Comments on The web is overrun by pop-ups and blockers haven’t worked in years

I might be wrong, but I vaguely remember Google and Yandex punishing websites for using full-page ads (or some other horribly intrusive advertisement). I assume in order to slow down adoption of various adblocks, but it seemed to be *very* effective.

I assume that if they did something like that for modern popups - it would be as effective, but I doubt they will do it - somewhere I heard that using Google Analytics to track users requires consent from said users.

Alexey, Google said around 2016 that they consider interstitial dialogs as a negative search ranking. However, later that year, Google AdSense introduced full-page interstitial ads, and they’ve kept quiet about it since.

Sharing visitor data with a third party requires consent. The idea was for the web to stop doing that, and not for it to add needless consent dialogs everywhere.

Sadly, most of what popup blockers block nowadays are legitimate popups (if you open a Google doc for editing, it's blocked).

Some of the knowledge in this post is quite useful. I was probably aware that inaction counts as non-consent, but the constant cookie consent popups are indeed so remarkably intrusive and serve to brainwash users / wear them down into compliance. It's disgusting. We do not live in a technocracy.

This writeup noticeably omits mention of adblockers. Not the built in browser tool, the kind that people actually use. It was kind of funny to see the "please disable adblock" message at the end. But on a nice little pro-user blog like this one, I don't mind making an exception and disable my adblock.

For the big sites owned by tech giants... I already pay for a computer and internet service, I don't have the spare mental bandwidth and cash to look at ads all day. They're trying to stalk us around the web and sell our data anyway. Use an adblocker, folks. They're worth using, and if you get bugs, it's easy to disable on a per-site basis.

If you have an ethical stance about adblocking that's frequently relevant for you, like if you read a lot of independent journalism, you might try https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ . This blocker is specifically to protect your privacy and free you from sites begging for your cookie consent, and it shouldn't block commercial ads.