This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.
Maybe we could turn it around: adblockers are tools that block ads and other kinds of dark traffic such as trackers and malicious scripts.
depending on your household's browsing habits, it can be downright insane how much traffic goes through ones network (and the web at large), that is just nothing but dog shit.
I monitored my pihole at my place and my own traffic is usually no more than 15% garbage with about 750,000 domains blocked, but the second grandma or grandpa starts doomscrolling boomer things on their phones and ipads. I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them "what the fuck are you doing on your phone?"
also set up a Region exemption or whatever, blocking russian, chinese, and a whole bunch of other untrustworthy TLDs and im literally showing my grandmother the repeated attempts to communicate with something in fucking China in real time whilst she's playing some solitare game she downloaded.
They are so short sighted to. Ad blocker help advertizers. It allows sites to fill up sites with ads to the point of being unusable while not losing 100% of traffic. That keeps these site relevant enough that old people who don't have ad blockers end up there too when they follow links or google ranks a site high because it has traffic.
If they got rid of all ad block somehow they would have to decrease the ads because I wouldn't use the web. Or online communities would be way more conscious of the ad level of the things they link to.
The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.
Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That's like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.
Website: "You appear to be using an ad blocker." Me: "You appear to be correct."
An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.
More necessary than that, really.
That entirely depends on the quality of your water.
Dark traffic?!?! LMAO. Can we start calling malicious ads dark advertising?
I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.
We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.
He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).
Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.
What we have now isn't that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don't let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
100% this and also, consider allow-listing specific sites which deserve your support, or better yet, contribute directly if you can – e.g. your local bike club forum, your local newspaper, a blogger whose work you enjoy, etc., assuming of course, the ads are reasonable.
Guilty? Hahahahahaha
They will never make me feel guilty because they are the guilty ones. Guilty of greed and of destroying our society. Fuck big advetisers. They would put billboards in outre space if they thought it would make them a tenth of a penny more in profit.
I dont even consider them human to be honest.
Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.
"We paid for the right to show you this!"
You paid for the opportunity not the right, but you didn't pay me, motherfucker -- and my price is everything you have or fuck off and die.
Edit: You know what? This is how I really feel about ads.
This is a consent issue, and I will not allow advertisers inside me. They hire psychologists in order to exploit humans' most vulnerable mental blind spots. They don't just brainwash us. They mindfuck the entire human species, and they do not recognize consent. We need to treat advertising as the collective mindr*pe that it is, otherwise they will never stop exploiting us, and we will never be able to build a bright future for humanity and this world. They are manipulating the trajectory of an entire species with zero regard to any future well-being. The butterfly effects are inconceivable. Our minds are sacred. The advertising industry is committing a crime against humanity that we have failed to recognize as such, because money is all that matters today. They must be stopped before Big Tech perfects brain-computer interfaces.
If ad networks weren't the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn't slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn't be such an issue.
If your site can't exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.
Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.
Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
It would have to be millenials since Gen z exist almost entirely in the walled garden of a phone app.
Most people now a days don't even use a desktop with a browser. I honestly expect that most of what they are "seeing" is just web scrapers for the LLM. Those are likely to "block" ads simply based on efficiency, since it shows down crawling.
Bottom line: if I'm forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!
They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not "dark traffic", the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren't "brutal", the people without blockers are being brutalized.
"dark" as in "not visible". Adblock users can't be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. "Dark", in this instance, is not a derogatory term.
"Brutal" is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.
Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much
Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks
Ad BwOcKeRs ArE StEaLiNg FwOm Us!!!!
Meanwhile Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a billion AI web crawlers can hammer the fuck out of of your site and nobody cares.
The larger problem that is not discussed so much is the amount of Ai generated garbage that is put on the web now.
When these Ai web crawlers start to read that Ai garbage as source data, the models will start to become worse and worse, and as a result, our Ai clients will start to get worse and worse.
I dont think there is a way for the crawlers to understand what is Ai generated fluff and crap. The reasons the Ai responses are so good now is because people actually posted these solutions on the web. What happens when Ai crap overflows the web so much that good answers are drowned out?
Also, no ads in chat gpt yet. Thats going to change and it will become impossible to block those.
The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
There was a time in the 90's where ads were mostly banners, and that was fine; google's text-only ads were completely acceptable.
But that didn't last long - it went downhill with the proliferation of popups, especially the nefarious kind which created even more popups or tried to stop the user from closing them, and usage of dialog boxes.
And whoever was the first person to add sound to an ad, i wish you and your entire family tree that your genitalia translocate to your forehead.
Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
I believe this to be true.
What's frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don't have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead "☝️🤓 actually you don't own it." Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that's my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
Fuck yeah, advertiers are a cancer.
I personally am not bothered at ALL by the banner video ads overlayed on top of another banner ad that opens a new tab when you try to close the banner video then another one opens covering the original banner then the page scrolls all the way back to the top and shows you an email list sign up, why would I be?
News Media: "ADVERTISERS CAN'T DISTRIBUTE ADS BECAUSE OF YOUUUUUU"
g-good!
I don't mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don't track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it's absurd.
It's far far worse than American TV. TV commercials are a scattershot hope that you show the ad to 2 million people and 10,000 see it and buy your product.
With Google fingerprint tracking, advertisers are selling hyper-targeted ads so a company buys only ads to show to the right 10,000 people over and over. It's a literal dream for advertisers. But it's a fucking dystopian nightmare for us.
The fbi suggests using an ad blocker. Guess what an ad blocker is as important as an antivirus.
I used my mother's laptop once 2 years ago, and i was like, how the fuck do you people browsing without an adblock?
When piholes go mainstream they are fully cooked. Even tech illiterate in your family won't get the ads
I tried to give my mom a pihole, she made me get rid of it because it broke the NY times and some rando mobile game she plays. Some people can't be helped.
i know this may go against the general attitude here but i gotta say this does make me a little sad when i think about it. and i use adblockers as well, but i never knew what the numbers were. when it's put into context like this it's hard not to be discouraged by the fact that this is still probably a minority of users. i mean what the hell, how are people still using the internet with ads turned on.
“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”
And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.
Are they trying to present it as if poor innocent users need to be protected from the vile ad blockers?
So this confirms that people have a negative reaction to ads, which every actual internet user knows in their bones already. This means they ALSO are not even doing their one job of persuading people to buy shit. Of course this won't lead to companies reducing investment for ad carrying or finding ways to make them more appealing, that costs money, instead they will use AI generators to produce WORSE ads and leverage their capital to have governments capitulate and force users to watch by banning blockers, probably VPNs too. Bill Hicks was the most correct about advertising, and remains undefeated.
US trade association News/Media Alliance announced it had secured the takedown of 12ft.io
Oh thats why that stopped working. Bunch of jerks.
Ads are out of control, they fill my day.
My home, my rules. Ads are not allowed on the devices i BOUGHT.
99% of the targeted ads i get tend to be targeted at someone who has a family and makes 3 times my wage, so you're wasting business resources for your own gain and wasting my time by serving them to me.
So fuck off outta my house.
Seeing static banner ads on 2000s websites without popups or tracking: 🤷♂️
Blocking ads on Firefox after popups and other crap started: 😀
Browsing the internet on Android before I realised the browser supports addons: 🤮
Blocking ads and tracking on Android via uBlock origin and Privacy Badger: 😀👍
My feeling of guilt when scummy megacorporations miss out on ad revenue:
25 years of adblockers and that is the single most important thing that keeps me from cutting myself off the web. I've donated money to adblockers and will continue to do so until I die! I send emails to the web sites that ask me to remove the blocker to tell them I will not and that there are many other sites that welcome my adblocking ass!
Let me know when you can't inject malware via ads....
I didn't mind having a couple of static ads on a page. But now it's so much. So many dynamic ads, autoplaying videos, popups asking you to sign up to a newsletter, etc. No thanks.
