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I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

ryansouthgate.com

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Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#331

Post by drnick1 »

jayd16 wrote: post #276
drnick1 wrote: post #246

"After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like." It is estimated that between 30% and 50% of Internet users run ad blockers. I haven't see a single ad in years. Besides, Pi-holes are kind of overrated. First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply m…

Is that right? Mobile is like 60% of the web traffic and they don't really have popular and effective ad blocking.

iOS (Safari) also has uBlock now.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#332

Post by SpicyUme »

CIPHERSTONE wrote: post #320

I suspect 99.5% of blogs like this don't make any appreciable amount of money from ads. Which begs the question, why even do it? If it cheapens your readers experience and you are not making significant money from it, just don't do it at all. Everyone thinks their blog will make money, few do.

Maybe I'm just lucky but looking at special interest blogs I appreciate the comments from other users/experts/makers. Diqus is the latest in a string of commenting tool and they all seem to have issues over time. A favorite blog resource of mine got nuked after the comments were filled with spam, and possibly used to hack the site. Unfortunately the blog was a collection of years of specific experiences in places with very little other information for that activity. I've talked to the owner about getting information in the years since and he's been helpful, but building the site back would take too long for him, so it's mostly gone. The comments there were useful for updates from people who visited those locations, or found alternate routes/approaches.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#333

Post by dvdgsng »

drnick1 wrote: post #331
jayd16 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that right? Mobile is like 60% of the web traffic and they don't really have popular and effective ad blocking.

iOS (Safari) also has uBlock now.

I run ublock in all my browsers and devices, but other people on my network (family) don't, so pihole helps there. Its really not an either-or question, they are complementary.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#334

Post by snailmailman »

mort96 wrote: post #117
lupusreal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.

I feel like there are almost two completely incompatible stories being sold by ad tech people. One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware". The other is that any time there's a story about malware and scams on reputable websites, they say: "there are so many ads being submitted, Google is doing their best bu…

When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.

Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#335

Post by micromacrofoot »

mrweasel wrote: post #63

Other than the volume, one of the issues I have with these types of ads is that you're rarely able to report them as scams. Reddit have a similar issue. You can report an ad, but you have to pick "Other", there's no: "This ad is clearly a scam". That's by design obviously, because by removing the scams, most of the ad networks are left with very little inventory. Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported serv…

there's not much difference between an ad that's a scam and an ad that's not, so many networks don't bother policing it much

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#337

Post by drnick1 »

accrual wrote: post #296
boilerupnc wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on! My samsung TV menus are soooo much better in terms of snappiness by having Pi-Hole running and also setting up DNAT for those IoT devices who want to hardcode their DNS.

> DNAT (Destination Network Address Translation) Yes! This is easy to do on OpenBSD as well, though it's called "redirect" instead of "DNAT": pass in quick on $int_if inet proto udp to any port 53 rdr-to $dns_server port 53 pass in quick on $int_if inet proto tcp to any port 53 rdr-to $dns_server port 53

I also redirect port 53 traffic, and in addition filter traffic to "well known" public DNS servers like 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 and many others (lists can be found on GitHub), but this is ineffective against ads and telemetry served from hardcoded IPs.

Overall, it's just easier not to connect "smart" devices to the Internet at all. I prefer to use a Linux HTPC instead of a smart TV for example. It is completely under my control and I am not restricted to apps approved by Apple or Google, asked to log into anything or to accept ever-changing terms and conditions.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#338

Post by grishka »

drnick1 wrote: post #246

"After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like." It is estimated that between 30% and 50% of Internet users run ad blockers. I haven't see a single ad in years. Besides, Pi-holes are kind of overrated. First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply m…

> First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply more effective.

On my phone I do both: I use AdGuard DNS to block ads system-wide, and Vivaldi's built-in ad blocker to block those ads that still slip through.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#339

Post by conradfr »

edoceo wrote: post #227
conradfr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work for adsense as they basically get a new account every day so you can't effectively block scams.

Google can't figure out rate-limiting and trust-leveling/ramp? Sure they can; it just slows the money-pipe

Google could but I was responding to "the website that integrates ads can".

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#340

Post by garganzol »

wltr wrote: post #249

This constant difference between the original title and its censored version contributes into the whole impression (this, plus the lack of any moderation log) into the whole community to be very much censored and demotivates me to be here. Which isn’t a bad thing for me personally, the domination part, but the censoring part for no reason is quite disturbing. Why not keep the original title? Rhetorical question.

In this case, keeping the original title would allow you to be better connected to the reality. But this is not what some actors want - they want you to stay disconnected, and thus easily "influenced", to put it mildly.
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