[HN Gopher] Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
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Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
Author : robin_reala
Score : 1126 points
Date : 2021-08-31 08:18 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plausible.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (plausible.io)
| sharmin123 wrote:
| 5 Things To Check Before Taking Divorce Decision Or Separate:
| https://www.hackerslist.co/5-things-to-check-before-taking-d...
| marcinzm wrote:
| >I looked at analytics of a site that had a post trending on
| Hacker News and Reddit with more than a thousand upvotes and more
| than a thousand comments.
|
| Reddit is a very diverse site and not a tech savvy site overall.
| This just means the subset of users who liked this, likely very
| technical link, blocked GA. To use that to claim 58% of all
| reddit users block GA is very disingenuous imho.
| asddubs wrote:
| doesn't ublock black GA by default? That might help explain it
| ovebepari wrote:
| I don't. I like personised ads. I don't want bra ada at 3 am
| whish I won't buy.
| thrower123 wrote:
| How is the percentage that low? Maybe iPhone Safari is to blame?
|
| It's not quite as bad as things were ten, fifteen years ago,
| where not using an ad blocker was just begging to get your
| machine pwned, but it's still bad.
| [deleted]
| aomobile wrote:
| I surf in private mode. A super simple solution for all your
| tracking protection needs people. It boggles my mind how this
| comes up again and again yet we have private browsing since when?
| The 90s? Don't be lazy - that's the real reason, isn't it? Having
| to login again..
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yes, because of course private mode protects you from
| fingerprinting tech and other tracking infrastructure
|
| /sarcasm
| llarsson wrote:
| No, we really did not have private browsing since the nineties.
| It's a new thing, for sure.
|
| What we had in the nineties was that we could configure our
| browsers to ask for every single cookie that a site wanted to
| place on our computers. That got old really fast when internet
| advertising became a thing, and tracking cookies were all over
| the place.
| capableweb wrote:
| > No, we really did not have private browsing since the
| nineties. It's a new thing, for sure.
|
| Indeed! Seems the first browser to implement some sort of
| incognito/private/separated profile (specifically to hide
| your tracks, not general like Firefox Profiles) was Safari
| around the release of Mac OS X Tiger (April 29, 2005).
| jobigoud wrote:
| Chrome's incognito mode doesn't block Google Analytics.
| piaste wrote:
| You do know that fingerprinting is a thing, right? Private
| browsing is designed to keep your local device clean of your
| tracks, not the wider web. At all.
|
| Telling Facebook "hello, I am visiting baddragon.com from
| Mozilla Firefox 63.1 on Obscure Linux in Podunk, Saskatchewan,
| population 32" is barely an improvement over telling them
| "hello I am John Q. Smith and I am visiting baddragon.com".
|
| And of course, private browsing is generally per-instance. Log
| in to your Google account in a private tab? All your other
| "private tabs" are also logged in to Google until you close the
| private browser.
| aomobile wrote:
| I use a generic iPhone without any mods
|
| And yeah probably need to use windows not tabs on desktop. On
| iPhone each tab wouldn't see that another is logged in though
|
| (Otherwise yes good to be aware of fingerprinting I agree
| with you)
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I used to have Google Analytics blocked on my home networks
| (through Pihole/Adguard Home) with the exception of one network
| which my wife uses. She works with SoMe so not having access
| kinda interferes with her job.
|
| I've since moved to NextDNS.io to have network agnostic
| ad/malware filtering. Still keep a "special" configuration for my
| wife :)
| jerrre wrote:
| what is SoMe?
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Social Media manager.
|
| I was as confused when i first saw job postings for "SoMe
| experience", and figured it was a MeToo thing :)
| klausjensen wrote:
| Social Media
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Shocking it's not higher.
| stanislavb wrote:
| Only 58% :)?
| octref wrote:
| Does anyone have recommendation for static site hosting with
| simple server-side analytics? The only thing I can find is
| Netlify Analytics, but $9/mo is too much for hosting a few pages
| of OSS project documentations.
|
| If there's no complex interactivity achieveable only through JS,
| I prefer to ship sites with plain HTML/CSS, so I don't really
| like to use any client-side analytics. And yes - I can live
| without all the fancy features to track and profile my visitors.
|
| I don't want to host by myself either, since I enjoy using a
| simple git push to deploy my site.
| maattdd wrote:
| I use AWS Cloudfront on top of my static blog to get basic
| analytics (and some edge caching). It is almost free.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| Netlify analytics is very inaccurate to begin with-- it was
| showing me I was getting 20,000 visits a month on a 5 year old
| blog I never updated!
|
| Moving to a normal analytics, the number is closer to a dozen,
| maybe a few hundred.
|
| I suspect Netlify doesnt remove bot traffic
| sofixa wrote:
| CloudFlare Pages does this.
| busterarm wrote:
| https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-alternatives
| the_duke wrote:
| If you are willing to go a bit more hands on:
|
| * Use a CDN which provides access logs (AWS Cloudfront, logs
| are stored in S3, Azure supports this too i think) * Feed those
| logs into a self-hosted analytics solution, like goatcounter
| [1]
|
| [1] https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter
| marvinblum wrote:
| How about Pirsch [0]? It starts at $4/month and you can set up
| as many sites as you want for up to 10k page views/month. That
| should be sufficient for most smaller sites.
|
| [0] https://pirsch.io/
| lobocinza wrote:
| So Linux user base is kind of almost 5% instead of <1%?
| fartcannon wrote:
| Healthy people don't eat junk food.
| Dah00n wrote:
| And 90+ % of those likely have plausible.io on their block list
| too. At least it is on all tracking/analytics blocklists I use.
| wooptoo wrote:
| * at the DNS level.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather
| TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports
| what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big
| statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in
| the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the
| German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't
| have to pay) and some other groups. This group of critical people
| figured that out and started to hack into these machines to fake
| ratings. They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards
| some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously
| in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got
| smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.
|
| I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and
| analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So
| the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built
| to serve them (and or exploit them).
|
| Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come
| fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.
| dreen wrote:
| I think very few actual people click on ads. Ad exchange
| platforms get majority of their revenue from impressions
| anyway.
| fnord77 wrote:
| What's the name of the movie?
| erdii wrote:
| You mean something like AdNauseam?
|
| https://adnauseam.io/
|
| Edit: it's an adblocker that is supposed to click on EVERY ad
| that it blocks.
| divbzero wrote:
| What GP describes would be stronger than AdNauseum. Instead
| of sending clicks indiscriminately for every ad, you would
| send clicks for high quality content.
| scrollaway wrote:
| That'd just end up costing the high quality content
| providers money. Ads wouldn't just get cheaper for them.
|
| On the contrary, clicking only on trash, and having the
| high quality content have a much higher signal-to-noise
| ratio would have the desired effect.
|
| Maybe.
| chrischen wrote:
| Pretty much all pay per click ads are trash... and I
| guess most other ads too. No complicated logic needed
| here!
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| The idea is not so much of clicking on high quality
| content ads, but sending visits to high quality content
| pages and click on the ads of those pages, to get them
| more money. Would obviously stop working if the sales
| after the ad click are not made.
|
| But, hey this isn't a gameplan, this was just a "what if"
| :D
| monkpit wrote:
| > to get them more money
|
| Wouldn't they just lose money? Ad clicks are not valuable
| to the businesses themselves. Only to the ad companies.
| scrollaway wrote:
| That could work, or indeed it could get them dropped
| quicker because they have a high fraud rate :)
|
| I'm fully on board with the AdNauseam model which fucks
| about indiscriminately. The ad industry can burn.
| mrjin wrote:
| Cannot agree more. Since the the advertisers have that
| much to spend, let's make them to spend more for nothing.
| Also by doing so, it will literally put enough noise into
| the data those trackers collect and renders the user
| profiling useless and effectively protecting us from
| being tracked.
|
| If we only click ads on high quality contents, those
| content owner might benefit from it in short term but in
| long run it most likely going to back fire and make them
| penalized as for sure there is going to be counter
| measures. If we simply click every ad indiscriminately,
| there is no way to tell or they have to penalize everyone
| which almost equals to do nothing.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >That'd just end up costing the high quality content
| providers money.
|
| I always click on Taboola bitcoin scam links for that
| exact reason. It's like scambaiting an algorithm.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Plus, low quality content providers would have a high
| click-through ratio but very low conversion rate.
|
| Might be interesting.
| a_imho wrote:
| Last time I checked you could configured click frequency in
| AdNauseum.
| cnxsoft wrote:
| Maybe that's where all the invalid clicks came from last
| year...
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I think it wouldn't be about the ads, but the visit tracking.
| Like, block GA from seeing your visits on trash sites, but
| allow when it's a high quality post/content/source, so we
| skew the numbers for high quality content
| skinkestek wrote:
| That's actually very interesting.
|
| Is there any extension that blocks analytics selectively?
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who has been in one or another meeting with German
| TV stations I can assure you this is not completely far
| fetched. The people deciding what is running at these stations
| are of the mindset (a translated quote):
|
| > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing
| the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood
| by them
|
| and then they will serenade about how they would "love to have
| a bit more sophisticated things", but as they are the only ones
| who really understand their audience, they cannot allow this,
| although they support the values of the 68 generation etc. pp.
|
| From my standpoint the German television landscape is
| completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the
| illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in
| fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid
| and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them
| that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
| touristtam wrote:
| In France there is the 50 yo housewife: https://translate.goo
| gle.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
| bluGill wrote:
| That is always the problem with data: it is reactive. Sure
| the average watcher is 65, and wants easy to understand
| stuff: that is what the data shows (I'll assume for
| discussion that is what the data shows, but I have no insight
| into if it is true or not). What the data doesn't show is if
| content would draw in day 25 year olds, they need several
| years of trying those other shows to see if it makes a
| difference - a very risky best that could run them out of
| business even if true (that is the older crowd stops watching
| faster than the younger crowd figured out it is worth
| watching meaning advertisers don't pay enough to keep
| producing content).
|
| Of course TV in the US has figured out that the 65+ crowd is
| very valuable to customers (the advertisers, not viewers!),
| so even though they could get more viewers by not showing the
| nightly news, the nightly news is what they show.
| muffinman26 wrote:
| In the US there's actually an FCC requirement that
| television channels air news.
|
| From https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-
| broadcasting: "virtually every station has an obligation to
| provide news, public affairs, and other programming that
| specifically treats the important issues facing its
| community." The details are specific to the license, but
| almost every station is required to air at least an hour of
| news a day.
|
| There's also requirements to air a certain number of hours
| of educational material for children
| (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-
| educational-t...).
| bluGill wrote:
| Does the requirement mean air news during prime time
| though, or can they do it at times when most people are
| not even able to watch TV?
| muffinman26 wrote:
| It's unclear, because the exact details are specific to
| the license and therefore may vary from station to
| station. My local television stations usually air the
| news at 11, which is after primetime.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is true, but it's worth noting that the FCC revoked
| the fairness doctrine in 1987.
| a4isms wrote:
| This the same problem as interviewing people for a job nd
| collecting data about which "features" from interviews
| correlate with job performance... Without tracking the
| performance of any of the candidates who weren't offered
| jobs--or turned down an offer.
|
| Something, something, a diagram of a plane showing where
| the damage was on those that returned from missions.
| andai wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| errantspark wrote:
| > Something, something, a diagram of a plane showing
| where the damage was on those that returned from
| missions.
|
| Ahahahah I love this dogwhistle. You always know you're
| in good company when someone waves their hands around and
| says "put the armor where there _AREN 'T_ bullet holes"
| and gives you a significant look. XD
| lamontcg wrote:
| "you don't build bridges by measuring swimmers" or whatever
| that quote is.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Reminds me of a thread a while ago pointing out that a
| single show dominates the MTV programming lineup almost
| every day [1]. It's as if there is some algorithm running
| without human intervention that feeds on itself by reacting
| only to current viewing habits: foreach
| (show s in lineup) if (s.viewers > THRESHOLD)
| lineup.replace_with_more (s)
|
| Obviously resulting in this weird local maxima where no
| other shows get broadcast.
|
| 1:
| https://twitter.com/MTVSchedule/status/1422934028253081603
| jandrese wrote:
| I don't have MTV so I had to look up what
| "Ridiculousness" is. Apparently they play
| Youtube/Tiktok/etc... clips? Sounds like it must be
| incredibly cheap to produce. This is what it looks like
| when you let a race to the bottom continue on
| indefinitely.
|
| And the cable industry can't understand why people keep
| cutting the cord. Can you imagine shelling out $120/month
| to have some producers pick out Youtube clips for you?
| jancsika wrote:
| > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while
| doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be
| understood by them
|
| So like, sticking only to the first and second derivative in
| soap opera plots about retired civil engineers?
|
| No late-period Beethoven sonatas as background music?
|
| That must be difficult for you as a German.
|
| Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away
| from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning an
| Oscar.
| JTbane wrote:
| > Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away
| from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning
| an Oscar.
|
| Very true, this is the first thing I thought of when I head
| of the popular show "Naked and Afraid".
| eru wrote:
| Are you joking, or do you have perhaps too high an opinion
| of German TV?
| jancsika wrote:
| On the one hand: yes, I am.
|
| On the other-- we have a network that bills itself as
| educational and spends over a month marketing a full week
| of programming dedicated to propagandizing its audience
| to be maximally afraid of sharks.
|
| It broadcast a _wildly popular_ movie where a tornado
| full of sharks attacks a city.
|
| German TV could be an order of magnitude worse than my
| parody and it still wouldn't even register on the
| American scale of stupidity.
| jandrese wrote:
| It reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) reasoning behind
| the cancellation of "Police Squad" back in the day: that
| people would have to pay attention to get the jokes.
|
| https://boingboing.net/2014/07/04/police-squad-was-
| cancelled...
| eru wrote:
| The '68 generation' is pretty much the same generation that's
| now 65 years old and washing dishes..
|
| > From my standpoint the German television landscape is
| completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in
| the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while
| in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible
| stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that
| shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand
| in the world.
|
| Well, that would be more bearable, if half the TV market
| wouldn't be allowed to essentially tax everyone to finance
| their drivel.
| noAnswer wrote:
| > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while
| doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be
| understood by them
|
| > because the people at the levers are in the illusion they
| do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just
| think the small man is incomprehensible stupid
|
| So basically they have a Hacker News mindset!
|
| In every thread about a dumbed down GUI/website it is argued
| that granny wouldn't understand it otherwise. No power user
| allowed, because data shows user is monkey.
| josefx wrote:
| > > Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while
| doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be
| understood by them
|
| I haven't watched german TV in ages, but I distinctly
| remember science shows degrading from science to thinly
| veiled ads - things like literally running a companies
| marketing video or making a "scientific comparison" where
| they hand out random style points at the end to make a
| specific product win. I think they even got into trouble over
| it since ads and science/education shows are taxed
| differently. Anyone pretending that they are doing that for
| their viewers is living in denial at best, but probably just
| outright lying.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I stopped watching TV more than 10 years ago because I was
| worried to turn stupid from it. Not so far fetched after all.
|
| There are some high quality shows and TV stations though.
| Namely Phoenix (similar to PBS in the U.S.) and some of the
| news magazines that run in the late evenings. Of course there
| are also all the other public stations with higher quality
| programs but I find the program most of the time quite random
| and sometimes even a bit elitarian.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix got
| rid of ratings?
|
| All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so
| would display highly in searches, but not many people
| actually watched them.
|
| It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do
| read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest
| of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash.
|
| I don't want to read about an existential crisis after
| programming all day, I want someone to hit something with a
| big sword and get the girl.
| q-big wrote:
| > Well, you say that, but isn't that exactly why Netflix
| got rid of ratings?
|
| > All the documentaries were getting really high ratings,
| so would display highly in searches, but not many people
| actually watched them.
|
| This rather shows that ratings _do_ work, but are used
| wrongly for giving recommendations:
|
| If you want to create suggestions for a user, in many case
| the wrong answer is "suggest what has really high ratings",
| but rather "given the ratings that this user gave and the
| films that he watched, what will he also like."
|
| The fact that these documentaries get high ratings (the
| same might hold for art house films) shows that there is
| some (niche?) audience which really loves this kind of
| films, but not that "John Doe" will love it, too.
| monkpit wrote:
| Isn't this why it now says something like "your match:
| n%" now?
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used
| wrongly for giving recommendations
|
| And I know I'm (possibly) a minority on hacker news, but
| I prefer the new system. I was giving everything I wanted
| to watch more 4 or 5, even when it was clearly not the
| case, but because I want recommendations of things I'm
| going to like AND actually watch
| sempron64 wrote:
| Predicting exactly this was the premise of the famous
| Netflix Prize, one of the first open machine learning
| challenges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize
| tehjoker wrote:
| I remember my professor talking about the ensemble
| approach the competitors were taking in a data mining
| class I took. I was saddened when Netflix ended up not
| using it because it was too slow and expensive or
| something.
| jandrese wrote:
| It didn't promote Netflix content above third party
| content. Not enough control for the algorithm is
| unacceptable for the marketing guys.
| dmoy wrote:
| I remember when that competition was released, I was
| working (as an undergrad) in GroupLens, which had
| MovieLens still around but it was getting a bit of
| bitrot.
|
| It was always weird to me that GroupLens didn't spin up a
| team for it, but it seemed like everyone in the research
| group had moved on to other things and didn't want to
| context switch back. Someone mentioned something like
| "shame they didn't do this 10 years ago, a million
| dollars would have been nice". I think someone was doing
| tagging on movielens, but I don't remember the details.
|
| I got the sense that neither Riedl nor Konstan (or any of
| the current grad students it seemed) wanted to pursue it
| (Terveen, I think, wasn't in to recommender systems at
| all in the first place).
|
| I don't think the lab had any funding problems haha, so
| maybe that was what it came down to.
| bluGill wrote:
| > It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I
| do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The
| rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining,
| trash.
|
| I feel the same way. However I force myself to read things
| that will better me once in a while anyway. I too want to
| hit things with a big sword (without the pain of getting
| hit), and get the girl (without cheating on my wife), but
| the world including me is better if I do something else
| anyway. Which is why I do sometimes read a complex math
| book.
| tehjoker wrote:
| That is how it is with documentaries. Just because they are
| getting lower viewing numbers doesn't mean you shouldn't
| keep promoting them. Certainly there should be a mix of
| entertainment and public interest stuff, but following
| audience preferences for entertainment creates a feedback
| loop that damages society.
| eru wrote:
| Things like documentaries are mostly watched by already
| well-off people (mostly middle class and up).
|
| In Germany, public TV is paid for by (nearly?) every
| household. [0]
|
| Forcing everyone, including poor people, to subsidize
| rich people's taste for documentaries seems a bit.. off?
|
| Similar arguments apply to public libraries and opera
| houses, though at least there the financing is done
| mostly via progressive taxation.
|
| Of course, you can argue that we sophisticated people
| know what's good for those unwashed masses, and if only
| they watched their documentaries like they are supposed
| to, they would soon see the light. Colour me skeptical.
|
| [0] As far as I am concerned, private broadcasters can
| and should do what they feel like.
| tehjoker wrote:
| People choose from what is presented to them. That's
| consumerism. It's not like people get to pick what gets
| produced. If more public interest material is available
| and advertised, it'll get watched more. The alternative
| is to watch less TV and engage with society directly
| more. Both of those outcomes would be preferable to the
| excessive production and consumption of entertainment.
|
| Private broadcasters do not pick material based on public
| interest or even their judgment of what is good. It is
| far more mechanical and influenced entirely by market
| forces. Herman and Chomsky discuss this in Chapter 1 of
| Manufacturing Consent.
|
| https://ia802700.us.archive.org/31/items/pdfy-
| NekqfnoWIEuYgd...
| nitrogen wrote:
| Well, when people complain about a growing wealth divide,
| and those who are doing okay financially say that
| childhood access to public libraries and documentaries
| made them who they are, shouldn't those things receive
| funding?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| When I was first living on my own barely making rent, PBS
| documentaries were the most interesting thing on
| broadcast TV. Infinitely more entertaining than drivel
| like the Bachelor. Other than available time and offered
| free content I doubt preference of documentaries is
| different among income classes.
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's crazy how many people believe being poor means
| you're stupid. Not true! Thank you for pushing back!
| [deleted]
| eigen wrote:
| > Things like documentaries are mostly watched by already
| well-off people (mostly middle class and up).
|
| assuming a normal distribution, wouldn't this then be the
| majority of people?
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| The movie is "Who Am I (2014)".
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I meant Free Rainer, didn't know that who am I had similar
| themes. Is it good?
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| Oh. I must have remembered wrong then. Maybe I mixed those
| up. I think it is worth watching.
|
| Edit: Note: Free Rainer also goes under the name "Reclaim
| your brain"
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then
| built to serve them (and or exploit them)_
|
| Believe it's Scott Galloway who said advertising is a tax on
| the poor and technologically illiterate.
| lgats wrote:
| Exactly like https://syntheticmessenger.labr.io/
|
| Though, I would say this can actually hurt publishers in the
| long run
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Untill your last paragraph I was thinking you were going to say
| "so let's lead from the front and let the trackers see the real
| internet."
| hadrien01 wrote:
| What's the name of the movie? I'll add it to my watchlist
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Free Rainer
| kyazawa wrote:
| This movie sounds great and I would love to watch it. It's
| a shame there's no legal way to watch many international
| movies like this if you are in the US.
|
| I make a point of watching a non-US film on every
| international flight I take - I find it to be a unique
| opportunity to watch interesting non-US movies with English
| subs. I have discovered two excellent oddball comedies from
| in flight movies (Die Goldfische from Germany and Le Grand
| Partage from France), but when I tried to rewatch these
| films with others in the US, I discovered it was basically
| impossible. There must be so many other great movies from
| around the world we are missing out on.
| muglug wrote:
| It's called "Reclaim Your Brain" in the US and you can
| buy/rent it via Apple TV.
| hammock wrote:
| Hacking democracy (ratings voting system, whatever) to
| indirectly effect a supposedly benevolent unilateral outcome?
| Sounds familiar.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's not exactly hacking democracy. Democracy implies every
| gets a vote. This is P hacking small sample sizes.
| hammock wrote:
| So it's engineering falsified scientific conclusions then.
| Still sounds familiar.
| mdoms wrote:
| There's a Family Guy episode where Peter does the opposite.
| jseigj43 wrote:
| Do you have any links or references to that? It's fascinating.
| hkai wrote:
| I can't quite understand this. By "exploiting" you simply mean
| targeting ads?
|
| The real harm seems to be from the tech giants censoring speech
| and policing payments, but what's the harm that someone targets
| a pair of shorts that I might like or show an ad for a
| conference I might be interested in?
| Lio wrote:
| It's a question of control; no should mean no.
|
| Some people don't want to be tracked or monitored by
| advertising companies and it should be enough to just say so
| without companies like Facebook always trying to sneak
| tracking back in via dark pattens, shadow profiles, etc, etc.
|
| For example once you've seen a website offer you the same
| product for different prices based on arbitrary tracking it
| leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I.e. ads, facebooks feed, endless scrollers like 9gag -> they
| like to use dark patterns and exploit tricks against the
| human mind to keep and guide your attention.
|
| The harm if targeted ads depends on your viewpoint.
|
| A targeted ad might serve you something you were looking for
| anyway, or it might manipulate you into spending on something
| you don't actually need. I.e. look at Instagram influencers,
| showing off their fake perfect live, making the viewer feel
| small and then try to buy the same happiness by buying the
| same product.
|
| At best, ads are information that you need, at worst, they
| use psychology to manipulate you.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| I think you might have the meaning of 'i.e.' ( _that is,
| namely_ ) confused with 'e.g.' ( _for example_ ).
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Thank you very much, I am proud to say that I did this
| wrong for at least 10 years :D
|
| Thanks!
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| There is a shortcut to remember this: 'e.g.' for 'example
| given' (and therefore, 'i.e.' for 'that is').
|
| ('E.g.' doesn't really mean 'example given' in English -
| it means 'exempli gratia' in Latin. But it's a useful
| mnemonic.)
| xenophonf wrote:
| I also use "in essence" for "i.e." even though it's
| actually 'id est' in Latin.
| JohnFen wrote:
| In my mind, when I see i.e., i think "in other words",
| and when I see e.g., I think "for example"
| hkai wrote:
| Seriously, you're worried about someone spending more time
| on their phone or spending more money on goods and
| services? Spending their own money -- not the public money?
| That's what freedom is to you? Not the freedom to talk to
| whoever you want, say whatever you want or pay whoever you
| want?
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I have no clue where you derive any of these things from.
| I certainly never said any of it. I never even made a
| claim a out freedom.
|
| I was talking about how ads, tv programming, trackers and
| such have a tendency to create a positive feedback loop,
| which leads people towards less quality and mindless
| consumption. And about a fun idea from a movie, to break
| this feedback loop and replace it with another one, that
| promotes higher quality content.
|
| You then started talking about a different topic and are
| now accusing me of not being interested in free speech.
| chalst wrote:
| hkai's mind is like a hammer: whenever it sees an opinion
| relating to human choice, it sees a nail.
| kervantas wrote:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810868/
| belter wrote:
| Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or deaf,
| or do not have a Radio or TV? Gives you the most boring TV News
| in the world, plus 600 movies per year nobody wants to watch,
| because they are horrible? But they collected the tax and they
| have to spend it, as the German actors guild is worst than a
| cartel? :-)
|
| https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-t...
| geraneum wrote:
| I personally prefer boring news backed by quality journalism
| and funded by people rather than sensational, outrageous and
| superficially controversial news! If I want the excitement I
| watch a drama or action movie. I think the news
| articles/pieces work like clickbait; the more head-turning
| they get, the more viewers they acquire which results in
| higher profits.
| belter wrote:
| I am not talking about sensational or misleading like in
| FoxNews or CNN :-) I am talking about boring as in....very
| serious persons, on a serious background, reading very
| serious the Reuters or Ap news of the day. As the service
| was paid and it has to provided ;-) A better model would be
| instead having to provide good analysis or quality content
| otherwise your audience will go somewhere. As in for
| example, the FT or the Economist.
|
| Actually thinking about it, the issue is wider than just
| the news and I think the financing mode of the mandatory
| tax is a big part of it. What is really a shame, as Germany
| has a rich culture of hundreds of years so great content in
| all forms should not be a problem.
|
| "Why is TV in Germany so bad?" https://www.reddit.com/r/ger
| many/comments/3d4vxz/why_is_tv_i...
|
| "Why is German TV so crap?"
| https://www.exberliner.com/blogs/the-berlinale-
| blog/berlinal...
|
| You might comment the BBC financing model is similar and I
| would agree. I think the difference is that the BBC also
| embraced a highly commercial model of selling content like
| Top Gear and other stuff worldwide. In this case the
| English language content with its planetary audience,
| pushed for a more competitive/commercial model and the
| German TV stayed too insular in my view.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Audience engagement chases entertainment (and thus
| reproduces CNN/MSNBC/Fox etc). You won't get what you
| want by tweaking that metric alone.
| matzab wrote:
| Deutschlandfunk alone is worth it imho
| MrGilbert wrote:
| > Is this the fee you have to pay even if you are blind or
| deaf [...]
|
| That's not correct. If you are deaf, you get a reduction - if
| you are blind, you get a reduction. If you are deaf-blind,
| you don't pay at all. If you are already receiving financial
| help because of your blindness, you don't pay at all.
| belter wrote:
| You are right about it, did that change recently? According
| to the reference below it depends on the degree of deafness
| or blindness...if you can still hear or see something still
| have to pay...
|
| https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/buergerinnen_und_buerger/inf
| o...
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Not a big fan of the GIS either, but my stance is not as
| extreme. I see benefits, but there is problems as well. It
| could be a good system if there was a proper reform and if
| you get politicians out of the system.
| Simplicitas wrote:
| What an awesome idea! :-)
| smilbandit wrote:
| digital idiocracy
| Semaphor wrote:
| > which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay)
|
| That is incorrect, they do have to pay (once per household).
| But if you get BAFOG (student loan/social benefit mix that
| require you and your parents to be below a certain income
| bracket), you don't.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I know that very well, I had to pay it because there is no
| BAFOG for foreign students. Just felt it might not be an
| important enough detail to explain BAFOG to the international
| audience.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| You could have called them and they would usually give you
| an exception. Not sure if that situation has changed now.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud.
|
| You may like the "Google will eat itself" idea.
|
| https://www.gwei.org/index.php
| NmAmDa wrote:
| "202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google."
|
| Nice cosmological time scale idea
| vincentmarle wrote:
| > Google Shares owned by GWEI: 819
|
| Those 819 shares are worth $2,371,005 now
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Isn't this just investing the results of ad fraud into
| Google? Probably a profitable idea, but I'm not seeing the
| "Google eating itself" aspect.
| byecomputer wrote:
| According to their numbers they netted $400,000 worth of
| Google, essentially for free. Mind, that hasn't been
| updated in close to a decade; nowadays their 819 shares
| would be worth about $2.4 million.
| kzrdude wrote:
| That's art!
| cm2187 wrote:
| Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what people
| are watching? Surely we don't need a sampling anymore?
|
| Just thinking that the elderly population is probably the least
| likely to use those boxes (though I am not even sure of that),
| whereas they constitute the (dying) core of traditional TV
| viewership.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Don't modern internet-connected TV boxes snitch on what
| people are watching?
|
| Yes, which is why I will never own one.
| 14 wrote:
| Just wait until 5g is everywhere and companies will just
| add its functionality to your tv and connect regardless of
| what you do.
| JohnFen wrote:
| They can't add functionality to a device that I don't
| own.
| conradfr wrote:
| You know a connected TV / set-top box is on a channel but you
| don't know how many / which persons in the house is in front
| of it.
| ta988 wrote:
| Most "smart" TVs have cameras these days...
| yissp wrote:
| How long until they start putting cameras in them and doing
| facial recognition?
| ta988 wrote:
| Cameras are here and we have no idea what they do with
| them.
| gruez wrote:
| Put tape over it?
| jobigoud wrote:
| They could put an IR camera right next to the remote
| sensor. Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to
| visible-light you wouldn't even know the camera's there,
| and if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work
| anymore.
| gruez wrote:
| >Since it's behind a glass that is opaque to visible-
| light you wouldn't even know the camera's there
|
| If it's opaque to visible light how does the camera
| produce an image?
|
| >if you put tape on it your remote wouldn't work anymore.
|
| Not really? You just have to be more careful placing the
| tape. Besides, nowadays many smart TV have app remote
| controls, or RF-based remote controls so the IR sensor
| being blocked is a non-issue
| bluGill wrote:
| > If it's opaque to visible light how does the camera
| produce an image?
|
| It isn't opaque to infrared light though. The image is
| still high enough quality to make out people, it looks
| funny but it is good enough for their purposes.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Some sort of localised motion sensor would probably be
| sufficient to tell you how many people are watching
| without invading too much on people's privacy. You
| wouldn't know the age, but you already have ton of
| information by knowing the address and the subscriber
| already.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > _Some sort of localised motion sensor would probably be
| sufficient to tell you how many people are watching_
|
| You'd also have pets captured, curtains flapping by an
| open window captured, and any toys kids are playing with
| (like balls) potentially captured as another viewer too.
|
| Meanwhile pap who likes to sit motionlessly while the
| kids round around him, isn't detected.
|
| > _without invading too much on people 's privacy_
|
| Motion detection feels like a pretty major privacy
| violation to me.
|
| > _You wouldn 't know the age, but you already have ton
| of information by knowing the address and the subscriber
| already._
|
| Except when you have friends or family over.
| justanotherguy0 wrote:
| Just use the microphone in the smart tv. That's what the
| CIA does: https://www-washingtonpost-
| com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.wa...
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Speaking of tracking, non-amp link:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| switch/wp/2017/03/07...
| KallDrexx wrote:
| So I found out my neighbors were proud to be
| participating in some new Neilson study. Apparently they
| pay you to wear these boxes in your pocket that pick up
| sound. At the end of the day it syncs what it heard to
| their servers and you get points, which eventually
| translates to money.
|
| Essentially the stated purpose is so that it can pick up
| what music you listen to throughout the day, but in
| reality it's picking up everything.
| touristtam wrote:
| Oh so like a cell/mobile phone, but only with the purpose
| stated out right?
| vel0city wrote:
| Nah, they get paid to have the box in their pocket, you
| pay to have your box in your pocket.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Ironically, modern streaming apps have far more accurate
| numbers than anything Nielsen ever cooked up sampling people,
| _but_ Netflix made the precedence that they should be
| "secret sauce" and not shared publicly and most of the
| "Streaming Wars" diaspora today are following that
| policy/precedent.
|
| We're in something of a worst of both worlds situation where
| Nielsen has an increasingly small number of viewers where
| traditional TV boxes work to get decent samples, has to rely
| more than ever on surveys, and distrusts all streaming
| viewership numbers because they are cloak and dagger white
| lies between competitors, despite in theory being way more
| accurate than all the previous tools (the surveys and the TV
| boxes).
|
| It's almost wild. The most forthcoming to shareholders/the
| general public over the years has been Hulu and Hulu's
| numbers at times have suggested Nielsen's data is _very,
| very_ wrong right now, but Nielsen doesn 't trust Hulu's data
| at all because it smells like lies because Netflix does
| nothing but lie or ghost them.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I have been exploring ways to avoid sending this data to
| them. To start: using an instance of Pi-Hole and running
| all your apps will remove some tracking from them.
|
| Following this up with paying for your subscription but
| pirating all the shows might help remove you from the cycle
| completely.
|
| I understand the second point is not realistic for the
| majority of people but I wonder if in the future we might
| have an easy to use version of Pi-Hole that most people can
| just flip on and strip a large chunk of tracking from the
| apps.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That just gets us back to the topic way above: if we
| aren't giving that tracking data to TV producers, it's
| tough to complain when our favorite nerdy/intelligent
| shows get cancelled.
|
| That's the deep weird irony that we live in a world where
| we could have the best possible numbers (directly tracked
| statistics), and yet TV Producers are still relying (for
| the most part) on Phone and Snail Mail Survey Results
| because they don't think they can trust streaming
| provider numbers. Pi-Holing those numbers just gives
| those Producers even more reason to feel that they are
| lies or wrong. At what point do you Pi-Hole too many
| telemetrics to oblivion and aren't allowed to complain
| when your favorite TV shows get canceled because "no one"
| was watching it?
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I guess this contributes to me watching less and less
| shows because I am tired of stuff being canceled
| midseason. It might be a self fulfilling prophecy. Less
| people watch these shows/appear to watch these shows, the
| networks stop producing it and these people don't come
| back to whatever the network does end up producing.
|
| From what I am hearing, traditional forms of media are in
| decline because people are spending their time on
| Youtube/Twitch/Social media instead.
| crtasm wrote:
| > Surely we don't need a sampling anymore?
|
| Depends, are the TV networks buying that information? Or just
| advertisers?
| dylan604 wrote:
| So does your cable provider's set top box. So does your
| Roku/Fire/AppleTV/etc, except it is at the app level.
| [deleted]
| dspillett wrote:
| Modern TVs do snitch but there are two issues with relying on
| that:
|
| 1. There is a disparity between age groups and other
| demographic dividers who have newer TVs. This could
| significantly skew the results for some advertisers.
|
| 2. The data is going to the TV manufacturer, and they will
| not share that freely between themselves or with anyone else.
| This will complicate collating the data as there are several
| entities to negotiate with in order to get an overall
| picture.
| ok123456 wrote:
| And the tech savvy people never connect their "smart" tvs to
| the internet.
| noir_lord wrote:
| My "smart" TV has one job - show the signal fed to it via
| HDMI from my linux box.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I don't block ads. I remember what the internet was about to
| become before ads stepped in. Everything of value was going to
| be pull behind paywalls.
|
| Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything
| will require a purchase. Those purchases are logged to a real
| name/address. You end up with bigger privacy leaks.
|
| People will still be tracking you the way they are now. And at
| the credit card level.
|
| As an adult in the first world I can afford to pay for adfree
| solutions. Most people can't. Ads level the playing field.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Ads have bloated the useful internet to the point that it is
| more expensive and less functional. We have 8,000 websites
| trying to show me a recipe for chicken parm, most of them
| with pages of family history and backstory, because they are
| all trying to get me to see _their ads_. A lightweight
| Wikipedia for recipes and a few high value added websites
| charging a trivial amount for access to their recipe catalog
| would be highly value added for me, and run on a fraction of
| the infrastructure.
|
| Ads obscure solutions, and add redundancy and complexity with
| zero value added, because solving a problem means you no
| longer are on the page _seeing ads_. Simplifying or
| automating a process means you are clicking less pages less
| often and _not seeing ads_. If you automate something to
| directly connect users with what they need, then they don't
| need to come back and see your ads. So we have automations
| they bring us to some middle man that can _show us some ads_
| before we can get to what we need.
|
| Ads mean that maximizing the time your attention is held is
| the core value. High quality content that leaves you
| informed/satisfied/fulfilled is worthless compared to low
| quality content that is just good enough to keep you from
| leaving, without being having enough substance to actual
| fulfill you, because then you might leave and _not see the
| ads we have to show you_.
|
| Podcasts show us that a tiny minority of users able to pay
| for content subsidize an incredible amount of added value
| content for everyone, whether they can pay or not.
|
| Ads don't level the playing field. Ads are an ever growing
| tumor, sapping resources and weighing everything down in a
| mindless effort to replicate.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I don't think the playing field is disleveled without ads.
| Wikipedia has no ads.
|
| If you're willing to handle ads, they should at the least be
| untargetted.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Agreed.
| hollerith wrote:
| Your personal prosperity depends on a prosperous online ad
| industry; doesn't it?
| ipaddr wrote:
| The last time I worked in adtech was 2012.
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away.
| Everything will require a purchase.
|
| No, it won't. There was plenty of high quality stuff on the
| internet before ads or payment was even possible, and there's
| plenty of high quality stuff that don't track you or require
| payment right now. There's no reason to think that would all
| evaporate.
| ipaddr wrote:
| We will see plenty of high quality stuff still I agree. But
| much of the free stuff will be about converting you to the
| paid stuff.
|
| With ads or not you are still the product. You will still
| be tracked because people want you to spend money on their
| service. People will sell that information. Companies will
| use it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure, much of it will. But certainly not all of it. The
| amount of actually free content will certainly not
| decrease, and it would probably increase, even if by only
| a little.
|
| > With ads or not you are still the product.
|
| It depends on the site. There are lots of sites where the
| site operator has no interest in it generating an income,
| let alone a profit. You are not the product there.
| McDyver wrote:
| While that speculation is plausible, another view would be
| that companies would offer quality content without tracking
| users and invading their privacy (how many paid services
| still flood you with ads?), and possibly free alternatives
| would start to come up.
|
| From your point of view, free open source is something that
| wouldn't exist
| ipaddr wrote:
| The hobbiest websites will not go away. Open source existed
| long before the internet.
|
| What you are left with is the hobbiest websites or the mega
| brands that want to funnel you into their ecosystem. To
| offer anything that cost resources that you are willing to
| spend you must be a megabrand using this as a loss leader
| opportunity.
|
| I don't think we want that world. We may think we do but
| look at what happened in Mr. Robot.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I don't think we want that world.
|
| That's the world we have right now, though, just with the
| addition of the spying that advertising brings.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The spying still happens regardless. We just don't have
| advertising (benefits and drawbacks)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| .
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| What even gives you the idea I am saying that? Did I say it?
| Nope.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is the Nielsen system in the US and I wonder if it is the
| other way around. That is, in reality, nobody has watched MTV
| since 1994 but Viacom bribed a Nielsen family to tune a TV to
| it and keep it there.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud.
|
| Data poisoning for something the scale of Google I fear would
| be ineffective to the point of laughability, sadly.
| kin wrote:
| So you want more targeted ads for tech savvy people? I wouldn't
| give ad tech that much credit. Many tech savvy people have cut
| the cord and watch TV through streaming. Anecdotally, I watch
| Hulu. Hulu knows so so so much about me yet zero of the ads are
| targeted. They very much have this capability (engineering
| resources) but due to a number of reasons I can only assume
| (network contracts, ad bids) it just probably isn't going to
| happen. I would love if I could have an ad blocklist cause one
| more Progressive Ad will drive me bonkers.
| gmadsen wrote:
| I don't live in the ad tech world, so I only vague know what
| is interconnected. Do the tech giants just sell info back and
| forth to each other?
|
| For example, When I watch youtube on my Roku, if im not
| signed in, does roku still aggregate what I watched on
| youtube, could that be sold to Hulu, for ads when I watch
| that on the same tv?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "large scale AdWords fraud."
|
| Be carefull - fraud is a crime. But I am under no obligation to
| provide AdWords any data, let alone true and reliable data.
|
| Considering the tracking and spying, and my legitimate interest
| in privacy, there is no room for fraud argument here.
|
| PS: this would be probably a Hoax
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Fraud would involve financially benefiting from it - if you
| don't benefit I don't think it would count as fraud in most
| countries.
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| In England and Wales, all three types of fraud covered by
| the 2006 Act have as substantive elements of the offence a
| requirement that a defendant intends to either "make a gain
| for himself or another" or "cause loss to another or to
| expose another to a risk of loss", where gain and loss are
| defined as only referring to "money or other property".
|
| Note also that the offence is framed in terms of intention
| to gain or cause loss. Even if no material gain or loss
| happens, the intention is what matters. (The equivalent
| mental element for theft in England is that one dishonestly
| intends to permanently deprive someone of the property
| being taken.)
|
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35
|
| This applies to online ad 'click fraud' in both ways--if a
| publisher fraudulently clicks on adverts to make money,
| that'd potentially be fraud to make a gain for themselves.
| If a competitor clicks on adverts to get their competitor
| to lose money on pay-per-click, that'd potentially be fraud
| to cause a loss to another.
|
| I can't speak for jurisdictions other than England and
| Wales but I'd be surprised if a fair number of other
| jurisdictions didn't also define fraud in a way that covers
| both gain and loss scenarios.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| You may want to read the CFAA and report back.
|
| Spoiler alert, it doesn't involve your intentions or money.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Ac
| t
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| We are talking about general fraud, not CFAA, which is a
| 'hacking' law.
|
| The companies spying on me should be the first in line to
| be tried under CFAA
| yunohn wrote:
| Where did you get this notion from? That's absolutely not
| true, and there are many acts that can be illegal without
| benefitting from them.
|
| I don't think AdNauseum users would be prosecuted, but
| you're still wrong.
|
| source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Correct, fraud isn't the correct term here. The op grabbed
| the first word that probably presented itself, and others
| nearly ad nauseam (lowercase) have discussed its merits as
| the term.
|
| What's needed is a better term.
|
| I propose either AdTurfing (hat tip AstroTurfing) or
| AdLighting (hat tip GasLighting). My personal preference is
| the second.
| treis wrote:
| Isn't it just vandalism?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Vandalism is, again a crime against property that is
| legitimately placed on the street or somewhere.
|
| Ad biz is a business model, not property, and a predatory
| one as that. You are not obligated to enable someone
| else's business for free.
|
| They are claiming their clicks and impressions mean
| something - its their problem to ensure they are
| accurate.
|
| Imagine someone is doing a survey of sex habbits, and
| selling the results. Is it a fraud to lie? Ofcourse not,
| why should you be responsible for their profits.
|
| The fact that people think they are legally obligated to
| enable this is really fucked up.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not actual fraud. You're not bound by the terms of
| service of ad providers. Your device is actually sending
| requests to the ads, which they are counting themselves to
| determine payment rates. If it's fraud to send ad impressions
| to sites I like without visiting them, it could be fraud to
| deny ad impressions to sites that I do visit (with my ad
| blocker on.)
|
| If the sites set it up themselves, it's fraud. If you
| conspire with the sites to set it up, it's fraud and
| conspiracy to commit fraud. But if I'm prosecuted for the
| crime of not actually looking at ads I request, that's just a
| judge with an agenda. Whether it went one way or another at
| every layer of appeal would probably be a coin flip, though.
| [deleted]
| mrjin wrote:
| Agree. I'm genuinely want to click every ad I see to protect
| myself from being tracked. If that could be fraud, will there
| be anything not a fraud?
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| I think it is just a matter of semantics. Let's call it
| "large scale AdWords statistics improvement". Look, sounds
| much better now!
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| While legally we are probably far away from this being a
| fraud, nothing stops google from adding something to their
| TOS and banning your account on that basis... This is the
| only reason I'm not using those noise generators even though
| all ad-tech should burn in a trashcan fire in my opinion.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Do you remember the name of this movie? Might it have English
| subtitles?
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Free Rainer is the one I'm referring to.
| [deleted]
| Closi wrote:
| > They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some
| higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in
| the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got
| smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.
|
| > I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads
| and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against
| us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is
| then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
|
| I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually
| I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all.
|
| A few personal examples:
|
| * On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start
| Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up
| for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best,
| 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for
| thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice
| (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become
| too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-
| volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it
| does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime'
| for this marketing.
|
| * One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen
| the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single
| advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many
| of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a
| wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and
| care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's
| core really just targeting women and telling them that they
| should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should
| be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares?
|
| * While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile
| friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents
| just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are
| probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I
| can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of
| death before every youtube video.
|
| * My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only
| my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags,
| tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't
| want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last
| few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me
| this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even
| though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated
| through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be.
|
| Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why
| should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told
| by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Just change your gender to trans/alien and your age to 5...
| hackmiester wrote:
| "trans" isn't a gender. But, I am trans, and advertisers
| are more than prepared to advertise to me. So I'm not sure
| what the goal would be there.
| malka wrote:
| Irrelevant ads are less likely to work.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| > The advertiser has a tracker that it places on multiple
| sites and tracks me around. So it doesn't know what I bought,
| but it does know what I looked at, probably over a long
| period of time, across many sites. Using this information,
| its painstakingly trained AI makes conclusions about which
| other things I might want to look at, based on...
|
| > ...well, based on what? ...Probably what it does is infer
| my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that,
| it sells me cars and gadgets if I'm a guy, and fashion if I'm
| a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but
| because some very uncreative human got into the loop and said
| "please sell my car mostly to men" and "please sell my
| fashion items mostly to women."... You know this is how it
| works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the
| ads are. Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff
| they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to
| offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars
| sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning
| Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV
| infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my
| demographic profile is that I was still awake.
|
| > You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging
| for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that
| some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business...
| for this? [1]
|
| [1] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201
| Igelau wrote:
| Your female friend should probably take a pregnancy test.
| During my wife's first pregnancy, my Kindle started
| displaying diaper ads within days.
| kjs3 wrote:
| On the other side of the coin, my ex-wife continued to get
| diaper/formula/etc ads for years after our miscarriage.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| >why should we put up with it?
|
| You, your friends, and your family personally don't have to
| put up with it. Ublock Origin can block ads on Youtube with
| ease.
| touristtam wrote:
| It isn't available on all plateform utube is unfortunately.
| Closi wrote:
| I agree on a personal level, although at a societal level I
| believe regulation is required.
|
| As per the parent comment to my original one, I just
| fundamentally do not believe that most advertising
| contributes anything positive to society and mostly
| generates negative externalities.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Is it the Simpsons or Seinfeld where in one episode one of the
| characters gets a Nielsen box that is used for measuring tv
| viewership and they can't leave the house for fear of shows
| being canceled if they're not home to watch it.
| sofixa wrote:
| Happens in Family Guy too.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| They did something similar in "Roseanne." The Connors were
| selected to be a Nielsen family and Roseanne made the family
| watch nothing but PBS, documentaries, etc the whole time. She
| wanted to hack the ratings so that over time, regular folks
| like her family would get exposed to a better class of
| information.
| marvion wrote:
| And ALF in 1987 S02E05
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I want to believe that you just remembered that, like if
| the top of your head.
|
| The idea that some die hard Alf fan just made they way past
| my post on hacker news really puts a smile on my face.
| asiachick wrote:
| Me, I don't block Google Analytics intentionally, I run Ublock
| Origin to get rid of ads in general and it happens to block
| Google Analytics.
| tiku wrote:
| I wonder why Google did not yet make a tool to integrate your
| server logs into analytics. That way you can really measure
| everything.
| uthapaa wrote:
| Why people block google analytics let the owner of the website
| track you.. it will help them to earn because they open a website
| to serve you not to untrack you...
| CalChris wrote:
| Ok, so I sheepishly admit that didn't know how to block
| analytics. Now I do.
|
| https://www.privacyaffairs.com/block-google-analytics/
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| That link is a joke: The highest ranked solution is installing
| a google extension.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| > Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is only
| blocked by those visitors who block JavaScript entirely. It is
| not blocked by any browser or adblocker
|
| Would be interested to also include that into the statistics. How
| many nerds block javascript? I wouldn't be counted by the
| plausible proxy since I disable javascript per default via ublock
| and if I allow javascript I still filter it using uMatrix.
| zoobab wrote:
| Get me some lawyer and enforce Schrems2 against Google Analytics.
| tomaszs wrote:
| I have been using professionally Google Analytics for over ten
| years. When I set up Summon The JSON store on Shopify I made
| decision to not use it.
|
| It does not give any value. And moreover it takes a lot of time
| to study. At the end rather on quality and sales you focus on
| visits, and a lot of other non important metrics.
| ponytech wrote:
| This article clearly suggests that you should use their own
| solution, Plausible Analytics.
|
| They are also JavaScript based, so how long before ad-blockers
| start blocking them too?
|
| Isn't it time to come back to server side analytics?
| Seirdy wrote:
| Plenty of filter lists block several instances of Plausible.
|
| I welcome that; if I want to give feedback I'll do so myself.
| Analytics should not be opt-out.
| timdaub wrote:
| They are blocked a whole lot too, see my comment in the thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365505
| ponytech wrote:
| I don't get your comment, sorry.
|
| By server side analytics I meant using a tool like AWStas or
| Webalizer which parse web server logs to tell you how much
| visitors you had on your site.
|
| I can't see how it can be blocked.
| jobigoud wrote:
| They meant that "Plausible Analytics" are blocked a whole
| lot too.
| timdaub wrote:
| exactly (can't edit original post anymore, sorry)
| ponytech wrote:
| You were answering the first question not the second,
| totally make sense now.
|
| Sorry for my misunderstanding.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I've noticed several plausible.js's blocked by uBlock origin.
| Not sure how, maybe pattern matching? I doubt it was manually
| in any blocklists as it was a small personal blog.
| ushakov wrote:
| you can serve the script from your own server (what they call
| proxy) and it shouldn't be noticed by adblockers
| Seirdy wrote:
| Adblockers are fully capable of blocking subdomains and
| individual scripts by name, as well as forbidding certain
| outbound connections.
|
| You'll probably have to use inline scripts and send data back
| bundled with actual data necessary for your site to run if
| you want to sneak past the user's defenses. But if a site has
| that much of an adversarial with its users, maybe it's time
| to stop using that site.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Most adblockers I know block Piwik and that's fully self
| hosted in most cases. I know because I gave it a spin and the
| entire interface was broken because of my adblocker.
|
| Smuggling tracking through first party proxies is certainly
| an easier way to avoid privacy protection systems on your
| customers' devices, but it's definitely not the silver bullet
| people want it to be.
| marvinblum wrote:
| That's the main reason we promote the backend integration for
| Pirsch [0] so much. In the long run, JS will probably not be
| sufficient, depending on your target audience.
|
| [0] https://pirsch.io/
| ponytech wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning Pirsch, their backend integration
| sounds like a modern solution.
|
| Tools like AWStats or Webalizer are really outdated nowadays.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's something I often think about. Are blockers used for
| fingerprinting? Especially by the likes of Google who controls
| both the ads/analytics platform and the website (aka first
| party).
|
| There is a specific demographic who use blockers, generally of
| the tech-savvy kind. It should even be possible to detect the
| blocker being used and some of its settings. It would be ironic
| to detect that a user is blocking almost everything and show them
| ads for privacy-oriented products and services.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Pihole (2M domains) + Firefox strict mode + uBlock Origin is what
| I do. Any other tips? Used to have privacy badger too but it
| breaks too many sites for me.
| 3r8Oltr0ziouVDM wrote:
| Disable JavaScript by default (try uBlock's advanced mode).
| OliverJones wrote:
| Pi-Hole on my domestic private network.
| underlines wrote:
| Every reputable Digital Marketing Agency now switches to Google
| Tag Manager Server Side (first party) tracking. Only disabling
| Javascript would circumvent this.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| 99% of users ignore online adds.
|
| Most advertising is a con, on the ad buyer.
| fortran77 wrote:
| HN users think they're too smart to be susceptible to ads, but
| I'm skeptical! I think ads work.
|
| I block ads not because I'm anti-ad, but because
|
| 1) it's nearly impossible to browse the web at all without an
| ad blocker
|
| and
|
| 2) Malware has been delivered via ad networks, sometimes on
| otherwise reliable websites that were duped into running the
| ad.
|
| I'd have no problem with ads if they appeared as ads used to
| appear in a newspaper - static content between articles that
| doesn't distract or interfere with my reading experience.
| libertine wrote:
| You're saying that while commenting on a HN post from a company
| that sells analytics solutions, with a piece of content showing
| that Google Analytics it's getting blocked a lot by a specific
| type of a audience.
|
| Like... _hey guys, you know, if you want to sell to these folks
| maybe you should consider an alternative to GA, right?_
|
| Why didn't you ignore this?
|
| This is fine for you, yet an AD that's it's clearly identified
| as being an AD, with, literally, a defined area - it's not.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I expected these numbers to be higher. However, an even more
| interesting metric is the 88% block in Firefox.
|
| Firefox may not have a great market share, but based on these
| numbers it's market share may very well be eight times higher
| than your analytics report. This can change the argument of "it's
| only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a
| quarter of our user base, we should at least test it", depending
| on your target audience. I've seen tons of people claim general
| Firefox usage is negligible based on public data from websites
| such as statcounter, but these metrics prove that those
| statistics are unreliable and should not be used.
|
| The best you can do is use server side UA inspection, though you
| can't really distinguish bots from real users that way.
| nix0n wrote:
| > I expected these numbers to be higher.
|
| The actual numbers might be higher, the article notes that
| these numbers still don't include anyone who blocks first-party
| JS completely.
|
| I don't know if any of the sampled websites actually work
| without first-party JS.
| sofetch wrote:
| > The best you can do is use server side UA inspection
|
| No, the best you can do is to stop caring. A distant second is
| this "server side UA inspection." Whatever that means exactly.
| batch12 wrote:
| Server side useragent inspection
| kongin wrote:
| >I expected these numbers to be higher.
|
| Home vs office.
|
| On my company laptop I am often not allowed to install software
| (but I'm allowed to develop the software that companies trust
| to handle billions of dollars in transactions) so my usage
| would look 60% chrome with no add blocking and 40% completely
| locked down firefox.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I feel this heavily depends on your goal.
|
| IMHO, this points at Firefox being used mostly by ad-averse,
| tech-savvy users, while the less-adverse, less-savvy users
| prefer Safari and/or Chrome.
|
| If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious
| approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on
| non-FF browsers.
|
| Of course, following web standards would be the Golden Way, and
| more selfless actors follow that rule, but that song has been
| sung ever since the old Netscape/MSIE wars.
| bluGill wrote:
| > If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most
| obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely
| and focus on non-FF browsers.
|
| No, your best approach is to test firefox carefully to ensure
| it is broken. That way you encourage people to use something
| more friendly to you.
|
| I hope I didn't give anyone ideas.
| nine_k wrote:
| It's less of a joke than it sounds.
|
| I have to keep Chromium around not just for testing in it,
| but also to make certain purchases, reservations, etc,
| because some sites just fail to work in regular Firefox,
| even with enhanced protection off. Not many, maybe 0.1%,
| but in a pinch there's no other way than to fire up MISE^W
| Chromium.
| dannyw wrote:
| Dont give Google Maps and YouTube ideas. Wait...
| tempestn wrote:
| Also Google Meet. I've noticed my webcam always comes
| through crystal clear in Meet on Chrome, but is reliably
| blurry in Firefox.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Is there a good blocking solution for Safari? From what I
| understand uBlock Origin cannot operate on Safari due to the
| way that it disallows some allows access to the underlying
| source of the webpage.
|
| Also it seems like extensions on Safari require you to
| install them via the App Store which just seems so dumb and
| unintuitive compared to Chrome/Firefox.
|
| If they fixed these two issues, I think Safari usage would be
| much greater. That browser is so incredibly fast and snappy
| especially on the new M1 macs but not having proper ad-
| blocking is a complete deal breaker.
| sidibe wrote:
| The reason Firefox is higher is probably because it's the
| easiest one to block ads on mobile. Most people I know who use
| Firefox on mobile do so specifically to have ublock origin. I
| personally use chrome on desktop but Firefox on mobile.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Funnily enough, Privacy Badger is an excellent ad blocker.
| Turns out 99% of ads come from tracking domains. You'd think
| the ad people would split up the tracking from actually
| showing the ad, but apparently it's not worth showing an
| impression without also tracking the user.
| [deleted]
| mywittyname wrote:
| Ad Block Plus browser on Android is easier. I use both but
| don't bother blocking ads in FF since I use reader mode 99%
| of the time.
| 300bps wrote:
| With so many options for Chromium-based browsers, is there a
| reason why you still use Chrome?
|
| I personally use Edge on desktop and iPhone because I give so
| much data to Google by using a gmail account that it lightens
| the load a little bit to use something other than Chrome. It
| functions the same as far as I see and it runs all the same
| plugins.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Not op.
|
| I also use Edge on my Android, it has a built-in adblock
| plus. I prefer unlock origin, but it's better than nothing.
| rovr138 wrote:
| Doesn't firefox on android allow ublock origin?
| SirFredman wrote:
| yes.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| and privacy badger, https everywhere, decentraleyes and a
| number of privacy addons.
| sidibe wrote:
| My reason for using chrome is I don't mind it. I think I'm
| less suspicious of Google than most of HN. They don't allow
| extensions on mobile though
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| You have to be on Android to use addons with mobile Firefox.
| Since Android=Google, doesn't that mean you are giving Google
| all your data including browsing data and the fact that you
| are blocking ads?
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Only if you are running Google Play services. You can
| certainly opt out of this if you like. I run LineageOS and
| do just that, but I also don't need my phone for much more
| than the basics, and F-Droid can fill those in for my use
| case.
| silon42 wrote:
| Why would you assume they are getting all browsing data?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Motive + ability. They want all the data and they own the
| OS.
|
| Why would you assume they aren't?
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| there's never been any evidence that Google is capturing
| all internet traffic on android devices.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Motive + ability aren't the only things. That'd be a
| clear invasion of privacy that you could expect to win a
| court case over.
| sidibe wrote:
| I don't know, but it definitely blocks ads which is why I
| use it.
| nix0n wrote:
| Yes, but at least I don't have to see as many ads, and my
| phone's CPU doesn't spend as much time rendering ads, and
| my limited mobile bandwidth isn't all sucked up by ads.
| polote wrote:
| The reason Firefox is higher is probably because users who
| choose it are more educated about the internet and are
| probably the ones who know how to use an adblocker. So it is
| unlikely that the proportion of users who use Firefox
| globally is higher than what stats give us.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| I thought Firefox desktop and mobile blocked Google
| Analytics by default these days, as part of the general
| anti-tracking protections. Maybe I'm wrong, though?
| pvg wrote:
| _I expected these numbers to be higher._
|
| These numbers are iffy or at least, very poorly described.
| They're not a percentage of HN or Reddit users - in the HN
| case, the sample is HN users who clicked on a front page link
| to a post about switching to Linux from MacOS. It's a fairly
| small sample biased in ways that are unknowable when all you
| have is that one sample. As a methodology, this is flaky enough
| to not warrant the headline and the significant digits in these
| numbers.
| joeframbach wrote:
| "it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to
| "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it"
|
| To nitpick. Starting with 3/100 FF, times 8 unaccounted for,
| you get 24/121, 20%.
| nine_k wrote:
| Why 121? I suppose visitors are counted by more reliable web
| server logs.
| tempestn wrote:
| If you're counting 3% Firefox usage in your analytics,
| that's 3 users in every 100 using FF, and 97 using other
| browsers. If we assume actual FF usage is 8x what's being
| reported, you actually have 24 FF users and 97 other users,
| for a total of 121.
| ionwake wrote:
| Doesn't Firefox still include google analytics into its
| Preferences dialog boxes or something? Im finding these stats
| ironic.
| irae wrote:
| I don't have any proof or study on it, but I suspect they
| don't do it. My anecdotal evidence is that I use an
| application firewall and Firefox by itself pings only
| telemetry.mozila.org or accounts.mozilla.org and stuff like
| that. It uses domains that explicitly say what they mean to
| be used for. At least in my experience
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Mozilla has a special agreement with Google about how their
| analytics data is stored and handled. I thought they only
| used it on their websites but it is not impossible that they
| use it for software telemetry.
| commoner wrote:
| If you're referring to Firefox using Google Analytics for the
| Firefox Add-ons frontend, as of July 2017, Mozilla has
| disabled Google Analytics for any browser that has Do Not
| Track enabled.
|
| https://github.com/mozilla/addons-
| frontend/issues/2785#issue...
|
| This change was made in response to pressure from HN readers,
| so thanks to everyone for that.
| zibzab wrote:
| It's odd a company of that size cannot roll their own
| solution.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It's odd a company of the size of GM cannot roll their
| own gas station and toad construction network.
|
| What's the purpose of the Mozilla organisation? Is it in
| creating a analytics platform? Mind that value of GA
| comes from all the info they have and thus can estimate
| age, gender, social things, ... of users etc. Building an
| comparable service is a notable effort with little
| synergies to what Mozilla does. (Whereas Google can
| combine with information from other businesses)
| nacs wrote:
| I'm a Firefox user but let's face it, Mozilla doesn't
| have to make their own -- there are plenty of open-
| source, self-hostable analytics solutions.
|
| (Also the "toad construction network" made me laugh)
| mkl wrote:
| Maybe it's a condition of their funding deals with
| Google?
| tr33house wrote:
| So proud of the plausible guys for getting to the top of HN. I
| remember reading about them in 2019 on indie hackers! All the
| best
| ScottWRobinson wrote:
| Really curious how this compares to Cloudflare's analytics. I run
| a site for developers with decent traffic, and according to
| Cloudflare only about 25% of our readers block Google Analytics.
| I had always thought it would be a higher percentage, so this
| seems to make sense.
|
| It's also odd that the clicks from Google Search Console line up
| very closely with what we see from Google Analytics. I had always
| thought this data would be more accurate since Google SERPs uses
| (used to use?) forwarding URLs to track this stuff.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| How do I block Plausible?
| mrlatinos wrote:
| Pihole
| yoble wrote:
| Their open analytics page shows the live HN traffic to their
| website, driven by this article - quite a peak from regular:
| https://plausible.io/plausible.io
| mastazi wrote:
| I'm curious as to why Reddit users were considered a tech-savvy
| audience. While there are some tech-centered subreddits, many
| others are not.
| markosaric wrote:
| the subreddit that drove the traffic to the post that was
| analyzed was /r/linux which should be more technical than the
| average subreddit out there
| mastazi wrote:
| Thank you, I missed that part.
| randomperson_24 wrote:
| This is highly inaccurate. The author is using Plausible via a
| proxy but Google Analytics directly (a very biased way to do
| things).
|
| Secondly, PiHole, uBlock origin and most other adblockers also
| block Plausible analytics (there are discussions on their own
| Github Issues regarding it). If you are proxying Plausible to get
| accurate readings, same should be done with GA.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I don't read this as Plausible vs GA but server-side anything
| (including a GA proxy) vs client-side GA. in that case, it
| doesn't seem like these figures should be wildly wrong.
| cwizou wrote:
| They definitely did, this is not a GA vs server side
| comparison. From the source :
|
| > I compared stats between Plausible Analytics and Google
| Analytics.
| happybuy wrote:
| As a developer of an ad blocker[1] our stats would seem to back
| up what Plausible has found:
|
| - Despite having equivalent desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS)
| apps, most of our users (> 75%) use the app primarily on desktop
|
| - Most users say the key reason for use is for privacy
| protection; even with Safari providing some inbuilt privacy
| tracking protection
|
| - Our app is focused on providing a simple 'set and forget' ad
| blocking approach; so you would think the key audience would be
| less tech savvy users. However a large proportion of users are
| tech-inclined and knowledgeable users.
|
| - A lot of tech heavy websites are some of the worst offenders in
| terms of tracker usage and advertising. For example, The Verge
| can load 3.5x faster simply by using an ad blocker that blocks
| the on-page trackers and ads[2]
|
| [1] https://www.magiclasso.co/
|
| [2] https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/difference-adblocking/
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| My experience running a web server also backs this up. The
| number of GET requests to the back end is around twice as much
| as I see in Google Analytics.
| thurn wrote:
| Are there any ad blockers for iOS that can block ads in google
| search results? Or is that kind of thing essentially
| impossible?
| graftak wrote:
| I use 1Blocker which blocks those (checked just now), I don't
| see why other apps could not do the same.
| 1--6zVa-E wrote:
| AdGuard is the best option, plus it's free.
| hkai wrote:
| Why is it important to have "privacy" from someone selling me a
| new video streaming service, but not important to fight against
| censorship and policing of content by tech giants?
| telesilla wrote:
| Can you make this for Android?
| slaw wrote:
| On Android you can use Firefox + uBlock Origin.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| Add Blokada + Newpipe to the mix as well.
| htns wrote:
| I don't recall ever having heard about Blokada before,
| but looking it up now it doesn't seem recommended: https:
| //gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536
| ignoramous wrote:
| (I created _that_ merge request)
|
| Blokada's UI is without peer and so it makes for a very
| good "just works" for the majority (in fact, from what I
| know, it is the most downloaded DNS-based content blocker
| on Android by far).
|
| However, it is disappointing that some of their decision-
| making is found wanting: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy
| toolsIO/comments/papgeq/any_...
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Forgive the questions, but you seem to be a good person
| to ask.. How does Blokada actually work? Its FAQ claims
| it:
|
| > prevents apps and browsers installed on your device
| from sending your private data (known as tracking
| fingerprints) to the Internet.
|
| Is it doing some kind of packet inspection?
|
| As a secondary layer of blocking I use DNS66 which
| intercepts DNS requests and fails them for blacklisted
| domains, by installing itself as a virtual VPN -
| essentially a cooked /etc/hosts for Android.
|
| Would Blokada work alongside that?
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _prevents apps and browsers installed on your device
| from sending your private data (known as tracking
| fingerprints) to the Internet._
|
| For now, Blokada's utility is limited to DNS-based
| content blocking. It cannot and does not prevent most
| forms of fingerprinting.
|
| > _Is it doing some kind of packet inspection?_
|
| Yes, only DNS packet inspection, but even for the only
| thing it does, it is clumsy: It leaks DNS requests; that
| is, Blokada _does not_ trap all DNS traffic on port 53,
| and it _does not_ handle DNS queries sent over TCP. DNS66
| has these same issues, too.
|
| > _As a secondary layer of blocking I use DNS66 which
| intercepts DNS requests and fails them for blacklisted
| domains, by installing itself as a virtual VPN -
| essentially a cooked /etc/hosts for Android._
|
| Blokada uses the same trick (I mean, core parts of
| Blokada 4 code-base does bear similarities with DNS66
| which preceded it... Blokada 5 however was re-written in
| Rust).
|
| > _Would Blokada work alongside that?_
|
| No, it cannot. But: Apps that support "DNS proxying"
| (like Nebulo [0]) can. It is quite an involved setup. I'd
| simply use Nebulo over DNS66, as it is not only more
| capable but also encrypts DNS traffic unlike Blokada 4 or
| DNS66.
|
| > _...but you seem to be a good person to ask.._
|
| A disclosure, rather something to keep in mind: I have
| been accused of spreading fud by the Blokada lead
| developer and using it to "market" a "competitor" app I
| co-develop. In my defense, it wasn't / isn't fud what I
| spread, unless fud === uncomfortable truth.
|
| [0] https://github.com/ch4t4r/Nebulo (fixed link, thanks
| _u /NoGravitas_)
| status_offline wrote:
| Would you mind to suggest any alternative to Blokada?
| Thanks!
| ignoramous wrote:
| https://github.com/offa/android-foss#-ad-blocker and
| https://github.com/offa/android-foss#-firewall
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Thanks for the info!
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Github link for Nebulo appears wrong: is this the correct
| one?
|
| https://github.com/Ch4t4r/Nebulo
| [deleted]
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| This is the way. Although the built-in blocker in "strict"
| mode does a darn good job as well with a rare site breakage
| 45ure wrote:
| In addition to uBO, I also use TrackerControl.
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.
| f...
| zibzab wrote:
| And uMatirx, but Firefox put stop to that one.
| Lev1a wrote:
| Pretty sure Firefox did no such thing, instead IIRC the
| developer (gorhill) of both addons (uMatrix and uBO)
| realized that uMatrix was pretty much redundant given the
| options available in uBO and thus archived uMatrix.
| zibzab wrote:
| We had a HN discussion where users brought up situations
| where uB could not replace uM.
|
| IMO what really killed uM was major API changes by chrome
| and Firefox.
| happybuy wrote:
| Google has no incentive to support effective ad blocking on
| platforms they control (Android and Chrome). This has made us
| reluctant to develop for or invest time on these platforms -
| the platform owner would be working against what we would be
| trying to achieve.
| Dah00n wrote:
| What? Apple is even worse. There was a big cry when Google
| wanted to nuter adblockers API but Apple have done exactly
| the same thing. You fell into a pr stunt. Apple doesn't
| care for privacy. Just look at how they scan you pictures..
| nacs wrote:
| Apple literally built an API for ad-blocking. How is that
| worse?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Are you referring to the "content blocker" API? Because
| that basically forces plug-ins to supply a list of
| blocked domains. Just like Google's upcoming changes.
| Neither allow you to run your own engine for blocking
| like what uBlock Origin does.
| [deleted]
| FabHK wrote:
| No, _other_ cloud providers scan all the pictures you
| upload. Apple does a careful private set intersection
| (partially on the client, partially on the server) on all
| the pictures you upload to collect strictly less data
| than other cloud providers.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| All prominent smartphone OS come with an advertising id.
| It wouldn't have to be this way. I think Android is open
| source done wrong to be honest.
|
| But yes, in the end they are both crappy vendors.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| It appears that Magiclasso is not open source. That being the
| case, how can anyone trust your claim that "Magic Lasso Adblock
| doesn't see or have access to any of your web pages or browsing
| history?"
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The Safari content blocking API makes sure of that. Content
| blockers can only provide a list of rules for content to
| block (based on URL regexes, CSS selectors, etc) but can't
| actually access the content itself.
| anon9001 wrote:
| How do you collect your analytics?
| happybuy wrote:
| On our website we have no analytics or trackers installed at
| all. The app usage statistics come via the Apple App Store.
| App Store users can opt out of these stats via an OS-level
| setting.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Opt out? It should be an opt in system in a for-privacy
| app.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Opt out? It should be an opt in system in a for-privacy
| app.
|
| I think it's pretty clear that they are discussing an App
| Store policy, not analytics collected by their app.
| minhazm wrote:
| Apple does ask you when you set your phone up if you want
| to share analytics or not. I consider that opt-in, since
| you're given the choice up front.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Great, now it's equally as privacy-friendly as Windows 10
| /s
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I'm curious how does this compare/align with 1Blocker ?
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Worth noting that if you're already willing to setup a first-
| party proxy like Plausible does in this comparison, you can do
| the same thing with Google Analytics using either the NYPL
| project [1] or send whatever you want to the Google Measurement
| Protocol API [2]. You can usually send whatever you want through
| a first-party proxy in basically any competent analytics product.
| Analytics is not ads.
|
| I find it this comparison a little misleading because Plausible
| admits that their own script/endpoint are blocked by adblockers,
| just to a lesser extent than Google Analytics [3].
|
| [1] https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy
|
| [2]
| https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
|
| [3] https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction
| enigma-reload3d wrote:
| I expect HN to be close to 90%
| nullc wrote:
| Can some HN users that don't block ads across the board in their
| browser explain how you can stand using the Internet at all?
| daitangio wrote:
| PiHole is my preferred solution. I have come with some insights
| here:
|
| https://gioorgi.com/2020/pihole-lockdown/
|
| Give it a try!
|
| https://pi-hole.net/
| tsjq wrote:
| is there a way to run this pi-hole on cloud so, multiple users
| can use it , and also while using mobile data ? also, for those
| who do not want to spend on / does knot know to fiddle with
| RPi.
| Havoc wrote:
| This should only be done in combination with a VPN. Open DNS
| points are not generally recommended
|
| Check out nextdns instead. It can likely do what you had in
| mind
| dalu wrote:
| I run c64g.com
|
| Back in the day I could choose ad formats and place them to be
| non-invasive. Since a while ago Adsense only has the responsive
| ad format. It stretches across the full width and is extremely
| high. I tried what they suggested to limit the size but it isn't
| working. The site looks nice without ads. And I personally hate
| so see it so full of ads. But server needs to be paid and I'd
| like to also earn something for my time and knowledge spent on
| developing the site and maintaining. There's a lot of work to be
| done there. I'd like the audience to be able to write their own
| reviews, upload images, maybe even offer a way to play those
| games in the browser. The site used to be #1 in search results,
| but since Google prefers wikis it's not anymore. I've also
| decided to not track my visitors via any trackers, so no piwik,
| no GA. Only server logs.
|
| There's also legacy.c64g.com which despite not being listed
| anywhere anymore performs better than the main site in ad
| revenue. It has static banner ads that are not invasive.
|
| I had a free forums service many years ago. German audience.
| Barely made server costs. I wanted of course to earn something
| for my time maintaining it so I put those annoying layer ads
| there. It was a downward spiral. The layer ads initially brought
| additional revenue, really nice revenue but people started
| protesting and after a while leaving and using adblockers, who
| could blame them. It was so full of ads it was unusable. I wrote
| an adblocker-blocker, which displayed a black screen if adblock
| was detected. That lead to people leaving even more. Eventually
| so many people left that removing the annoying ads resulted in
| not being able to pay the server rent and it had to close down.
|
| Ads are a necessity for some sites (subscription based model
| won't work) Google is actively destroying the sites that choose
| to put those ads on them by removing choice of ad formats.
|
| Recently I moved away from chrome on the phone for my daily
| browsing because Firefox allows me to install an adblocker add
| addon and chrome doesn't. Even worse are those cookie nag
| screens. Every top result on Google search has an annoying one. I
| blame the, sorry but it's true, idiots of the EU parliament who
| make half assed laws without taking care of the consequences.
| Remeber Shareware of the 90s? It's worse than that now. I wish
| there were cookie screen blockers. Lately I started to just
| navigate back when I visit a site with a modal cookie dialog that
| wants you to accept all by default. In most cases I don't bother
| to click anything anymore, if I visit your site and can't read
| the info I came for to read I will leave. Too bad there isn't a
| metric to count that.
|
| GA is some of the worst spyware and since the US government has
| access to it whenever it desires it's also used to track
| individuals. It's one part of the huge spy apparatus the US
| shadow government built.
| newbamboo wrote:
| And we know it doesn't make a difference.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| This is exactly why metrics like "only 10% of our users use
| Firefox" are complete rubbish.
|
| Only 10% of the users that don't block GA.
|
| That's pretty in line with "X% of users that participated in our
| poll say they don't min participating in polls".
| xnx wrote:
| Google even has official add-ons (for multiple browsers
| nonetheless) to opt out of Google Analytics:
| https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
| FriedrichN wrote:
| Seeing as Plausible is still a script, how much of the remaining
| percentage of Firefox/Linux users are blocking scripts entirely?
| My default uMatrix settings block everything but first party CSS
| and images.
| lopis wrote:
| Considering that most of the web is unusable for most people
| without javascript, I'm pretty sure no-script people are a very
| very small portion of the internet.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| A lot works quite okay, reader view also works great a lot of
| the time. And if necessary I'll allow first party scripts and
| most tracking scripts are third-party.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Now I need to teach my adblocker to block Plausible, even when
| hosted first-party.
| splch wrote:
| _as i browse from duckduckgo browser_
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This is good to hear. I didn't think the percentages would be
| that high.
|
| "Data driven design" is kinda overrated anyway. It's better to
| actually listen to your users. Stats don't show what people
| think, and they're often tweaked to show what people want to see.
| WJW wrote:
| "Listening to your users" is just a more manual form of data
| gathering though. Also, it's not like "hearing what you want to
| hear" has been invented by statisticians, that is super easy to
| do when talking to users as well.
|
| Some of the problems in talking to users:
|
| - people will often tell you what they think you want to hear
| rather than what they really think. (Very few users would ever
| tell an interviewing dev that they think the product is
| unsalvageable, the dev team wasted several months and that the
| user would never ever use it)
|
| - Users often don't know what they want because they don't
| understand the full range of possibilities. Sometimes they
| dream of tech that would violate several laws of physics, at
| other times they fail to realize that for-loops exist and just
| ask for a faster way to manually click a button a thousand
| times.
|
| - Fads affect users just as much as anyone else. If there has
| been a surge of news articles about how Google is doing fancy
| AI stuff, you can bet the bakery on the corner of the street
| will mention machine learning when asked what they want to
| improve their business.
| JohnFen wrote:
| "Listening to your users" is a voluntary exchange with your
| users, not compelling data from them. The difference between
| the two is critical.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's amazing how far the goalposts have moved on analytical
| data.
|
| I worked retail in The Time Before The Web and we collected
| and analyzed data from our customers. We had a door clicker
| to give us a daily record of traffic. We did detailed
| analytics on what items customers bought when, to inform
| inventory and staffing decisions. We did regular people-
| counting studies to evaluate our merchandising in different
| parts of the store. We did coupons in local papers for
| which we could directly track redemption. This was all in
| the service of making the store work better for our
| customers.
|
| Now, you might say that those are all anonymous aggregate
| piles of data. Well, so are most web analytics packages,
| including many client-side JavaScript.
| JohnFen wrote:
| No goalposts have moved.
|
| The difference between the two is that there's no
| question that counting heads walking through a door and
| watching inventory patterns are not personal to the
| customer.
|
| With telemetry, including web analytics, there is always
| a question because there is no visibility as to their
| actual practices. It all amounts to "trust us". And we've
| had more than enough experience with these things to know
| that such trust is frequently misplaced -- so none of it
| can be trusted.
|
| And GA especially cannot be trusted, and also happens to
| be pretty much ubiquitous.
|
| As a side note, it's become just as dangerous to be in a
| physical store as online now. People who prefer not to be
| spied on must pay in cash, be sure to put their phones
| into airplane mode before entering the store, and so
| forth. And with the increasing adoption of face
| recognition in stores, it becomes risky to even show your
| face. In other words, they have to be as "on guard" in
| the store as online.
| ehsankia wrote:
| The percentage is misleading. it's not people intentionally
| blocking Google Analytics, it's anyone that runs any adblocker,
| which almost all block Google Analytics. I installed uBlock for
| my parents and they don't have the faintest clue what GA is. A
| significant portion of those 58% probably don't care either.
| hkai wrote:
| Why is it good to prevent analytics? How can it benefit the
| user?
|
| Why is it more important to hide the fact that you're
| interested in cars and Netflix, but not important to protect
| free speech, free enterprise and free association?
|
| I'm absolutely shocked by why someone would want to protect
| against a vendor selling me a new mobile phone when the real
| threat of social media is promoting left-wing extremism and
| censorship.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| > not important to protect free speech, free enterprise and
| free association?
|
| Analytics is able to track your speech, enterprise and
| association to facilitate their encroachment. Part of the
| metadata collected from messaging apps, for example, is the
| network graph of your interactions with other users.
| Association. If you're not using something E2EE, that's
| speech as well. And so on.
|
| > the real threat of social media is promoting left-wing
| extremism and censorship.
|
| Oh, you're one of those.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I think both are important.
|
| Personally I hate analytics because it makes my equipment
| work against me, or at least for someone else. Consider that
| there are websites and apps that are so overloaded with js
| and ads, that they will run sluggishly on anything but the
| latest phones and laptops. I would rather not allow that.
|
| I have no problem with static ads. I love watching creative
| ads on TV during a sports broadcast. Instagram ads are
| another example of advertising done well. Minimal distraction
| from the content, no slowdowns, easily dismissible.
|
| As for censorship, I agree that is a more important issue.
| But we can focus on more than one issue at a time. I will
| take a win on either front.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'll take your question at face value (even though you're
| very certainly a troll account given your post history).
|
| It's less about "hiding" or "preventing" anything, and more
| about putting the user in control of sharing those things. If
| I tell you I like figure skating, here on an online forum,
| I'm making a conscious decision to share that fact about my
| life.
|
| If a script completely silently figures out I like figure
| skating, because of websites I previously visited, that it
| was able to infer due to various data sharing setups (such as
| google analytics overprevalence etc), that is not a choice I
| made. It's a form of stalking.
|
| The problem is accentuated because it's not just one hobby,
| it's _everything_. Your hobbies, your location, gender,
| religion, income, political affiliation, etc.
|
| That it serves ads based on that is icky, but the problem is
| that it knows those things _at all_ without me choosing to
| share that. And this is without even getting into "bad
| actor" territory.
|
| Privacy is control over what you share with others.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Collecting telemetry is essentially doing an impromptu social
| science study, and it suffers from the same problems -
| collecting good data and making correct inferences is a
| difficult task, and it requires specialized skills. Social
| scientists are trained to do this, and yet they still fail more
| often than not[0]. A random business trying to run product
| development off automated metrics? They don't stand a chance.
|
| This is not to say the data is useless - it's just worth
| remembering that, unless you have strong statistical
| background, you're probably reading your data wrong, so your
| metrics should be treated as weak evidence at best.
|
| --
|
| [0] - It's not snark, it's a corollary of the replication
| crisis. This is a _hard_ job.
| gruturo wrote:
| The remaining 42% of users work in adtech and need to monitor
| their own product, are stuck on some platform where an adblocker
| is not possible, or are they just masochistic ?
| yoz-y wrote:
| Or they put their money where their mouth is and stop going to
| websites that are ad ridden to the point of unusability.
| saagarjha wrote:
| A lot of people in adtech block ads.
| tsjq wrote:
| forgot the ignorant or not-tech-savvy ?
| ghostpepper wrote:
| The entire methodology of this 'study' is comparing analytics
| from Google to analytics from Plausible? Who is Plausible, you
| might ask? Just take a look at which blog is hosting this very
| study.
|
| This is a clever ad for a google analytics competitor.
| masto wrote:
| The title seems to have been truncated. Presumably it meant to
| end with ", according to a Google Analytics competitor"
| fswwi wrote:
| Only 58%? I expected 95% at least.
| _arvin wrote:
| Can confirm, part of the 58% who block all the ads. Using a
| raspberry pi as a pi-hole, works great.
|
| Getting 100% blockage [0] on this adblock test [1].
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/7hdaHmh.png
|
| [1] https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html
|
| Haven't seen an ad in months. (kidding)
| [deleted]
| herbst wrote:
| Same here. I don't even open the browser when my phone is not
| connected to my safe heaven WiFi.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| Just wireguard to your "safe haven" and you can open your
| browser anywhere.
|
| Or, if you're lazy like me, just use NextDNS when you're
| outside. There's even an option to only activate NextDNS when
| not connected to the Wi-Fi of your choice.
| herbst wrote:
| To be honest. I enjoy being semi offline when not home. But
| yeah, would be easy to VPN home.
| drpancake wrote:
| This is pretty much in line with what I observed a few days ago
| when my post[1] reached the top of the front page here.
|
| Google Analytics reports 10k uniques vs. 35k in Netlify's server-
| side analytics.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28288760
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm surprised it's not higher to be honest
| throwawayswede wrote:
| The fact that it's so low (yes imo 58 is pretty low) speaks
| volumes to the attitudes of the "tech-savvy crowd" towards
| tracking and data mining.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Including Reddit's audience as "tech savvy" is an outright lie.
| Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world. (And
| even if it weren't, it doesn't take much browsing to see how
| non-tech-savvy its audience is. It's basically Facebook at this
| point.)
| throwawayswede wrote:
| While I agree with you, unfortunatley that is still
| technically considered the tech-savvy crowd, amongst others
| at least.
| scrollaway wrote:
| The audience isn't even sort of comparable to Hacker News
| though, so putting both in the same headline is weird.
| There was some correlation long ago, now not so much.
|
| The Firefox numbers above are a much better tell of what a
| "largely tech savvy crowd" looks like. 88%.
| markosaric wrote:
| Depends really on the subreddit in question. The traffic
| to the blog post that was analyzed came from /r/linux
| which should be more tech savvy than the average web user
| and also more tech savvy than the average Reddit user (i
| would put /r/linux audience close to the Hacker News
| audience)
| Tenoke wrote:
| I assumed it was more since posts I've had on the front page have
| more like 70-80% of traffic missing in GA. It could be because I
| only enable it when DoNotTrack is off though which I don't
| believe is the default.
| YKreator wrote:
| One solution is to use its own Google Tag Manager server. In this
| case, the events are sent to the server container via a custom
| URL and the data is then transmitted to Google analytics.
| superasn wrote:
| That's why I prefer goaccess(1) over any other tool that uses
| client side Javascript.
|
| It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you
| enough information to know whats happening on your website but
| doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it.
|
| Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never
| be blocked.
|
| (1) https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303
| scrollaway wrote:
| By nature it won't filter out bots, however.
|
| One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75% bot
| traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other than
| site performance.
| superasn wrote:
| Goaccess does have a separate panel for Crawlers/Bots(1) but
| I think it's based on the UA.
|
| There is also an option to ignore IPs/Referrers too which can
| work very well for such cases.
|
| (1) https://goaccess.io/features#:~:text=Spot%20aggressive%20
| hos...
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Can't you have a client side system do nothing but tell the
| server it's not a bot?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75%
| bot traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other
| than site performance.
|
| I'm unclear how broad you intend that second sentence to be,
| but there's still a ton of info you can glean just from
| server-side logs:
|
| - Referrer info, and, by extension, popular search terms
| being used to find your site;
|
| - Paths on your site causing 5xx errors (so pages which might
| be triggering an error in a server-side script)
|
| - Paths on your site causing 4xx errors, and associated
| referrers (might be broken links on your own site; might be
| stale search engine indexing)
|
| - Mobile vs desktop access statistics
|
| Finding this data among a bunch of bot-induced noise might be
| annoying, but if they're good bots and sending proper UA
| headers specifying their botness, it's easy enough to filter
| out. Even otherwise there might be typical bot-like behavior
| you can find and account for such as not sending a referrer
| header or trying to access known exploitable PHP scripts (in
| which case you should block that IP address for a few hours
| or days - there are programs which can do this sort of thing
| automatically but frustratingly I can't recall the name of
| one off the top of my head right now).
|
| Granted, a lot of this can be spoofed, but I'm pretty sure
| the number of people sending spoofed referral or UA headers
| is dwarfed by the number of those (like me) who block Google
| Analytics and similar cruft entirely.
| second--shift wrote:
| | frustratingly I can't recall the name of one off the top
| of my head right now
|
| fail2ban
| scrollaway wrote:
| No, you're right, I shouldn't have written something so
| dismissive. (I do include error tracing as part of
| "performance" for what it's worth but those have their own
| system from within the app itself)
|
| Frankly I would love to see some serious low-config
| solutions to analyzing server-side logs. Oh, especially
| Fastly. Client in question uses Fastly and it blew my mind
| to find out that there was nothing in place to answer
| simple questions such as "what are the slowest paths to
| respond", "which paths are a cache hit most often", "which
| paths are most hit overall", etc. And being able to look at
| various dimensions such as browser, bot traffic, country of
| origin, etc. If you have suggestions...
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Any log analyzer will tell you which path is the most
| hit. For slowest paths, I think a server daemon could
| theoretically log how long it took to serve the page from
| request in to last byte out, but I don't know if any of
| them do that - you might have to set up a custom format
| for logging, and then from there you'd need to tell your
| analyzer how to interpret that field. For cache hits, I
| guess it'd depend on what sort of cache you have in mind,
| but that might be something you could only effectively
| log at the application level.
| marvinblum wrote:
| The middle way is using something like Pirsch's API [0] from
| your backend.
|
| [0] https://pirsch.io/
| dschooh wrote:
| > By nature it won't filter out bots, however.
|
| I have two questions about this:
|
| - Since you know they are bots, why couldn't you filter them?
|
| - On the other hand, couldn't there be bots that run
| JavaScript which would be tracked client-side?
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _Since you know they are bots, why couldn 't you filter
| them?_
|
| A decent amount can be filtered by UA. This is inconvenient
| because UA is a very large piece to log and index on, so
| you need to do UA processing to do anything useful with it
| and ... well by that point it just becomes a chore and I
| suspect there's good logging services that do this better
| than you'd spend your time doing yourself.
|
| > _On the other hand, couldn 't there be bots that run
| JavaScript which would be tracked client-side?_
|
| They exist but they're more rare by nature, because running
| JS at bot scale is expensive.
| dschooh wrote:
| > well by that point it just becomes a chore and I
| suspect there's good logging services that do this better
| than you'd spend your time doing yourself.
|
| Which is why the OP suggested using tools like goaccess.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Can I evade tracking by disgusing my traffic as bot traffic?
| Sounds like a startup idea.
| ignoramous wrote:
| You're likely going to end up implementing a poor man's
| Tor.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Oh I suspect you'll have a decent amount of sites not
| serving you ads or analytics if you put "googlebot" or
| "chrome lighthouse" in your UA.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| If you use googlebot you'll likely just get blocked
| altogether.
|
| Using Lighthouse might be an interesting experiment
| though.
| napoleond wrote:
| I think this is why most sites--especially those targeting
| technical audiences--should rely on server-side analytics
| instead. Add some middleware to your web framework of choice
| which logs request data and parse that, or use something like
| https://www.tabbydata.com (disclaimer: I built that) to pipe it
| into a data warehouse. Voila! No JS tracking, retain useful
| metrics.
| prepend wrote:
| I've used server log analysis, awstats, for maybe 20-25 years.
| It's really interesting the difference between awstats and
| Google analytics (or Adobe analytics, etc).
|
| The reason I keep using Google stats on my backend is
| convenience and "Google magic" for tracking session length,
| bounce, behavior, etc etc. I can get most of that out of
| awstats, but that requires more work.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Can I block this on safari on the iPhone.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Why is this even at the front page of HN? I give them credit for
| the brilliant marketing.
|
| This is an ad disguised as an article targeting the "tech savvy"
| by _bundling_ HN and Reddit (a truth + a lie makes the statement
| more true), a common clickbait tactic
|
| > This makes sense especially considering how difficult it is to
| install an adblocker on Chrome, the most popular browser on
| mobile devices.
|
| Nope, it is really easy: is just an extension
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-...
|
| It makes me think Reddit users are inflating/manipulating this
| article w/ votes and comments
|
| Correction: "difficult to install adblocker on _mobile_ devices "
| ehsankia wrote:
| The headline is the perfect anti-Google HN-clickbait, and it is
| quite misleading. These people just run any ad-blocker, they
| mostly all block Google Analytics as a side-effect. The
| majority of those 58% probably don't care about GA
| specifically.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| It says it's difficult to install on _mobile_
| mgh2 wrote:
| My bad, but the original premise still stands
| mdoms wrote:
| No it doesn't.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Care to elaborate? Not sure why the HN title changed
| [deleted]
| blackoil wrote:
| How do you install extension on mobile Chrome? The link shows
| button to install on Desktop.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Well, for extra irony, I use the Steven Black /etc/hosts
| content to block on the order of 70,000 domain names, and
| plausible.io is in there. So I can't even read the article
| because I'm one of the people it describes.
| zaphar wrote:
| Isn't the primary use-case for plausible that you can run the
| tracking entirely off of your own domain. Which means that
| blocking plausible.io doesn't really give you much.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| it's just one of a list of about 68,800 hosts in the
| blocking data. nothing specifically intended to block
| plausible alone.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > > This makes sense especially considering how difficult it is
| to install an adblocker on Chrome, the most popular browser on
| mobile devices.
|
| > Nope, it is really easy: is just an extension
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-...
|
| The key word here is _mobile_ devices.
|
| AFAIK, ad blocking in Chrome on my phone is difficult. But with
| Firefox, I can easily install uBlock Origin.
|
| I use a PiHole on my phone occasionally to block ads in
| anything that isn't Firefox, but I found that the OpenVPN
| client is a significant battery drain (~7% per hour).
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| The thing is, they also block plausible. It's the ad blockers
| that block.
| platz wrote:
| Adblocking an immoral tragedy of the commons type move.
| Psychologically, It's not unlike NIMBYism or residents of a gated
| community that figured out how to avoid paying their taxes.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Adblocking an immoral tragedy of the commons type move.
|
| Adblocking is a reasonable defense against the constant and
| expanding abuse (of both people and the commons) that the ad
| industry brought on us.
|
| For the record, I don't engage in ad blocking as such. I block
| scripts, which has the side effect of blocking much of the more
| abusive ads. However, reasonable ads aren't blocked at all --
| it's just that there aren't many reasonable ads on the
| internet.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| You mean because the free internet is infrastructure belonging
| to all and ads are its maintenance?
|
| I fundamentally disagree with this parable. I don't think
| common practices in advertising are a necessity, especially
| when it comes to analytics.
| devilduck wrote:
| This is a hilarious take, thanks for the laugh!
| batch12 wrote:
| These poor, poor ad companies are being taken advantage of by
| me. I have no shame. I even immorally block ads on thousands of
| endpoints used by other people! Quite the tragedy!
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365335.
| jokoon wrote:
| Are there relevant studies on the effectiveness of advertising?
|
| I remember spotting such study.
|
| I still wonder if advertising is always worth spending on,
| beacuse google and facebook make a big amount of money with it,
| but I'm still skeptical when I see the actual amount of people
| "engaging" in ads, when you see how much it actually costs.
| [deleted]
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| The old saw is that 50% of advertising works, it's just that
| nobody knows which 50%
| bertil wrote:
| Yes, pretty much every company first data person runs Cost-per-
| action (CPA) analysis to estimate how many sales can be
| attributable to ads vs. other ways of raising your brand. It's
| an imperfect science (just use the word "attribution" to
| trigger shivers in any data person) but it's very clear that
| targeted platforms offer dramatically cheaper leads for almost
| every product.
|
| That's why the hostility to ads feels misplaced: it works, it
| helps company to whom you want to give money to find you and
| people like you. It's just that condescension from _some_
| people in Ad platform and a press that insistently favours the
| worst people mean that people like me who argued for more user-
| friendly interfaces (ban certain content, prevent repeated ads)
| were routinely overruled.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > That's why the hostility to ads feels misplaced
|
| I have no hostility to ads themselves. I have a huge amount
| of hostility to the spying that comes with them.
| WJW wrote:
| > it helps company to whom you want to give money to find you
|
| You mean, the companies who want me to give them money. I'm
| sure there are a few companies out there whose product I
| actually want and don't mind paying for, but their number is
| absolutely dwarfed by the number of companies that seek to
| induce FOMO/status anxiety/etc in order to get me to buy
| things I don't need and would not want if not for
| advertising.
| foerbert wrote:
| Yup. I find it amazing the quoted myth lives on. It doesn't
| even make sense.
|
| How many problems do most people have that can be solved
| with an existing product they are unaware of? The numbers
| can't be very high.
|
| How do you explain well-known brands advertising the same
| product for decades on end? Surely Coke and Pepsi aren't
| suddenly enlightening many people to the existence of their
| drinks.
|
| How about ads that get shown to the known-same individual
| time and time again after mere minutes? (See Hulu, at least
| back in the day, not sure what it's like now.)
|
| The whole line about ads being mere consumer education is
| ridiculous and doesn't even stand up to a cursory thought.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| every advertising platform wants to pretend they are
| delivering useful products that people would otherwise be
| unaware of, but almost exclusively deliver what you have
| identified.
| CerebralCerb wrote:
| Every business with a competent marketing department will
| continuously track and measure the effect of the ads they run,
| like how many users who click the ads turn into paying users.
|
| My startup has tried a variety of marketing strategies from in-
| person campaigns on the street, video ads on YouTube, "free" PR
| through newspapers etc. In order to measure the effect of each
| approach we only did one at a time.
|
| For us paid marketing on Facebook/Instagram was, unexpectedly,
| the most efficient form of marketing by far. But I would not
| assume that applies to all, or even most, businesses. So you
| should experiment with different strategies for your business.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| I dislike ads in general. Specially Youtube ads. They are
| hysterical and for some god knows reason advertisers think
| its a good idea to repeat ad nauseum the same ad multiple
| times even on the same video. I end up hating the brand more
| than having some interest in the product.
|
| (Paid) reviews on the other hand like unboxing, configuring
| and testing a product that I'm interested in are totally
| another thing. This applies to furnitures, house appliances,
| computers and so on. A good example is that I did not knew
| how much I wanted to build a fully silent computer before
| watching so many build videos of a certain fanless case that
| looks like a metal cube.
| jerrre wrote:
| It's the tracking part here that's hard. How do you know that
| the FB/IG ad was the first time the converting user heard of
| your product, or that it was the deciding factor? If you
| literally have no other way of discovering your product than
| this works, but it's easy for FB/IG to show your ad to users
| who were already going to convert and claim the conversion...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I see this so many times. Someone Googles for <product
| name> and then clicks on the _ad_ for said product instead
| of their website which is the first organic result. Google
| claims it's an ad conversion and gets the money, marketing
| monkey will happily take this as credit for their work and
| justification for further ad spend & their own salary,
| while the truth is that this user already made their
| decision to use this product (as they've searched for it)
| and didn't need the ad.
| yunohn wrote:
| Ad platforms, like Google Search ads, will give you
| metrics on clicks/conversion on a keyword basis
| (obviously).
|
| No marketing dept is dumb enough to equate brand-keyword
| traffic with organic traffic.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think it's more like 75% for HN alone.
|
| I built a game - termsandconditions.game that got to #1 on HN a
| few months back and for a while I couldn't understand why I had
| such high CDN use and 4X less registered hits. This is why!
| mrlatinos wrote:
| plausible.io is also blocked
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| That's why apps are so popular with ad driven properties. No
| cookie banners, hardly any limitations. And you get to keep users
| nicely inside the walled garden.
|
| Anyway, I indeed use Firefox with ublock origin, multi account
| containers, etc. I also use Firefox on Android. A lot of stuff
| people assume they need apps for works just fine in that.
| 63 wrote:
| Same here. I particularly enjoy the mobile YouTube and Twitch
| experiences much better than their respective apps (mostly
| because of ad blocking).
| driverdan wrote:
| This is why it's important to block ads and trackers at a lower
| level, such as using a hosts blocklist.
| account42 wrote:
| > No cookie banners
|
| You still need informed consent in the EU, GDPR is not specific
| to websites.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Why so little? Honestly, I believe the percentage is much higher,
| we just deliberately unblock certain sites for market research
| and so on. Most of the web is completely unusable w/o adblockers.
| martinpw wrote:
| Maybe browsing from work? Some companies have policies against
| installing third party browser extensions.
| jopsen wrote:
| Or using default browser on your phone.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| And...
|
| 100% of Google Analytics authors are tech savvy.
|
| This is called irony.
| cbsmith wrote:
| In other news, water is wet. ;-)
| cm2187 wrote:
| ...but the same people stuff their own products with ads and
| analytics.
| scotty79 wrote:
| How do you deal with "please disable adblocker" messages? I found
| them way more annoying than the ads themselves.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Any website with a fully blocking message I disable JavaScript
| entirely in uBO. If the site is still unusable after that I
| just close the tab.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| uBlock Origin eye dropper, select that element, and add it to
| my blocklist.
| nullc wrote:
| The blockers also block most of those. When that fails I find
| the back button works pretty well.
|
| If it's a popup for something I don't have a choice about using
| (e.g. a government site), right clicking the offending element
| choosing inspect and then deleting it out of the dom usually
| solves the problem.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Strange, but I haven't seen one lately that actually blocks
| you. Clicking outside of the modal tends to make them
| disappear.
|
| Could be that I am visiting less annoying websites these days
| though...
| cyberpsybin wrote:
| There are anti anti-adblockers built into uBlock. If that does
| not work, just ditch the site.
| skizm wrote:
| Aside: I thought I heard a while back that Chrome and Safari were
| changing their browser extension APIs such that it would make it
| difficult to truly block ads / 3rd party scripts / blacklist
| domains. Did this ever come to fruition? Was it overblown? Never
| heard where that went.
| dgudkov wrote:
| It amazes me that over the last 10-20 years an astonishing amount
| of money and intellectual capital have been invested in adtech
| and crypto but nothing in micropayments. Ads are evil, but it
| will remain a moot point until we have working micropayments. We
| have (and will have) ads with all their downsides exactly because
| we don't have micropayments, because ads basically work as a
| substitute to micropayments.
| NiloCK wrote:
| Here's one cryptocurrency PoC on micropayments:
| https://web3torrent.statechannels.org/
|
| More directly to your point, I think lots of people have made
| attempts at micropayment protocols. The difficulty is
| psychological rather than technical - the cumulative mental
| burden of repeatedly deciding whether to part with a tenth of a
| cent "costs" much more than value being exchanged.
| sofixa wrote:
| > but nothing in micropayments
|
| That's not true. Web Monetization is built on top of the
| Interledger and does precisely that - micropayments for web
| content. When i wrote about it[0] and posted on HN[1] the
| overwhelming response here was negative, presupposing greed and
| lack of privacy of everyone ( as in the website would still
| track and run ads to earn more money, etc.). The solutions
| exist, people just don't want them, even supposedly privacy-
| focused people.
|
| [0] https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-
| monetizati...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26375857
| jsymolon wrote:
| > overwhelming response here was negative, presupposing greed
| and lack of privacy of everyone
|
| Because the history of other platforms which have done this,
| shows that ads didn't go away.
|
| Cable TV, full of ads.
|
| Satellite Radio, not too bad but still has ads.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| But then again Netflix et al, zero ads
|
| Spotify premium, zero ads
|
| I think it's just a question of coming up with the right
| model. Assuming that failed examples are the rule isn't all
| that useful
| kasabali wrote:
| Some Netflix originals have a lot of product placement
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Product placement is a slight annoyance compared to ads.
| That said, I could see them becoming just as toxic.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| For now, Netflix and Spotify have no ads. I have a
| feeling that if these companies feel the pinch during a
| bad quarter or two, they will 100% start introducing ads.
| That's how business works, they want to maximize revenue.
| TV publishers have traditionally charged a fee on top of
| the ads. That demonstrates that audiences are fine with
| it. 100% Netflix and Spotify will eventually have ads.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > TV publishers have traditionally charged a fee on top
| of the ads.
|
| While not wanting to get into a debate about what is and
| isn't an ad in the context of US public broadcasting,
| this claim is not true of public broadcasting worldwide.
| sofixa wrote:
| > TV publishers have traditionally charged a fee on top
| of the ads. That demonstrates that audiences are fine
| with it. 100% Netflix and Spotify will eventually have
| ads.
|
| Or maybe the huge success of Netflix and to a lesser
| extent Spotify is in no small part because they don't
| have ads and they know it?
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Netflix doesn't have ads, yet. Spotify Premium doesn't
| have ads, yet.
|
| Hulu didn't use to have ads on its most premium tier, and
| from what I know, you now get ads on that too.
| Corporations generally don't like leaving money on the
| table. If you can pay, you are even better target for
| ads.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Netflix doesn't have ads, yet. Spotify Premium doesn't
| have ads, yet.
|
| Both of those are replacement products for models of
| consumption that were previously pretty much entirely ad
| based.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Hulu, in my country at least, is ad-free on premium. It's
| not a hard thing to investigate rather than speculate[1]
|
| [1]https://help.hulu.com/s/article/how-much-does-hulu-
| cost
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Because the history of other platforms which have done
| this, shows that ads didn't go away.
|
| This is classic negativity bias, I can think of plenty of
| platforms that transitioned to paid models without ads
| libertine wrote:
| The reality is that you can't have it all.
|
| You live with the assumption that everyone would just accept
| micropayments, and that's far from the truth.
|
| The result would be content for a small portion of those with
| available income, and content for those without it (with
| parallel markets for content distribution under paywalls - like
| piracy).
|
| That's even more messed up than the current advertising model.
|
| Don't get me wrong, some brands would love that, to pile up
| those with available income and serve them marketing
| communication through press releases, reviews and stuff like
| that. I can see Apple applauding this.
| dijit wrote:
| I'd be interested in working on stuff like this; I used to work
| in a PCI-DSS Tier 1 company storing cardholder data on-premises
| so if someone wants to work on this and would like my help with
| this please reach out; my contact information is in my bio.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I feel like most on the producer side are coming at this from a
| totally wrong angle. A better web isn't a web in which content
| is monetized in a different way. Consumers don't want to pay
| because most content on the web is not worth paying for. Not
| with ads, not with micropayments, not with anything. There's
| the saying about five web sites consisting of screenshots of
| the other four, but even with news, the vast bulk of it that
| isn't legitimately old media like Al Jazeera or Reuters is 22
| year-olds being paid with exposure to summarize Reddit threads.
| Much of it isn't even that at this point and is probably just
| programmatically generated with no writer at all. When all you
| have to go on is a link, you can't possibly know whether
| something is worth paying for until after clicking, reading it,
| and finding out. But if the first thing you see is some pop up
| begging you to subscribe to content you've not even read yet,
| turn off an ad blocker to a server you don't trust, or even
| some gate requiring a micropayment, a whole lot of people are
| just going to go elsewhere for what is likely to be identical
| information content at a less annoying source.
|
| If content producers are willing to put in the hard work of
| developing a reputation for quality output slowly, disseminated
| through trusted sources, surely augmented by some form of paid
| marketing but not by just spamming the web with links in the
| hopes that they can get clicks and then use dark patterns to
| keep people on the site long enough to monetize 20 seconds of
| their eyeball time, then maybe they can get people to willingly
| pay them. This is sort of what Substack is proving. The tiny
| number of writers worth reading are actually being paid by
| willing readers. But it's a tiny number. Micropayments can
| never solve that most web content is worth 0 dollars and 0
| cents.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Consumers don't want to pay because most content on the web
| is not worth paying for.
|
| This can be true at the same as another truth: consumers
| would pay for _some_ content on the web if it was convenient
| to pay small amounts for it on an ad-hoc basis. Nobody is
| suggesting that most of the web is worth paying for, but that
| doesn 't mean that none of it is, and it also doesn't mean
| that subscription models (which mostly avoid the micropayment
| "problem") should be the only way to address this.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > If content producers are willing to put in the hard work of
| developing a reputation for quality output slowly,
| disseminated through trusted sources, surely augmented by
| some form of paid marketing but not by just spamming the web
| with links in the hopes that they can get clicks and then use
| dark patterns to keep people on the site long enough to
| monetize 20 seconds of their eyeball time, then maybe they
| can get people to willingly pay them.
|
| What do you think traditional print media organizations were
| trying to do for decades before they gave up and embraced the
| new normal with layoffs and consolidation? Substack is an
| extremely, small, extremely premium part of what used to be
| the whole.
|
| > Consumers don't want to pay because most content on the web
| is not worth paying for.
|
| Maybe much content on the web is not worth paying for, but
| the vast majority consumers don't want to pay _regardless_ of
| the quality, not because of it. It has literally been
| impossible for most news organizations to survive because
| people would rather read the advertising-funded "22 year-
| old" than a quality outlet where they have to pay any amount
| of money.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is a complicated phenomenon and I can't possibly do
| justice to the complexity in the space of a link
| aggregation comment. Arguably, the truth of that very
| statement is part of the problem here. Our attention spans
| have shortened. When I was 8 and wanted to learn about
| something, I'd gladly dive into the library and read
| thousands of pages uninterrupted for hours a day. Now I'm
| here, skimming thousands of comments to try and figure out
| which seem interesting enough to make the link itself worth
| visiting, then possibly actually visiting it or possibly
| just putting in a tab I later close when I realize I'll
| never get to it.
|
| Without any sort of gate to publishing, we're all inundated
| with information overload. So yeah, print media got their
| lunch eaten for many reasons, including being too slow to
| pivot to digital delivery at all, but also with the payment
| model. Outsourcing content curation to Hacker News or the
| people you follow on Facebook is free. I used to read the
| LA Times for two hours every single morning when I was in
| middle school and high school. Do I trust Hacker News more
| than I trust the LA Times editorial board today? Do I trust
| the LA Times more but not $6 a month more or whatever
| they're charging now? I have no idea, but I've changed my
| information consumption habits anyway.
|
| At least part of the issue is the nature of news itself.
| Events happen in the world. Someone out there finds out and
| reports it to others. Eventually, it reaches me. It used to
| be that people being paid by the LA Times had a level of
| unique access both to the sources of information and to
| dissemination channels I could readily access, and that was
| worth paying for. Today, that no longer seems to be the
| case. A thousand different people are going to post the
| same information to a thousand different sources at exactly
| the same time. Which of those thousands of people deserves
| to be compensated? If you just split whatever the salary of
| an LA Times reporter used to be a thousand different ways,
| that isn't enough to make it into a viable profession.
|
| Maybe information about important events in the world has
| become a public good in a world with such a low bar to
| publishing. We can try to invent technical means of
| preventing access and then charging for it, but it can
| never possibly be enough to actually cover the costs of all
| of the different people out there trying to publish, not
| with micropayments, not with subscriptions, not with
| anything. Maybe we need to just publicly fund some small
| number of professionals doing this for a living and anyone
| else that wants to try can do it without the expectation
| they'll ever be compensated for it. Expecting high-quality
| fact-based reporting paid for by consumers may just not be
| possible any more.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Micropayments can never solve that most web content is worth
| 0 dollars and 0 cents.
|
| The irony is that most of the actually valuable content is
| user generated. A site like Reddit could be actively curating
| all of the great content that people give away for free and
| people would pay for it. Then Reddit could actually pay their
| content creators. And -poof- we have high quality content
| that is worth paying for and people getting paid to generate
| it - all without the scourge of ads.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| I'm still surprised more apps don't have inbuilt marketplaces
| and then take a cut of payments. Reddit could do this. Users
| sell to each other through an Etsy like interface. Reddit takes
| 5% of each transaction. This solves Reddits existing inability
| to monetize through ads as successfully as their major
| competitors.
| sodality2 wrote:
| What would be sold on a Reddit market?
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Special goods catered to specific subreddits.
|
| On /r/fishing you obviously sell fishing supplies. On
| /r/$political_faction you sell bumper stickers with
| slogans. /r/nonbinary you sell pronoun pins.
|
| It would be like an etsy or a shopify store for each
| subreddit with a UI that reflects that. It could also be a
| big Amazon style UI for a sitewide shop.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Like craigslist 2.0? They could capitalize on the fact that
| there are existing sub-communities around various niches.
| [deleted]
| travoc wrote:
| Moderator privileges and astroturfing opportunities.
| wiether wrote:
| Karma and insults ?
| ignoramous wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies, ironically, enable micropayments. Orchid.com
| did an extensive write-up on how they achieve this
| (https://www.orchid.com/assets/whitepaper/whitepaper.pdf
| Chapter 5, Nanopayments) The Brave Attention Token is another
| example.
|
| Although, I am not convinced micropayments would save the
| Internet from this ad-winter: It is hard to beat _free_ at
| scale.
| lodovic wrote:
| Not if the transaction cost is $10
| thehappypm wrote:
| There's a little bit of a fundamental problem here.
|
| We're talking about paying a cent to avoid an ad. On a
| blockchain, work needs to be done to register that
| transaction. If the fee is a fraction of a penny, who is
| going to want to do the work? I get that you'll make it up at
| scale, but each transaction must be cryptographically secure
| (and therefore take up some type of resource), so there's a
| problem.
| ignoramous wrote:
| For "crypto" transactions, on-chain is no longer seen as a
| stringent requirement. In fact, the entire DeFi ecosystem
| wouldn't exist if there wasn't a cryptographically-secure
| way of doing transactions off-chain on second-level chains
| (0x, Polygon, Compound etc) or on chain of chains
| (Polkadot, Cosmos, Kava etc), or on chains built for
| payments (Celo, Diem, Stellar etc).
|
| Beside, Orchid.com whitepaper talks about doing
| _nanopayments_ on-chain, which is quite a radical approach.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Sure, if you put a layer on top, you can do whatever you
| want! It just adds more centralization, which isn't
| better than something like a Venmo that would be based on
| fiat.
| emptyfile wrote:
| "Enable micropayments". Where are they disabled? And in what
| world is it easier to do a micro payment with cryptocurrency
| instead of one of your cards?
| bbarn wrote:
| Micropayment are a non-starter, and even if they weren't, you'd
| still have ads. There are companies lined up willing to pay
| money to show you something they want to sell you, and even if
| your favorite news site was micropayment enabled, even the most
| righteous media companies would be fools not to keep taking
| that money to expand their ability to give you more and better
| news, as an example.
|
| But to my first point, they are a non-starter because too much
| of the world has trouble managing their money, and mentally
| don't want to pay for something until they've seen it. Why
| should I pay a dollar to read an article that might be poorly
| written, full of inaccuracies, etc.?
|
| The closest model I've seen to working is twitch. You have a
| central content platform, with silly cosmetic awards for
| subscription, and a sense of "credibility" among others there
| in interactions because you've been subscribing for x amount of
| time. This would require a more interactive news service, and
| hell, that I would pay for. If I read an article by an expert
| who answered (reasonable) follow up questions and owned their
| journalism, that would be incredible.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| "All in all, the difference in stats would mostly come from
| people blocking the Google Analytics script. Google Analytics is
| listed on many blocklists while the Plausible proxy runs as a
| first-party connection and is not."
|
| So what exactly does Plausible do to avoid being blocked in the
| same manner? What prevents GA from doing the same?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > So what exactly does Plausible do to avoid being blocked in
| the same manner?
|
| It seems they serve plausible from the same server as the
| origin website (first party), probably under an unique name,
| which means you need to block the script manually on every
| domain instead of simply blacklisting `plausible.io` (for
| example).
|
| > What prevents GA from doing the same?
|
| That's a good question. Probably ease-of-use (no need to
| explain how to host it, easier updates) and the lack of need to
| do so. YouTube, for example, could also make it _far_ harder to
| block ads by simply sending a single video stream, but they
| don't for some reason.
| maple3142 wrote:
| IIRC, It is possible to serve Google Analytics script on your
| server if you really insisted in doing it:
| https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/save-your-analytics-
| from-c...
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Of course they do. Every invasive thing I'm made aware of, will
| be blocked.
|
| My home network runs Pi-Hole, and every browser has uBlock
| Origin. The Internet has been a bearable place. And then I
| happened to show my 2 year old a cartoon from Youtube on a non-
| adblocked device.
|
| My. Freaking. God.
|
| It's full of ads.
|
| The cartoon is 10 minutes. Every minute, an 15-second, at the
| very least, ad rolls in. Like fucking gnats by the river in the
| summer: you get one, two, and then you are swarmed in them. There
| weren't the yellow markers anywhere on the progress slider, too.
|
| Not all of those ads were good for kids, too. One was, I kid you
| not, an ad for Jira. An ad for the fucking Jira, in the middle of
| a cartoon. Won't anybody think of the children!?
|
| My daughter was very much not impressed. So was I.
|
| I promptly got uBlock Origin running, and youtube-dl'd the whole
| channel those cartoons were in, for good measure.
| cyberpsybin wrote:
| Only 58%?!
| timdaub wrote:
| Nice that Marko did a follow up by writing this blog post. A few
| months ago (in May), I also asked myself the question of "How
| _plausible_ are our web analytics? ", and I was able to see the
| same phenomenon [1]. Many people in my audience block client-side
| web trackers.
|
| One option would now be to host a plausible proxy on-premise. But
| I didn't have time to try that out yet.
|
| PS: We're paying plausible customers and our stats are publicly
| accessible [2].
|
| -1:
| https://rugpullindex.com/blog#HowPlausibleareOurWebsiteAnaly...
|
| -2: https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com
| nikkinana wrote:
| Me too! You all suck, don't deserve tracking revenue.
| bawolff wrote:
| Its not that i care about google analytics per se, its that i
| really want to kill more aggressive ads, and the easiest option
| is an extension that does both.
|
| I certainly dont really like GA, but i wouldn't take specific
| action to block it. Definitely not taking specific action to
| unblock.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| One of the reasons for mobile apps is that adblocking is
| disabled. Explains why Reddit promotes it so much.
|
| Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in Electron
| also gives the website owners full telemetry and tracking that
| they can't get in a tech savvy browser.
|
| Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for
| privacy?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not sure if VPN would help you much against telemetry in a
| mobile app. A native foothold in your phone's system gives them
| access to much better data than they could infer on the server
| side.
|
| E.g. if I wanted to know where you're hailing from, I'd
| browbeat you into granting me Location access privileges. If
| that's too difficult, I'd get you to grant me Files/Photos
| privileges (this one won't raise too many alarm bells with apps
| like Discord or Reddit), and then try to read EXIF geotags off
| your recent photos.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Wouldn't it be possible to fingerprint users just based on
| the images they have installed?
| Rastonbury wrote:
| I use nextdns to block ads on my phone
| eitland wrote:
| It doesn't need to be an actual VPN to somewhere else. Lockdown
| for iOS can be run without using the VPN server.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > Explains why Reddit promotes it so much
|
| It must be very disheartening to work on reddit's mobile site.
| Not only is it deliberately made a miserable experience by
| forcing you through AMP via Google and insisting you "continue
| in browser" every time, but then you're greeted with a banner
| that outright says "this page is better in the app".
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > It must be very disheartening to work on reddit's mobile
| site.
|
| If they cared that much about whether or not what they were
| working on made the world better or worse they'd never have
| taken a job at Reddit.
| reayn wrote:
| Literally this, it's hard for me to even consider a job at
| Reddit without the companys' reputation coming to mind.
| al_ak wrote:
| Reddit literally does not care about the usability of their
| mobile site: https://old.reddit.com/r/mobileweb/comments/o7wo
| 1s/this_subr...
| [deleted]
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > It must be very disheartening to work on reddit's mobile
| site.
|
| You can probably cross "mobile" out of this entirely.
|
| Reddit have spent three years now building sites that are
| worse in every way than the decade old junker it's trying to
| replace.
| chungy wrote:
| It's ironic that I find old.reddit.com to provide a vastly
| superior mobile experience than the mobile-focused
| replacement is supposed to be.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Say what you want about the implementation but the new
| design is definitely better for watching memes. And I
| wouldn't be surprised if the design doc simply said "focus
| on memes"
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| It's definitely not better then old reddit + reddit
| enhancement suit.
|
| So, maybe, they should have improved the old design
| instead of creating that insanity that is newreddit.
| entropicgravity wrote:
| Yes but if you use old.reddit.com and specify just the
| subreddits you want (eg
| http://old.reddit.com/r/truereddit+technology+science) then
| you can still get something that's not too crappy.
| falcrist wrote:
| I wonder how long it'll be before they phase out the old
| site.
|
| For now I still use it because it's significantly faster
| and easier to use, but I strongly suspect they want me on
| their new site.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| As long as reddit's API still exists, someone will make a
| site that recreates the old reddit experience.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Agreed. I don't mind the new layout but it is still amazing
| that after years of this new layout that at least once a
| week I go to reddit and it can't load comments. I'm not a
| developer so maybe there is a valid reason but as a user it
| just seems ridiculous that the site can't do its main
| function reliably.
| prox wrote:
| Reddit's mobile site looks like it was made by a group of
| 15 year olds and doing a my first website tutorial, falling
| into all the traps there are.
|
| The amount of times it crashes on mobile platforms is
| insane.
| 3np wrote:
| > Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for
| privacy?
|
| Maybe for now, but it's just a matter of time until use of DoH
| to circumvent your attempts at redirecting DNS becomes more
| widespread as well.
| silon42 wrote:
| Time to ban/firewall DoH then.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Good luck with that. I strongly object to DoH, but it
| exists and we have to deal with it.
|
| The only approach that I could come up with to do so was to
| install a proxy to MITM all HTTPS connections to allow me
| to filter out DoH requests.
| VadimPR wrote:
| Pretty much - and there's a nice app developed by an Oxford
| student that does this for Android: https://trackercontrol.org
|
| It works very well, I highly recommend it.
| hotgeart wrote:
| > One of the reasons for mobile apps is that adblocking is
| disabled.
|
| That and revenue is much higher on apps than on the web. I made
| an android apps for a website. And just alone the android apps
| made more money than the web version. With less ads.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Maybe it having less ads made it a better experience, thus
| bringing in more ad revenue?
| account42 wrote:
| > Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in
| Electron also gives the website owners full telemetry and
| tracking that they can't get in a tech savvy browser.
|
| Discord, Slack and other similar webapps can (and maybe do)
| send telemetry in the same connections used for the app's
| features. You can't reliably block that.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| DNSFilter[1] does the trick even for android apps though, but
| yes it's even less mainstream than in-browser ad blockers.
|
| [1] https://www.zenz-solutions.de/personaldnsfilter-wp/
| tmslnz wrote:
| I found NextDNS to be relatively convenient and easy to set up
| even for a lay audience. Definitely easier than a PiHole or a
| custom `dnsmasq` setup, and it offers mobile configuration
| client apps.
|
| What I do not know is if it will work also when apps begin
| using DNS over HTTPS... I suppose not?
| tristor wrote:
| NextDNS offers a DoH endpoint and is a selectable TRR in
| Firefox. Unfortunately that doesn't help with apps doing DoH
| to bypass DNS blocking. The current state of the Internet /
| computing is a bit problematic, but there are ways forward.
|
| What I do and recommend everyone to do is:
|
| 1. Run an edge network device using network access controls
| and filter which devices on your network get outbound network
| access (in my case just the gateway device). Block all
| inbound traffic except what you choose to pinhole, block all
| outbound traffic except ports you choose to add to the allow
| list.
|
| 2. On every client device run a local application firewall (I
| like Vallum and Little Snitch on MacOS as examples) and
| filter applications by domain + port on outbound requests,
| block all inbound requests.
|
| 3. On every client device force it through a VPN to a gateway
| device internal to your network to get internet access,
| anything that falls off the VPN is then blocked from the
| internet. The gateway device can forcibly route traffic and
| perform additional filtering
|
| 4. On every client device, configure it to use an internal
| DNS on your network with a fallback to a trustworthy external
| provider, have the internal DNS use a trustworthy external
| provider over DoH. Block outbound DNS at the edge device
| (blocks all non-encrypted lookups).
|
| It's kind of a pain, and a mess, but it does greatly restrict
| the damage that rogue IoT / Smart devices can do.
| dgan wrote:
| I have been using NextDNS for couple of days, but since I
| don't have a static IP, it's obviously not so convenient, I
| have to reset my IP every time it changes But otherwise,
| absolutely great, awesome statistics about blocked/requested
| domains, countries, etc...
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| They have ways to automatically detect your IP so you don't
| have to update it manually.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Unless they provide a VPN it is only blocking the not-so-bad-
| actors. Everyone else use hardcoded DNS IPs. If you look at
| traffic from an Android phone you will get lots of DNS
| requests to Google DNS no matter if you use NextDNS or not.
| If you only provide one (primary) DNS IP in android 8.8.8 8
| (Google DNS) will even be used by default together with your
| DNS provider. Same is going on in iOS. If they do provide a
| VPN then it isn't really for a lay audience IMO but it is the
| only thing that isn't like pissing in the wind.
| lucasverra wrote:
| IOS have the NextDnS app as a vpn setup. So I guess yes?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I use a third party Reddit app! No ads and better experience
| than web
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| Blokada and others work by using the VPN functionality in
| Android, to implement DNS blacklists. Alternatively, AdGuard
| and NextDNS run DNS servers where you can customize the block
| list, a remote Pi-Hole as you said.
|
| I'm using NextDNS as the system-wide private DNS on my Android
| phone, it works great and eats less battery than Blokada.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I use Little Snitch on my Mac desktop. There is about a week
| burn-in where you are constantly clicking to accept things.
| After that it's great.
| timdaub wrote:
| Honestly, if they'd abuse their power given through electron -
| surely, we the users would start boycotting one way or another.
| Ultimately, this purpusefully regressing UX for revenue -
| nobody likes it except the finance department.
| poisonborz wrote:
| A DNS with adblock blacklist is a simpler solution. Also, it's
| the only way for system-wide adblock for rootless Android.
| Procedural wrote:
| I don't.
| megamix wrote:
| Might as well stop the whole damn thing :). For the better
| internet health
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I am amazed at how non-techy people use the internet. I teach
| college and I will sometimes have students go to some web site. I
| am amazed at how few use adblocking and just accept all the ads
| and popups and overlays and crap. Even more than that, I will see
| them using something like google docs and google will put an
| overlay for some new feature and they don't click the X to close
| it. They just type away with that overlay in the corner. That
| drives me crazy. I don't know how they do it.
| rapnie wrote:
| Yes, and it goes further than that: "Should I add an ad-blocker
| to your browser for an ad-free internet experience.. it'll only
| take 2 sec." and they respond: "Nah, not needed".
|
| And also "You are using the worst browser available to you
| (Samsung), shall I install Firefox?" and then "Nah, don't
| care".
| mardifoufs wrote:
| The Samsung browser isn't actually that bad at all. Has some
| neat features that can't be found in Firefox or even Chrome,
| like the enhanced video playback tools. Plus it supports
| adblocking plug ins (though only FF has the much better
| ublock origin). Keep in mind that tons of website just
| outright won't work with Firefox mobile too, and it has a
| very annoying bug that has been known for years where _all_
| your tabs will very oftem reload whenever you switch to
| another app and come back. And that 's regardless of how much
| free ram you have. Samsung browser just... Works.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't trust any Samsung software to respect my privacy.
| Tom4hawk wrote:
| > Keep in mind that tons of website just outright won't
| work with Firefox mobile
|
| I know this anecdotal but I'm using FF on Android (Lineage
| OS without google apps/micro g etc. - only F-Droid) and the
| only site that causes issues is google.com. For some
| <sarcasm>unknown</sarcasm> reason it servers images in much
| lower quality. Of course it's not a technical limitation.
| If you change your UA to chrome everything goes back to
| normal. That was the biggest reason I moved to DDG.
|
| > it has a very annoying bug that has been known for years
| where all your tabs will very often reload whenever you
| switch to another app and come back
|
| I definitely don't have this issue. I have over a thousand
| tabs opened, it definitely doesn't reload all of them while
| I'm switching between apps.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I've had some issues with layout mostly and I never use
| google products on Firefox, but that may be due to ublock
| being aggressive with it's filters. And yeah the tab
| reloading is weird because it only affects some people
| and when it does it's very constant. Honestly I didn't
| mind since I'm not affected by the bug anymore since I've
| upgraded my phone.
|
| The real problem was the add-on removal. I know you can
| still get them through the collections work around on
| Firefox nightly but... It's a pain and I'm still honestly
| baffled that Mozilla would just remove one of the only
| "selling" points for their mobile browser. I'm not averse
| to change and I get that it is sometimes needed to cut
| complexity, so I got why they needed to depreciate stuff
| likd XAML. But in this case afaik nothing was
| communicated, the new engine already supports the add
| ons... but only on nightly? Very puzzling
| [deleted]
| rapnie wrote:
| Ah, could be. But I was not really referring to how good
| the browser is, but the extent to which I trust Samsung to
| protect my privacy. They are particularly greedy for your
| PII on their mobile phones. For instance, after I minimised
| permissions for my apps, the Samsung Gallery app suddenly
| popped an "Allow location data" dialog coming from
| Foursquare.
|
| Edit:
|
| Here's a video showing the Foursquare dialog
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e-P0hy5QY and also:
|
| _" For Korean phone giants Samsung and LG, Foursquare's
| API will be used in some of their default apps. If you take
| a picture using a Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+, the phone will
| tag your location based on Foursquare's Places database."_
|
| https://mashable.com/article/foursquare-asia-tencent-
| samsung
| noway421 wrote:
| In terms of product tours, I'm totally on-board with your
| students. I don't know how to access that product tip later on,
| often times revisiting a product tip later on is not even
| implemented so I'd rather have it stay in place until I have
| some time to study it. Hopefully I'll be off of the website
| before I need that.
| massysett wrote:
| I don't use adblocking because if a site is so revolting that
| it requires adblocking to make it usable, I just don't visit
| the site at all.
|
| I used to use adblocking but the tiny site Distrowatch made an
| impression on me. The owner rigged something so that those
| using adblock also would not see non-ad images. He said it's
| really not fair to visit a free site and then block the thing
| that allows it to be free.
|
| Also, I then read that one of the adblockers would take
| payments from advertisers to unblock their ads. What a racket.
|
| So I block no ads. This does mean that I don't look at the vast
| bulk of news sites because they have obnoxious ads. However,
| most decent news sites are now pay walled, and those that
| aren't are junk anyway. I get my news from some sites I pay
| for, and from non-profit email newsletters, and from sites my
| employer pays for. These have few ads.
|
| So I have found no loss from not using adblock. Adblock is like
| putting on a bulletproof vest to walk through a warzone. Better
| to just keep out of warzones.
| Moru wrote:
| Adblock is like having a bodyguard running ahead of you,
| making sure the neighbourhood is still safe to walk, just in
| case someone shady moved in. Added bonus is he drags you
| along on a rope so you can move faster and bring more
| groceries from the store.
|
| Adblock makes my slow computer and phone bareable to use on
| "modern" homepages. Without them the load times multiplies.
| mywittyname wrote:
| My phone isn't even slow and ad blockers are required for
| most sites to be usable.
| yumraj wrote:
| Oh it's not just non-techy, I think you/we overestimate the
| techiness of techy people.
|
| I have yet to meet a _single_ person, and yes they are all in
| the Bay Area tech industry, who knew about pi-hole before I
| told them.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Been blocking pretty much all advertising on mobile and desktop
| for years and I couldn't go back. At work I see how the
| internet is SUPPOSED to look like and it is horrible.
| distances wrote:
| Why don't you use adblocking at work too?
| recursive wrote:
| Why are you directing your students to ad-laden sites that are
| burning CPU?
|
| I don't use an ad-blocker, and nor do I accept sites with
| unreasonable ads. I block the whole site by closing the tab or
| hitting the back button.
| bredren wrote:
| I know a CTO with plenty of wealth and space that sits at a
| kitchen table with a laptop instead of setting up a home work
| station.
|
| I know information workers who have workplaces that would
| gladly pay for nicer monitors or keyboards but don't bother to
| even request them.
|
| I know a couple with a brand new house that has a miserably
| squeaky front door that could be silenced a half dozen ways in
| under a minute.
|
| People of all kinds contortion themselves into knots, giving
| little notice to the daily, near constant twinge of their
| circumstances but don't improve them.
|
| Tolerating ads is just one example of this.
| yosito wrote:
| A kitchen table? That's way more fancy than I bother with. I
| do most of my programming work from a couch or a hammock.
| It's a feature, not a bug. I have a workstation with a fancy
| dock, keyboard and trackpad, but I never really feel like
| using it. I will, however, close every unnecessary popup that
| comes my way.
| bradstewart wrote:
| I'd love to work from a hammock, but I get crazy neck and
| wrist pain when I use a laptop for several hours.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| One contracting job I had, on my first day one of my tasks
| was to do some grunt work right in front of the bathrooms.
| The men's door was squeaky as all hell.
|
| "Oh don't worry, it's always done that."
|
| I lasted as long as I could but I finally walked over to the
| shop crew and asked if I could borrow some WD-40. "I'll bring
| it back in 10 minutes."
|
| 10 minutes later it's all "Thanks guys!" "No problem" and
| "Wow you really did mean 10 minutes!".
|
| And the door never squeaked again. My sanity was saved.
|
| If anyone else ever noticed, they never said a word. The door
| had always squeaked and literally everyone either didn't care
| or did nothing about it; it just was how it was.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| schiem wrote:
| I was doing some pair programming with a colleague not too long
| ago, and after several minutes he was said something to the
| effect of "Could you close that [expletive] dialogue?" that had
| popped up to tell me that VS Code couldn't deal with some file
| extension or other. It had apparently been there the entire
| time.
|
| I hadn't even noticed it (at least not consciously). I've
| apparently been trained somewhere to ignore dialogues, and I
| would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the
| prevalence of hostile UX patterns.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You all but certainly overestimate typical technological
| literacy.
|
| About 5% of computer users have "advanced" literacy, defined as
| "Some navigation across pages and applications is required to
| solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is
| required to make progress towards the solution. The task may
| involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem
| may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to
| be met may or may not be explicit"
|
| https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106841164116074208
|
| Even just _general_ literacy and numeracy are ... far lower
| than you 'd expect:
| https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
|
| An OECD 20-country survey gives the 5% "advanced" technological
| literacy statistic: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en
|
| Jacob Nielsen discussed that at the time:
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
|
| This is a substantial aspect of my "Tyranny of the Minimum
| Viable User":
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
| nebula8804 wrote:
| This data is incredible. I cannot believe how the most
| powerful/richest/most influential country in the world has
| these kinds of numbers. I notice that it tends to follow a
| standard distribution but even then, I was expecting the
| window to be more towards highly educated.
|
| This is so depressing. I have been wondering for a while as
| to why ~40 percent of the country rarely if ever votes in
| elections. This might help to explain it.
|
| This also shows that technology people are amassing an
| unbelievable amount of power in their knowledge of how these
| systems work and operate given that the masses don't know how
| to weld that knowledge.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Note that most countries report only _basic_ literacy
| rates, not _functional literacy_ levels.[1] The apparent
| poor performance of the US here is largely a function of
| its own investigation and reporting of of the full extent
| of literacy.
|
| Note too that lack of _English_ literacy is pronounced in
| regions with a high _immigrant_ or _migrant_ workforce and
| population. Illiteracy can exceed 30% amongst Texas
| counties bordering on Mexico in particular. It 's possible
| that many of those testing with no English proficiency are
| at least somewhat literate in Spanish or other languages.
|
| But you're mostly confirming my earlier statement: you very
| likely overestimate typical technological literacy.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. That I'm aware of. If anyone has references on
| comprehensive functional literacy assessments _elsewhere_
| than the US, I 'd appreciate it. I've not found any on a
| somewhat cursory search.
| 63 wrote:
| Even with an ad-blocker, there are still huge cookie and "join
| our email list" banners. Banner blindness is just the way
| things go for most people. Fun little anecdote, in high school
| I had to work at a pizza joint but the screens where they
| showed the orders had a gui that looked just like a website.
| Thanks to banner blindness, I missed important info all the
| time because it was in places that brain had internalized as
| looking like ads. I had to really focus on it.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Last year I was building a "Cookie Consent" banner for one of
| my sites. I wanted to be transparent as possible with it so I
| had this box come up in the corner to ask for permission, big
| blue button for OK, big red button (of the same size) to
| decline, zero dark patterns.
|
| Looking at the analytics after the fact made me realize why
| these cookie consent boxes use so many dark patterns. My
| acceptance rate for the box was like 4%, I tossed out cookies
| (and the banner) in the next update.
| gpas wrote:
| The best cookie banners have a small neutral button labeled
| OK to accept only required cookies and then, on the right,
| a happy big blue button to Accept All. Transparency!
| JohnFen wrote:
| I never click on cookie consent banners, period. It has
| nothing to do with me not noticing them. I just leave them
| where they are unless they are too intrusive. If they're
| too intrusive, I leave the page.
|
| The reason that I don't click on them is because I've had
| bad experiences clicking on them in the past.
| b3morales wrote:
| Zapping them with uBlock is also a good option.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True.
|
| I've been using an old version of Waterfox until
| recently, when I finally had to change to a modern
| browser. Looking at the alternatives, I chose Firefox as
| the least bad of the available options. On the plus side,
| this means that uBlock/uMatrix is an option for me now.
| zo1 wrote:
| Big game changer that, right-click what is bothering you
| and choose "Block element", then drag sliders to get it
| perfect. Done.
| distances wrote:
| Nice, hadn't seen those sliders before. Must be a new
| feature.
| ibelong2u wrote:
| https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
| coldpie wrote:
| NoScript goes a long way to fixing this. Yes, it's a chore,
| but it's less of a chore than the modern web.
| LordRishav wrote:
| The best way to prevent that is by disabling JavaScript.
| Generally, JavaScript is what enables such banners to popup
| and obstruct your vision with newsletter requests.
| gpas wrote:
| The best way is to install uBlock (or your preferred ad
| blocker), not to disable javascript.
|
| Javascript is like a knife. Do I want people who know how
| to use a knife in my house? Yes of course. Do I want people
| that stab other people in my house? No. Nowadays there are
| tools to leave those people outside your door.
|
| It's time to end the association between javascript and bad
| web practices.
| yosito wrote:
| I use uMatrix. It allows me to block all third party
| scripts by default, easily unblock them one by one if I
| need to, and save my changes for sites I visit often.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| There are cosmetic filter lists that filter out most of that
| stuff, e.g. Fanboy's Annoyances.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Not only that but some of them actually think there's a moral
| problem with blocking ads.
|
| Perhaps if the advertising industry didn't already prove for
| 20+ years that they are entirely made up of scum, I would
| agree. People use ads to make money. I feel bad that they
| aren't making money passively that way.
|
| But I grew up with ad networks, including Google themselves,
| turning a blind eye to deceptive ads, bait and switch, fake
| window popups, and outright scams. The online advertising
| industry has done everything they could to fuck us over and big
| tech companies were complicit in the crime.
|
| So that's why I don't care about running an ad blocker. Maybe
| the advertising industry will have a code of ethics after I'm
| dead, but until then I'll keep using uBlock Origin and NoScript
| (and other extensions) to screw with the ad business as much as
| possible.
|
| Putting aside the ethics, advertising turns the internet into a
| race to the bottom. Ad blocking is good for the internet
| because it means that your ads had better be good, minimally
| intrusive, and also be integrated with the content you are
| providing. In other words, do things like preroll and midroll
| sponsorships and referrals rather than slap a bunch of banners
| on your site that peddle crap du juor.
| ukyrgf wrote:
| I hate those tutorial popups and refuse to engage them.
| mdoms wrote:
| Technical literacy among young people is so depressing. I'm 36
| so I grew up in the last of the non-digital native cohort - I
| vaguely remember life before the internet. But growing up
| surrounded by computers and the internet, but seeing many of my
| peers miss out, I was certain that the next generation would be
| so much more tech savvy. As full digital natives they will
| learn to code, understand the protocols on which their primary
| communications are built and just be steeped in this stuff from
| birth.
|
| How naive I was. No one actually cares. It was like assuming
| everyone born after 1908 would fully understand how cars work.
| kixiQu wrote:
| I'm a very techy person and I interact with modals as little as
| possible, even if that means ignoring a chunk of my screen. I
| have a probably-unreasonable sense that it's only going to
| trigger a bunch of JS or something unsafe [1].
|
| [1]: https://archive.is/TZ7oe was the best, but is kinda dead
| now. https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-
| analysis/2016/01/clickj...
| tempestn wrote:
| We had to make an adjustment on our site to account for that
| second one. I had just assumed if you have some kind of notice
| that can be closed, people would close it after they'd had a
| chance to digest the info (or decided they didn't care, or
| whatever). But no, turns out the vast majority never close
| anything unless it's physically preventing them from using the
| site. (Of course the vast majority also never bother to read
| anything that doesn't prevent what they're trying to do either,
| but we already knew that.)
| bhauer wrote:
| Bear in mind that many younger people grew up with mobile
| computing first. So they're not as familiar with the "power
| user" desktop computing behaviors us older people have
| developed.
|
| Not dismissing that Google Docs overlay may be explained by any
| of the following: (a) learned behavior from mobile computing
| that very few things are configurable (mobile apps tend to have
| far fewer preferences on how things are displayed; (b) pop ups
| on mobile often don't close when clicked; and (c) they are used
| to operating with very tight screen real-estate. I think (c) is
| most likely.
|
| As someone brought up on desktop computing, I fight to
| eliminate anything that needlessly wastes screen real-estate
| such as bloated window chrome. But I think someone brought up
| on small screens might actually feel agitated by "too much"
| space.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I think there might be a 4th option, which is that users are
| trained that clicking on anything other than links will
| result in pain. Clicking a dialog you didn't read may take
| you to another page and ask you to enter information. Or it
| may opt you in to something you don't want or need. It's just
| a needless distraction. This gets back to what I was saying
| about "cookie consent" dialogs a few weeks ago. I never click
| on them. I usually read in Reader view to not even see them.
| If I can't get the content without clicking something
| additional, I simply press the back button.
| Tarsul wrote:
| there are too many popups, especially now with how many cookie
| pop-ups work. So the easiest way is try to ignore it if
| possible. Ok, yeah, the best way would be to block it
| completely but as this shows again: humans are lazy creatures.
| Every click is a click too much.
| pachico wrote:
| That remaining 42% surprises me even more...
| Yuioup wrote:
| It would be 100% if I could do it on mobile.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| For Android, I'm using fennec with ublock origin and it's
| great. Also YouTube Vanced is very useful. And Infinity for a
| tolerable reddit experience on mobile.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I use Blokada and it works well.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| ublock origin is available on firefox mobile is you use
| android.
| buro9 wrote:
| Android offers Private DNS, just point that at nextdns.io and
| block things even within apps that aren't browsers.
|
| The biggest benefit is definitely the sheer speed at which news
| websites load on my phone now, even when I'm on a crap
| connection.
|
| Another benefit: This isn't a VPN, so you can still use a VPN
| whilst using Private DNS.
|
| Edit: Also... lol, I can't access TFA as plausible.io is also
| blocked on my network and phone. I'm going to assume that the
| article is actually an analytics competitor whose pitch is "GA
| is blocked, use us instead!".
|
| Edit 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=plausible.io
| Yes, assumption was correct.
|
| Edit 3: NextDNS stats from my home network: 11.45% of DNS
| requests blocked, but from my phone 23.7% of DNS requests
| blocked. You need this more on your mobile than in a web
| browser!
| dalu wrote:
| Nextdns is giving me an ID. Why would I want to be tracked by
| unique ID? That's even worse than GA
| buro9 wrote:
| You don't have to do that... NextDNS ultimately uses
| Cloudflare DNS under the hood, so just point yourself at
| 1.1.1.1 and you're done but it will block nothing.
|
| If you want a DNS server to block things, know that the
| definition of what to block is subjective and some people
| may disagree with what you want to block.
|
| For that reason you get an account, which allows you to
| have a configure, and that needs to be resolve to you... so
| at some level an identifier of the configuration is needed.
| This is the id.
| gpas wrote:
| Thanks for sharing nextdns. I just registered and I'm very
| impressed.
| toastal wrote:
| AdAway (root) from F-Droid helps me out
| lambdaba wrote:
| On Android I use personaldnsfilter
| (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dnsfilter.android/), which
| creates a local VPN, there are also actual VPN apps that allow
| blocking ad hosts, and you can also use AdGuard DNS directly.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what does this bring you over hosts file
| blocking, and how much does it affect battery life? I use
| dead-simple modifications to /etc/hosts and it seems to be
| remarkably good. Do you MITM yourself for further adblocking,
| or just use it for the modified DNS?
| lambdaba wrote:
| My phone is not rooted, and I just switched to nextdns.io
| on suggestion of another commenter here. I can't say about
| the phone battery, but I don't think it makes a big
| difference.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
|
| Also on F-Droid:
|
| https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:IceCat/icecat-help-help
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser....
| kklisura wrote:
| Use Brave.
| underscore_ku wrote:
| so brave!
| azinman2 wrote:
| iOS has content blocking extensions.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| NextDNS does comprehensive blackholing of tracking and ads,
| very limited battery impact.
|
| Works on ios and android.
|
| I think their free tier is very generous at 300k lookups/month;
| otherwise it's something cheap like 2EUR/month if you want
| unlimited lookups (i use this to block tracking on all my
| devices + home network)
| aembleton wrote:
| > very limited battery impact.
|
| Why would it use any extra battery? The phone has to make DNS
| lookups whether its with the one from nextDns or from the
| DHCP server.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I've had bad experiences, battery-wise, using on-device
| adblocking solutions (that inspect DOM). An alternative i
| tried was tunneling to my raspberry pi that ran pihole (dns
| blocker), and bouncing all my traffic off the home
| connection, but that was also battery intensive.
|
| You're right, this dns solution is very unobtrusive when it
| comes to energy use.
| ddaalluu1 wrote:
| Are you working for them?
|
| When I want to "try for free" I'm assigned a unique ID which
| is then used in all DNS resolution requests. How is that even
| remotely tracking-safe?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| No, not working for them.
|
| The unique id is to retain settings across different
| devices.
|
| Of course you have to trust them not to sell you out.
| leokennis wrote:
| If on iPhone, install NextDNS and enable a blocklist which
| blocks GA, flip the switch, now NextDNS handles your DNS and
| will answer requests to GA with a "sorry cannot find this".
| kunagi7 wrote:
| Use Bromite, Vivaldi or Brave on Android. They have built-in ad
| tracker protection. The first two even support custom filtering
| lists.
|
| On iOS the options are a bit worse but Brave has some kind of
| adblocking that works. Safari also supports blocking lists via
| AdGuard but it's more limited.
| marak830 wrote:
| Or just use Firefox. Android of course, your screwed on
| Apple.
| teekert wrote:
| AdGuard (local app) works in Safari. I don't like safari,
| but the AdGuard blocking does not work in FireFox! I use
| DDG browser mostly and it works well. I do see the
| occasional ad.
|
| The whole browser situation in iOS is really user
| unfriendly.
| kunagi7 wrote:
| Firefox is another nice alternative if you have a good
| Android phone I guess.
|
| Sadly, I have a quite old Android device (but its battery
| life it's still good) where Chromium-based browsers are
| already quite slow and Firefox feels even slower and drains
| the battery faster (the old Fennec was worse than the new
| one, it hanged for 30 seconds).
| throwawayswede wrote:
| Get yourself a PiHole&PiVPN or NextDNS and never look at ads on
| any of your devices again
| vmoore wrote:
| Oh yeah because sending all your DNS requests to a US company
| that's probably under duress by the NSA to hand over logs
| sounds like a great idea!
| throwawayswede wrote:
| Newsflash: most of your data is reaching a US based company
| anyway
| zorked wrote:
| Use Firefox mobile then.
| ohazi wrote:
| Seriously, this.
|
| There may be an argument that Chrome is marginally faster
| than Firefox on desktop, and while this may also technically
| be true on mobile, it's completely dwarfed by the fact that
| Chrome is being asked render 5x as much _crap_ (with
| animations and sound and video and nagbars and ...) compared
| to Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin.
|
| You will literally regain hours of battery life. Those Joules
| belong to you -- don't just shrug and hand them to Google.
| jobigoud wrote:
| > Those Joules belong to you
|
| My Joules, my rules.
| robin_reala wrote:
| You can: use Firefox Mobile and turn on Enhanced Tracking
| Protection.
| kubav wrote:
| You can install ublock on mobile firefox too.
| robin_reala wrote:
| On Android, yes. On iOS you can't, but at least you've
| still got ETP and Firefox Focus's ad blocking.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| You can use adblockers on ios aswell, I use adguard. It
| works for youtube ads which is nice.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I wish you could install umatrix, and it had a decent
| mobile UI. Umatrix has just transformed the way I browse
| the web and if anything it has educated me at the same
| time. I _like_ seeing that this random site has about 2^5
| different domain names contacted, ranging from ad-junk to
| CDNs. It tells me quite a lot about its developer. Sites
| with one hostname, minimally awful JS and few-to-none XHR
| requests get a thumbs up.
|
| On the other hand, it probably means that I am a "false
| negative" in TFA's report. I'd love to know the correlation
| between the server logs and what Plausible shows for a
| connection. I'd also like to know how they infer OS -- e.g.
| for privacy reasons, my reported user agent is _not_
| accurate...
| jobigoud wrote:
| > I like seeing that this random site has about 2^5
| different domain names contacted
|
| You can see that in uBlock Origin already. The summary
| info has the number of domains connected and if you click
| on "more" you have the details, just like on desktop. You
| can also block JavaScript altogether for a particular
| site.
| CyanBird wrote:
| You can install noscript in Firefox mobile without problems,
| that's what I did
| aomobile wrote:
| Just use the private/anonymous browsing feature - problem
| solved
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I'm surprised the number is so low. I would expect it to be way
| higher for this specific group.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| hmm, so this means it's about time for the newest how to hire
| guideline being - come to our site, if you block Google Analytics
| that means that you can go to the potential interview pool.
| gigatexal wrote:
| only 58% of us? I thought that number would be much closer to 99%
| bob229 wrote:
| Only idiots use google services
| t0bia_s wrote:
| PC: SimpleWall, uBlock, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger Android:
| AdAway, uBlock, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger Home network: Pi-
| hole
|
| I never asked for ads and telemetry, so there is no other option
| for me.
| eterevsky wrote:
| This is a bit concerning. I would like to block ad, but would
| prefer to keep analytics enabled, since it helps improve the
| products that I'm using. I'm using Brave and I don't see any
| obvious way to set it up like that.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is only
| blocked by those visitors who block JavaScript entirely.
|
| Which means it still underestimates; those who selectively
| disable Javascript, through things like uBlock Origin's advanced
| mode or uMatrix, will not be counted. So the real percentage is
| probably higher than that 58%, and we don't know how much higher.
| masswerk wrote:
| For the tech-savvy audiences and blog writers: Google provides a
| dedicated opt-out plugin [0] for various browsers. (So it's not
| just browsers interfering, ad-blockers and disabled JS.)
|
| [0] https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
| fergie wrote:
| Well done lads!
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Great article! I have always wondered about this
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