We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?

Only for chrome.

I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.

I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.

It's good enough.

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is the superior way? Pi-Hole?

You all still use the web? I've been transpiling video game frame data into shader, geometry, lighting, color gradient data, and an agent system that mix-n-matches styles.

I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.

DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.

Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.

The same author made another app that replaces click bait video titles with a cloud sourced video title. It also replaces cluck bait thumbnails.

Yes. This is visible on news sites. The title and lede are rewritten as clickbait. The actual story may not be so bad. On some sites, the title on the home page may not match the article. Yesterday there was "(something happened) in Red State" on Fox News on the home page, but the actual article begins "(something happened) in Florida".

Turning off youtube watch history stops the shorts tab from working. And you can use a userscript to swap the "shorts" word to "watch" in the url to convert all shorts to normal videos.

For example:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name         Redirect YouTube Shorts to Regular Videos (Mobile-Friendly)
  // @namespace    https://example.com/
  // @version      1.4
  // @description  Redirects YouTube Shorts URLs to regular video URLs on mobile
  // @author       YourName
  // @match        *://*.youtube.com/*
  // @run-at       document-end
  // @grant        none
  // ==/UserScript==
  
  //Written by GPT-4o Mini
  (function () {
      'use strict';
  
      // Function to redirect Shorts to regular video URLs
      function redirect() {
          if (location.pathname.startsWith("/shorts")) {
              const videoId = location.pathname.split("/")[2];
              const newUrl = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" + videoId;
              window.location.replace(newUrl);
          }
      }
  
      // Observe changes to the DOM and check for navigation
      const observer = new MutationObserver(() => {
          redirect();
      });
  
      // Start observing the body for changes
      observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
  
      // Initial check in case a Shorts URL is loaded directly
      redirect();
  })();

Idk if they work but several extensions on the chrome web store claim to hide/block shorts like https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-shorts/mnakeci...

https://github.com/Onsotumenh/YouTube-Cosmetic-Filters-for-u...

I can’t let you do that Dave.

Perplexity strongly disagrees

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...

Some examples, with varying levels of predation:

An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.

It would change the way they spend their nondisposable money.

They might not have enough disposable income to pay for software but enough to pay for whatever is on the ad.

More generally, if the service is free, you're the product, and you're being sold to someone else

Propaganda

Does the client know they lack disposable income? This is just as much an exercise about fleecing a client out of their adspend by giving shoddy metrics on your end.

> bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.

This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.

I have always wondered what the web would be like if we added the scripting language later and only solidified CSS and HTML for the first 15 years or so.

I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions

I use the following code (as a toolbar bookmarklette) for a quick button which disables all pop-overs/cookie requests:

    javascript:/*https://bookmarkl.ink/ashtonmeuser/849a972686e1505093c6d4fc5c6e0b1a*/(()%3D%3E%7Bvar%20e%2Co%3Ddocument.querySelectorAll(%22body%20*%22)%3Bfor(e%3D0%3Be%3Co.length%3Be%2B%2B)getComputedStyle(o%5Be%5D).position%3D%3D%3D%22fixed%22%26%26o%5Be%5D.parentNode.removeChild(o%5Be%5D)%3B%7D)()%3B%0A

At least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc

If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.

> we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could

A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.

In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.

The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.

Google began as a search engine with a popup blocker extension for a competitor's browser. Now they're a display ad company with a browser that includes a built in popup blocker extension blocker.

Well, there are really only three things that form the aggregate of the world we see today.

There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.

These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.

Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.

At least these popups are restricted to the page. It's one thing for a website to decide to block my use of it for some asinine reason. It's quite another for it to block my use of everything else on my computer.

Suggestion in case it helps:

  step 1: install & use Firefox
  step 2: install and use adblockers (multiple)(I got ublock origin, adblock plus, noscript, privacy badger, privacy possum)(nothing gets through!!)
  step 3: install "Open in Reader View" addon (not affiliated in any way). With this, when I DDG-search for something, especially lyrics or something for which I am interested in only the text, I right-click and "open in reader view" so it does exactly that.
  step 4: set the Reader View (F9) in FF, to the font size, color, etc. 

EDIT: tip: tell your 'friend' to search for Band Song_title AZLyrics (not affiliated) so the first hit will be from "AZLyrics.com" which will have a standard format (I always search for ".... azlyrics" instead of just "..lyrics")

N.B., he is right on the Gen-X/Millenial border. So, we can now look retrospectively at a good chunk of his generation’s career. The tech industry we’ve built does, in fact, suck.

Although, Millenials seem to be pretty annoyed by all this, and aren’t really anywhere near retirement yet. So maybe we can figure out some way to apply the brakes.

That's such a copout quote. The people working on ads aren't the best minds, if they were they wouldn't be working on ads. We somehow bought into the lie that "maximize profit" has anything to do with intelligence. And that a bank account is a equivalent to an intelligence score.

No, the problem we find ourselves in is that we let ad companies buy the entire economy and infect it with anticompetitive behavior. The people working on Android aren't working on ads. Their work is being exploited by an ad company and twisted to serve ads.

I personally find my doctor infinitely more intelligent than any Google tech bro. I find the group of people making Little Kitty Big City infinitely more intelligent than some Facebook wanker.

You're right: it's probably fine then. My bad.

Give every Internet user a domain name and routable IP for free with their Internet account.

That won't magically fix all the problems in an instant, but the core of everything wrong with the Internet starts with the Internet being separated into consumers and providers, instead of being a true peer2peer network.

Even in the olden days of the Internet when ISPs would give you free webspace with your Internet account, you still didn't get your own domain name, meaning all your Web presence would bust when you switched providers.

Alternatively, get Freenet, IPFS/IPNS or any of the other distributed alternatives working, but after 25 years of people trying, I kind of given up hope of it ever happening.

Couple choices:

1. Switch to cryptocurrency, let small-time criminals control the web.

2. Switch to micropayments, let criminal corporations control the web.

Step 1: remove Section 230 protection for algorithmically-elevated content.

If you're going to have attention-mining addiction-creating software funnel people into rabbit holes, then those rabbit holes need to be verified, safe-to-consume stuff. Watching 5 hours of 5 minute crafts is at worst, going to make someone spend too much money at Hobby Lobby. Certainly not good, but a workable issue. Watching 5 hours of white supremacist propaganda is how you get our current sociopolitical climate.