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My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked, which is absolutely mind-blowingly ridiculous. I

My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked, which is absolutely mind-blowingly ridiculous. I see absolutely no negative effects browsing like this. Everything I've come across still works fine. Even sites that detect uBlock Origin and tell me to disable it, will work with that disabled and Pi-hole still blocking the ads instead. I heavily believe we should be supporting creators, and go out of my way to support them in direct ways (Patreon, buying merch, direct donations, Twitch subs, etc), but I absolutely will not submit my family/kids to the mess that is online advertising these days. Ads that look like legitimate download buttons, or that run scripts to do cryptomining popunders, autoplay video ads with sound, etc etc. Modern online advertising companies are malicious entities that actively harm users, and I absolutely classify them as malware.

slacka 8y ago
> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described. All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too. I'm all for blocking intrusive or malicious ads. But quality content depends on ad revenue. The author dedicated an entire paragraph on donating to the pi-hole project, but no mention of supporting quality content with subscriptions or unblocking acceptable ads.
- Improvotter 8y ago
  > Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described. I've still got ads blocked on reddit because they're so clickbaity as of late. They look like posts from subreddits I'm subscribed to and turn out to be an ad, no thank you.
- thieving_magpie 8y ago
  I hope more companies offer a paid version of their site that completely removes Advertisements. I cannot stand ads and won't use a site if I can see them. I'm not trying to be a bad guy though, I want to use those sites legitimately. My only option is to not visit them until they offer a compromise.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  I used to have Reddit whitelisted until they started showing subreddit-targeted ads in other subs. I follow a bunch of cryptocurrency subs and the ads there are… well… as you expect.
  - aquadrop 8y ago
    Why is this bad? You follow cryptocurrency subreddit, they show you relevant ad. You follow "warm mittens" subreddit, they show you relevant ad, etc. So why is it a bad thing?
    - dogecoinbase 8y ago
      I can't speak for the GP, but in this case of the cryptocurrency sites/fora I frequent (including topical subreddits), the ads are for idiotic scams. This indicates that whatever vetting they're doing is insufficient, and so they can be safely blocked (specifically -- if they can't be trusted to not display ads for obvious fraud, they can't be trusted to vet ads for other malicious attributes).
      - Semaphor 8y ago
        Yep.
- mikestew 8y ago
  All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too. The ads are not malicious, granted, but in the case of NYT at least they're still "blinky". They get blocked at the Pi-hole now. I do subscribe, however. I'd like to turn the ads back on because I view the NYT to be a quality publication, but I'm not going to have something moving out of the corner of my eye while I try to read the paper.
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    What in the world does your subscription pay for, if you still get advertisements on the New York Times?
    - mikestew 8y ago
      Same thing my subscription pays for if I get the dead tree edition: ads sprinkled in with the news. Right or wrong, it's not like there isn't 100 year old precedent for this.
      - michaelt 8y ago
        Right, but if you've already paid I don't see why you'd want to turn ads back on? You've already fulfilled your moral duty to reward them.
- noreddit323 8y ago
  Reddit is work friendly 4chan. That is, (mostly) not quality content. I stick to a search engine rather than browsing Reddit directly. If what I'm looking for comes up in a relevant Reddit thread, huzzah. I get the contemporary meme is "Agree with great-great-grandpas economics of 'survival of the fittest'." But I feel little obligation to pander to it everywhere it exists. Maybe I'm an odd bird, having grown up in the remote wilderness in the 80s, no TV, growing food and hunting/fishing, and only using money for things like clothing and basic services (water/electricity/phone).
- freehunter 8y ago
  Do you keep your car doors unlocked when you park in safe neighborhoods? Do you give nice strangers a spare key to your house? Do you sleep in an expensive hotel with the door propped open? Do you keep your password on a sticky note at your desk inside your secure office? Of course not. So why would I disable my security software just because a site I visit hasn't been hacked yet? That's just basic security hygiene.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    Agreed. Furthermore, nothing guarantees that them being good actors now won't be changed when they get acquired by a media giant. Policy and culture can and have changed overnight in organizations after acquisition. It's the same as with Troy's argument about good browser extensions. Yes they are good today but them being bought for 5 figures and the personal data harvested does not make the news and the users are clueless about it. I rather just not take the risk.
- FridgeSeal 8y ago
  Ads on Reddit used to be alright, but since the advent of their dumpster fire of a redesign, their ads have turned into block worthy material.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: 1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked from here that I only visit when something interesting is waved under my nose. There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from. 2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. Leaves things a bit stuck, and me paying out a smaller amount than I'm willing to.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  > 2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. Ars technica. (Subscriptions are tiered but I think this is included in a low tier.)
- mygo 8y ago
  > There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing There is yet to be a quick and simple micro-transaction infrastructure for the web. Transaction costs inhibit micro-transactions. They don’t scale down. Some are trying to use crypto to do micro-transactions, but even crypto has transaction costs that inhibit how small micro-transactions can be, not to mention the exchange rate volatility. It’s a big unsolved problem. Gotta spend money to spend money.
  - clarkmoody 8y ago
    I suggest looking at Lightning Network for micro-transactions. Still emerging tech, but it shows great promise.
    - zhoujianfu 8y ago
rufugee 8y ago
I use a /etc/hosts-based (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) approach to add blocking across my machines, but I have found some sites (fansided.com) comes to mind, which detect that I'm blocking and won't let me read them. How easy is it to get around this with the pi-hole?
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Very easy. You can pause it for 10s, 30s, 5mins, or a custom timeframe via the dashboard, or whitelist domains/subdomains as well. You basically do everything via a very slick dashboard running locally on its IP.
  - rufugee 8y ago
    Very cool...thanks. I'll give it a serious look.
    - jaaames 8y ago
      Highly recommended, incredibly easy to set up and use.
greymeister 8y ago
> Modern online advertising companies are malicious entities that actively harm users, and I absolutely classify them as malware. This is exactly the response for anyone that is frustrated by blocking ads impacting revenue for web publishers. Had the ad tech not become so invasive and pernicious, users wouldn't be going out of the way for solutions like this. The advertisers have essentially forced our hand.
- ethagnawl 8y ago
  Exactly. I believe Troy has another post about this topic where he discusses why he's able to justify selling the single, static banner ad at the top of his site.
- OzCrimson 8y ago
  Where I feel my hand was forced was when a friend wanted help promoting a professional conference in the area of data and tech. I went to the website and, in the center of the page, there was an ad for cellulite cream. OH! C'MON!!! I believe in the conference, but I'm not going to share the link with that ad on it. It's been explained to me that the website owners don't know what ads are being served up. All they know is they signed up for an ad service. If that ad is a redirect to a porn site, the website owner has no clue unless people complain. And that's why I ordered a raspberry-pi to set up a pi-hole. I get that a lot of my friends won't like this. They're in advertising and marketing, and they insist that they're one of the good ones. Fine. But the bad ones are REALLY bad. Also. I've spent HOURS opting out of tracking cookies. Then I heard that my effort is only as good as the entities that respect that I opted out. OH? WOW! So, when I hear people complain that we're hurting them, and they're one of the good ones, it ignores the real problem. Look ... if I was bitten by 10 dogs out of 50 dogs, I'm gonna have a problem with dogs. Period. You can insist on how friendly your dog is, but no. Talk to the other dog owners before trying to get me to take another risk.
  - PacifyFish 8y ago
    Someone's been searching for cellulite cream on Amazon!
mikestew 8y ago
My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked Where in THE hell are you going on the Internet? Wait, don't answer that. I only wonder because we sit at around 20-30% at our house (which is still ridiculous). But approaching 90%? Maybe I need to crank the blocklists up a notch, but I can't imagine even surfing porn sites all day that I could get anywhere near that percentage of blocked requests. But, man, I enjoy a challenge...
- JadoJodo 8y ago
  I've hit 75% before. My Roku desperately wants to phone home (25k requests/day).
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Yeah, upvote for reminding me about chatty IoT crap. I've got a Nest right now that was phoning home every four seconds. Why, I have no idea, so now it doesn't phone home at all. And a Foscam camera that isn't as persistent, but still tries a few times a day. We're still at < 35% blocked, though.
  - sandoz9 8y ago
    My Samsung TV wants to send home info about everything I watch.
- zmw 8y ago
  I’m only at 7.5%, probably because I use uMatrix in the first place, and have gone out of my way to kill a few applications that phone home like crazy.
- freehunter 8y ago
  Ever visited Forbes or Business Insider? Easily 90% of those sites are third-party scripts served from other domains.
  - JadoJodo 8y ago
    This is why Forbes is in my blacklist.
cmurf 8y ago
This is really depressing. I immediately want to blame the ISP for empowering malicious entities to harm their paying customers. 88% is obscene.
fosco 8y ago
did you use the 'default' lists that come with the installation or did you add new ones? would you mind sharing your feed list?
econnor 8y ago
Whenever mine has gone much above 30% (70ish prob highest ever) it generally turns out to be an unattended app left open on the android device I have hanging off the back of the TV. I recall the NYT app, for example, pinging home every 30 seconds or so. You can trace offending devices and traffic via pi-hole logs. The UI is a bit clunky but gets the job done.

slacka 8y ago

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described. All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too. I'm all for blocking intrusive or malicious ads. But quality content depends on ad revenue. The author dedicated an entire paragraph on donating to the pi-hole project, but no mention of supporting quality content with subscriptions or unblocking acceptable ads.

Improvotter 8y ago
> Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described. I've still got ads blocked on reddit because they're so clickbaity as of late. They look like posts from subreddits I'm subscribed to and turn out to be an ad, no thank you.
thieving_magpie 8y ago
I hope more companies offer a paid version of their site that completely removes Advertisements. I cannot stand ads and won't use a site if I can see them. I'm not trying to be a bad guy though, I want to use those sites legitimately. My only option is to not visit them until they offer a compromise.
Semaphor 8y ago
I used to have Reddit whitelisted until they started showing subreddit-targeted ads in other subs. I follow a bunch of cryptocurrency subs and the ads there are… well… as you expect.
- aquadrop 8y ago
  Why is this bad? You follow cryptocurrency subreddit, they show you relevant ad. You follow "warm mittens" subreddit, they show you relevant ad, etc. So why is it a bad thing?
  - dogecoinbase 8y ago
    I can't speak for the GP, but in this case of the cryptocurrency sites/fora I frequent (including topical subreddits), the ads are for idiotic scams. This indicates that whatever vetting they're doing is insufficient, and so they can be safely blocked (specifically -- if they can't be trusted to not display ads for obvious fraud, they can't be trusted to vet ads for other malicious attributes).
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      Yep.
mikestew 8y ago
All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too. The ads are not malicious, granted, but in the case of NYT at least they're still "blinky". They get blocked at the Pi-hole now. I do subscribe, however. I'd like to turn the ads back on because I view the NYT to be a quality publication, but I'm not going to have something moving out of the corner of my eye while I try to read the paper.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  What in the world does your subscription pay for, if you still get advertisements on the New York Times?
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Same thing my subscription pays for if I get the dead tree edition: ads sprinkled in with the news. Right or wrong, it's not like there isn't 100 year old precedent for this.
    - michaelt 8y ago
      Right, but if you've already paid I don't see why you'd want to turn ads back on? You've already fulfilled your moral duty to reward them.
noreddit323 8y ago
Reddit is work friendly 4chan. That is, (mostly) not quality content. I stick to a search engine rather than browsing Reddit directly. If what I'm looking for comes up in a relevant Reddit thread, huzzah. I get the contemporary meme is "Agree with great-great-grandpas economics of 'survival of the fittest'." But I feel little obligation to pander to it everywhere it exists. Maybe I'm an odd bird, having grown up in the remote wilderness in the 80s, no TV, growing food and hunting/fishing, and only using money for things like clothing and basic services (water/electricity/phone).
freehunter 8y ago
Do you keep your car doors unlocked when you park in safe neighborhoods? Do you give nice strangers a spare key to your house? Do you sleep in an expensive hotel with the door propped open? Do you keep your password on a sticky note at your desk inside your secure office? Of course not. So why would I disable my security software just because a site I visit hasn't been hacked yet? That's just basic security hygiene.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Agreed. Furthermore, nothing guarantees that them being good actors now won't be changed when they get acquired by a media giant. Policy and culture can and have changed overnight in organizations after acquisition. It's the same as with Troy's argument about good browser extensions. Yes they are good today but them being bought for 5 figures and the personal data harvested does not make the news and the users are clueless about it. I rather just not take the risk.
FridgeSeal 8y ago
Ads on Reddit used to be alright, but since the advent of their dumpster fire of a redesign, their ads have turned into block worthy material.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: 1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked from here that I only visit when something interesting is waved under my nose. There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from. 2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. Leaves things a bit stuck, and me paying out a smaller amount than I'm willing to.

reitanqild 8y ago
> 2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. Ars technica. (Subscriptions are tiered but I think this is included in a low tier.)
mygo 8y ago
> There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing There is yet to be a quick and simple micro-transaction infrastructure for the web. Transaction costs inhibit micro-transactions. They don’t scale down. Some are trying to use crypto to do micro-transactions, but even crypto has transaction costs that inhibit how small micro-transactions can be, not to mention the exchange rate volatility. It’s a big unsolved problem. Gotta spend money to spend money.
- clarkmoody 8y ago
  I suggest looking at Lightning Network for micro-transactions. Still emerging tech, but it shows great promise.
  - zhoujianfu 8y ago

rufugee 8y ago

I use a /etc/hosts-based (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) approach to add blocking across my machines, but I have found some sites (fansided.com) comes to mind, which detect that I'm blocking and won't let me read them. How easy is it to get around this with the pi-hole?

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
Very easy. You can pause it for 10s, 30s, 5mins, or a custom timeframe via the dashboard, or whitelist domains/subdomains as well. You basically do everything via a very slick dashboard running locally on its IP.
- rufugee 8y ago
  Very cool...thanks. I'll give it a serious look.
  - jaaames 8y ago
    Highly recommended, incredibly easy to set up and use.

greymeister 8y ago

> Modern online advertising companies are malicious entities that actively harm users, and I absolutely classify them as malware. This is exactly the response for anyone that is frustrated by blocking ads impacting revenue for web publishers. Had the ad tech not become so invasive and pernicious, users wouldn't be going out of the way for solutions like this. The advertisers have essentially forced our hand.

ethagnawl 8y ago
Exactly. I believe Troy has another post about this topic where he discusses why he's able to justify selling the single, static banner ad at the top of his site.
OzCrimson 8y ago
Where I feel my hand was forced was when a friend wanted help promoting a professional conference in the area of data and tech. I went to the website and, in the center of the page, there was an ad for cellulite cream. OH! C'MON!!! I believe in the conference, but I'm not going to share the link with that ad on it. It's been explained to me that the website owners don't know what ads are being served up. All they know is they signed up for an ad service. If that ad is a redirect to a porn site, the website owner has no clue unless people complain. And that's why I ordered a raspberry-pi to set up a pi-hole. I get that a lot of my friends won't like this. They're in advertising and marketing, and they insist that they're one of the good ones. Fine. But the bad ones are REALLY bad. Also. I've spent HOURS opting out of tracking cookies. Then I heard that my effort is only as good as the entities that respect that I opted out. OH? WOW! So, when I hear people complain that we're hurting them, and they're one of the good ones, it ignores the real problem. Look ... if I was bitten by 10 dogs out of 50 dogs, I'm gonna have a problem with dogs. Period. You can insist on how friendly your dog is, but no. Talk to the other dog owners before trying to get me to take another risk.
- PacifyFish 8y ago
  Someone's been searching for cellulite cream on Amazon!

mikestew 8y ago

My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked Where in THE hell are you going on the Internet? Wait, don't answer that. I only wonder because we sit at around 20-30% at our house (which is still ridiculous). But approaching 90%? Maybe I need to crank the blocklists up a notch, but I can't imagine even surfing porn sites all day that I could get anywhere near that percentage of blocked requests. But, man, I enjoy a challenge...

JadoJodo 8y ago
I've hit 75% before. My Roku desperately wants to phone home (25k requests/day).
- mikestew 8y ago
  Yeah, upvote for reminding me about chatty IoT crap. I've got a Nest right now that was phoning home every four seconds. Why, I have no idea, so now it doesn't phone home at all. And a Foscam camera that isn't as persistent, but still tries a few times a day. We're still at < 35% blocked, though.
- sandoz9 8y ago
  My Samsung TV wants to send home info about everything I watch.
zmw 8y ago
I’m only at 7.5%, probably because I use uMatrix in the first place, and have gone out of my way to kill a few applications that phone home like crazy.
freehunter 8y ago
Ever visited Forbes or Business Insider? Easily 90% of those sites are third-party scripts served from other domains.
- JadoJodo 8y ago
  This is why Forbes is in my blacklist.

cmurf 8y ago

This is really depressing. I immediately want to blame the ISP for empowering malicious entities to harm their paying customers. 88% is obscene.

fosco 8y ago

did you use the 'default' lists that come with the installation or did you add new ones? would you mind sharing your feed list?

econnor 8y ago

Whenever mine has gone much above 30% (70ish prob highest ever) it generally turns out to be an unattended app left open on the android device I have hanging off the back of the TV. I recall the NYT app, for example, pinging home every 30 seconds or so. You can trace offending devices and traffic via pi-hole logs. The UI is a bit clunky but gets the job done.