Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#481

Post by bredren » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

jccalhoun wrote: post #299

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 ov…

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.

Tolerating ads is just one example of this.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#482

Post by hackmiester » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #277

Closi wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Just change your gender to trans/alien and your age to 5...

"trans" isn't a gender. But, I am trans, and advertisers are more than prepared to advertise to me. So I'm not sure what the goal would be there.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#483

Post by 14 » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #461

cm2187 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what people are watching? Yes, which is why I will never own one.

Just wait until 5g is everywhere and companies will just add its functionality to your tv and connect regardless of what you do.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#484

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #324

atoav wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ve…

Reminds me of a thread a while ago pointing out that a single show dominates the MTV programming lineup almost every day [1]. It's as if there is some algorithm running without human intervention that feeds on itself by reacting only to current viewing habits:

    foreach (show s in lineup)
        if (s.viewers > THRESHOLD)
            lineup.replace_with_more (s)

Obviously resulting in this weird local maxima where no other shows get broadcast.

1: https://twitter.com/MTVSchedule/status/1422934028253081603

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#485

Post by silon42 » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

3np wrote: post #228

thinkingemote wrote: post #58

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?

> Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for privacy? 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.

Time to ban/firewall DoH then.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#486

Post by ukyrgf » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

jccalhoun wrote: post #299

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 ov…

I hate those tutorial popups and refuse to engage them.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#487

Post by second--shift » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

Cyberdog wrote: post #156

scrollaway wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

> One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75% bot traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other than site performance. I'm unclear how broad you intend that second sentence to be, but there's still a ton of info you can glean just from server-side logs: - Referrer info, and, by extension, popular search terms being used to find your site; - Paths on your site causing 5xx errors (so pages wh…

| frustratingly I can't recall the name of one off the top of my head right now

fail2ban

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#488

Post by michaelcampbell » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

turbinerneiter wrote: post #15

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 gr…

> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud.

Data poisoning for something the scale of Google I fear would be ineffective to the point of laughability, sadly.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#489

Post by dmoy » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

sempron64 wrote: post #379

q-big wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used wrongly for giving recommendations: If you want to create suggestions for a user, in many case the wrong answer is "suggest what has really high ratings…

Predicting exactly this was the premise of the famous Netflix Prize, one of the first open machine learning challenges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize

I remember when that competition was released, I was working (as an undergrad) in GroupLens, which had MovieLens still around but it was getting a bit of bitrot.

It was always weird to me that GroupLens didn't spin up a team for it, but it seemed like everyone in the research group had moved on to other things and didn't want to context switch back. Someone mentioned something like "shame they didn't do this 10 years ago, a million dollars would have been nice". I think someone was doing tagging on movielens, but I don't remember the details.

I got the sense that neither Riedl nor Konstan (or any of the current grad students it seemed) wanted to pursue it (Terveen, I think, wasn't in to recommender systems at all in the first place).

I don't think the lab had any funding problems haha, so maybe that was what it came down to.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#490

Post by buro9 » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

dalu wrote: post #378

buro9 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android offers Private DNS, just point that at nextdns.io and block things even within apps that aren't browsers. The biggest benefit is definitely the sheer speed at which news websites load on my phone now, even when I'm on a crap connection. Another benefit: This isn't a VPN, so you can still use a VPN whilst using Private DNS. Edit: Also... lol, I can't access TFA as plausible.io is also blocked on my network and…

Nextdns is giving me an ID. Why would I want to be tracked by unique ID? That's even worse than GA

You don't have to do that... NextDNS ultimately uses Cloudflare DNS under the hood, so just point yourself at 1.1.1.1 and you're done but it will block nothing.

If you want a DNS server to block things, know that the definition of what to block is subjective and some people may disagree with what you want to block.

For that reason you get an account, which allows you to have a configure, and that needs to be resolve to you... so at some level an identifier of the configuration is needed. This is the id.