- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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I have said it before, and I’ll say it again.
An adblocker is part on my security suite on my computer.
Ads can be hijacked to spread malware, and unless the site owner agrees to take both financial and legal liability for the possible dammage caused by their website I will never consider removing my adblocker.
If they agreed to take on the responsibility, I still wouldn’t remove my adblocker, but I would consider it.
I mean, even CIA recommends the use of an adblocker for personal cybersecurity. And one or two other US agencies too.
The FBI too recommends adblockers as part of general web browsing security.
What’s your preferred adblocker?
NextDNS + uBlock
uBlock Origin
This is basically the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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I don’t understand how this serves the purpose of ad blocking.
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uBlock Origin
Block Site - Whitelist mode
If this trend annoys you, check out A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites.
I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?
I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.
Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.
Just like the bad old days, when entire sites were made in Flash and Linux users were shafted. Ridiculous.
It makes me glad for having been born when I was. I am a younger Millennial, so I wasn’t online for the early internet, but I am old enough that when I read this blog post, it reminds me that I have seen firsthand that it wasn’t always this bad — even if, like you, I was surprised to realise how bad things have gotten. I feel like a frog boiling in water that started cool, but gradually became hotter[1]
I feel sorry for Zoomers and younger, who have grown up only knowing the walked gardens of big tech. It invokes an odd sense of ethical duty in me; many of them believe they hate tech in all its forms, because all they know is the toxic cycle of dark patterns and a culture that expects them to be always contactable, making it hard to disengage. However, there’s an entire world that they don’t know that beyond the walled garden. I wish I could show them what I have seen, but you can’t easily convey the magic of a memory — after all, the internet that shaped me no longer exists.
So I guess the challenge ahead of me is trying to figure out how I can work with them to co-create a vision of a better internet. We can’t put all the enshittification and spambots back in Pandora’s box, but maybe we can build something new if people like us can use our memories to distribute hope to where it’s needed.
1 ↩︎
You say “after all, the Internet that shaped me no longer exists.”
In a way, that’s true, but the reality is that most of it is still there; it’s just dwarfed by what came after.
I can still log on to mume.org and play on a Middle Earth-based MUD. I can still connect to IRC.
FirstClass BBSes, Hermes BBSes, Hotline servers and trackers, a plethora of self-hosted HTTP1.0 compliant sites, Gopher servers, FTP sites, and more.
The only real victim that I can think of is Usenet; AIM servers are back again, as are ICQ servers, shoutcast servers and battle.net servers.
Dialup is gone, but people have built TCP wrappers so all the old dialup stuff can be used over the Internet. You can even run the operating systems and software packages just the way they were in 1979 (or the year of your choice).
The callenge is finding all that when your phone and computer do all they can to direct you to Instagram, Tiktok and Temu, and system defaults use add on technology that has only existed for a decade max.
I do agree that there is much that remains. Indeed, I have found a lot of joy by discovering all the weird little personal websites that people are building as an act of rebellion. However, the culture has irrevocably changed. It makes me think of the line “man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man”.
Many of us who grew up on a more free and chaotic internet have become jaded over time. If I went back in time, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the internet in the same way I used to because I’d be too acutely aware of what lies ahead. That’s why I prefer to focus on moving forwards — it feels like a kind of healing
On the topic of load time, it didn’t even mention the compulsory “prove you are human” Cloudflare gate on practically every website these days. Add 10 seconds to every visit.
Let’s go back to gopher?
Read the guardian over the gopher protocol at my gopher hole:
gopher://theunixzoo.co.uk/the-guardian
That was a great read. I have worked at companies that lived on display ads and it’s a terrible, desperate business to be in. Personally I think branded display ads have always had zero value (or even negative value) and the better the net has gotten at tracking their value, the more this has come to light, the less advertisers are willing to pay, and therefore the more fuckery publishers engage in to try to survive. It’s extremely hard or impossible to deliver a good user experience under this set of incentives.
Thinking back to the print news era, a lot of the ads were local, which made them much more valuable. But now the net has snuffed out local retail too, so that model isn’t even there to fall back on if we tried.
I’m grateful now to be working somewhere that doesn’t survive on display ads, and that may be one of the big reasons I’ve stuck with this employer for almost a decade now.
Btw, anyone has a example of a tracking canvas in html? Wouldn’t it falsify the results, if you resize it via a userstyle?
Funny enough, most JS-only sites (those who are empty with JS disabled) display fine on Dillo.
