this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
480 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
87147 readers
3654 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not a matter of technical implementation, but a procedural one. It was never a secret, it was just too expensive and impractical to do. If you changed how you implement ads every single day, the ad blockers would have to change their rules every day. Just keep going forever, and eventually the adblockers won't have the resources to keep up.
It's like if a food truck driver was trying to operate without a permit. If they sat in the same spot every day, officials would see them and easily catch them. If they moved to different apots around town every day and repainted their truck, they could evade officials. That's not a secret, it's just that it's more work than it's worth. While not a great analogy for many reasons, the idea is that it was never a secret how to get past ad blockers. It was just never worth the money. You'd spend more money implementing the evasion than you'd get back from the ad revenue.
At this point yhey are probably using AI to do the job of adjusting ad formats, so humans especially couldn't keep up. Perhaps AI could be used to counteract it, but that's expensive to setup and keep running. A free software obviously can't aford that.
Sure, they could have been silent about it, but they would still get reports about missed ads. There would be enough hubbub online they'd eventually have to address. Maybe this way they can use the attenion to get more contributors