I cannot understand how some people are living with this. It is unbearable

  • @[email protected]
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    72 years ago

    My retired parents live with me. I went ahead and put a PiHole on our home wifi. A day later my mother was literally complaining that she couldn’t click on ads on facebook. I told her those are ads and they track her and she says “well everyone likes to use the internet how they like to use it… can you put it back the old way? I want to look at these shoes”. Can’t fucking win.

    • @[email protected]
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      72 years ago

      My wife turns off the WiFi on her phone to avoid the pihole. She does this so she can watch the ads in her games to get an extra life or whatever. You’ll never win on that front and I won’t either.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      People actually CLICK on ads??? Genuinely never had even an iota of desire to do that. I forgot it was even an option.

    • Boozilla
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      12 years ago

      I got a lot of complaints from family, too. Especially because I block Meta. I just let them bitch and I tell them things like “those ads are broken because of malware” which isn’t entirely untrue.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      02 years ago

      but this means that she would see the ads but not being able to click? I don’t get it. They should had just disappeared, no? Or was she complaining that she wasn’t seeing the ads?

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        The ads still appear in the facebook feed but clicking them results in a “this site could not be found” or similar error, is how I understood it to work. I know the PiHole basically makes it so the routes from “whateveradwebsite.com” end up not resolving to an IP address. I’m not sure how FB is serving them; so the text/image content might be coming from an FB server and the link is just an ad URL with a bunch of tracking info on it.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          12 years ago

          yeah you’re right actually. I always use it combined with a local browser adblock and didn’t think of that

    • I Cast Fist
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      62 years ago

      You forgot the endless popups in the 2000s, which led to every browser integrating a popup blocker since then (and which often fail to stop actual malicious popups, no less)

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Yes, in these years are a lot of pop ups, pop unders among other crap in some pages, but normally in most pages there was, apart of an ocassinal Banner not much else to justify an adblocker. But nowadays, between ads, clickbaits, cookie consent, adblocker detections and ant-adblocker, paywalls and other shit like these, you need a lot of extensions and scripts if you don’t want that the page fills your browser and HD with all kind of PUPs and unwanted scripts, apart of an ad/trackerblocker. It’s a cats and mouse game between companies which want to track and profile you with all kind of dirty tricks, and the user and devs continuos searching contrameasures to show them the middle finger.

    • Y|yukichigai
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      2 years ago

      Almost, but needs a few tweaks:

      • Content should be border-to-border in the 2000 panel.

      • Needs to be 3 lines of content in 2010 and only two lines of content in 2018.

      • 2018 needs a slide-over autoplay video on the bottom-left of the content space.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      I always forget about my adblocker until I need to use a browser without one. It’s really pretty miserable.

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    As I recall, back in the late 90s there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about a man who loved receiving email spam. After a long day’s work he would go home and relax by looking through his email spam and order things.

    Some people are just like that.

    • Khrux
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      12 years ago

      I don’t like spam but I do like a good scam email, especially if they’ve actually given it some plot.

  • netburnr
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    22 years ago

    I have it on good authority, if you type Google into Google, you can break the internet.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      Wait a minute, the “Elders of the Internet”!? The Elders of the Internet know who I am!? You’ve got to let me have it!

  • Radioactive Radio
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    12 years ago

    My former co-worker was daily driving his browser without any extensions and didn’t see anything wrong with it. I was watching him work one day and he was literally fighting a battle against the unholy pop-ups just tryna download some free fonts. What could’ve been done in 2 clicks took him minutes to do trying to close all the ads and tabs kept opening, videos kept playing. It was painful just to watch.

  • lorez
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    12 years ago

    I’m noticing some sites have become pretty unusable on mobile and I dunno what to do.

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    I once had a user whose PC would freeze every time they tried to see their desktop. Like, you minimise something full screen and the PC would freeze for a few minutes and crawl while the desktop was in view.

    Turns out they had more than 4,000 items on their desktop.

    That day I learned where Windows puts icons that don’t fit on the desktop (it stacks them all on the first icon’s place, lol). And this wasn’t even the problem they called about! They were just grumpily blaming Microsoft and working around it for years.

    I guess my point is computer illiterate/belligerent people will find a way around the problems they cause and just blame something/someone else.

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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      12 years ago

      Kind of like smartphones today with an app for literally every friggin thing.