The ad in the middle of this article about conspiracy theories

perishthethought@lemm.ee to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 570 points –

Remember when the web didn't suck?

95

Here’s what’s behind that stupid ad

https://www.10news.com/news/fact-or-fiction/fact-or-fiction-online-ad-advises-people-to-wrap-doorknobs-in-foil-when-home-alone

It clearly implies there is some kind of safety benefit to it. But there is not.

Clicking on the ad leads to a lengthy slide show which eventually gets to the doorknob story.

All it says is aluminum foil can be used as an alternative to tape to cover doorknobs and hardware while painting.

It has nothing to do with safety and the inclusion of the phrase "when you're home alone" was only used as clickbait to make the ad seem more important.

Thanks for taking one for the team and checking that out. I sure wasn't gonna

I Always click on those ads to waste their daily budget

Explain to me like I'm five, how does this?

They pay for the number of impressions as well as the number of click-throughs. More clicks on the ad = more cost for running the ad, or fewer impressions. However, it also gives more money to those hosting the ads, so it supports them imbedding them.

You can use this plugin to automate the process if you want to continue down this path. https://adnauseam.io/

That's freakin awesome! I absolutely love that idea/solution. Is it kinda hot in here? Why'm I all moist?

Seriously tho, is there any downside? Also, I'm still not sure I understand the point of running the ad in the first place. Why run a shitty ad that costs you money? Is the idea to get people to follow that other conspiracy site more regularly?

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Advertisers pay a fee to the website where their ad is displayed every time someone clicks on it, it's called the Pay Per Click model. It's how websites make money off running ads. There is a small fee for displaying the ad and larger one for click throughs.

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I might have looked it up. Even when I'm 99% sure something is a scam I often want to push a little further to understand more about how the scam operates but I don't think I have enough skill or dedication to scambait properly.

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The quality of the internet is so low these days

"Articles" like this have been around for decades unfortunately

I've been using ad blockers for so long that I forgot about these ridiculous click bait ads.

Of course, the "while painting" was implied. I'm so embarrassed I didn't clue in immediately.

I mean... if you are like, home alone status, in a whole ass house with a bunch of doors... maybe covering the knobs in foil would make it so some kind of intruder makes more noise when opening doors, as they either handle the foil opening the door, or when removing the foil?

????

It kind of makes some sense?

I was under the impression it was a safety thing. If you grab loose foil like that it will form to the hand crushing it to turn the knob and therefore you know the home has had "visitors" without you saying so.

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I can remember around 1999-2000 if you clicked the wrong thing in IE you'd get 50 popup windows with ads for porn. At least that's behind us.

This still happens on dodgy football streaming sites.

Find the ones that only give you 2-3 links to go through. They used to exist for the NHL atleast.

Then you also had the sites that would trap you there, every time you clicked the back button it would just reload the page.

I mean there are still websites that open themselves 10 times so you can't click back out of them. I am curious as to what their end game is. Do they imagine we go "well damn can't go back out of this page, might as well start living here now"

At least that's behind us.

I sure am (‿!‿) ԅ(≖‿≖ԅ)

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firefox and ublock origin will filter these right out

Sorry, I couldn't resist. And contrariwise to this pic I do agree with you, the web used to be better. Sure, ads were always a fucking annoyance, but they're reaching unbearable levels nowadays; a lot of people (like me) tend to not see it because of ad blockers, but once you turn them off? Eeeeew.

Well, you could land on a bad site full of nasty ads or wind up downloading software that offered you the finest of malware or viruses.

And you could just not go to them, or not download sus programs or warez.

Now the sites and apps hunt you down and shove it in your face. They follow you, rat on you, sell your info, and constantly try to sell You stuff every page you land on.

Yeah, Old Internet wasn’t great, but it wasn’t institutionalized malice like we have today.

Wild that the original of this image edit was “remember when /b/ was good” back in 2005

Whenever I turn off AdGuard on my phone to get something to work and then forget it's off I'm bombarded with ads everywhere and I'm like "oh, yeah, gotta turn that back on"

It's the nostalgia filter. By the 2030s, some would think the year 2020 is the closest thing to utopia humans actually experienced

There was, like, a golden age in the early 10's before popups and animations everywhere, and after popups and animations everywhere.

It's possible I'm just nostalgic. If it sucked some way I'm not remembering I'm very interested to hear about it.

Remember when the web didn't suck?

Was there ever a time? In the late 80s and early 90s when it was mostly text only, there really wasn't a whole lot of content, and bandwidth sucked massively.

Once connection speeds improved, we got banner ads, popups, and noisy flash animations, all of which were vectors to install viruses.

Then came google, facebook and amazon, and monopolized the web.

Every era sucked in its own right. But I'm rather using it now where plenty of other educated people develop countermeasures that work out of the box, rather than having to fiddle around with browser configurations to block ads and malware myself.

TL;DR: Use adblock.

There's less info now than a few years ago and it's harder to find. Web 2.0 has put most of the data and traffic into just a few hands. And as we can see with Twitter that can lead to a significant part of the Internet going to shit overnight.

Hell, most of us are here because of what reddit did overnight. It's certainly better than the age of web rings but we've entered a downturn.

Agree, especially with the getting harder to find part. I've followed some other user's recommendation and have been using kagi.com for the last 2 weeks as my search engine of choice, and it's really way ahead of google these days. I'm still in the free tier but about to hit the ceiling this week, and I'm rather certain I'll end up paying for it before I go back to google.

The results are about on par with Goolge ~2022. No ads, no trackers, and most of the SEO garbage that's targeting google (and maybe bing?) is by and large disregarded. Worth a try for sure.

99% of the time I just want a wikipedia summary, i just search wikipedia directly now and have done for years

In the late 80s and early 90s

Hold up there… HTLM wasn’t even invented until 1991 by Timothy Berners-Lee who then made the first web server, web browser, and web page. It was another two or three years before browsing the web became more common. Before then, the internet was very basic, consisted of a few simple services, and was typically only accessible via universities and large corporations.

Regular people often only had access to regional online services until national services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL came along.

Yep, ARPAnet and some messaging boards pre-90's. Slow as hell and limited content, that's what I mean.

The internet existed pre-web. Email, Usenet, IRC, Archie, etc. the real difference between ARPANET and the Internet was the introduction of TCP/IP packet handling and CIX which unified ISPs, but those both came pre-1991.

At least now I can watch porn without it turning out to be that middle eastern dude getting his head cut off

Remember when the web didn't suck?

No, I don't. Not since 2000, when I logged on from home for the first time. The majority of it has always sucked. Then the web can suddenly do new things... and finds new ways to suck.
It has, however, always had excellent little areas and corners.

Right? Do you remember going to websites and your computer would yell out that you were watching porn? Ads would burst forth like you just won fucking Solitaire. Shit took forever to download, and if you lost connection in the middle, start over!

I guess if you started using the Internet after like 2008, when things really started to take off, you saw a golden hour. But it was a dangerous place in the early 2000s, although I learned a lot about how to unfuck computers in my quest for boobs as a teenager.

I miss early YouTube that had full episodes of just about any TV show illegally uploaded without any sort of copyright enforcement.

I also miss reddit, but what it used to be is gone forever.

Knowing about "Temporary Internet Files" while my family was unaware made me feel like some sort of God of knowledge.

Oh and yeah I think I found porn there hooray!

Actually the ad matches the article. To me the ad is “fringe” and it has infested the “mainstream” (CNN).

So I think the idea of the tinfoil is that somebody grabbing the knob will make noise.

Therefore altering you.

You’d be better off with an alarm system and a deadbolt lock, though.

Alternatively the intruder will just be so confused they'll decide to break into another house instead of figuring out what the foil does

Probably assume they ran out of socks.

You put foil on the knob when you have a date with a leftover pizza.

That's what I figured - pretty much any alarm system would be better, but could technically help you in a pinch

me: what a silly article who could ever fall for this

also me: buys lots of tinfoil just in case

Tinfoil never goes bad, it can't hurt to stock up!!!

I wanna know who did the financing for the ad. A tinfoil company? Big Tough Softy Iron? A Goog guy worn off yoga?

(I aim to not say the fifthglyph for all days to promote !avoid5@sh.itjust.works)

It's an ad in your post, fittingly (although yours isn't particularly ironic).

Do you know of oulipo.social? No fifth symbols found on all of that domain.

(btw i wanted to somehow word in "at least once per day", but found using "per", "every", "for each" etc challenging to translate)

"I might try to put up a (compliant) post a day for a half-fortnight"?

thought it fit! >:)

ooh, kinda wonky of los oulipos to call that thing just cuz of that only work which had this gimmick

also i think that the original book allows using "the", in fact it also allows "me" and forms of "be". so los oulipos gonna , huh?

I'm so frustrated with the internet right now. My wife started making Castile soap and I'm trying to find out if its some fu-fu-berry-bullshit or like an actual decent soap. Google is feeding me momfluencers (which range from 'fine but there is no accountability' to blatant grifters) and sites that are simply trying to sell this stuff. I'm going to try again with kagi tonight, but it's still very frustrating that I never know what to trust anymore. The bullshit is coming faster than I'm able to handle it

You beautiful bastard, that's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.

I'm bookmarking that page. Thank you!

It was literally the first result on DuckDuckGo for me FWIW.

I used to use DuckDuckGo but I found it wasn't very good. Haven't tried in a few years though

A good way to make your own soap without artificial fragrances in them. My wife has skin sensitive to fragrances, and most commercial soaps have fragrance (even unscented Yeesh)

The web back then didn't have AdBlock. Now it does. So not really lol.

CNN and other news organizations in a nutshell

In Canada, we have a state broadcaster, which is nice. The current election frontrunner, according to the polls, is a guy who's made it his entire life's quest to get rid of it. Sigh.

I can't say I would want state run media but then again, I'm not Canadian

We have private ones too, to be clear. And the CBC doesn't actually take orders on what to run.

What? That is gold, not Mildly Infuriating at all.

Use an adblocker in your browser and an ad-blocking DNS server like Mullvad DNS (it's super easy on Android, just search for Private DNS in the settings and set it to base.dns.mullvad.net), AdGuard DNS (same thing, super easy, just set it to dns.adguard-dns.com) or NextDNS on your phone (and ideally on all your other devices). There's also an app called AdAway, but it takes up the VPN slot so you can't use it together with a VPN.

I just saw this but with a toilet paper roll under the toilet seat when alone.

"be reminded that you forgot to get tp when you really need it with this one weird trick!"

I only had to play an hour of "Thief" to thank myself I don't have door knobs.

The MSM tries to act like the voice of reason when they're the biggest purveyors of disinfo by a wide margin.

If you mean via ads like this, I would agree. They could do more to filter out the garbage.

But if you mean in their content, I'm not seeing that, beyond the usual (long history) leaning to one side or another.

But these are two very different things and shouldn't be equated.