this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

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[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yo bro. Looks like you are looking at some information without 15 things popping up in your face. I see you are into the "dark traffic"

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What's frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don't have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead "☝️🤓 actually you don't own it." Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.

Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that's my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.

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[–] Xenny@lemmy.world 13 points 2 weeks ago

Let me know when you can't inject malware via ads....

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 13 points 2 weeks ago

AdBlocker is the one who should get the Nobel Peace prize.

[–] johncandy1812@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.

[–] paulcdb@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

[rant] The Internet is not FREE. Its just free at the point of use!

Just like ad funded websites aren’t free to use, they are also just free at the point of use!

People seem to forget where the all this ‘ad money’ comes from. It’s not growing on magic money trees, it’s coming from every product you buy and it’ll be interesting to see how much products have gone up against the sheer amount of ads that are shovelled everywhere now.

The reason the internet used to be great was because people shared information with no expectation of monetary gain. Just the love of what they knew and the joy of sharing information.

So the sooner everyone realises you’re all paying for the ads on every product/service to be shown already, and blocking them actually saves you money because the more ads that are shown, the more websites get paid, the more ad/tracking companies charge companies and yes, the more expensive you’re product and services get! [/rant]

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[–] arc99@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.

It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don't do it.

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[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

I'm wondering if Gopher should make a comeback ? Gemini is a thing so, well you know.....

For those who don't know, they're alternative internet protocols similar to HTTP

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[–] salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 9 points 2 weeks ago

Good 🖕🏻

[–] zanyllama52@infosec.pub 8 points 2 weeks ago

Whatever number it is, it ain't big enough yet.

More power!

[–] thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

Good. Hopefully the advertisers will realize that it's not profitable to advertise online anymore, and then we'll be left the hell alone.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you've voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.

Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.

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[–] lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Damn people, enshitifying the internet for the advertisers.

I switched to GrapheneOS which uses Vanadium browser by default, which doesn't support any content blocking yet. I use ProtonVPN which seems to block everything.

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[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 8 points 2 weeks ago
[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This is easily solved by not using 3rd parties and tracking data for ads. If the ad was just part of the page (similar to an ad in the newspaper) then ad blockers would not be able to detect them at all. A YouTuber saying "before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]" does not get blocked by ad blockers.

However, in order to do that websites would be responsible for the ads they display. If they don't do their due diligence they won't be able to pass it off as "we're not responsible for it, it's our ad company that put it there." They don't want to be responsible for the ads they show, but they want you to be responsible for the ads you don't watch.

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A YouTuber saying "before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]" does not get blocked by ad blockers.

Well, there's sponsor block which uses crowd sourced timestamps to skip those segments, but yeah you're right.

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