this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
1152 points (99.4% liked)

Technology

73066 readers
2268 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 23 minutes ago

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

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

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 minutes ago

Only a billion. Need to quintuple that.

[–] Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 11 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.

"We paid for the right to show you this!"

You didn't pay me, motherfucker, and my price is everything you have, or fuck off and die.

[–] StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.world 27 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

More necessary than that, really.

[–] StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.world 12 points 6 hours ago

That entirely depends on the quality of your water.

[–] reshuffle6655@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Tangentially related but britta filters actually suck as far as I know; they're like the worst water filter for removing materials. Did a test myself with a fresh filter - 105 ppm tap to around 72 ppm vs 0 ppm for zero water pitchers and around 30ish for epic, it's been a bit so the numbers are rough for the britta and epic but I test my tap and ZW pitcher routinely.

[–] J52@lemmy.nz 24 points 12 hours ago

Bottom line: if I'm forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 53 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.

Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That's like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 20 minutes ago

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills whenever I hear them say things like this! These things belong to me, I should be able to control them. My perception, my LITERAL GATEWAY FROM MY MIND TO REALITY is mine and I have a right to control what I see.

[–] Ebber@lemmings.world 1 points 44 minutes ago

Or saying it's illegal to hang up on telemarketers

Beautifully worded 🙏

[–] Jimmycakes@lemmy.world 14 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

When piholes go mainstream they are fully cooked. Even tech illiterate in your family won't get the ads

[–] DicJacobus@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Not even a linux guy, but I had a Pi from a decade ago that I never opened, decided to set it up and use it for something useful, friends suggested Pihole. pained myself for 2 days getting everything working (most of my trouble had to do with peripherals and IP addresses not the device itself) but after the grief, got it working and it was well worth it.

I even printed a sticker for it that said "where ads go to die"

sorry doubleclick, but you're toast

[–] teuto@lemmy.teuto.icu 19 points 13 hours ago

I tried to give my mom a pihole, she made me get rid of it because it broke the NY times and some rando mobile game she plays. Some people can't be helped.

[–] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 20 points 18 hours ago

Fuck yeah, advertiers are a cancer.

[–] NutWrench@lemmy.ml 67 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Website: "You appear to be using an ad blocker." Me: "You appear to be correct."

[–] normalexit@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago

Then I just sigh and go to archive.is and solve their captcha, so I can read the article.

[–] m3t00@lemmy.world 26 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

'disable ad block to contine'. no

[–] Jolteon@lemmy.zip 3 points 13 hours ago

There's almost always another website that has the same thing.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 45 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

If ad networks weren't the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn't slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn't be such an issue.

If your site can't exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.

Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.

[–] Binturong@lemmy.ca 15 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

So this confirms that people have a negative reaction to ads, which every actual internet user knows in their bones already. This means they ALSO are not even doing their one job of persuading people to buy shit. Of course this won't lead to companies reducing investment for ad carrying or finding ways to make them more appealing, that costs money, instead they will use AI generators to produce WORSE ads and leverage their capital to have governments capitulate and force users to watch by banning blockers, probably VPNs too. Bill Hicks was the most correct about advertising, and remains undefeated.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 14 hours ago

A true visionary, taken too soon.

[–] killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 158 points 1 day ago (10 children)

The use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.

I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.

[–] DicJacobus@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

depending on your household's browsing habits, it can be downright insane how much traffic goes through ones network (and the web at large), that is just nothing but dog shit.

I monitored my pihole at my place and my own traffic is usually no more than 15% garbage with about 750,000 domains blocked, but the second grandma or grandpa starts doomscrolling boomer things on their phones and ipads. I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them "what the fuck are you doing on your phone?"

also set up a Region exemption or whatever, blocking russian, chinese, and a whole bunch of other untrustworthy TLDs and im literally showing my grandmother the repeated attempts to communicate with something in fucking China in real time whilst she's playing some solitare game she downloaded.

[–] sfbing@lemmy.world 0 points 49 minutes ago

You shouldn't say that to your Grandma or Grandpa. :)

[–] Oneshot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 hours ago

Clean traffic, smooth traffic, able-to-get-to-where-you're-going traffic

[–] grueling_spool@sh.itjust.works 61 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe we could turn it around: adblockers are tools that block ads and other kinds of dark traffic such as trackers and malicious scripts.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] Ironfacebuster@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago

I personally am not bothered at ALL by the banner video ads overlayed on top of another banner ad that opens a new tab when you try to close the banner video then another one opens covering the original banner then the page scrolls all the way back to the top and shows you an email list sign up, why would I be?

[–] DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 41 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much

Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks

[–] StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

And the button to close it is usually tiny and mapped poorly. Which is in and of itself shitty.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›