Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you make this for Android?
On Android you can use Firefox + uBlock Origin.
This is the way. Although the built-in blocker in "strict" mode does a darn good job as well with a rare site breakage
Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
91–100 of 710 posts
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#92This is good to hear. I didn't think the percentages would be that high. "Data driven design" is kinda overrated anyway. It's better to actually listen to your users. Stats don't show what people think, and they're often tweaked to show what people want to see.
"Listening to your users" is just a more manual form of data gathering though. Also, it's not like "hearing what you want to hear" has been invented by statisticians, that is super easy to do when talking to users as well.
Some of the problems in talking to users:
- people will often tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. (Very few users would ever tell an interviewing dev that they think the product is unsalvageable, the dev team wasted several months and that the user would never ever use it)
- Users often don't know what they want because they don't understand the full range of possibilities. Sometimes they dream of tech that would violate several laws of physics, at other times they fail to realize that for-loops exist and just ask for a faster way to manually click a button a thousand times.
- Fads affect users just as much as anyone else. If there has been a surge of news articles about how Google is doing fancy AI stuff, you can bet the bakery on the corner of the street will mention machine learning when asked what they want to improve their business.
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#93One 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?
> Explains why Reddit promotes it so much
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".
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#94One 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?
Pretty much - and there's a nice app developed by an Oxford student that does this for Android: https://trackercontrol.org
It works very well, I highly recommend it.
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#95One 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?
> 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.
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
By nature it won't filter out bots, however. One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75% bot traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other than site performance.
> By nature it won't filter out bots, however. I have two questions about this: - Since you know they are bots, why couldn't you filter them? - On the other hand, couldn't there be bots that run JavaScript which would be tracked client-side?
> Since you know they are bots, why couldn't you filter them?
A decent amount can be filtered by UA. This is inconvenient because UA is a very large piece to log and index on, so you need to do UA processing to do anything useful with it and … well by that point it just becomes a chore and I suspect there's good logging services that do this better than you'd spend your time doing yourself.
> On the other hand, couldn't there be bots that run JavaScript which would be tracked client-side?
They exist but they're more rare by nature, because running JS at bot scale is expensive.
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#97There 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 gr…
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?
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#98Are there relevant studies on the effectiveness of advertising? I remember spotting such study. I still wonder if advertising is always worth spending on, beacuse google and facebook make a big amount of money with it, but I'm still skeptical when I see the actual amount of people "engaging" in ads, when you see how much it actually costs.
Yes, pretty much every company first data person runs Cost-per-action (CPA) analysis to estimate how many sales can be attributable to ads vs. other ways of raising your brand. It’s an imperfect science (just use the word “attribution” to trigger shivers in any data person) but it’s very clear that targeted platforms offer dramatically cheaper leads for almost every product. That’s why the hostility to ads feels misp…
> it helps company to whom you want to give money to find you
You mean, the companies who want me to give them money. I'm sure there are a few companies out there whose product I actually want and don't mind paying for, but their number is absolutely dwarfed by the number of companies that seek to induce FOMO/status anxiety/etc in order to get me to buy things I don't need and would not want if not for advertising.
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money. Ads wouldn't just get cheaper for them. On the contrary, clicking only on trash, and having the high quality content have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio would have the desired effect. Maybe.
The idea is not so much of clicking on high quality content ads, but sending visits to high quality content pages and click on the ads of those pages, to get them more money. Would obviously stop working if the sales after the ad click are not made. But, hey this isn't a gameplan, this was just a "what if" :D
That could work, or indeed it could get them dropped quicker because they have a high fraud rate :)
I'm fully on board with the AdNauseam model which fucks about indiscriminately. The ad industry can burn.
Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
#100One 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?
DNSFilter[1] does the trick even for android apps though, but yes it's even less mainstream than in-browser ad blockers.