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I'm a freelance writer. What little money I make is usually connected to advertising in some way. So, I've generally been against ad blockers. But lately, I've
by loudandskittish 11y ago
I'm a freelance writer. What little money I make is usually connected to advertising in some way. So, I've generally been against ad blockers.
But lately, I've been considering it.
More and more I'm coming across web sites that are just supposed to display a text article that are unusable, either loading painfully slowly on my aging PC that isn't getting upgraded any time soon, or completely freezing my browser.
While I couldn't say for certain the exact cause, the problem almost always exists on a site with an auto-playing video ad in the sidebar.
Heck, I have no problem watching an HD stream on Twitch.tv while having 40 browser tabs and other apps open but as soon as there's an ad break, my whole computer grinds to a halt.
I don't want to deprive anyone of money but in the last few months, online ads have started affecting my ability to use my computer. And that's on top of the privacy issues and the occasional malware dumps through ads.
- mej10 11y agoIt is really the pop-up ads and ones that auto-play audio or have any kind of animation that are terrible. Also the sites that make you click through a bunch of pages to read an article. I don't mind the rest. I thought it might be fun to add a request header like "X-AdBlock-Reason" that lets them know why I blocked their ads. "X-AdBlock-Reason: too-many-ads" "X-AdBlock-Reason: overbearing-ads" "X-AdBlock-Reason: poor-ad-performance" "X-AdBlock-Reason: stop-paginating-unnecessarily" "X-AdBlock-Reason: i-dont-like-supporting-web-content-creators"
- J_Darnley 11y agoNow that makes me wonder whether there's an extension that will let me add that header and randomise the reason. Sounds like an interesting thing to shove into someone's log. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't use it. I would stick out like a sore thumb to people tracking me.