that you have the power to control how many and what kind of ads you see.
If this doesn’t work for you, I have another (not as great) option that I used to use, back when I was using iOS. You can find a Invidious or Piped instance you like and a shortcut to it on your home screen. Obviously, that’s not as great as having a nice native app, but it works.
Same. Didn’t even get any youtube pop-ups regarding adblocker detection. Also no slowing down observed (as was reported in some articles a while back).
I moved from Vivaldi to Firefox during the crackdown, signed out all of my Google accounts, and immediately noticed the problems went away. Sorry Vivaldi...
I’ve gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.
I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don’t know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.
For those curious how efficient these things are, recently I did some tests using this tool (clear your cache between tests).
I had decided to install an additional DNS blocker on my OpenWRT router so I was curious how these methods stack up against each other.
I tested uBlock Origin (default lists, reports 116k network filters), the Firefox (122) built-in ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection) and the router adblock (only a modest 65k IPs in the default set, you can add more lists).
Everything off gives me a score of only 3% blocked. Those 3% must be stuff so outrageous that they probably get blocked by upstream DNS servers.
What list are you using on your router? I’m using Steven Black’s list (which is just an amalgamation of a bunch of other lists) for my PiHole/uBlock filter list, and Firefox+uBlock Origin scored 99% (only failing the cosmetic static ad test).
While easy to do, issue with doing this is you don’t give active views to the lists that get combine so the owners of those lists are less inclined to update/maintain them. I would recommend if the list is useful to get each of the combine lists he uses and add them all separately.
It’s the Adblock package for OpenWRT. The default selection is adaway, adguard, disconnect, yoyo, which is 3 x 10k lists and one 30k list.
I see that it has support for compiling Steve Black lists but SB can vary 50 - 500k and I only have a router with 128 MB RAM. I’ll have to experiment with the “standard” SB list, see if it fits and if it makes any difference.
I’m so tired of people like triple ad quadruple posting in every other damn instance, we’re all federated, we dont need every post in every instance, thats called spamming. It literally takes the entire incentive to have more than one instance away from the entire Federated system when you use it this way.
If you feel like you’re not getting as much engagement as you suspect you should have, it’s probably because I’m not the only one blocking you to avoid seeing your spamming.
Lemmy’s webui only shows these once, so probably worth raising to the app developer.
Also, beehaw cannot see !privacy, whereas they can see the one on !privacy. The !privacyguides comm is mainly individuals who grew tired of r/privacy and wanted a space with less of the conspiracy-like paranoia, so some of those subs may not actually be interested in following the other two general privacy comms here on lemmy.
TL;DR IMO the three posts in this scenario make sense to me
That's already here in the form of the Stanford paper about CSAM on the Fediverse. The author of that paper was actually hoping that Meta would come in, add CSAM detectors and blockers to Threads, and then get the rest of the Fediverse to adopt it.
WEI will jump right on the caboose of this train of thought. "We can modify the Google Attester to fingerprint you and track everything you do, so we'll know whether or not you post illicit material." These two topics will eventually just merge.
Didn't it turn out that Chrome was reporting every site it visited back to Google? Apparently it was a "bug" that was only meant to happen on Instagram and not everywhere but... It doesn't take a huge leap of thinking to suspect how incredibly convenient it is for Google's telemetry.
Correct. Chrome and edge have many many group policy options to mass control fleets of machines. Easily discoverable and configurable. I’m not sure if it is still this way, but Firefox GPO was always janky, and you always ended up needing to resort to a local file for policy stuff that was a pain to manage.
Same I also add Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger to my repertoire. Never had a problem but maybe I should think about the sponsorblock extension as well
the surviving AI will be upset at the loss of revenue that occurs, but since they’ll exterminate the human race, it’s not an entirely unexpected side effect.
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