- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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This is what is absolutely crazy about the modern internet. We pay for data – and because net neutrality is dead, we pay more if we go over a cap. And yet, we do not have direct control over what corporations choose to force feed us through that data.*
Consider the analogy of terrestrial TV (not a perfect one, but good enough for this). Back in the day, you put up an antenna, and you received programming. There was no data limit, because it’s just airwaves. Watch as much as you want. But one downside: advertising, except the case was easily made that it pays for the programming, the broadcasting, etc, so it was somewhat of a different beast. That cost was not passed to you. You “paid” for it by accepting the injection of ads into the programming.
Fast forward to today. Let’s say you want to stream a show that you would have gotten on terrestrial TV back in the day. Now, you pay to access that content (not going into the deeper issue of lack of ownership here), but you also effectively pay for the broadcasting, in the old sense of the word. While it is true that companies incur costs to run their servers and dish out the data, you, the consumer, must pay to access the network it uses. And again, because neutrality is gone, you pay more if you go over your cap – for the content that you pay to access anyway.
It starts to look shockingly like a double dip. Consider what you’re doing when on a corporate website: you pay for the hardware. You pay for the data. You (often) pay for the content that uses the data. And yet, these corporations still gave the gall to inject advertising into your data stream.
It gets crazier the more you think about it.
*ad blockers and sponsorblock give you some control, but ultimately they are reactive Band-Aids on the modern system
And that’s why I have pihole setup to which I connect to using wireguard.
They are not chewing through mine, I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Android too.
After reading the article:
To test this, Enders used a browser that mimicked an iPhone 6 and accessed a total of eight “popular” news sites (though they didn’t confirm what these were).
Wow yea great methodology, thanks guys. It really captures your motto of “Rigorous Fearless Independent” especially the first term.
Also good job by Santiago Luque of Nextpit to generalize the result to the maximum possible extent.
Yeah, I can’t imagine raw-dogging the internet like that, even on mobile. If I opened an app or web page, and saw ads, I would just exit the page completely.
Internet without ad blocking is unbearable.
I have a setup of about 250 mb worth of blocklists on the home router (openwrt). The adblocker generates a statistic. Around 20 percent of all connections get blocked, so that’s my personal traffic saved every day. On mobile your can block traffic systemwide too, so not only your browser but also app based adds.
On android just go to settings – network – private dns and chose one provided by mullvad for example:
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
On ios:
I use NextHub and NextDNS on iPhone and although it is limited compared to Android, it blocks around 12% of my traffic.
Looks like I’m not reading their article.
We require your consent for the use of cookies and other technologies by us and our partners (393) to store and process personal data on your device.
Consent dialog is not conforming law.
And man, even if you go into the settings of the consent dialog, I hate these kinds of misleading toggles. Which option do you think is active?
Ironic.
Use the consent-o-matic browser plugin, works with Firefox mobile, you just have to set it up as a private collection.
uBlock Origin also has a built-in list (not enabled by default) that blocks cookie pop-ups too!
Yes, and in doing so it breaks some websites, just like the “I still dont care about cookies” extension. Consent-o-matic rejects cookies instead of breaking websites by blocking the popup
Consent-o-matic doesn’t block them, it opens all the consent dialogues in the background and flips every single switch to reject/deny, so you’ll never be bothered again.
Schaut aus als wärs an
Genau. Ist es aber nicht. 😬
Ich bin nicht überrascht
I think it’s an. Was it?
It’s off. When setting it on, the An becomes bright green.
I was misled as well.
Disgusting. At least you can tell that way, sometimes toggling doesn’t help to tell, which is even worse.
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It’s the most pervasive pollution wrought upon our environments, and amplifies the carcinogenic perpetual growth delusion.
People are not willing to pay for services that they get for free.
How, precisely, does that relate to, or negate, what I posted?
You can’t ban something that basically supports all products that people use for free. You can’t compare it to smoking. Some advertising is pure pollution, like highway billboards
If cannot operate service without invade everyone with annoying bullshit, then simply do not. Never start.
They should not exist in first place.
So you are willing to pay for the content you consume?
I am paying for the content I consume, yet I still get ads. Why is that?
And don’t say it’s due to rising costs of production, because their profits somehow also grow every year.
Probably because of the platform? No idea, you don’t give details.
If paying doesn’t prevent ads, how does your suggestion help?
I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about any specific platform since multiple are starting to introduce this, and more will follow. But if you’d like we could go with Amazon Prime Video. Why are they showing me ads, even though I’m paying for the service?
They are trying to squeeze every cent possible, in typical Amazon fashion. If you don’t like, speak with your wallet and cancel the subscription.
Ah, so I should pay for the content, but since that’s not enough I should boycott and not consume media.
Or we can recognize that individual user action doesn’t help and regulate ads, because as I said, it’s not just Amazon that’s trying to squeeze every cent possible. It’s every company. Netflix has ad-supported plans (and is phasing others out), YouTube still shows some ads with Premium, …
It’s not just one company, it’s all companies.
You said it, ad-supported. Pay a little and watch ads, or pay more and don’t watch ads. Prime apparently doesn’t offer the second option.
Translated to American: Costco charges a membership and Walmart doesn’t. You still have to pay for the groceries either way. You don’t like the membership? Shop at Walmart.
This is a false dichotomy, and illustrates the pernicious terminal incuriosity and learned helplessness modern society incentivises, rewards, and celebrates.
There are models other than incendiary extraction and debasement which can be implemented to value and promote creative work. Elevating the legitimacy of advertising in its current role perpetuates its abuse, and suppresses these preferable alternatives.
sick words bro but dude u got any practi-cool ideas? or just complaints :/
Care to share some of those models?
In the society where I live, journalists, artists, developers and others like to have food and shelter. Ads is 9nr way of paying for it, cash is another. What do you propose, paying in exposure?
Reminder that e.g. Firefox mobile has full extension support und as such can run uBlock Origin.
DNS blockers are nice, but they can only do so much against tracking without overblocking.
Reminder that e.g. Firefox mobile has full extension support und as such can run uBlock Origin.
Calling it full extension support is a bit misleading. Some desktop extensions do not work on mobile Firefox, although most work
Yeah, Firefox on mobile is great. It’s horrible if I have to use stock Chrome for anything, ads everywhere, layers of ads, fullscreen popups, the horror
Just don’t use stock Chrome then.
For me it only opens if I have to click some Wifi portal confirmation.
Not on iOS I don’t think.
I got excited for a second.
Try the Orion browser , it has support for extensions, including uBlock
Can install all extension from mozilla or even google chrome store. But almost no work.
uBlock seems to mostly work for me. Better than nothing
Yeah. I regret the iPad purchase. I should have gotten the pixel tab…
I use “video lite” & mullvad dns blocking for my youtube and that works quiet decent.
Great! How do I add add-ons on iOS?
Move to EU )
I didn’t know about iOS - Firefox only seems to allow this on android unfortunately.
Ex wife: Turn off the blueberry pie or whatever! [She really said that.] It’s blocking my clicks!
OK.
“Why is my internet so slow?!”
Dunno, let me see your phone.
Points finger: Ad, ad, ad downloading, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad…
“Fine. Turn it back on.”
I had that too, my Mother was wondering why the first two Google results weren’t working. Because they were the ads, and the Pihole refused to resolve the domains. She didn’t even realize she fell for the Google Ads injected as pseudo results. (It’s been a while I don’t know if they are still around)
Even worse my ex almost payed for Firefox, because she fell for the ad links above the real Mozilla link below, when she was looking for the Installer.
If you extrapolate from that and suppose that somewhere around half of all internet traffic is ad transmissions, that means that the internet ad industry has about 20 times the carbon emissions of crypto.
How did you arrive at that number?
Crypto bad for environment though. Corpo-net good for economy though, so environment never talked about.
Two things can be bad for the environment. Maybe even more.
deleted by creator
Internet, especially on mobile devices, is becoming more and more unusable every day. Fucking ads everywhere, taking up more space than the content. Autoplaying videos overlayed on top of the content. Close buttons so small they are all but impossible to hit on a touchscreen. Cookie consent banners on every site (opt out of course). The list just goes on…
I don’t even care about the bandwidth, it’s just a pain to use. I’ve started using Safari’s reader view and the new “Hide Distracting Items” option to hide most of it, but I shouldn’t have to. Capitalism really does ruin everything.
You should try out Brave Browser on iOS
It’s true and I saw it first hand at an airbnb with so so WiFi. My pops needed his football fix and managed to stream but the connection kept blurry or disconnect. Asked him why he was still using chrome; he even had firefox with uBlock Origin. Following my advice, closed chrome and sure enough, no video ads and shit fixed his connection problem.
Internet enshittification is real but we can fight it.
Internet enshittification
Web enshittification actually. The Internet itself still works mostly fine, apart from a few unfair peering disputes among the giants, and the Chinese and Russian disconnection efforts.
Internet enshittification is real…
Why would you even say that? It just opens the door to an argument that doesnt exist.
“Help fight internet enshittification” is a better message.
Just my opinion, and likely neither of us would even see the difference in our life times, but for what its worth, i want to help fight the good fight, even if its something as minor as this mentality.
To me its like people making really bad arguments for worthwhile causes, it just feeds the trolls and makes the cause harder to achieve
I wonder how many lemmy users dont use adblock
There’s dozens of us!
Why do people not use adblock?
Because they use ublock.
But adblock has 4.5 stars on the chrome web store
Ublock has only 3.6 stars
I will ignore the reviews on the Firefox version because Google is much better at keeping users data secure than Mozilla
Because I want the people running the website to earn some money with my visit.
But couldnt you just use an allowlist?
I could do many things, but I don’t because:
- that would require effort
- if I use a service I pay for it as the provider requests, or I don’t use it at all. I also donate to the Wikipedia and contribute to open source.
I have Firefox with Ublock Origin, YouTube ReVanced, and a DNS-level adblocker to cover everything else; ads ain’t chewing through shit on my device.
YouTube seems to make the experience worse and worse for us, tho. Pages not loading correctly, adds still showing up before the video plays, page unresponsive several seconds every few seconds, …
Sounds like you need a better adblocker. I’m not having any of these issues.
What is better than uBlock origin?
Try enabling all the optional filters and then updating them.
What do you mean… all filters? There is a ton. Why should that do anything? I actually looked at it and reset it to default, no change.
Cause Ublock Origin works flawlessly for me and the first step towards troubleshooting is replicating the results.
as long as data caps exist all internet advertising is theft
As long as time exists, all internet advertising is time theft.
For what it’s worth, nextdns (referer link) servers block ads at the DNS level, works pretty well on iPhones and Androïd without root.
I’ve been using nextdns for ages and it’s great.
Far left one has to be msn.com
