The easiest way to block these ads is to stop using X.
Elon investigated himself and said he found no evidence of wrongdoing tho!
Anyway
Bold claim, that. Don’t underestimate my unwillingness to watch ads
Can’t see ads if you don’t use Twitter
Don’ start nothin’ Won’t be nothin’
Can’t see ads on twitter :/
How much would it cost to show 2girls1cup as umskipable ad to musk fanboys? Asking for a friend…
That would be…
… priceles.
The FTC would like to have a word. At least they have a spine.
Seems like Elon is trying to accelerate the collapse of his $44B boat anchor
It’s not collapsing fast enough. Bluesky and threads are both pretty dead. The userbase just doesn’t leave, no matter what happens.
…just like with this place… :P
So on one hand they’re cluttering user feeds with the spammiest, scammiest ads they can and on the other hand they’re rolling out paid subscriptions to remove ads.
Cause a problem; sell the solution. Transparent scumbags.
Didn’t they also remove some of the things that indicated a post was “sponsored” or whatever?
Pretty sure that’s illegal under EU law
Something being illegal under EU law is used as an ace in the hole for some reason. These multi-billion companies will pay the fines in the EU and continue operating. On the off chance they roll back these changes in the EU, they’ll keep using them in the US, China, Russia, wherever.
Only thing that’ll stop this is global laws against it, which is impossible because of bribery. Oh sorry, lobbying.
Yes, though it was unclear if that was a feature or a bug. Since their dev team was decimated, the site has been struggling to even do basic maintenance and security updates. It’s entirely possible that was a bug, especially since it only appeared to be happening with certain users and servers.
I remember when Circuit City fired the employees that were costing them the most money. https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Lessons-in-how-Circuit-City-s-job-cuts-backfired-3298517.php
They eventually went bankrupt.
I despise Twitter’s leadership as much as the rest, but increasing ads is not at all a “cause a problem” situation Twitter doesn’t owe you ad-free usage of their platform. So no, not a scam/scummy behaviour, just bad value.
And you don’t owe Twitter your patronage. So just move on from it.
They are allowed to try and monetize in various ways, but there are still ethical standards that are just consistently not followed in online advertising (like doing due-diligence to make sure the company advertising isn’t some sort of transparent scam). But this change seems to be stepping away from one of the standards that is actually a legal mandate, properly labeling adverts and sponsored content as such.
increasing ads is not at all a “cause a problem” situation
Tech executives would disagree with you - creating a problem that users have to buy their way out of is one of the most popular business models going at the moment. The mobile gaming industry, for example, is basically $140B worth of intentionally created frustration.
There’s been so much written about this obviously scummy practice. It’s everywhere.
It’s either naive or disingenuous to suggest they’re not obviously trying to annoy cash out of people.
Even if X wasn’t trying to make a profit. They still have cost to cover.
I don’t use it. Never have. Never saw any value in it.
I still have yet to understand Elon’s strategy with it but it’s his billions to waste.
It’s actually not his billions. He borrowed billions to finance the purchase. There are talks of the banks stepping in to protect their investment.
Twitter by J.P Morgan
It’s my bandwidth. If I don’t want to use it to download ads, I don’t have to.
You do realize that the actual issue is that this is kind of thing is going to be normalized, so that it can spread like a plague across the corporate-touched internet, objectively making the entire thing as a whole objectively worse… right?
Because it sure doesn’t seem like it with that reply.
Reddit is already following in footsteps of twitter. unsurprising but worrying because they could influence other companies to do the same
The author of the article determined that these ads are coming from the trashy ad networks that brought you such classic clickbait ads as “Doctors hate this one weird trick” and “[Current President] has slashed auto insurance rates in [your state], here’s how” that you see at the bottom of low quality news articles. So, it’s not just that X has spam ads, but they aren’t even directly selling them, which the article summarizes is a sign of desperation to get any ads, no matter how shit in quality, no matter how low paying to X they are, on the platform. At least the low tier news sites have the decency to identify them as ads and label the ad networks that is putting them up.
Well on our way to All-Despising Baby Skull
I’ve blocked all Twitter ads since it got taken over by hate groups and will continue to successfully block them forever.
How?
By deleting the app and never looking at the website.
Lol nice one
Based
Ads have gotten way worse in quality. I keep seeing stuff that makes Temu look like top tier. Recently community notes jhave added context noting these adverts are for dropshipping services and there is no guarantee you will get the advertised product.
That and so many funking places wanting my email to send me top tips on life, money, crypto or w.e.
I’m genuinely glad when I see a normal funking advert for pizza or a charity or a film, there’s something happening with that dicaprio guy and scorsee director.
the new ad format also doesn’t disclose … that it is even an advertisement at all.
Well, that’s clearly illegal in most places. Ads have to be somehow identifyable as ads, because of misinformation (ads lie, who thought?). Just wait for the court case.
Well they clearly aren’t normal posts, so I guess they’re obviously ads?
Also Twitter is one man who hates laws now, so most places might need to see about enforcing that.
Im starting to think that is their game, doing whatever is illegal until caught by a court of law, and then find ways to do it without getting caught.
Or the fine is so small it’s just a “cost of doing business”
Lol every day I’m hearing some new way Elon’s managed to make Twitter worse. I’m glad I switched to Mastodon the day Elon walked into Twitter HQ with that stupid fucking sink.
Between Ice Cubes for iOS and the Halcyon desktop UI (which is a near perfect replication of Twitter) Mastodon has been great.
Have you met @AcidBurn yet?
Shit, now I’m mad I didn’t get @CerealKiller
Yeah every day is a little too often for me to want to hear about Elon and Twitter, honestly. Even the schadenfreude isn’t that important to me.
The aerospace industry has a term: “Controlled flight into terrain.”
Lithobreaking
Unplanned rapid disassembly. I know Muskrat got all training in Kerbal Space Program.
“can’t [yet] be blocked” This is the claim of every new advertiser platform. Looking forward to it being blocked (and not because I’m on X, just because I’m excited to see them burn).
Can’t wait to have an AI based ads remover that rewrites the page HTML and removes all ads.
When they say “can’t be blocked” I presume they mean “can’t be blocked with the block function in X/Twitter”. They also say it can’t be liked or retweeted.
So far ads have been treated as sort-of regular posts that are just shown according to the ad rules rather than because they belong in the timeline under normal criteria, and you could like, retweet and block them just like any other post.
So this is basically them treating ads as a fully separate thing rather than just a different post type.
Though the article suggests they’ll still try to make them look mostly like posts, except without showing a handle etc. though, which is extra scummy
I’m not gonna risk my computer by turning off my ad blocker, but I wonder if that article comes with exactly the kind of chumbox ads that they’re rightfully criticizing.
There’s 9 ads between the chapters of that article and one that follows you on the side of the screen as you scroll
If it has a link it can be blocked. Just block by content instead of by node path.
I disabled my adblocker to take that screenshot.
