Firefox + uBlock Origin + Reader View
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Reader view is pretty good at decluttering the web and uses less power on laptop and phone as well.
We have made mistakes.
We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.
And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!
They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.
Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.
And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"
I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.
There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.
Running servers got expensive
No it didn't. Running a server today is dirt cheap compared to the bad old days. So is registering a domain. Getting a TLS certificate doesn't cost anything at all.
However, there are a lot more people here now. It used to be you could feasibly run a moderately popular website off a single server and it'd be fine. Now, with billions of people on the Internet, you need an army of servers distributed around the world if your site gets even remotely popular.
But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
That's a feature, not a bug. Consent banners were manufactured as a way to turn public opinion against GDPR and generate political pressure to repeal it. “Look at how those Europeans ruined the web!” GDPR was supposed to pressure these unscrupulous advertisers into giving up their spooky tracking, but they did this instead. And it's working—most people blame GDPR for ruining the web, not the sleazeballs who actually ruined it.
Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.
For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn't just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.
By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let's Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.
honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.
i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.
The comment was getting long and I didn't want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.
It's not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …
The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don't become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don't have to depend on big social networks.
The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn't work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There's no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it's not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).
There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you'd need to manually approve it, such as with a like.
Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would’ve been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could’ve worked? but its really hard to say.
So people don't want advertisements but they also don't want to pay for a bajillion subscriptions. I think the solution is socialization of the Internet. Governments should simply guarantee funding and make up the cost in taxes.
i think most people would be fine with advertising, as long as it 1: isn't overly obnoxious, 2: isn't scammy and doesn't contain malware or other garbage, and 3: doesn't track you and everything you do. advertising itself isn't the problem, it's the way it's being currently handled on the internet that's the issue.
I'm not inherently against the idea of advertising. I get why it exists, and I'm all for it. What I resent and have no intention of complying with, are the attempts at identifying me and collecting my data, as a means to 'manipulate' me into buying things. And, it also can't ruin my experience on the site. If advertisements were minimal and invasive, didn't try installing all kinds of ad/bloat-ware on my machine, you'd never see me making any attempt to protect myself against it.
A lot of the VALUE of a news article on the internet is the ability to share it and discuss it with everyone else. Paywalls remove that value, or require all of the people you share it with to already have subscriptions to everything else.
News has been paid for via advertisements for a lot longer than the internet. The subscription fees for Newspapers really only covered the printing and distribution costs, while the reporters' salaries were paid for via advertising.
The problem is that the advertising has gotten TOO intrusive. It isn't just a banner ad anymore. It is a ton of banners speckled between every other paragraph on the page. As soon as advertising gets in the way, people will look to get around it.
I have found that I am overly sensitive to almost all forms of push-advertising (as opposed to pull-advertising where I am looking for marketing materials on something I want to research). I have browser ad blockers as well as DNS based ones on my wifi. I also watch very little broadcast TV. I have no problem waiting for a season of a TV show to be on DVD so I can watch it without breaks, or the annoying banners that pop up while watching.
I don't understand why so many people are making concessions towards advertisements. Yes, some aren't too bad, but at the end of the day all advertising is just brainwashing you to buy more things. If we're going to dream about an alternate universe where the internet was better, we don't need to compromise with our imaginations.
At the end of the day, running a server does cost money, and people's goodwill will only go so far. I don't want to have to pay directly for every service, website, or whatever I see, but don't mind doing it from time to time.
I buy a lot of DVD's, blurays, or 4K UHD movies and tv shows, and then immediately rip them onto my Jellyfin server so that I know I will be able to watch them when I want, how I want. I feel like that does my karma of supporting the creators of those shows.
Advertisements allow me to watch everything else. There are youtube channels I follow, that get sponsored by "NordVPN" or whatever, and even though I don't use Nord, and would probably go out of my way to NOT use them because of all of the sponsorship messages I see, I am glad they give money to the creators I like.
The real problem is when they become too intrusive. I use ad blockers to remove Youtube ads, because I don't want a video to be split up abruptly while watching it. If there was a simple, short, ad before the videos, I would have no problem with them, but they became intrusive, so I block them.
@Skimmer5728 I think what we're doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We're just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.
well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.
i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it'll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that'll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.
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The "web3.0" is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that "web2.0" has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.
For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that's being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It's a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the "base service", while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.
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The first big problem was malware in ads (and web in general). This has caused people to install adblocks on their parents' and friends' devices.
Then there were the annoying ads: autoplaying videos, popups and other shit. This has caused a lot of normies to install adblockers themselves.
Then the privacy concerns, where even basic users notice that they look at a product on one store and now the recommendations follow them everywhere.
But the marketing companies keep pushing, and the OS providers like Google, MS and Apple keep restricting what you can install on your machine, this is a full-on war between users and the big tech.
Nobody was complaining about small banner ads. But they just have to keep pushing and break things. It's like with banks, or mythological creatures - insatiable.
Nobody was complaining about small banner ads.
Everybody hated banner ads. The first adblockers were targeting banner ads, and they were the beginning of the arms race. Advertising? On the Internet? Not a chance!
How little we knew back then...
Maybe my memory doesn't go quite as far. But still, I believe adblockers didn't take off in such a huge ways until we've seen all those popups, malware and other shit on a massive scale.
I use uBlock Origin in Firefox, with all the boxes ticked. It's not only adds it blocks also plentiful of trackers. Just to make my visits on today's web usable. As a result, my laptops / smartphone resources are saved up, more battery time or cooler device as example.
Personally I like ads, totally ok for it - if informative, sharing some kind of relevant value with greater good. Companies should let the product or service itself advertise, not throw these on people constantly.
This is why I whitelist duckduckgo in firefox in my ublock extension. I will gladly look at the relevant ads at the top of the list, knowing they are just that. I glance at them, most of the time it's a sales pitch, I go "not interested" and just move down the page to the results. 100% fine with that.
I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.
But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.
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I always forget how many intrusive ads are on the internet. One time I shared a link to one of my family members and they almost got a virus because of a pop-up ad. The web is actually unusable without uBlock Origin.
I shared a link from a movie streaming site not knowing that without uBlock Origin the page was covered in nearly pornographic mobile game ads.
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ublock origin is the best! I currently use it to filter out all twitter blue users :)
Why are you on the birdsite?
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Road to hell being paved with good intentions and all, I guess. The reason sites all have the cookie permission dialog now is because of the GDPR, which has the right idea on data privacy, but the implementation wound up being so terrible that it winds up doing this. Prior to that dialog, they'd just store/read the cookies without permission (though lots of people would proactively sandbox browsers to make it a non-issue). I honestly can't decide which is worse, at this point.
I like the ones that show the prompt for "we've detected an ad-blocker" with the option you can click for "continue without disabling and not supporting us". Guilt trips work in human to human interactions, but not for random Internet prompts.
Of course I'd prefer the web simply not using cookies on every single site I visit (therefore not needing the prompt), but that's not going to happen. Sites have to monetize somehow to stay alive.
The reason sites all have the cookie permission dialog now is because of the GDPR, which has the right idea on data privacy, but the implementation wound up being so terrible that it winds up doing this.
GDPR is not at fault here though, since it does not require asking for consent if the processed data is necessary for the purpose of the provided service. For example, a web shop usually wouldn't have to ask for permission to store items in the shopping part because that is a necessary part of the online shopping process. In that sense, requiring the consent dialog for all unnecessary purposes is better as you can at least see who's trying to screw you over. Don't kill the messenger here.
I think it's also important to remember that websites can only get away with these annoyances because it a) is easily automatable and b) has been the default mode of operation for decades. If restaurant waiters today started asking guests if they could sell info on what and when you ate, who you were with, and what you looked like, everyone would be creeped out. Before GDPR, it was pretty much normalized to do the same thing on the internet without even asking for consent.
"Let us demonstrate"
I miss the old internet
Lemmy feels like the old internet IMO and I'm really enjoying it so far! :)
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Oh the irony.
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