(Note that the plugin doesn't work too well right now, the ad-blocker detection started to get pretty unreliable. Maybe it's time to look at this again.)
@stefan@aral I run a site that has been largely ad-supported for a long time, and even I'm ready to do something like this, mainly because Google have gradually enshittified the experience my visitors by unilaterally making my site more hostile to them over time.
@sanityinc@stefan Yeah. Basically, one where they place ads not on tracking but based on the topic of your articles. They’re usually far more relevant anyway (I’m already there because I care about your topic), and I’m not having my privacy violated and being sold off in a real-time auction before your page even loads.
@the1goit@aral I'm not really familiar with it, but I think next week I should have some time to update the plugin, get it to work again, and also look into extending it beyond WordPress.
Like I said in the previous post, this plugin will need some work to get it to work properly again, but I should have some time to look into this next week, and also extend it beyond WordPress.
@stefan@aral
I actually do not use Wordpress... I'll just FAFO with the detection code and reimplement it in vanilla JS. Or so i plan.
The worst part would be not to reopen the warning on alla the pages, since I'm not using cookies at all... I'll figure out something!
@aral
The most irksome part of this banner is the assumption, “We know…” How dare they presume to know my ethics and values? … Unless, of course, they’ve purchased my profile from Google, Meta, data brokers, or all the assorted twatwaddle purveyors of #surveillancecapitalism & #adtech…
@aral Works for a lot of sites, but not all. Strangely I've found Microsoft Edge's reader mode to be the best at bypassing paywalls on more sites than any of the other browsers.
I know very well what this means. I am a computer scientist with a PhD in cs. I am in the internet since 1989 and have my webpage since 1994. I never used cookies on any of my webpages.
I block cookies wherever I can and delete the rest regularly.
What did I say? I said: pay them. I pay the Guardian and the taz although they provide their content for „free“. They have to pay their staff. I also pay for other newspapers and magazines.
If you do not want to pay them with cash you pay with data. A much higher price. We both agree on this. However, I would not call people names who try to run a newspaper or blog and pay their staff.
PS I am one of the press directors of an #openaccess publishing house that publishes free for authors. But somebody has to pay the bills in the end. In our case it is 100+ universities.
@stefanmuelller@breadandcircuses If describing what they do is calling them names then maybe they should reconsider what they do. They’re not journalists, they’re an adtech company. They’re surveillance capitalists. They make money by being part of the same extractive and exploitative system that gave us Cambridge Analytica and Boris Johnson and Trump and women in the US getting prosecuted for having had abortions.
@stefanmuelller@breadandcircuses We no longer maintain it. It just wasn’t viable and building the Small Web is taking up every minute of my time :) (The link is to an article we published while we were maintaining it that I thought you might find interesting.)
@aral I get those all the time and I don’t run an ad blocker. I run a tracker blocker, which they “confuse” with an ad blocker. Tells me what they’re really concerned with.
@donw Exactly. When we were maintaining Better¹ (our tracker blocker), we would run into this constantly.
This isn’t about the kind of ad that’s just an image. This is about adtech. This is about violating your privacy as much as possible and selling you to the highest bidder in an online auction every time you refresh the page.
@aral I have sympathy for this message. It's irritating, but they have no obligation to provide services for free. What could they do instead which would be better?
@mattb How about this: provide a paid for service and don’t track people.
You might say “but that’s exactly what they are doing!”
Not really. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it too. They have absolutely no problem with surveillance capitalism – with exposing people to tracking by third parties and everything that that entails – and with their site making money from adtech. Then, on top of that, they’ll also take money to turn off the ads. The tracking? Not necessarily.
@aral I take your point, but picking on a specific internet facing organisation for using an ad network in the current environment is arbitrary. You can apply the same to almost everybody.
If you pay them, is their site still broken if you use a blocker? That would make them douchebags imho.
I don’t know who you mean when you say the ‘far left’ but there are some of us out there who would never dream of being funded by a billionaire (or take VC, etc.) In fact, I don’t see how you can be left of anything if you’re funded by a billionaire.
@msbellows@mattb@CynAq Oh, you’re talking about The Intercept, the rag that employs Greenwald? He’s not far left – again, whatever the fuck that is, I guess people who really, really want everyone to live in a fair and equitable society – he’s far right.
I agree, to a point. They can serve ads the same way papers in the past did without requiring our captivity or spying ever after for looking at one article from time to time. They can have ads on the page, as they do...they just want to make those ads 'targeted'. When instead they should just promote what they believe in and might be actually good for the world.
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