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Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

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Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#51
post #5

Everyone should install Millennials to Snake People. It's a great addon that makes the internet way better. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...

I prefer the cloud to butt extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-xkcd...

Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#52
post #5

Everyone should install Millennials to Snake People. It's a great addon that makes the internet way better. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...

Is no one else concerned about granting this extension a permission to "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"? This is a joke extension and nothing is stopping the author from selling it to someone who might have more sinister uses for it.

Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#53
Even my grandfather (in his 80s) uses one and when I asked him where he got the idea for using it he said "I got sick of all the spam and thought I might get a virus so searched for ' block ads / pop ups and installed the first one I found, I guess it could be doing bad things itself but websites load so much faster now!" - pretty amazing invasive ads are now that they lead the elderly to a search engine for a fix! (Not an easy thing to do at the best of times!)

Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#54
post #29

Who in that age cohort didn't experience the wild west days of shady Flash and Java applets, Punch the Monkey games, RealPlayer, Shockwave, Internet Explorer and all the other insecure crap we used to deal with. Raise your hand if you never got a virus and almost bricked the family computer doing something mostly innocuous... Ad-blocking may not be as essential to self-defense as it used to be, but old habits die har…

>Ad-blocking may not be as essential to self-defense as it used to be, but old habits die hard.

Possibly even more relevant nowadays than it used to be with more drive-by malware, 0-day exploits, and more and more people using the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-b...

Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#55
I browse most of the time without extensions other than a cookie editor, since I've encountered a number of weird bugs in my company's own product that turned out not to be bugs but weird interactions with browser extensions I was running. I also read a lot of news articles both on big sites like the WSJ and whatever regional news outlets turn up in my news searches. That is to say that ad networks should (presumably) have a great profile on me and be able to show super-relevant ads.

But I still get Linode ads for weeks if I make the mistake of visiting Linode outside incognito mode (I've been a customer there for 5 years; I don't need another ad prompting me to sign up). I still get ads for things that I've just bought instead of complementary goods for the things I've just bought.

I still see absolutely insulting garbage ads for One Weird Trick that $GROUP hates. It's the offensively stupid Taboola/Outbrain etc. bottom-of-the-barrel ads that repulse and puzzle me the most. My memory says -- and scanned newspaper archives confirm -- that back before online news was a thing, regional newspapers had plenty of advertising but it was advertising for normal goods and services: snow tires, a clothing sale, lawn care, oil changes, etc. Shortly after the turn of the millennium I thought that online advertising was going to be kind of scary due to the profiles advertisers could build up on me but also kind of nice because I'd always see ads that aligned with my interests, instead of e.g. randomly bombarding me with ads for baby diapers in hopes that I am a new parent. Ha, if only.

The most noticeable difference between small news outlet ads now and 30 years ago isn't that the ads I see are now all eerily aligned with my interests; it's that worst of them are aggressively misaligned with my interests and with the interests of anyone who's not a total fucking rube. Who actually believes that they've won the iPhone giveaway contest or that they need a weird trick to clean the dangerous fluoride toxins from their tap water? I've never clicked on this trash but I appear doomed to encounter it forever.

Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#56
post #52
post #5

Everyone should install Millennials to Snake People. It's a great addon that makes the internet way better. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...

Is no one else concerned about granting this extension a permission to "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"? This is a joke extension and nothing is stopping the author from selling it to someone who might have more sinister uses for it.

I know nothing about this addon at all, but that's how most ad blockers work...?

Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you use LA Times if we'd convince them to implement the following user experience: https://demo.adtechmedia.io/atm-core/nytimes/www.nytimes.com... NOTE: Above article is from NY Times and is ONLY for demo purposes :)

Ugh, no. Blurring the text not only kills performance but since it happens after page load is incredibly irritating. Nevermind all the irrating navigation that suddenly appeared around the edges of the page. Quora does this and it's why I will never, ever sign up for an account with them.

Imagine it's not blurring, but random replacement of alphanumeric characters that quickly replaces the original text in the article. Would you use it that way and which route: micro-payments or ads?

Re: Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker

#59
post #46

Young Millenials? Are they different to "Young persons"? And what is an "Old Millenial"? Why not just describe the group of 18-24 year olds as "Young adults", which is what they are.

"Millenials" is always used in combination with derogatory terms like "entitled, lazy, hopeless". Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's workplace and how little power you can hope for, regardless of how much you work.

It's used to try and drive a wedge between the elderly and the young so that the old will be apathetic about fighting against onerous student debt/shitty entry level jobs and the young will be apathetic about fighting the drive to destroy medicare, privatize social security, etc.

Divide et Impera, etc.

Unlike other propaganda attempts this one actually works pretty well.

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