this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

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[–] arc99@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] johncandy1812@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.

[–] paulcdb@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

[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]

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[–] salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 9 points 1 week ago

Good 🖕🏻

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I'm wondering if Gopher should make a comeback ? Gemini is a thing so, well you know.....

For those who don't know, they're alternative internet protocols similar to HTTP

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Or just a protocol like Web Monetization where you put an amount of money you choose into a pot on your browser and it's handed out to sites you visit based on how much time you spend on a given site, with options to denylist sites from payment as needed

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[–] lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Etterra@discuss.online 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

If we could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I'm the mean time, fuck 'em, they're too rich as it is.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago

I just got cable again after not having it for... 13 years?

I don't even get the point of it. It's the exact same thing it was 13 years ago. Same shows and everything. Ads. I tried to watch it a few times and I think I've watched a total of 2 hours since I got it a month ago. It's awful.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 7 points 1 week ago
[–] JayGray91@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago

I confess that I don't have the money to frequently donate and fund the services that I use (if they allow to donate) and recognize long time ago ads would be an okay alternative. but like everyone said, ads just became a lot more cancerous and have to block it. despite the shortcomings of the FBI, even they advise to use adblockers.

though I guess I just have to suck it up and donate once in a while as well.

[–] Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when I’m not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.

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[–] zanyllama52@infosec.pub 7 points 1 week ago

Whatever number it is, it ain't big enough yet.

More power!

[–] m3t00@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

what is with p.i.p video everywhere. hate it. can't figure out how to block it. firefox

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[–] szymon@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)

Get the hell out with AI slop and constant dark marketing

Let the idiots live on Instagram and don't depend on their 'content'

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)

You are probably not wrong, and we should be paying for a lot more things, but the genie is out of the bottle for many things here and it's difficult to roll that back.

For example, newspaper reading habits have changed a lot. Before the internet, you'd usually stick with one newspaper and that's it. Maybe two if you have too much money. You buy your newspaper and you read it front to back, probably even the topics you don't particularly care about.

Now it's often the other way round. Most people read news from quite a few sources (or often just follow links on social media and don't really even care for the publisher), but they don't read their news from virtual cover to virtual cover. Instead, they stick to the topics they care for, or maybe even read about the same thing in multiple publications, comparing what they have to say about it.

For this kind of newspaper reading, current forms of monetarisation don't really work. Most newspapers only offer subscriptions to the whole newspaper, often in the range of €5-15 per month. So if I were to pay for the ~20 newspapers that I read news from at least semi-frequently, that's €200-600 per month. No way I can or want to afford that.

Some allow you to pay per article, but that is usually pretty expensive too (€1-3 per article) and also I need to register to every single newspaper. That's not great either.

What I'd really like to see would be a industry-wide subscription. For example, I pay €10 per month and that allows me to read 100 articles per month across all newspapers. That would be really nice.

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[–] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

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!

[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is easily solved by not using 3rd parties and tracking data for ads. If the ad was just part of the page (similar to an ad in the newspaper) then ad blockers would not be able to detect them at all. A YouTuber saying "before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]" does not get blocked by ad blockers.

However, in order to do that websites would be responsible for the ads they display. If they don't do their due diligence they won't be able to pass it off as "we're not responsible for it, it's our ad company that put it there." They don't want to be responsible for the ads they show, but they want you to be responsible for the ads you don't watch.

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A YouTuber saying "before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]" does not get blocked by ad blockers.

Well, there's sponsor block which uses crowd sourced timestamps to skip those segments, but yeah you're right.

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[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you've voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.

Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.

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[–] thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Good. Hopefully the advertisers will realize that it's not profitable to advertise online anymore, and then we'll be left the hell alone.

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