Enshittification

Discounting temporary tech issues, I haven't browsed internet without an adblocker for a single day in my entire life. Nobody is entitled to abuse my attention; no guilt, no exceptions.

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate

They don't, though! Pages of static HTML are tiny and cost almost nothing to serve; they bring the cost upon themselves by ballooning the page with multiple megabytes of ad-injection and tracking scripts. That claim is like 99% self-serving lie.

I feel some guilt for using content blockers

Please don't. The advertisers "defected" decades ago with popup windows (and probably before that, but popups in the late 90s/early 2000s stand out in my mind). It's only gotten worse since then.

Fuck Fandom, find alternative wikis whenever possible.

"Our studies have shown we can fill up to 80% of a user's visual field with ads before it induces seizures."

It's been shitty for a long time now. I've been using adblockers since they exist. And I can not fathom how people don't realise how pathologically sick its become. The internet used to be a great place, everyone forgot.

Becoming?

The internet has always been unusable without an ad blocker. The difference now is that it's not really usable at all. Somehow major multi billion dollar companies have decided it's completely okay to have broken-ass websites that don't work. This is especially true if they're trying to push an app. The major websites like Facebook, Reddit, and TikTok actually go out of their way to break the fuck out of their mobile site to try to push people onto their app. The biggest fucking problem is that the strategy works. People are desperate, stupid, little animals, and they'll do whatever they're told to do to get their little hit of entertainment and dopamine. The internet is dead. Long live the internet!

And now the gas pumps blather at you while filling your car. Marketing ruins everything.

Let me just step back here, away from the fact that they’re obtrusive, annoying, and waste your time you didn’t sign away.

Malvertising is a serious risk these days. Every week we see new malware kits, phishing and increasing complexity. Now, Google’s search algo source code has been leaked. You can bet your shiny ass that the attacks will get more dangerous and even harder to discern.

Block the fuck out of ads, JavaScript, frames, xhr. Use a secure browser that doesn’t have ad revenue at their forefront and use hardened configs where possible.

This isn’t tin foil hat, and it’s not hard. Plenty of people out here want you safe and for corpos to eat shit.

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate,

This is verifiably just false.

How much does food cost you a day? Maybe $25, depending on what you buy.

How much does operating a 1000-user lemmy-instance cost for a day? Around $0.0003 per person per day.

Trust me I did the math on this one. Internet services are not expensive. Internet corporations just try to extract a lot of money out of you.

I use an ad blocker on my notebook, always have. When I browse on my phone I am often shocked by the amount of ads on websites. I clicked on a link from Lemmy yesterday and the website was 95% ads. It was one sentence of the story followed by one or two large ads, then another sentence of the story and another one or two ads. The whole site was like that. I don't want to read your story that badly. Unfortunately, many of the ads had already impressed by the time I left so the shitty website got their $0.001 of ad revenue from my visit.

Fuck fandom

https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Fallout_Wiki

Don't use Fandom

There's ads on the internet?

online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate

A 40kb HTML page packaged with 450MB of JavaScript, AJAX, and streaming video costs a shitton for some reason.

I have always used ad blockers and whatnot. I used a friends phone to show them something and was blown away by the web. Wtf happened? I knew it was bad but damn. It's like playing a fucking minigame to use the web.

At home I'm hardcore. I use noscript to essentially white-list the things I want to see.

"We hate ads, too!" — some window asking me to turn off my adblocker

No, you don't. Otherwise, you wouldn't be showing me this notice asking me to turn off my adblocker. Either that or I hate ads way more than you do.

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.

That's only partially true. "Simple" pages like a wiki are stupidly cheap in comparison of operational costs. This is not some online image editor, some huge social media outlet or whatever. From a content perspective, the traffic to be served is an absolute joke.

What drives costs for operations up is stupid design decisions (e.g. Cora) and bloating your own page using several ad providers, trackers and a metric fuck ton of additional services like disqus and whatever all of this idiotic shit is called.

And what drives "cost of operations" up the most is pure greed, because for most parts there is no longer an internet community, where someone wants to contribute something cool. Maybe that's where they started, but seeing their page hits climb obviously makes them think about monetizing them. Just add some non intrusive ads, page views still climb, and you see the money coming in - in the case of Fandom with mostly zero effort, since the content is brought by the editors, who even also generate ad views, while generating content. Add one more ad, income doubled. Add a potentially more intrusive ad bringing more money per view - maybe your income triples. It's all just a pump and dump until it becomes the ad-riddled trash, but you don't really need to care, since it's still high ranking in Google results and still brings in visitors.

Obviously this does not apply to all, but to a fucking lot if not most pages, and it's getting even worse with gen-AI content and "features".

Becoming? I think we are past that stage. What grinds my gears is how hostile the net is to adblockers where users are either barred from the site entirely or guilted into turning it off.

Worse yet is if you try to take back your privacy thru a VPN you are instantly deemed a bad actor or a downright threat!

“Becoming”? How about “became”?

I also worry this is breeding generations of scam victims. We all know people who don’t realize there are ad-blockers or for some reason can’t manage one. Part of that is elderly who aren’t comfortable with technology, but it includes many people of all ages. This knowledge gap means huge portions of the population see an unusable internet that can’t be responsive no matter how fast the connection. It means their data will be tracked and sold in all directions. It means every click will have hundreds of trackers. It means exposure to every ad, every scam. How can they not be victims?

Meanwhile we know enough to complain but also to use the tools to find a useable internet. We’re much less tracked, see faster responsiveness, even our data is less exploited. Most importantly, we never even see most of the pop up scams

What really pisses me off is when sites tell me to disable it. It's my computer, I'll choose what extensions I run. Fuck you.

I experienced a shock watching my much younger cousin play mobile games on his phone. It's just constant unskippable ads next to all the banners. Back when I was young, mobile games were actually playable and ads were at most a voluntary option to get some in-game currency. In general, though, I have grown so accustomed to my Pi-hole (+ automatically connecting to a VPN when I leave my house so Pi-hole is always there) that I've either forgotten what life without it was like or completely missed the downfall of the modern internet.

Fandom is as trash as sites come. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Fandom wiki page

Yeah, no, fandom is dirt and has been dirt for a while now.

Don't feel bad for blocking their ads. The internet was never meant to have that much advertising in the first place. If websites can't afford to keep their site up then they probably don't need to be running it in the first place.

If your site has to host spammy bloated malicious third party advertising then I think there's a bigger issue at stake. Users shouldn't have to sacrifice their privacy and security to view content. Also greed isn't the same as "we need ads to keep our site running" when clearly they are making enough but want more.

It's honestly insane how tech illiterate people can't grasp this privacy concept and just learn to use a damn ad blocker. I don't mind justification but at some point you have to be the bad guy and fight back against cooperate greed.

Stay strong. Firefox+uBlock origin is the goat!

Speaking of gaming websites being goddam awful, you ever accidentally clicked on an IGN link? Goddamn that site is cancer.