Internet content filtering

[domesticated om]

What do you guys use to filter out all the noise on the internet? By noise, I mean all of the side-content, recommedatioms, advertising, propaganda, headline news, or anything else designed to be provative to grab people’s attention.

Ad blockers are one option, but lately is seems like the internet has turned into a guantlet of non-advertising related distractions. I use a aearch engine to look for infermation on a breed of dogs, and instead I get a small nugget pertaining to the subject surrounded by swarm of hyperbolic links to political issues.

Interested to hear what tools you’re using.

 

[sculptor]

brain

 

[DaveC426913]

I have a fine-tuned sense of "banner-blindness", honed from decades of tuning out TV commercials, and more recently, ads running before YouTube videos.

I take a perverse sort of pride occasionally - when seeing a commercial for about the 100th time - yet it still hasn't risen to the level of consciousness where I actually know what the product/service in the commercial is.

 

[sideshowbob]

Sometimes, just for fun, I click "stop seeing this ad" and give "inappropriate" or "offensive" for the reason. It doesn't have any effect on the ads, of course, but it makes me feel like I'm doing something about it.

I do make a point of not buying anything whose ads offend me. For example, I haven't bought a Pepsi product since the 1970s.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

What do you guys use to filter out all the noise on the internet? By noise, I mean all of the side-content, recommedatioms, advertising, propaganda, headline news, or anything else designed to be provative to grab people’s attention.

Ad blockers are one option, but lately is seems like the internet has turned into a guantlet of non-advertising related distractions. I use a aearch engine to look for infermation on a breed of dogs, and instead I get a small nugget pertaining to the subject surrounded by swarm of hyperbolic links to political issues.

Interested to hear what tools you’re using.

i suspect you are probably now experiencing the new change by content providers to get around blockers.
getting around the side of content blockers is HUGE money !
content hackers you could term them.

sites want to monetize themselves by selling their membership numbers
that money only is paid when they can get around the peoples content blockers.

thus its about time someone anonymously upped the anti on some better tuned content and site blockers to weed out the mass media trawling of the common net probably...

you can add on content blockers on to your web browser as add-ons
but you will need to individually site block some of the biggest spammer cookie sites.
this will probably limit your ability to search.

 

[domesticated om]

Sorry for the delayed response with this thread. It’s taken me a bit to put my thoughts together to explain this a bit further.
This “noise” has become prevalent to the point of being deafening when spending time online - which is why banner blindness isn’t really helping. As explained, this does come in the usual form of pop up images recommendations and links when visiting different websites. This also includes search results (information pushed to the top due to search engine optimization manipulation - ie - the content hackers) which can’t really be blocked. Very easy to skim past visually, but this means the 30 per page matching search results becomes five pages about the breed of dog and 25 related to kim kardashion, brexit, the latest disaster, and where to buy it on Amazon.

The modern day “common internet” this has created feels more like the checkout line at a grocery store than the information superhighway it used to be. As a user, I’m standing in the line as captive audience to the magazine and newspaper front pages telling me about “prince whazzisname’s marriage problems”, how to “lose belly fat”, and “the latest horrible thing Trump said on twitter”.
I feel as though this noise is causing me to miss out on relevant information unless I explicitly know it by name ahead of time.

Would be nice if there were a way to permanently exclude certain data as a whole.

 

[sculptor]

... the information superhighway it used to be. ... .

Ah yes
I remember the information superhighway from years ago
when/where
If I were to search for "holocaust"
a pop up add on the right hand side of the screen would offer
"GET YOUR HOLOCAUST HERE---TODAY ONLY---35% DISCOUNT ON HOLOCAUST"

ah
the good old days

 

[RainbowSingularity]

content hackers

this is now what marketing companys do and call it legitimate business practice
it is the modern day equivalent to the old 'buy-coke' subliminal messages on movie screens at the cinema

where to buy it

if i cant buy it i dont want to see it(this is a reality for a large proportion of US & UK and asian culture)

“prince whazzisname’s marriage problems”

all fake news

“lose belly fat”

news faked to sell fake things

“the latest horrible thing Trump said on twitter”

not fake news

unless I explicitly know it by name ahead of time.

back to marketing companys and the 'buy-coke' thing being considered morally ok

Would be nice if there were a way to permanently exclude certain data as a whole.

that is why the fake net-neutrality debate was created.
to fake a sense of free market access to the US internet.
instead of it all being paid for content, which it is now.
this is probably why the whole fake news to swing election voting in the usa is seen as a bit of a comedy.
it is morally and ethically and socially accepted as a form of legitimate sales technique by the majority of those in political office and business(and about 50% of the working adult civilians if not more) to make lies up to swing national election voting.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

i use to use around 4 or 5 different search engines to locate a single subject set of information.
it would take me several hours
i would trawl through pages of search results.

you have to use intuitive search techniques to locate specific items then cross reference them while wading through endless attempts to exploit and change your search criteria into something that you will buy.

you could phrase this the war on intellectualism by the marketing company managers.
once the universities became privatized & the trade qualifications were de-regulated, the next step was to destroy the ability to locate factual data for learning.

the american norm of culture has become a hunger games like hold on the truth.
its all lies designed to swing your vote or sell you something.
lobbyists... corporate brand messages...
divide and conquer to be the biggest cannibal is the culture. eat everything until you get soo big and fat you explode and kill yourself...(opioid cultural genocide?)
hhmmm....

are there any sociologists in the usa who are not religious extremists cat-fishing ?
look how tightly they hang on to "pray the gay away"
such blatant racism & hate in broad day light just by a different sticky label.

a good model would probably be the flint water poisoning of thousands of children by the state officials and business people.
has anyone faced a jail term ? lol how deep is the corruption.


Sentencing scheduled for two Flint water crisis figures
By Steve Carmody • Jan 24, 2019
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/sentencing-scheduled-two-flint-water-crisis-figures

In all, seven of 15 government officials criminally charged in connection with the water crisis have reached plea deals with prosecutors.

So far, no government officials have actually stood trial, though judges have bound two over for trial.

deliberate act to tamper with a trial by a state employee in a position of influence and power in an attempt to make a lawful trial impossible ?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/21/us/flint-water-crisis-trial/index.html

Despite the charges that came out last year, Gov. Rick Snyder threw his support behind Lyon and Dr. Eden Wells, another high-ranking state health department official who was charged last year. Snyder said both will keep their jobs and have "my full faith and confidence."

no problems everything fine as long as the rich elitists get away with anything...
stop making such a big deal, they said "oops" that should be enough because they are coveted by greed and lust and envy.

that is just one easy example to use

 

[domesticated om]

So to make this a little more technical: from my understanding there are really only two ways to strip unwanted stuff out of the content returned.

1. Parsing then sanitizing at the http response level. This is where the client (the consumer of the response) has some control over what’s actually rendered in the browser, From a high level, all the data is always there in the response, but we use tools to cut stuff out of that response.
This mainly applies to individual websites, but not search engines since they represent a slightly different problem.

2. Controlling the data and content returned at the host level. This is where the client has no real control. I ask the search engine to show me 30 rows of links to websites about “treating separation anxiety in Corgis”, and I get the five rows of relevant data with 25 rows being the result of “the powers that be” paying their way into invasive ranking.

Rainbow, I take it your approach is just acknowledging the problem, but nobody has really come up with ways to circumvent it entirely.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

Rainbow, I take it your approach is just acknowledging the problem, but nobody has really come up with ways to circumvent it entirely.

i am not a coder so i cant really apply a solution per-say
knowing the paid content spammers also game the big corps to deliver faked/dominant numerical results lists.

what i wonder is if the hot-word type search result is forced via content results which is able to be scammed to push fake returns.
(fake returns by virtue of true data intent)

clients want total management, but consumers want group experience
i dont have any real answers to this.
what i notice is the expansion of individual units(cell phones & tablets)
which changes the distribution process and changes hit counting(pay per click)
while the individual value of a click has dropped significantly, the potential link to other networks by tracking cookies and data mining is extensive.

2 things atmospherically strike me
1 the new era cold war type issues between sovereign nations seeking to nationalize and protect their own consumer markets.
2 the ultra nationalization trend that is almost a retreat of interactive association(this will skew data)

meanwhile the machine of profit just hunts clicks n trends for as much access as possible.
you cant fight the system and reward yourself with it without massive processing control which might be potential self filtering(servers searching and then filtering to pre chosen result values).

google is like dipping your toe in the community pool that may be filled with human waste , or perfectly clean.
im not sure AI can define a difference
i would simply block amazon outright and all servers running shopping data bases.
the use of them excluded would show enough of a gap to elucidate any required alternate value search i would guess.

thats my casual laymens opinion

...i would term this "intuitive searching" where you have a pre chosen set rule of valued results.
results are then processed.
blocking primary channels can give a much smaller yet vastly more accurate result.
however, doing this would face you off directly against paid coders seeking to exploit those avenues to remove them.