There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This group of critical people figured that out and started to hack into these machines to fake ratings. They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ...
Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.
I feel like this is similar.
All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.
As someone who has been in one or another meeting with German TV stations I can assure you this is not completely far fetched. The people deciding what is running at these stations are of the mindset (a translated quote):
> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them
and then they will serenade about how they would "love to have a bit more sophisticated things", but as they are the only ones who really understand their audience, they cannot allow this, although they support the values of the 68 generation etc. pp.
From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
That is always the problem with data: it is reactive. Sure the average watcher is 65, and wants easy to understand stuff: that is what the data shows (I'll assume for discussion that is what the data shows, but I have no insight into if it is true or not). What the data doesn't show is if content would draw in day 25 year olds, they need several years of trying those other shows to see if it makes a difference - a very risky best that could run them out of business even if true (that is the older crowd stops watching faster than the younger crowd figured out it is worth watching meaning advertisers don't pay enough to keep producing content).
Of course TV in the US has figured out that the 65+ crowd is very valuable to customers (the advertisers, not viewers!), so even though they could get more viewers by not showing the nightly news, the nightly news is what they show.
Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got rid of ratings?
All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them.
It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash.
I don't want to read about an existential crisis after programming all day, I want someone to hit something with a big sword and get the girl.
I stopped watching TV more than 10 years ago because I was worried to turn stupid from it. Not so far fetched after all.
There are some high quality shows and TV stations though. Namely Phoenix (similar to PBS in the U.S.) and some of the news magazines that run in the late evenings. Of course there are also all the other public stations with higher quality programs but I find the program most of the time quite random and sometimes even a bit elitarian.
> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them
> because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid
So basically they have a Hacker News mindset!
In every thread about a dumbed down GUI/website it is argued that granny wouldn't understand it otherwise. No power user allowed, because data shows user is monkey.
> > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them
I haven't watched german TV in ages, but I distinctly remember science shows degrading from science to thinly veiled ads - things like literally running a companies marketing video or making a "scientific comparison" where they hand out random style points at the end to make a specific product win. I think they even got into trouble over it since ads and science/education shows are taxed differently. Anyone pretending that they are doing that for their viewers is living in denial at best, but probably just outright lying.
The '68 generation' is pretty much the same generation that's now 65 years old and washing dishes..
> From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
Well, that would be more bearable, if half the TV market wouldn't be allowed to essentially tax everyone to finance their drivel.
Is it the Simpsons or Seinfeld where in one episode one of the characters gets a Nielsen box that is used for measuring tv viewership and they can’t leave the house for fear of shows being canceled if they’re not home to watch it.
They did something similar in “Roseanne.” The Connors were selected to be a Nielsen family and Roseanne made the family watch nothing but PBS, documentaries, etc the whole time. She wanted to hack the ratings so that over time, regular folks like her family would get exposed to a better class of information.
What GP describes would be stronger than AdNauseum. Instead of sending clicks indiscriminately for every ad, you would send clicks for high quality content.
I think it wouldn't be about the ads, but the visit tracking. Like, block GA from seeing your visits on trash sites, but allow when it's a high quality post/content/source, so we skew the numbers for high quality content
It's not actual fraud. You're not bound by the terms of service of ad providers. Your device is actually sending requests to the ads, which they are counting themselves to determine payment rates. If it's fraud to send ad impressions to sites I like without visiting them, it could be fraud to deny ad impressions to sites that I do visit (with my ad blocker on.)
If the sites set it up themselves, it's fraud. If you conspire with the sites to set it up, it's fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. But if I'm prosecuted for the crime of not actually looking at ads I request, that's just a judge with an agenda. Whether it went one way or another at every layer of appeal would probably be a coin flip, though.
Correct, fraud isn’t the correct term here. The op grabbed the first word that probably presented itself, and others nearly ad nauseam (lowercase) have discussed its merits as the term.
What’s needed is a better term.
I propose either AdTurfing (hat tip AstroTurfing) or AdLighting (hat tip GasLighting). My personal preference is the second.
While legally we are probably far away from this being a fraud, nothing stops google from adding something to their TOS and banning your account on that basis... This is the only reason I'm not using those noise generators even though all ad-tech should burn in a trashcan fire in my opinion.
Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what people are watching? Surely we don't need a sampling anymore?
Just thinking that the elderly population is probably the least likely to use those boxes (though I am not even sure of that), whereas they constitute the (dying) core of traditional TV viewership.
Ironically, modern streaming apps have far more accurate numbers than anything Nielsen ever cooked up sampling people, but Netflix made the precedence that they should be "secret sauce" and not shared publicly and most of the "Streaming Wars" diaspora today are following that policy/precedent.
We're in something of a worst of both worlds situation where Nielsen has an increasingly small number of viewers where traditional TV boxes work to get decent samples, has to rely more than ever on surveys, and distrusts all streaming viewership numbers because they are cloak and dagger white lies between competitors, despite in theory being way more accurate than all the previous tools (the surveys and the TV boxes).
It's almost wild. The most forthcoming to shareholders/the general public over the years has been Hulu and Hulu's numbers at times have suggested Nielsen's data is very, very wrong right now, but Nielsen doesn't trust Hulu's data at all because it smells like lies because Netflix does nothing but lie or ghost them.
Modern TVs do snitch but there are two issues with relying on that:
1. There is a disparity between age groups and other demographic dividers who have newer TVs. This could significantly skew the results for some advertisers.
2. The data is going to the TV manufacturer, and they will not share that freely between themselves or with anyone else. This will complicate collating the data as there are several entities to negotiate with in order to get an overall picture.
So you want more targeted ads for tech savvy people? I wouldn’t give ad tech that much credit. Many tech savvy people have cut the cord and watch TV through streaming. Anecdotally, I watch Hulu. Hulu knows so so so much about me yet zero of the ads are targeted. They very much have this capability (engineering resources) but due to a number of reasons I can only assume (network contracts, ad bids) it just probably isn’t going to happen. I would love if I could have an ad blocklist cause one more Progressive Ad will drive me bonkers.
I don't live in the ad tech world, so I only vague know what is interconnected. Do the tech giants just sell info back and forth to each other?
For example, When I watch youtube on my Roku, if im not signed in, does roku still aggregate what I watched on youtube, could that be sold to Hulu, for ads when I watch that on the same tv?
> which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay)
That is incorrect, they do have to pay (once per household). But if you get BAFÖG (student loan/social benefit mix that require you and your parents to be below a certain income bracket), you don’t.
I know that very well, I had to pay it because there is no BAFÖG for foreign students. Just felt it might not be an important enough detail to explain BAFÖG to the international audience.
> They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.
> I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all.
A few personal examples:
* On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing.
* One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares?
* While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video.
* My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be.
Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.
> The advertiser has a tracker that it places on multiple sites and tracks me around. So it doesn't know what I bought, but it does know what I looked at, probably over a long period of time, across many sites. Using this information, its painstakingly trained AI makes conclusions about which other things I might want to look at, based on...
> ...well, based on what? …Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that, it sells me cars and gadgets if I'm a guy, and fashion if I'm a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but because some very uncreative human got into the loop and said "please sell my car mostly to men" and "please sell my fashion items mostly to women."… You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are. Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.
> You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business... for this? [1]
There is the Nielsen system in the US and I wonder if it is the other way around. That is, in reality, nobody has watched MTV since 1994 but Viacom bribed a Nielsen family to tune a TV to it and keep it there.
This is funny to me, because there's an American movie where Danny DeVito manipulates TV ratings to get his own (worse) shows on the air: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087979/
I don't block ads. I remember what the internet was about to become before ads stepped in. Everything of value was going to be pull behind paywalls.
Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase. Those purchases are logged to a real name/address. You end up with bigger privacy leaks.
People will still be tracking you the way they are now. And at the credit card level.
As an adult in the first world I can afford to pay for adfree solutions. Most people can't. Ads level the playing field.
> Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase.
No, it won't. There was plenty of high quality stuff on the internet before ads or payment was even possible, and there's plenty of high quality stuff that don't track you or require payment right now. There's no reason to think that would all evaporate.
Ads have bloated the useful internet to the point that it is more expensive and less functional. We have 8,000 websites trying to show me a recipe for chicken parm, most of them with pages of family history and backstory, because they are all trying to get me to see their ads. A lightweight Wikipedia for recipes and a few high value added websites charging a trivial amount for access to their recipe catalog would be highly value added for me, and run on a fraction of the infrastructure.
Ads obscure solutions, and add redundancy and complexity with zero value added, because solving a problem means you no longer are on the page seeing ads. Simplifying or automating a process means you are clicking less pages less often and not seeing ads. If you automate something to directly connect users with what they need, then they don’t need to come back and see your ads. So we have automations they bring us to some middle man that can show us some ads before we can get to what we need.
Ads mean that maximizing the time your attention is held is the core value. High quality content that leaves you informed/satisfied/fulfilled is worthless compared to low quality content that is just good enough to keep you from leaving, without being having enough substance to actual fulfill you, because then you might leave and not see the ads we have to show you.
Podcasts show us that a tiny minority of users able to pay for content subsidize an incredible amount of added value content for everyone, whether they can pay or not.
Ads don’t level the playing field. Ads are an ever growing tumor, sapping resources and weighing everything down in a mindless effort to replicate.
While that speculation is plausible, another view would be that companies would offer quality content without tracking users and invading their privacy (how many paid services still flood you with ads?), and possibly free alternatives would start to come up.
From your point of view, free open source is something that wouldn't exist
Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf, or do not have a Radio or TV? Gives you the most boring TV News in the world, plus 600 movies per year nobody wants to watch, because they are horrible? But they collected the tax and they have to spend it, as the German actors guild is worst than a cartel? :-)
I personally prefer boring news backed by quality journalism and funded by people rather than sensational, outrageous and superficially controversial news! If I want the excitement I watch a drama or action movie. I think the news articles/pieces work like clickbait; the more head-turning they get, the more viewers they acquire which results in higher profits.
> Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf [...]
That's not correct. If you are deaf, you get a reduction - if you are blind, you get a reduction. If you are deaf-blind, you don't pay at all. If you are already receiving financial help because of your blindness, you don't pay at all.
Not a big fan of the GIS either, but my stance is not as extreme. I see benefits, but there is problems as well. It could be a good system if there was a proper reform and if you get politicians out of the system.
I can't quite understand this. By "exploiting" you simply mean targeting ads?
The real harm seems to be from the tech giants censoring speech and policing payments, but what's the harm that someone targets a pair of shorts that I might like or show an ad for a conference I might be interested in?
Some people don't want to be tracked or monitored by advertising companies and it should be enough to just say so without companies like Facebook always trying to sneak tracking back in via dark pattens, shadow profiles, etc, etc.
For example once you've seen a website offer you the same product for different prices based on arbitrary tracking it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
I.e. ads, facebooks feed, endless scrollers like 9gag -> they like to use dark patterns and exploit tricks against the human mind to keep and guide your attention.
The harm if targeted ads depends on your viewpoint.
A targeted ad might serve you something you were looking for anyway, or it might manipulate you into spending on something you don't actually need. I.e. look at Instagram influencers, showing off their fake perfect live, making the viewer feel small and then try to buy the same happiness by buying the same product.
At best, ads are information that you need, at worst, they use psychology to manipulate you.
I expected these numbers to be higher. However, an even more interesting metric is the 88% block in Firefox.
Firefox may not have a great market share, but based on these numbers it's market share may very well be eight times higher than your analytics report. This can change the argument of "it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it", depending on your target audience. I've seen tons of people claim general Firefox usage is negligible based on public data from websites such as statcounter, but these metrics prove that those statistics are unreliable and should not be used.
The best you can do is use server side UA inspection, though you can't really distinguish bots from real users that way.
The reason Firefox is higher is probably because it's the easiest one to block ads on mobile. Most people I know who use Firefox on mobile do so specifically to have ublock origin. I personally use chrome on desktop but Firefox on mobile.
The reason Firefox is higher is probably because users who choose it are more educated about the internet and are probably the ones who know how to use an adblocker. So it is unlikely that the proportion of users who use Firefox globally is higher than what stats give us.
Funnily enough, Privacy Badger is an excellent ad blocker. Turns out 99% of ads come from tracking domains. You'd think the ad people would split up the tracking from actually showing the ad, but apparently it's not worth showing an impression without also tracking the user.
With so many options for Chromium-based browsers, is there a reason why you still use Chrome?
I personally use Edge on desktop and iPhone because I give so much data to Google by using a gmail account that it lightens the load a little bit to use something other than Chrome. It functions the same as far as I see and it runs all the same plugins.
You have to be on Android to use addons with mobile Firefox. Since Android=Google, doesn't that mean you are giving Google all your data including browsing data and the fact that you are blocking ads?
Firefox is likely higher because FF users are more likely to have Ublock or some other content blocker installed. I'd also guess FF users are older, on average. Some will remember a time when FF was the clear choice over IE6. I used Chrome exclusively for a long time, then went back to FF once Chrome started to automatically log me into Chrome with my Google account.
There's a whole generation of users who first experienced the web via mobile browsers that don't block anything. When they become old enough to start using laptops and desktops, I imagine that it won't occur to them that an analytics-free and ad-free world is possible.
IMHO, this points at Firefox being used mostly by ad-averse, tech-savvy users, while the less-adverse, less-savvy users prefer Safari and/or Chrome.
If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers.
Of course, following web standards would be the Golden Way, and more selfless actors follow that rule, but that song has been sung ever since the old Netscape/MSIE wars.
Is there a good blocking solution for Safari? From what I understand uBlock Origin cannot operate on Safari due to the way that it disallows some allows access to the underlying source of the webpage.
Also it seems like extensions on Safari require you to install them via the App Store which just seems so dumb and unintuitive compared to Chrome/Firefox.
If they fixed these two issues, I think Safari usage would be much greater. That browser is so incredibly fast and snappy especially on the new M1 macs but not having proper ad-blocking is a complete deal breaker.
On my company laptop I am often not allowed to install software (but I'm allowed to develop the software that companies trust to handle billions of dollars in transactions) so my usage would look 60% chrome with no add blocking and 40% completely locked down firefox.
These numbers are iffy or at least, very poorly described. They're not a percentage of HN or Reddit users - in the HN case, the sample is HN users who clicked on a front page link to a post about switching to Linux from MacOS. It's a fairly small sample biased in ways that are unknowable when all you have is that one sample. As a methodology, this is flaky enough to not warrant the headline and the significant digits in these numbers.
If you're referring to Firefox using Google Analytics for the Firefox Add-ons frontend, as of July 2017, Mozilla has disabled Google Analytics for any browser that has Do Not Track enabled.
Mozilla has a special agreement with Google about how their analytics data is stored and handled. I thought they only used it on their websites but it is not impossible that they use it for software telemetry.
I don't have any proof or study on it, but I suspect they don't do it. My anecdotal evidence is that I use an application firewall and Firefox by itself pings only telemetry.mozila.org or accounts.mozilla.org and stuff like that. It uses domains that explicitly say what they mean to be used for. At least in my experience
I am amazed at how non-techy people use the internet. I teach college and I will sometimes have students go to some web site. I am amazed at how few use adblocking and just accept all the ads and popups and overlays and crap. Even more than that, I will see them using something like google docs and google will put an overlay for some new feature and they don't click the X to close it. They just type away with that overlay in the corner. That drives me crazy. I don't know how they do it.
You all but certainly overestimate typical technological literacy.
About 5% of computer users have "advanced" literacy, defined as "Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit"
This data is incredible. I cannot believe how the most powerful/richest/most influential country in the world has these kinds of numbers. I notice that it tends to follow a standard distribution but even then, I was expecting the window to be more towards highly educated.
This is so depressing. I have been wondering for a while as to why ~40 percent of the country rarely if ever votes in elections. This might help to explain it.
This also shows that technology people are amassing an unbelievable amount of power in their knowledge of how these systems work and operate given that the masses don't know how to weld that knowledge.
Fediverse is usually hardcore web 2.0 "runs only in latest Chrome" "I remember entire caniuse.org" sort of stuff, not much different from facebook. So its first adopters can be only non-technical users, but they can't be first adopters of new technology.
Not only that but some of them actually think there's a moral problem with blocking ads.
Perhaps if the advertising industry didn't already prove for 20+ years that they are entirely made up of scum, I would agree. People use ads to make money. I feel bad that they aren't making money passively that way.
But I grew up with ad networks, including Google themselves, turning a blind eye to deceptive ads, bait and switch, fake window popups, and outright scams. The online advertising industry has done everything they could to fuck us over and big tech companies were complicit in the crime.
So that's why I don't care about running an ad blocker. Maybe the advertising industry will have a code of ethics after I'm dead, but until then I'll keep using uBlock Origin and NoScript (and other extensions) to screw with the ad business as much as possible.
Putting aside the ethics, advertising turns the internet into a race to the bottom. Ad blocking is good for the internet because it means that your ads had better be good, minimally intrusive, and also be integrated with the content you are providing. In other words, do things like preroll and midroll sponsorships and referrals rather than slap a bunch of banners on your site that peddle crap du juor.
Bear in mind that many younger people grew up with mobile computing first. So they're not as familiar with the "power user" desktop computing behaviors us older people have developed.
Not dismissing that Google Docs overlay may be explained by any of the following: (a) learned behavior from mobile computing that very few things are configurable (mobile apps tend to have far fewer preferences on how things are displayed; (b) pop ups on mobile often don't close when clicked; and (c) they are used to operating with very tight screen real-estate. I think (c) is most likely.
As someone brought up on desktop computing, I fight to eliminate anything that needlessly wastes screen real-estate such as bloated window chrome. But I think someone brought up on small screens might actually feel agitated by "too much" space.
I think there might be a 4th option, which is that users are trained that clicking on anything other than links will result in pain. Clicking a dialog you didn't read may take you to another page and ask you to enter information. Or it may opt you in to something you don't want or need. It's just a needless distraction. This gets back to what I was saying about "cookie consent" dialogs a few weeks ago. I never click on them. I usually read in Reader view to not even see them. If I can't get the content without clicking something additional, I simply press the back button.
I know a CTO with plenty of wealth and space that sits at a kitchen table with a laptop instead of setting up a home work station.
I know information workers who have workplaces that would gladly pay for nicer monitors or keyboards but don’t bother to even request them.
I know a couple with a brand new house that has a miserably squeaky front door that could be silenced a half dozen ways in under a minute.
People of all kinds contortion themselves into knots, giving little notice to the daily, near constant twinge of their circumstances but don’t improve them.
One contracting job I had, on my first day one of my tasks was to do some grunt work right in front of the bathrooms. The men's door was squeaky as all hell.
"Oh don't worry, it's always done that."
I lasted as long as I could but I finally walked over to the shop crew and asked if I could borrow some WD-40. "I'll bring it back in 10 minutes."
10 minutes later it's all "Thanks guys!", "No problem", and "Wow you really did mean 10 minutes!". [Note: I'm a man so there was no problem me stepping into the men's bathroom to make the repair myself].
And the door never squeaked again. My sanity was saved; it turns out I would be doing a decent amount of grunt work in that same area over my contract.
If anyone else ever noticed, they never said a word. The door had always squeaked and literally everyone either didn't care or did nothing about it; it just was how it was.
A kitchen table? That's way more fancy than I bother with. I do most of my programming work from a couch or a hammock. It's a feature, not a bug. I have a workstation with a fancy dock, keyboard and trackpad, but I never really feel like using it. I will, however, close every unnecessary popup that comes my way.
I don’t use adblocking because if a site is so revolting that it requires adblocking to make it usable, I just don’t visit the site at all.
I used to use adblocking but the tiny site Distrowatch made an impression on me. The owner rigged something so that those using adblock also would not see non-ad images. He said it’s really not fair to visit a free site and then block the thing that allows it to be free.
Also, I then read that one of the adblockers would take payments from advertisers to unblock their ads. What a racket.
So I block no ads. This does mean that I don’t look at the vast bulk of news sites because they have obnoxious ads. However, most decent news sites are now pay walled, and those that aren’t are junk anyway. I get my news from some sites I pay for, and from non-profit email newsletters, and from sites my employer pays for. These have few ads.
So I have found no loss from not using adblock. Adblock is like putting on a bulletproof vest to walk through a warzone. Better to just keep out of warzones.
Adblock is like having a bodyguard running ahead of you, making sure the neighbourhood is still safe to walk, just in case someone shady moved in. Added bonus is he drags you along on a rope so you can move faster and bring more groceries from the store.
Adblock makes my slow computer and phone bareable to use on "modern" homepages. Without them the load times multiplies.
Even with an ad-blocker, there are still huge cookie and "join our email list" banners. Banner blindness is just the way things go for most people. Fun little anecdote, in high school I had to work at a pizza joint but the screens where they showed the orders had a gui that looked just like a website. Thanks to banner blindness, I missed important info all the time because it was in places that brain had internalized as looking like ads. I had to really focus on it.
Last year I was building a "Cookie Consent" banner for one of my sites. I wanted to be transparent as possible with it so I had this box come up in the corner to ask for permission, big blue button for OK, big red button (of the same size) to decline, zero dark patterns.
Looking at the analytics after the fact made me realize why these cookie consent boxes use so many dark patterns. My acceptance rate for the box was like 4%, I tossed out cookies (and the banner) in the next update.
The best way to prevent that is by disabling JavaScript. Generally, JavaScript is what enables such banners to popup and obstruct your vision with newsletter requests.
Yes, and it goes further than that: "Should I add an ad-blocker to your browser for an ad-free internet experience.. it'll only take 2 sec." and they respond: "Nah, not needed".
And also "You are using the worst browser available to you (Samsung), shall I install Firefox?" and then "Nah, don't care".
The Samsung browser isn't actually that bad at all. Has some neat features that can't be found in Firefox or even Chrome, like the enhanced video playback tools. Plus it supports adblocking plug ins (though only FF has the much better ublock origin). Keep in mind that tons of website just outright won't work with Firefox mobile too, and it has a very annoying bug that has been known for years where all your tabs will very oftem reload whenever you switch to another app and come back. And that's regardless of how much free ram you have. Samsung browser just... Works.
Technical literacy among young people is so depressing. I'm 36 so I grew up in the last of the non-digital native cohort - I vaguely remember life before the internet. But growing up surrounded by computers and the internet, but seeing many of my peers miss out, I was certain that the next generation would be so much more tech savvy. As full digital natives they will learn to code, understand the protocols on which their primary communications are built and just be steeped in this stuff from birth.
How naive I was. No one actually cares. It was like assuming everyone born after 1908 would fully understand how cars work.
I was doing some pair programming with a colleague not too long ago, and after several minutes he was said something to the effect of "Could you close that [expletive] dialogue?" that had popped up to tell me that VS Code couldn't deal with some file extension or other. It had apparently been there the entire time.
I hadn't even noticed it (at least not consciously). I've apparently been trained somewhere to ignore dialogues, and I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the prevalence of hostile UX patterns.
I'm a very techy person and I interact with modals as little as possible, even if that means ignoring a chunk of my screen. I have a probably-unreasonable sense that it's only going to trigger a bunch of JS or something unsafe [1].
We had to make an adjustment on our site to account for that second one. I had just assumed if you have some kind of notice that can be closed, people would close it after they'd had a chance to digest the info (or decided they didn't care, or whatever). But no, turns out the vast majority never close anything unless it's physically preventing them from using the site. (Of course the vast majority also never bother to read anything that doesn't prevent what they're trying to do either, but we already knew that.)
In terms of product tours, I'm totally on-board with your students. I don't know how to access that product tip later on, often times revisiting a product tip later on is not even implemented so I'd rather have it stay in place until I have some time to study it. Hopefully I'll be off of the website before I need that.
Been blocking pretty much all advertising on mobile and desktop for years and I couldn't go back.
At work I see how the internet is SUPPOSED to look like and it is horrible.
there are too many popups, especially now with how many cookie pop-ups work. So the easiest way is try to ignore it if possible. Ok, yeah, the best way would be to block it completely but as this shows again: humans are lazy creatures. Every click is a click too much.
As a developer of an ad blocker[1] our stats would seem to back up what Plausible has found:
- Despite having equivalent desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS) apps, most of our users (> 75%) use the app primarily on desktop
- Most users say the key reason for use is for privacy protection; even with Safari providing some inbuilt privacy tracking protection
- Our app is focused on providing a simple 'set and forget' ad blocking approach; so you would think the key audience would be less tech savvy users. However a large proportion of users are tech-inclined and knowledgeable users.
- A lot of tech heavy websites are some of the worst offenders in terms of tracker usage and advertising. For example, The Verge can load 3.5x faster simply by using an ad blocker that blocks the on-page trackers and ads[2]
It appears that Magiclasso is not open source. That being the case, how can anyone trust your claim that "Magic Lasso Adblock doesn't see or have access to any of your web pages or browsing history?"
The Safari content blocking API makes sure of that. Content blockers can only provide a list of rules for content to block (based on URL regexes, CSS selectors, etc) but can't actually access the content itself.
My experience running a web server also backs this up. The number of GET requests to the back end is around twice as much as I see in Google Analytics.
On our website we have no analytics or trackers installed at all. The app usage statistics come via the Apple App Store. App Store users can opt out of these stats via an OS-level setting.
Google has no incentive to support effective ad blocking on platforms they control (Android and Chrome). This has made us reluctant to develop for or invest time on these platforms – the platform owner would be working against what we would be trying to achieve.
Why is it important to have "privacy" from someone selling me a new video streaming service, but not important to fight against censorship and policing of content by tech giants?
One of the reasons for mobile apps is that adblocking is disabled. Explains why Reddit promotes it so much.
Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in Electron also gives the website owners full telemetry and tracking that they can't get in a tech savvy browser.
Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for privacy?
It must be very disheartening to work on reddit's mobile site. Not only is it deliberately made a miserable experience by forcing you through AMP via Google and insisting you "continue in browser" every time, but then you're greeted with a banner that outright says "this page is better in the app".
I found NextDNS to be relatively convenient and easy to set up even for a lay audience. Definitely easier than a PiHole or a custom `dnsmasq` setup, and it offers mobile configuration client apps.
What I do not know is if it will work also when apps begin using DNS over HTTPS… I suppose not?
NextDNS offers a DoH endpoint and is a selectable TRR in Firefox. Unfortunately that doesn't help with apps doing DoH to bypass DNS blocking. The current state of the Internet / computing is a bit problematic, but there are ways forward.
What I do and recommend everyone to do is:
1. Run an edge network device using network access controls and filter which devices on your network get outbound network access (in my case just the gateway device). Block all inbound traffic except what you choose to pinhole, block all outbound traffic except ports you choose to add to the allow list.
2. On every client device run a local application firewall (I like Vallum and Little Snitch on MacOS as examples) and filter applications by domain + port on outbound requests, block all inbound requests.
3. On every client device force it through a VPN to a gateway device internal to your network to get internet access, anything that falls off the VPN is then blocked from the internet. The gateway device can forcibly route traffic and perform additional filtering
4. On every client device, configure it to use an internal DNS on your network with a fallback to a trustworthy external provider, have the internal DNS use a trustworthy external provider over DoH. Block outbound DNS at the edge device
(blocks all non-encrypted lookups).
It's kind of a pain, and a mess, but it does greatly restrict the damage that rogue IoT / Smart devices can do.
Unless they provide a VPN it is only blocking the not-so-bad-actors. Everyone else use hardcoded DNS IPs. If you look at traffic from an Android phone you will get lots of DNS requests to Google DNS no matter if you use NextDNS or not. If you only provide one (primary) DNS IP in android 8.8.8 8 (Google DNS) will even be used by default together with your DNS provider. Same is going on in iOS. If they do provide a VPN then it isn't really for a lay audience IMO but it is the only thing that isn't like pissing in the wind.
I personally use doh_blacklist with around 170ips, where I block outgoing traffic for known (publicly and not so) internet reachable doh resolvers. There is no problem(+) - everything works perfectly.
ipset create blist_doh hash:ip hashsize 1024
for ip in `cat /etc/bin/blist_doh.txt`; do ipset add blist_doh "$ip"; done
iptables -A <insert some iptables placement specific to your outgoing/forwarded traffic> -m set --match-set blist_doh dst -j DROP -m comment --comment 'SPY:all ext DoH BLOCKED'
Still, as of 2021, doh rule is around 2% traffic logged compared to my other rule, where I simply block outgoing 53/udp (except my resolver). a LOT of your devices ignore your dhcp dns settings and try to circumvent it going directly to shady 8.8.8.8 etc.
(*) you shall every few months check and update it.
I have been using NextDNS for couple of days, but since I don't have a static IP, it's obviously not so convenient, I have to reset my IP every time it changes
But otherwise, absolutely great, awesome statistics about blocked/requested domains, countries, etc...
Not sure if VPN would help you much against telemetry in a mobile app. A native foothold in your phone's system gives them access to much better data than they could infer on the server side.
E.g. if I wanted to know where you're hailing from, I'd browbeat you into granting me Location access privileges. If that's too difficult, I'd get you to grant me Files/Photos privileges (this one won't raise too many alarm bells with apps like Discord or Reddit), and then try to read EXIF geotags off your recent photos.
Blokada and others work by using the VPN functionality in Android, to implement DNS blacklists. Alternatively, AdGuard and NextDNS run DNS servers where you can customize the block list, a remote Pi-Hole as you said.
I'm using NextDNS as the system-wide private DNS on my Android phone, it works great and eats less battery than Blokada.
Honestly, if they'd abuse their power given through electron - surely, we the users would start boycotting one way or another. Ultimately, this purpusefully regressing UX for revenue - nobody likes it except the finance department.
> One of the reasons for mobile apps is that adblocking is disabled.
That and revenue is much higher on apps than on the web. I made an android apps for a website. And just alone the android apps made more money than the web version. With less ads.
> Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in Electron also gives the website owners full telemetry and tracking that they can't get in a tech savvy browser.
Discord, Slack and other similar webapps can (and maybe do) send telemetry in the same connections used for the app's features. You can't reliably block that.
Why is this even at the front page of HN? I give them credit for the brilliant marketing.
This is an ad disguised as an article targeting the "tech savvy" by bundling HN and Reddit (a truth + a lie makes the statement more true), a common clickbait tactic
> This makes sense especially considering how difficult it is to install an adblocker on Chrome, the most popular browser on mobile devices.
The headline is the perfect anti-Google HN-clickbait, and it is quite misleading. These people just run any ad-blocker, they mostly all block Google Analytics as a side-effect. The majority of those 58% probably don't care about GA specifically.
Well, for extra irony, I use the Steven Black /etc/hosts content to block on the order of 70,000 domain names, and plausible.io is in there. So I can't even read the article because I'm one of the people it describes.
Isn't the primary use-case for plausible that you can run the tracking entirely off of your own domain. Which means that blocking plausible.io doesn't really give you much.
AFAIK, ad blocking in Chrome on my phone is difficult. But with Firefox, I can easily install uBlock Origin.
I use a PiHole on my phone occasionally to block ads in anything that isn't Firefox, but I found that the OpenVPN client is a significant battery drain (~7% per hour).
Worth noting that if you're already willing to setup a first-party proxy like Plausible does in this comparison, you can do the same thing with Google Analytics using either the NYPL project [1] or send whatever you want to the Google Measurement Protocol API [2]. You can usually send whatever you want through a first-party proxy in basically any competent analytics product. Analytics is not ads.
I find it this comparison a little misleading because Plausible admits that their own script/endpoint are blocked by adblockers, just to a lesser extent than Google Analytics [3].
That's why apps are so popular with ad driven properties. No cookie banners, hardly any limitations. And you get to keep users nicely inside the walled garden.
Anyway, I indeed use Firefox with ublock origin, multi account containers, etc. I also use Firefox on Android. A lot of stuff people assume they need apps for works just fine in that.
Readit News
I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.
> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them
and then they will serenade about how they would "love to have a bit more sophisticated things", but as they are the only ones who really understand their audience, they cannot allow this, although they support the values of the 68 generation etc. pp.
From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
Of course TV in the US has figured out that the 65+ crowd is very valuable to customers (the advertisers, not viewers!), so even though they could get more viewers by not showing the nightly news, the nightly news is what they show.
All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them.
It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash.
I don't want to read about an existential crisis after programming all day, I want someone to hit something with a big sword and get the girl.
So like, sticking only to the first and second derivative in soap opera plots about retired civil engineers?
No late-period Beethoven sonatas as background music?
That must be difficult for you as a German.
Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning an Oscar.
There are some high quality shows and TV stations though. Namely Phoenix (similar to PBS in the U.S.) and some of the news magazines that run in the late evenings. Of course there are also all the other public stations with higher quality programs but I find the program most of the time quite random and sometimes even a bit elitarian.
> because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid
So basically they have a Hacker News mindset!
In every thread about a dumbed down GUI/website it is argued that granny wouldn't understand it otherwise. No power user allowed, because data shows user is monkey.
I haven't watched german TV in ages, but I distinctly remember science shows degrading from science to thinly veiled ads - things like literally running a companies marketing video or making a "scientific comparison" where they hand out random style points at the end to make a specific product win. I think they even got into trouble over it since ads and science/education shows are taxed differently. Anyone pretending that they are doing that for their viewers is living in denial at best, but probably just outright lying.
> From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
Well, that would be more bearable, if half the TV market wouldn't be allowed to essentially tax everyone to finance their drivel.
https://adnauseam.io/
Edit: it's an adblocker that is supposed to click on EVERY ad that it blocks.
Be carefull - fraud is a crime. But I am under no obligation to provide AdWords any data, let alone true and reliable data.
Considering the tracking and spying, and my legitimate interest in privacy, there is no room for fraud argument here.
PS: this would be probably a Hoax
If the sites set it up themselves, it's fraud. If you conspire with the sites to set it up, it's fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. But if I'm prosecuted for the crime of not actually looking at ads I request, that's just a judge with an agenda. Whether it went one way or another at every layer of appeal would probably be a coin flip, though.
What’s needed is a better term.
I propose either AdTurfing (hat tip AstroTurfing) or AdLighting (hat tip GasLighting). My personal preference is the second.
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Just thinking that the elderly population is probably the least likely to use those boxes (though I am not even sure of that), whereas they constitute the (dying) core of traditional TV viewership.
We're in something of a worst of both worlds situation where Nielsen has an increasingly small number of viewers where traditional TV boxes work to get decent samples, has to rely more than ever on surveys, and distrusts all streaming viewership numbers because they are cloak and dagger white lies between competitors, despite in theory being way more accurate than all the previous tools (the surveys and the TV boxes).
It's almost wild. The most forthcoming to shareholders/the general public over the years has been Hulu and Hulu's numbers at times have suggested Nielsen's data is very, very wrong right now, but Nielsen doesn't trust Hulu's data at all because it smells like lies because Netflix does nothing but lie or ghost them.
1. There is a disparity between age groups and other demographic dividers who have newer TVs. This could significantly skew the results for some advertisers.
2. The data is going to the TV manufacturer, and they will not share that freely between themselves or with anyone else. This will complicate collating the data as there are several entities to negotiate with in order to get an overall picture.
Yes, which is why I will never own one.
Depends, are the TV networks buying that information? Or just advertisers?
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For example, When I watch youtube on my Roku, if im not signed in, does roku still aggregate what I watched on youtube, could that be sold to Hulu, for ads when I watch that on the same tv?
That is incorrect, they do have to pay (once per household). But if you get BAFÖG (student loan/social benefit mix that require you and your parents to be below a certain income bracket), you don’t.
You may like the "Google will eat itself" idea.
https://www.gwei.org/index.php
Nice cosmological time scale idea
Those 819 shares are worth $2,371,005 now
> I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all.
A few personal examples:
* On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing.
* One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares?
* While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video.
* My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be.
Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.
> ...well, based on what? …Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that, it sells me cars and gadgets if I'm a guy, and fashion if I'm a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but because some very uncreative human got into the loop and said "please sell my car mostly to men" and "please sell my fashion items mostly to women."… You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are. Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.
> You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business... for this? [1]
[1] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201
You, your friends, and your family personally don't have to put up with it. Ublock Origin can block ads on Youtube with ease.
Though, I would say this can actually hurt publishers in the long run
Believe it’s Scott Galloway who said advertising is a tax on the poor and technologically illiterate.
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Data poisoning for something the scale of Google I fear would be ineffective to the point of laughability, sadly.
Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase. Those purchases are logged to a real name/address. You end up with bigger privacy leaks.
People will still be tracking you the way they are now. And at the credit card level.
As an adult in the first world I can afford to pay for adfree solutions. Most people can't. Ads level the playing field.
No, it won't. There was plenty of high quality stuff on the internet before ads or payment was even possible, and there's plenty of high quality stuff that don't track you or require payment right now. There's no reason to think that would all evaporate.
Ads obscure solutions, and add redundancy and complexity with zero value added, because solving a problem means you no longer are on the page seeing ads. Simplifying or automating a process means you are clicking less pages less often and not seeing ads. If you automate something to directly connect users with what they need, then they don’t need to come back and see your ads. So we have automations they bring us to some middle man that can show us some ads before we can get to what we need.
Ads mean that maximizing the time your attention is held is the core value. High quality content that leaves you informed/satisfied/fulfilled is worthless compared to low quality content that is just good enough to keep you from leaving, without being having enough substance to actual fulfill you, because then you might leave and not see the ads we have to show you.
Podcasts show us that a tiny minority of users able to pay for content subsidize an incredible amount of added value content for everyone, whether they can pay or not.
Ads don’t level the playing field. Ads are an ever growing tumor, sapping resources and weighing everything down in a mindless effort to replicate.
From your point of view, free open source is something that wouldn't exist
If you're willing to handle ads, they should at the least be untargetted.
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https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-t...
That's not correct. If you are deaf, you get a reduction - if you are blind, you get a reduction. If you are deaf-blind, you don't pay at all. If you are already receiving financial help because of your blindness, you don't pay at all.
The real harm seems to be from the tech giants censoring speech and policing payments, but what's the harm that someone targets a pair of shorts that I might like or show an ad for a conference I might be interested in?
Some people don't want to be tracked or monitored by advertising companies and it should be enough to just say so without companies like Facebook always trying to sneak tracking back in via dark pattens, shadow profiles, etc, etc.
For example once you've seen a website offer you the same product for different prices based on arbitrary tracking it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
The harm if targeted ads depends on your viewpoint.
A targeted ad might serve you something you were looking for anyway, or it might manipulate you into spending on something you don't actually need. I.e. look at Instagram influencers, showing off their fake perfect live, making the viewer feel small and then try to buy the same happiness by buying the same product.
At best, ads are information that you need, at worst, they use psychology to manipulate you.
Firefox may not have a great market share, but based on these numbers it's market share may very well be eight times higher than your analytics report. This can change the argument of "it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it", depending on your target audience. I've seen tons of people claim general Firefox usage is negligible based on public data from websites such as statcounter, but these metrics prove that those statistics are unreliable and should not be used.
The best you can do is use server side UA inspection, though you can't really distinguish bots from real users that way.
I personally use Edge on desktop and iPhone because I give so much data to Google by using a gmail account that it lightens the load a little bit to use something other than Chrome. It functions the same as far as I see and it runs all the same plugins.
There's a whole generation of users who first experienced the web via mobile browsers that don't block anything. When they become old enough to start using laptops and desktops, I imagine that it won't occur to them that an analytics-free and ad-free world is possible.
IMHO, this points at Firefox being used mostly by ad-averse, tech-savvy users, while the less-adverse, less-savvy users prefer Safari and/or Chrome.
If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers.
Of course, following web standards would be the Golden Way, and more selfless actors follow that rule, but that song has been sung ever since the old Netscape/MSIE wars.
No, your best approach is to test firefox carefully to ensure it is broken. That way you encourage people to use something more friendly to you.
I hope I didn't give anyone ideas.
Also it seems like extensions on Safari require you to install them via the App Store which just seems so dumb and unintuitive compared to Chrome/Firefox.
If they fixed these two issues, I think Safari usage would be much greater. That browser is so incredibly fast and snappy especially on the new M1 macs but not having proper ad-blocking is a complete deal breaker.
Home vs office.
On my company laptop I am often not allowed to install software (but I'm allowed to develop the software that companies trust to handle billions of dollars in transactions) so my usage would look 60% chrome with no add blocking and 40% completely locked down firefox.
These numbers are iffy or at least, very poorly described. They're not a percentage of HN or Reddit users - in the HN case, the sample is HN users who clicked on a front page link to a post about switching to Linux from MacOS. It's a fairly small sample biased in ways that are unknowable when all you have is that one sample. As a methodology, this is flaky enough to not warrant the headline and the significant digits in these numbers.
The actual numbers might be higher, the article notes that these numbers still don't include anyone who blocks first-party JS completely.
I don't know if any of the sampled websites actually work without first-party JS.
To nitpick. Starting with 3/100 FF, times 8 unaccounted for, you get 24/121, 20%.
https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785#issue...
This change was made in response to pressure from HN readers, so thanks to everyone for that.
No, the best you can do is to stop caring. A distant second is this "server side UA inspection." Whatever that means exactly.
About 5% of computer users have "advanced" literacy, defined as "Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit"
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106841164116074208
Even just general literacy and numeracy are ... far lower than you'd expect: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
An OECD 20-country survey gives the 5% "advanced" technological literacy statistic: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en
Jacob Nielsen discussed that at the time: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
This is a substantial aspect of my "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
This is so depressing. I have been wondering for a while as to why ~40 percent of the country rarely if ever votes in elections. This might help to explain it.
This also shows that technology people are amassing an unbelievable amount of power in their knowledge of how these systems work and operate given that the masses don't know how to weld that knowledge.
Fediverse is usually hardcore web 2.0 "runs only in latest Chrome" "I remember entire caniuse.org" sort of stuff, not much different from facebook. So its first adopters can be only non-technical users, but they can't be first adopters of new technology.
Perhaps if the advertising industry didn't already prove for 20+ years that they are entirely made up of scum, I would agree. People use ads to make money. I feel bad that they aren't making money passively that way.
But I grew up with ad networks, including Google themselves, turning a blind eye to deceptive ads, bait and switch, fake window popups, and outright scams. The online advertising industry has done everything they could to fuck us over and big tech companies were complicit in the crime.
So that's why I don't care about running an ad blocker. Maybe the advertising industry will have a code of ethics after I'm dead, but until then I'll keep using uBlock Origin and NoScript (and other extensions) to screw with the ad business as much as possible.
Putting aside the ethics, advertising turns the internet into a race to the bottom. Ad blocking is good for the internet because it means that your ads had better be good, minimally intrusive, and also be integrated with the content you are providing. In other words, do things like preroll and midroll sponsorships and referrals rather than slap a bunch of banners on your site that peddle crap du juor.
Not dismissing that Google Docs overlay may be explained by any of the following: (a) learned behavior from mobile computing that very few things are configurable (mobile apps tend to have far fewer preferences on how things are displayed; (b) pop ups on mobile often don't close when clicked; and (c) they are used to operating with very tight screen real-estate. I think (c) is most likely.
As someone brought up on desktop computing, I fight to eliminate anything that needlessly wastes screen real-estate such as bloated window chrome. But I think someone brought up on small screens might actually feel agitated by "too much" space.
I know information workers who have workplaces that would gladly pay for nicer monitors or keyboards but don’t bother to even request them.
I know a couple with a brand new house that has a miserably squeaky front door that could be silenced a half dozen ways in under a minute.
People of all kinds contortion themselves into knots, giving little notice to the daily, near constant twinge of their circumstances but don’t improve them.
Tolerating ads is just one example of this.
"Oh don't worry, it's always done that."
I lasted as long as I could but I finally walked over to the shop crew and asked if I could borrow some WD-40. "I'll bring it back in 10 minutes."
10 minutes later it's all "Thanks guys!", "No problem", and "Wow you really did mean 10 minutes!". [Note: I'm a man so there was no problem me stepping into the men's bathroom to make the repair myself].
And the door never squeaked again. My sanity was saved; it turns out I would be doing a decent amount of grunt work in that same area over my contract.
If anyone else ever noticed, they never said a word. The door had always squeaked and literally everyone either didn't care or did nothing about it; it just was how it was.
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I used to use adblocking but the tiny site Distrowatch made an impression on me. The owner rigged something so that those using adblock also would not see non-ad images. He said it’s really not fair to visit a free site and then block the thing that allows it to be free.
Also, I then read that one of the adblockers would take payments from advertisers to unblock their ads. What a racket.
So I block no ads. This does mean that I don’t look at the vast bulk of news sites because they have obnoxious ads. However, most decent news sites are now pay walled, and those that aren’t are junk anyway. I get my news from some sites I pay for, and from non-profit email newsletters, and from sites my employer pays for. These have few ads.
So I have found no loss from not using adblock. Adblock is like putting on a bulletproof vest to walk through a warzone. Better to just keep out of warzones.
Adblock makes my slow computer and phone bareable to use on "modern" homepages. Without them the load times multiplies.
Looking at the analytics after the fact made me realize why these cookie consent boxes use so many dark patterns. My acceptance rate for the box was like 4%, I tossed out cookies (and the banner) in the next update.
And also "You are using the worst browser available to you (Samsung), shall I install Firefox?" and then "Nah, don't care".
How naive I was. No one actually cares. It was like assuming everyone born after 1908 would fully understand how cars work.
I hadn't even noticed it (at least not consciously). I've apparently been trained somewhere to ignore dialogues, and I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the prevalence of hostile UX patterns.
[1]: https://archive.is/TZ7oe was the best, but is kinda dead now. https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/01/clickj...
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I don't use an ad-blocker, and nor do I accept sites with unreasonable ads. I block the whole site by closing the tab or hitting the back button.
I have yet to meet a single person, and yes they are all in the Bay Area tech industry, who knew about pi-hole before I told them.
- Despite having equivalent desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS) apps, most of our users (> 75%) use the app primarily on desktop
- Most users say the key reason for use is for privacy protection; even with Safari providing some inbuilt privacy tracking protection
- Our app is focused on providing a simple 'set and forget' ad blocking approach; so you would think the key audience would be less tech savvy users. However a large proportion of users are tech-inclined and knowledgeable users.
- A lot of tech heavy websites are some of the worst offenders in terms of tracker usage and advertising. For example, The Verge can load 3.5x faster simply by using an ad blocker that blocks the on-page trackers and ads[2]
[1] https://www.magiclasso.co/
[2] https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/difference-adblocking/
Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in Electron also gives the website owners full telemetry and tracking that they can't get in a tech savvy browser.
Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for privacy?
It must be very disheartening to work on reddit's mobile site. Not only is it deliberately made a miserable experience by forcing you through AMP via Google and insisting you "continue in browser" every time, but then you're greeted with a banner that outright says "this page is better in the app".
You can probably cross "mobile" out of this entirely.
Reddit have spent three years now building sites that are worse in every way than the decade old junker it's trying to replace.
If they cared that much about whether or not what they were working on made the world better or worse they'd never have taken a job at Reddit.
What I do not know is if it will work also when apps begin using DNS over HTTPS… I suppose not?
What I do and recommend everyone to do is:
1. Run an edge network device using network access controls and filter which devices on your network get outbound network access (in my case just the gateway device). Block all inbound traffic except what you choose to pinhole, block all outbound traffic except ports you choose to add to the allow list.
2. On every client device run a local application firewall (I like Vallum and Little Snitch on MacOS as examples) and filter applications by domain + port on outbound requests, block all inbound requests.
3. On every client device force it through a VPN to a gateway device internal to your network to get internet access, anything that falls off the VPN is then blocked from the internet. The gateway device can forcibly route traffic and perform additional filtering
4. On every client device, configure it to use an internal DNS on your network with a fallback to a trustworthy external provider, have the internal DNS use a trustworthy external provider over DoH. Block outbound DNS at the edge device (blocks all non-encrypted lookups).
It's kind of a pain, and a mess, but it does greatly restrict the damage that rogue IoT / Smart devices can do.
ipset create blist_doh hash:ip hashsize 1024
for ip in `cat /etc/bin/blist_doh.txt`; do ipset add blist_doh "$ip"; done
iptables -A <insert some iptables placement specific to your outgoing/forwarded traffic> -m set --match-set blist_doh dst -j DROP -m comment --comment 'SPY:all ext DoH BLOCKED'
Still, as of 2021, doh rule is around 2% traffic logged compared to my other rule, where I simply block outgoing 53/udp (except my resolver). a LOT of your devices ignore your dhcp dns settings and try to circumvent it going directly to shady 8.8.8.8 etc.
(*) you shall every few months check and update it.
E.g. if I wanted to know where you're hailing from, I'd browbeat you into granting me Location access privileges. If that's too difficult, I'd get you to grant me Files/Photos privileges (this one won't raise too many alarm bells with apps like Discord or Reddit), and then try to read EXIF geotags off your recent photos.
I'm using NextDNS as the system-wide private DNS on my Android phone, it works great and eats less battery than Blokada.
It works very well, I highly recommend it.
That and revenue is much higher on apps than on the web. I made an android apps for a website. And just alone the android apps made more money than the web version. With less ads.
Discord, Slack and other similar webapps can (and maybe do) send telemetry in the same connections used for the app's features. You can't reliably block that.
[1] https://www.zenz-solutions.de/personaldnsfilter-wp/
Maybe for now, but it's just a matter of time until use of DoH to circumvent your attempts at redirecting DNS becomes more widespread as well.
This is an ad disguised as an article targeting the "tech savvy" by bundling HN and Reddit (a truth + a lie makes the statement more true), a common clickbait tactic
> This makes sense especially considering how difficult it is to install an adblocker on Chrome, the most popular browser on mobile devices.
Nope, it is really easy: is just an extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-...
It makes me think Reddit users are inflating/manipulating this article w/ votes and comments
Correction: "difficult to install adblocker on mobile devices"
> Nope, it is really easy: is just an extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-...
The key word here is mobile devices.
AFAIK, ad blocking in Chrome on my phone is difficult. But with Firefox, I can easily install uBlock Origin.
I use a PiHole on my phone occasionally to block ads in anything that isn't Firefox, but I found that the OpenVPN client is a significant battery drain (~7% per hour).
Yet, their stated cause ("how difficult it is to install an adblocker on Chrome") refers to mobile users
A logic shift there - a bait and switch? Not sure if this is an error, or outright manipulation
This puts the entire article's credibility in question
Proof: in case they modify it like they did in HN's title
1. Title: https://ibb.co/Q87pDPr
2. Subtitle: https://ibb.co/nDshDCT
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I find it this comparison a little misleading because Plausible admits that their own script/endpoint are blocked by adblockers, just to a lesser extent than Google Analytics [3].
[1] https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy
[2] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
[3] https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction
Anyway, I indeed use Firefox with ublock origin, multi account containers, etc. I also use Firefox on Android. A lot of stuff people assume they need apps for works just fine in that.
You still need informed consent in the EU, GDPR is not specific to websites.