13 ms·

Just recently I experimented going without my pi-hole or any ad blocker software for 4 weeks to see what would happen. My goodness the internet is a dumpster f

by boyter 7y ago

Just recently I experimented going without my pi-hole or any ad blocker software for 4 weeks to see what would happen. My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load. Things I wanted to click that jumped when an ad loaded resulting in miss clicks. Annoying things following me around. It was especially bad on mobile with the GDRP/Cookie notices and ad's to the point that on my iPhone SE some pages had a thin smear of the actual content no taller than a single line of text. News sites were especially bad for this. With the experiment ended my pi-hole and ad blockers are now set to very on (and updated to this version and can confirm the block list went from 100,000 to 89,000) and I am much happier. Seems about 20% of the traffic on my network is blocked now which explains why some pages performed so awfully. The ad industry really needs to up its game because the current state of the web is just horrible.

madacoo 7y ago
Why four weeks? Surely you could have reached a similar conclusion in a day, or less? Or did you learn anything in that time that couldn't have been learnt in a short burst of unprotected internet activity?
- boyter 7y ago
  Seemed like a reasonable period of time. I got to see what the difference was on different devices including desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. I also got to see how they were affected for work, study and play over weekends and weekdays. I did notice I started to wait longer for pages to load with the ad's so that I would not accidentally click on them while they loaded in. That and I got generally annoyed by the web experience in general.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    This has always been my conclusion when I experiment with not using an ad blocker. So many websites with outwise "okayish" content are basically ruined by ads. Some sites are littered with "targeted" ads like download buttons and similar, which I'm not even sure why that's allowed. It's also fun on "big" websites like MS Teams, Netflix, hulu, etc, to see the "blocked" count raise into the hundreds.
paulcole 7y ago
If you’re into fun experiments, you can also try putting a few pennies into a jar whenever you visit a website or write a script to simply block the sites you need to visit.
- dinkleberg 7y ago
  That doesn’t sounds like a fun experiment at all!
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    more like full time job
- throwawawathrow 7y ago
  "But what about my business model? Don't you know I have an inalienable right to it?"
  - paulcole 7y ago
    How is that any different from someone thinking they have an inalienable right to any article/website they want?
    - kelnos 7y ago
      If your server sends bits back to my computer when I request them, it is perfectly within my right to decide which of those bits I do and do not want to see.
      - paulcole 7y ago
        This is like the people who say they can say what they want because of free speech. If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.
xienze 7y ago
> My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load. Yeah, people always knock pi-hole for not blocking "everything" like browser-based blockers do, but even though it's not perfect it still makes a huge difference. Due to some network changes I had to go without pi-hole for a couple days after having previously used it for years, and you never really appreciate how much crap pi-hole traps until it's gone.
- distances 7y ago
  Is it still worthwhile to set up if I have ad blocking in all my browsers?
  - hendersoon 7y ago
    Not for your browsers, no. UBlock Origin is far better than any host-based adblocker. I use pihole to block ads inside apps, it's unmatched for that.
    - distances 7y ago
      That would be a suitable use case, but I don't think I use any apps that contain ads.
      - jddj 7y ago
        It's not just ads in apps, it blocks tracking beacons too. If I connect my (big Chinese manufacturer's) android device to my vps which has the pihole running I can watch as one or two requests per second are blocked with no browser open.
      - bravoetch 7y ago
        Things like sonos devices make constant requests to metrics servers. Pi-hole drops that shit in a bottomless pit.
brenden2 7y ago
Yep, my experience as well. There must be a better way. I think we're warming up for a war since browsers (Chrome and Safari at least) have slowly started making it harder to block ads, which I think will becoming a creeping normality.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  It might work for the better in the long run. No possibility to block ads combined with advertiser's greed will eventually make the whole thing unusable. And I am okay with consuming less content. Maybe along with the fall of the internet advertising industry we'll reinvent the wheel from scratch. Paywalls are fine if you absolutely care about that content but they don't work so well alongside free content back-ed up by ads.
- mtsr 7y ago
  DoH in Firefox will bypass your pihole too and have all your DNS data go to cloudflare to boot.
  - MayeulC 7y ago
    Why couldn't pi-hole answer over http as well? You would also be able to use it from outside your home, without leaking your DNS traffic, or risking interception.
  - deadbunny 7y ago
    You can disable that; both at a network level, and in the browser itself. You can also choose a different DoH provider if you don't want to use cloudflare. Yes, it should be disabled by default but it not the end of the world. I would hazard a guess that when Chrome implements something similar that it won't be so easy to disable.
3xblah 7y ago
IME, it really depends on the website. If the user normally has Javascript disabled, then suddenly enables it on a graphical browser while visiting a news website, look out. Dumpster fire indeed. The user's computer resources are quickly usurped and things slow to a crawl. Users have been trained to be patient I guess, waiting for websites to "load". Interestingly, I find that many egregiously ad/tracker-laden websites actually "work" well enough without Javascript, meaning the content is readable, sometimes even the images are displayed. For these websites, it does not appear that they are purposely designed to be "unusable" without Javascript enabled. As a text-only browser user, I sometimes perceive some websites "do not work" with Javascript enabled. Trying to view them with the "recommended browser" with Javascript enabled makes the computer so unbearably slow and janky that I give up and go back to turning Javascript off.
- autoexec 7y ago
  > many egregiously ad/tracker-laden websites actually "work" well enough without Javascript, meaning the content is readable, sometimes even the images are displayed. Websites that can't manage to load an image without javascript are a pet peeve of mine and they are everywhere. News sites are the worst, but even popular images hosts where displaying images is their entire job fail miserably. At the very least sites that can't load the image should show a direct link to the image but they never do. I'd happily welcome back all the marquee tags and "under construction" banners of the past if we could take web development back to the point where we didn't need several massive JavaScript libraries hosted across multiple domains to do the most task like display an image.
vasili111 7y ago
Is there any special reason to use pi-hole + adblocker? Why just to not use one of them?
- Forbo 7y ago
  Adblockers can block specific paths/URLs, where Pi-Hole is DNS level only.
- schwartzworld 7y ago
  Pi-hole blocks ads for any device on your network. I consider it a courtesy for guests.
martinmunk 7y ago
I tried running pi-hole for a few days, but went back to pfBlockerNG. The ui is nice, but not really anything i care to look at as long as it works. AFAIK pfBlockerNG not only blocks the domains, but the IPs they resolve to as well, meaning no funny business will get around it. I realize it requires a pfsense router out similar, but don't understand why it's not brought up more alongside pi-hole.
tjoff 7y ago
Maybe don't use pi-hole and just stop visiting sites that disrespect their users? You don't really miss out on anything and actually reward proper sites.
- schwartzworld 7y ago
  Maybe don't use something free and awesome to improve your experience and instead find whatever magical slice of the internet isn't ad driven? It takes a few minutes to set up pi-hole, and it isn't just for websites either. It happily swallows in-app advertisements. The benefits are extended to anybody on your wifi. What possible reason would you have to not use it?
  - tjoff 7y ago
    The same reason you don't pirate photoshop. Adobe don't mind. You wouldn't buy it anyway. What suffers is the cheaper/free competition that is completely starved. Surely you realize that avoiding disrespectful sites and seeking proper sites will send a message? Two actually, one that that kind of shit isn't acceptable and second, that you appreciate honest people. If you can't be bothered then maybe we actually deserve the cesspool we've created.
modsiw 7y ago
I wonder if the ads are now targeted more toward the idiot end of the spectrum as the only people without ad blockers...

by boyter 7y ago

madacoo 7y ago

Why four weeks? Surely you could have reached a similar conclusion in a day, or less? Or did you learn anything in that time that couldn't have been learnt in a short burst of unprotected internet activity?

boyter 7y ago
Seemed like a reasonable period of time. I got to see what the difference was on different devices including desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. I also got to see how they were affected for work, study and play over weekends and weekdays. I did notice I started to wait longer for pages to load with the ad's so that I would not accidentally click on them while they loaded in. That and I got generally annoyed by the web experience in general.
- penagwin 7y ago
  This has always been my conclusion when I experiment with not using an ad blocker. So many websites with outwise "okayish" content are basically ruined by ads. Some sites are littered with "targeted" ads like download buttons and similar, which I'm not even sure why that's allowed. It's also fun on "big" websites like MS Teams, Netflix, hulu, etc, to see the "blocked" count raise into the hundreds.

paulcole 7y ago

If you’re into fun experiments, you can also try putting a few pennies into a jar whenever you visit a website or write a script to simply block the sites you need to visit.

dinkleberg 7y ago
That doesn’t sounds like a fun experiment at all!
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  more like full time job
throwawawathrow 7y ago
"But what about my business model? Don't you know I have an inalienable right to it?"
- paulcole 7y ago
  How is that any different from someone thinking they have an inalienable right to any article/website they want?
  - kelnos 7y ago
    If your server sends bits back to my computer when I request them, it is perfectly within my right to decide which of those bits I do and do not want to see.
    - paulcole 7y ago
      This is like the people who say they can say what they want because of free speech. If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.

xienze 7y ago

> My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load. Yeah, people always knock pi-hole for not blocking "everything" like browser-based blockers do, but even though it's not perfect it still makes a huge difference. Due to some network changes I had to go without pi-hole for a couple days after having previously used it for years, and you never really appreciate how much crap pi-hole traps until it's gone.

distances 7y ago
Is it still worthwhile to set up if I have ad blocking in all my browsers?
- hendersoon 7y ago
  Not for your browsers, no. UBlock Origin is far better than any host-based adblocker. I use pihole to block ads inside apps, it's unmatched for that.
  - distances 7y ago
    That would be a suitable use case, but I don't think I use any apps that contain ads.
    - jddj 7y ago
      It's not just ads in apps, it blocks tracking beacons too. If I connect my (big Chinese manufacturer's) android device to my vps which has the pihole running I can watch as one or two requests per second are blocked with no browser open.
    - bravoetch 7y ago
      Things like sonos devices make constant requests to metrics servers. Pi-hole drops that shit in a bottomless pit.

brenden2 7y ago

Yep, my experience as well. There must be a better way. I think we're warming up for a war since browsers (Chrome and Safari at least) have slowly started making it harder to block ads, which I think will becoming a creeping normality.

onemoresoop 7y ago
It might work for the better in the long run. No possibility to block ads combined with advertiser's greed will eventually make the whole thing unusable. And I am okay with consuming less content. Maybe along with the fall of the internet advertising industry we'll reinvent the wheel from scratch. Paywalls are fine if you absolutely care about that content but they don't work so well alongside free content back-ed up by ads.
mtsr 7y ago
DoH in Firefox will bypass your pihole too and have all your DNS data go to cloudflare to boot.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  Why couldn't pi-hole answer over http as well? You would also be able to use it from outside your home, without leaking your DNS traffic, or risking interception.
- deadbunny 7y ago
  You can disable that; both at a network level, and in the browser itself. You can also choose a different DoH provider if you don't want to use cloudflare. Yes, it should be disabled by default but it not the end of the world. I would hazard a guess that when Chrome implements something similar that it won't be so easy to disable.

3xblah 7y ago

IME, it really depends on the website. If the user normally has Javascript disabled, then suddenly enables it on a graphical browser while visiting a news website, look out. Dumpster fire indeed. The user's computer resources are quickly usurped and things slow to a crawl. Users have been trained to be patient I guess, waiting for websites to "load". Interestingly, I find that many egregiously ad/tracker-laden websites actually "work" well enough without Javascript, meaning the content is readable, sometimes even the images are displayed. For these websites, it does not appear that they are purposely designed to be "unusable" without Javascript enabled. As a text-only browser user, I sometimes perceive some websites "do not work" with Javascript enabled. Trying to view them with the "recommended browser" with Javascript enabled makes the computer so unbearably slow and janky that I give up and go back to turning Javascript off.

autoexec 7y ago
> many egregiously ad/tracker-laden websites actually "work" well enough without Javascript, meaning the content is readable, sometimes even the images are displayed. Websites that can't manage to load an image without javascript are a pet peeve of mine and they are everywhere. News sites are the worst, but even popular images hosts where displaying images is their entire job fail miserably. At the very least sites that can't load the image should show a direct link to the image but they never do. I'd happily welcome back all the marquee tags and "under construction" banners of the past if we could take web development back to the point where we didn't need several massive JavaScript libraries hosted across multiple domains to do the most task like display an image.

vasili111 7y ago

Is there any special reason to use pi-hole + adblocker? Why just to not use one of them?

Forbo 7y ago
Adblockers can block specific paths/URLs, where Pi-Hole is DNS level only.
schwartzworld 7y ago
Pi-hole blocks ads for any device on your network. I consider it a courtesy for guests.

martinmunk 7y ago

I tried running pi-hole for a few days, but went back to pfBlockerNG. The ui is nice, but not really anything i care to look at as long as it works. AFAIK pfBlockerNG not only blocks the domains, but the IPs they resolve to as well, meaning no funny business will get around it. I realize it requires a pfsense router out similar, but don't understand why it's not brought up more alongside pi-hole.

tjoff 7y ago

Maybe don't use pi-hole and just stop visiting sites that disrespect their users? You don't really miss out on anything and actually reward proper sites.

schwartzworld 7y ago
Maybe don't use something free and awesome to improve your experience and instead find whatever magical slice of the internet isn't ad driven? It takes a few minutes to set up pi-hole, and it isn't just for websites either. It happily swallows in-app advertisements. The benefits are extended to anybody on your wifi. What possible reason would you have to not use it?
- tjoff 7y ago
  The same reason you don't pirate photoshop. Adobe don't mind. You wouldn't buy it anyway. What suffers is the cheaper/free competition that is completely starved. Surely you realize that avoiding disrespectful sites and seeking proper sites will send a message? Two actually, one that that kind of shit isn't acceptable and second, that you appreciate honest people. If you can't be bothered then maybe we actually deserve the cesspool we've created.

modsiw 7y ago

I wonder if the ads are now targeted more toward the idiot end of the spectrum as the only people without ad blockers...