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No adblocker detected

maurycyz.com

121–130 of 388 posts

Re: No adblocker detected

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this often. My experience is totally different. I've installed ublock origin and I'm using Vivaldi as my blink engine wrapper. I've never seen a YouTube ad since years. I wonder why anyone has to fight for an ad free YouTube.

They often release new "features" in a A/B fashion to a small percentage of users. It's most obvious with UI changes, where a portion of users will get a disfigured version of the site for a month, but it's probably true for their ad-blocking endeavors as well.

I wonder if they're testing the new useless cinema mode on me because I'm running an adblocker.

Re: No adblocker detected

#122
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fine with static ads like you would have in newspapers. Another answer to this thread lists things advertisers did. Those are the reasons tracker blockers were created in the first place. Advertisers went too far and now they lost control and weep. My privacy, attention and digital security is not worth sacrificing for those greedy, unregulated people. Literally nothing prevents a blog from having static images…

We had static ads. We called them banners and websites abused them. Some sites were so bad that it was challenging to find content between horizontal and vertical banners. Animated GIFs followed soon and then everything else we know. Some sites are still as bad as those old ones. I'm can't believe what eyes are seeing any time I look at friends browsing on their computers.

Good point. My point still stands that it's possible to have ad revenue with unintrusive ads.

For instance, I'm fine with video creators having sponsored sequences because I can skip them if I want. And there's no way for them to know if I watched the ad. In fact, they don't care because they already got paid.

Re: No adblocker detected

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't use the internet at a whole - if you just stick to the 10 biggest apps/websites, the experience is acceptable without an adblocker. As for YouTube, blocking their ads is basically a part-time job at this point. On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.

Firefox and UBlock Origin has never broken for me and works effectively.

Consider yourself lucky. Some of their A/B tests seem to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60 seconds before they start playing, navigation taking 15+ seconds.

If that happens to you, this thread [1] is sometimes updated with manual workarounds that sometimes work:

    www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)
    www.youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.web_enable_ab_rsp_cl, false)
    www.youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.ab_pl_man, false)
    ||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com
    www.youtube.com/watch##+js(set, ytInitialData, undefined)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1jbv1xn/youtu...

Re: No adblocker detected

#124

I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly. There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeload…

Yeah, no thanks. I used to think like this, and i remember exactly what happened the day i installed my first adblocker: i was already annoyed that some sites i visited employed very annoying ads, on both sides of the window, occupying about 20% of the screen, each. And they were serving an animation with _very_ loud music.

That day instead, when i opened the page 3-4 other pages opened as soon as the website loaded, all serving loud and obnoxious virus alerts, porn and some other crap. But how? I disabled popups a long time ago.

That day i found out about self-clicking ads. That day i installed an ad blocker.

It is THEM that have broken the social contract. Screw them and screw ads.

(good thing that i wasn't on dialup anymore. Anybody remember that? scam sites that would make your dialup bill go up crazy, as if you were calling a courier's help line)

Re: No adblocker detected

#125
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why DNS ad blockers (Ad Guard, Pi-Hole, other) aren't frequently used across corporates. Especially given the regular-ish training on cybersecurity and related.

Because ads are not how malware is distributed? You have higher chance of getting a malware from `pnpm add` than seeing an ad on the web.

I took a careful look at the definition of malware on Wikipedia. Ads are malware.

Re: No adblocker detected

#126
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had static ads. We called them banners and websites abused them. Some sites were so bad that it was challenging to find content between horizontal and vertical banners. Animated GIFs followed soon and then everything else we know. Some sites are still as bad as those old ones. I'm can't believe what eyes are seeing any time I look at friends browsing on their computers.

Good point. My point still stands that it's possible to have ad revenue with unintrusive ads. For instance, I'm fine with video creators having sponsored sequences because I can skip them if I want. And there's no way for them to know if I watched the ad. In fact, they don't care because they already got paid.

Youtube creators get access to watchtime stats which show a dip for sponsored segments. My understanding is that sponsor contracts typically don't ask to get access to that data though, instead they look at views and refferals

Re: No adblocker detected

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why DNS ad blockers (Ad Guard, Pi-Hole, other) aren't frequently used across corporates. Especially given the regular-ish training on cybersecurity and related.

Don't ad blockers breach Terms of Service? I assume this is one reason that corps don't roll out adblockers

sosume.

Re: No adblocker detected

#128
post #36

I am extremely insulated from ads online and have been for about a decade. Once in a while I have to browse on a device that does not have an ad blocker or most of the times does not even let you install one. Seeing a website that is SEoptimised and heavily ad supported feels like walking into a crack den. That this is the normal experience for the vast majority of users is sad.

With uBlock Origin you can actually click on the first Google results for any search, scroll down a bit the initial yadda yadda and find the actual answer to your search even in those webSEOtes that are usually just ads over ads.

Re: No adblocker detected

#129
post #84
post #36

I am extremely insulated from ads online and have been for about a decade. Once in a while I have to browse on a device that does not have an ad blocker or most of the times does not even let you install one. Seeing a website that is SEoptimised and heavily ad supported feels like walking into a crack den. That this is the normal experience for the vast majority of users is sad.

I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.

Brave did this they ran ads on Facebook and YouTube where they would show ads telling you how to install brave to stop receiving them. Also they criticized because brave themselves was showing ads

Re: No adblocker detected

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost. Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. There is no social contract with them. They just sell your data. If you know what they are doing, know how to block it, and refuse to, you are complicit in m…

> Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. IMHO this is a very wrong take. Mega corporations are people. Demonstration: nobody goes to work at Google for a while. Everything stops, technical stuff and non technical stuff. No people, no corporations, small ones and large ones.

Easy bet that most of those people disagree with the corporation's ad (and other) practices also. I'd even bet the ones working directly in ad tech are probably the most likely to always use an ad blocker.
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