14 ms·

I Block Ads

281 points by cdme 3y ago

gaudat 3y ago
If you ever heard your friends complaining about the amount of ads they get on their phones and computers, gladly spend a while to help them install something like Ublock Origin. Let the less techy public know there is a way out.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Or they could boycott sites and services with the most intrusive ads. Ad blocking just encourages escalation, whereas a boycott of the hosting site sends a stronger and more ethical signal.
  - alexhsamuel 3y ago
    I disagree with the implication that there is anything at all unethical (so that anything else could be "more ethical") about blocking ads.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  This will also help add to the outrage if ad blockers are ever taken from us by some means.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    There isn’t really a way to take away ad blockers. Of course, a site can be made to not work with ad blockers, but then that’s their decision I guess. I’m happy to not use a service in that case.
- mgbmtl 3y ago
  Yep (and be pragmatic/emphatic, a lot of this stuff can seem obscure to non-techies). My partner/wife is a long-time iPhone fan. I never tried to convert her, but she is on the point of switching to Android because she can't use Firefox on iOS. It's completely absurd too - to discard a perfectly fine device otherwise, just because it cannot block ads, or at least, cannot run uBlock Origin (for blocking cookie-banners, social annoyances, etc).
  - judge2020 3y ago
    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/id989804926 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i... ? Or is it not "can't use Firefox on iOS" but "doesn't have x feature from Firefox on Desktop"?
    - mgbmtl 3y ago
      Last time I checked, it was just a Safari webview, and missed a lot of features compared to Firefox on Android. Has that changed recently? Other nice thing of Firefox on Android: being able to listen to Youtube videos even when the screen is turned off. (I'm sure there are solutions, but many seemed sketchy or didn't work well)
      - judge2020 3y ago
        What are the features missing then? The main one I can see is edit PDFs directly[0], but I'd bet money that Mozilla wouldn't implement that on iOS anyways. FF can largely do exactly the same thing they do on Desktop to attract people: create a privacy-focused browser (if that's even what they're doing) and things like syncing your bookmarks, passwords, using Firefox VPN, and blocking ads. 0: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
        Larrikin 3y ago
        No proper ad blocking. Firefox Privacy has some limited blocking but Cloudflare has rendered it useless and gets me into infinite captcha loops. Tailscale plus Adguard has finally brought sanity to all my mobile devices thankfully.
      - realityloop 3y ago
        You can play yt videos with screen off using vinegar if you pop the video out to pip view it will be able to keep playing when you turn the screen off. https://apps.apple.com/au/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303229 https://apps.apple.com/au/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Recently setup a W11 VFIO VM, even on its own MITM'd vNIC with DPI and custom heurestics to cut most out the naughty MSFT traffic: it was still a dizzying assault of ads and noiseware; being transported from serene LTSC W10 to the cyberpunk advertisment plaza of W11 was like my brain segfaulting. I won't lie: I could barely think with all the attention-grabbing, adtech bloat. Scary! Is there a way we can help people who don't know they're being exploited like this?
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  I'm almost afraid that if the userbase of effective ad blocking gets big enough, large firms like google will put even more resources into the anti-ad blocking like what is happening with Chrome's new plugin api. I feel like letting people enjoy the ads if they don't know any better is a little smoke screen for people who do know better.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    Isn't it already "big"? Over 25% in US according to https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/#topicOverv...
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      Oh dang, yeah that's a decent chunk.
chasebank 3y ago
Advertising is so completely intertwined with everyday life, it’s impossible to block them. The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR. The ultimate brainwash. Most of HN and Reddit content is advertisement whether you realize or not. Front page CNN, outside of weather events and sports, it’s closing in on 100%.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  What do you mean by “HN and Reddit content?” I think most of the people here are real (not ad bots) and most of the comments are just their opinions. I mean you can sometimes see folks who are clearly either super-fans or actual paid shills, but if they were the majority, I think people would give up on the sites.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Some of the HN content is explicitly advertising (the posts you see you can't comment on) but some percentage of the "native/organic" content posts are just advertising - which may not be bad mind you, I'd much rather have company X put $Yk dollars into well written posts that are actually useful than have them buy a stadium. But other are pretty thinly veiled, and some commenters are pretty obviously pushing something. It gets cleaned up decently well.
  - 93po 3y ago
    It's wild how often I click the comments on a reddit post and there's a link to buy something within the first full screen display of comments. Most recently it was some random dish towel in the background of a staged couples-prank video.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  I find product placement and 'organic' ads annoying, but I don't think they are as effective as regular old advertisements. If they were, the fraction of the advertising budget would be heavily shifted towards 'product placement' and away from '30 second pre-roll ads' and banner ads.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I'm about to reach this peak of enlightenment. I'm almost there. And yes, many family friends (non-technical and even a tad technical ones) are super happy with me setting up some form of ad-blocking, at least in their browsers. The internet has become a scary place.
- npteljes 3y ago
  Always have been. Online ads were obnoxious since the existence of them. And in the before times, there were no ad blockers, and there were popups, then pop-unders, I had no idea WTF was going on. And the first ad blockers made browsing noticeably slower too.
stalfosknight 3y ago
I wish it were possible to thoroughly ban all advertising and marketing. I have been that fed up with all of this crap for a long time now.
- rahidz 3y ago
  Yes, or at least all third-party marketing and advertising.
ltbarcly3 3y ago
Advertising based 'free' things cost you far more than a subscription ever would. This is because Advertising Works and it works on you too. You are being manipulated into buying things you wouldn't buy, manipulated into making poor decisions you wouldn't otherwise make. Generations of people lost decades with relatives from smoking and drinking that would not have happened but for advertising. Advertising makes people poorer by leading them to allocate their funds in a worse way. I'm not saying we should outlaw advertising, there is no realistic way to do so that respects rights. However, you should absolutely refuse to consume advertising whenever possible. Block it, mute it, and refuse to consume content or use services where avoiding advertising is not possible!
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  That depends on the cost of the subscription, the things being advertised, and the audience's will power.
  - ltbarcly3 3y ago
    I see what you are saying, but you are not correct on any of these points. 'depends on cost': It can't actually depend, on average. Advertisers keep spending money because they make more back overall than they spend on advertising. Only a small fraction of that increase in income is paid in fees to the platform that is funded by the advertising. To make the same amount of money, the platform would only have to charge you a small fraction of what advertisers are making off of those same users. Advertising isn't a battle of wills, it is leveraging psychology to manipulate you in ways you aren't even aware of. It works on you just as well as it works on everyone else, if you don't think so it probably works better than average.
    - mawise 3y ago
      Ehh, the ad networks want advertiser to believe that but they also do sketchy things like intercepting (and taking credit for) customers who already had an intent to purchase. There was a big story about Uber cutting lots of ad spending with little impact a while ago: https://thehustle.co/01072021-uber-ad-spend/ https://thehustle.co/01072021-uber-ad-spend/
moolcool 3y ago
“Advertisement is the rich asking for more money. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.” — G.K. Chesterton
- Atlas22 3y ago
  While I would agree the vast majority of the time, ads are also used heavily by small businesses and independent developers to gauge interest and even just to keep the lights on sometimes. Mostly referring to online ads, billboards and TV ads are much more expensive and are far more risky for small businesses.
  - moolcool 3y ago
    I don't like this argument. As if an indie shoemaker should be grateful to have the privilege to get in a bidding war against Nike for who can give Facebook more money to get noticed.
  - DirkH 3y ago
    Just want to point out I think there's a big difference between using tracking to "gauge interest" and using ads. You can do one without the other. In fact, there are even privacy-respecting alternatives for businesses to track online traffic.
    - nickwritesit 3y ago
      I tend to agree, even though the line can be blurry. I was more anti this kind of stuff until I used Google Analytics for the first time and saw how you could fiddle with just a few things on a page and decrease bounce rate or increase how long people stayed on page (reading the article, one hopes). I always assumed it'd involve more quality compromise or something but it's often just changing a headline and showing more before the fold. Seems like it benefits everyone to enable those kinds of iterations.
      - DirkH 3y ago
        But can't you use services that provide the exact same analytics benefit without Google's abysmal privacy policy? Privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives include: Matomo, Plausible, Umami, Nullitics, Shynet, Pirshc, Swetrix, Cabin, Aptabase I haven't used these and would use Google Analytics if it were indeed just too much better than everything else out there. But if another service gives me everything Google Analytics provides and more, why continue using Google Analytics? I wouldn't know though since I've never tried using these. I just know about them.
solarist 3y ago
I fully on agree on all the points and I try to protect my home (network), but I feel that’s a lost cause both from technical (e.g. dns on http/3) and psychological (more subtle and mixed with the actual content) aspects. My only hope is to try to digitally vaccinate my kids that they become more self aware on what they are exposed to.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rexreed 3y ago
Good list. Is there anything not included on this list that should be?
- houseatrielah 3y ago
  Browser-fingerprinting.
- morning-coffee 3y ago
  Would love to see links to information on how to block some of the particular avenues mentioned. Some I haven't heard of yet. I use a pi-hole and uBlock Origin, but am always up to learn more...
  - cdme 3y ago
    I debated linking solutions I use but didn’t want the post, in that way, to advertise anything.
    - voisin 3y ago
      It would be at the benefit of being more useful for readers.
      - cdme 3y ago
        I'll look at throwing together a repository in the model of the `awesome-<tool>` set that's more comprehensive than my specific use case and open it up to contribution for tools I'm not familiar with.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - rahidz 3y ago
    I pay for AdGuard (not an ad, I promise!) for Android. Other than that unlock Origin like you said, plus SponsorBlock on mobile and PC. ReVanced patch of Twitter and YouTube on mobile to block ads there (though I also pay for YouTube Plus), and "Orange TV Ad Free" for Twitch.
sergiotapia 3y ago
Use Brave Browser for insta-blocking all ads. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ Install Sponsorblock to remove sponsored content and fluff from videos. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y... Install SmartTubeNext on your Android TV device to watch youtube with no ads + sponsorblock support baked in. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext/blob/master/README... Install Revanced on your android mobile phone to watch youtube with no ads + sponsorblock support baked in. https://old.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/ https://old.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/
- stragies 3y ago
  And then pay for Youtube Premium, so they (hopefully) don't 'oops' your GoogleMail account 'by accident' one day?
pachico 3y ago
Damn, I was reading this hoping it was the page of the ultimate browser/mobile app or extension... How did we get so far without having all this by default?
chconsults 3y ago
This guy blocks.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
Imagine how much would be gained if advertising were lost.
aidenn0 3y ago
I don't block adds, I only block tracking cookies, and yet I am told repeatedly by websites that I am blocking ads on a daily basis, and that they will go out of business if I don't disable my "ad blocker." Meanwhile I am quite content with pages that show me full-width banner ads without tracking me.
- judge2020 3y ago
  How do you block tracking but not ads? As in, do you let adsense ads show up, which track you? If not, why do you think the site wouldn't think you are blocking ads?
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    This is a complaint that virtually every single ad out there is actually spyware that tracks you, with the "ad" part being almost like an afterthought.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - jagged-chisel 3y ago
    Blocking cookies. As in, the cookie gets ignored instead of being stored. No cookie returned to the server on future requests. Of course there’s also “use the cookies for this session and delete them later.” In any case, “blocking” cookies is not the same as blocking ads.
    - judge2020 3y ago
      Blocking just cookies isn't necessarily achieving the goal of blocking tracking, though, since the idea is that ad networks commonly fingerprint you and combine any of those signals with your IP address to enable cookie-less tracking and ad targeting.
      - 3y ago
jdthedisciple 3y ago
In before the "do you also steal from restaurants?"-clowns join the discussion. lmao They're simply the funniest And yes it's the most common "retort" to ad-blocking I always hear.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I think there will be almost no posters here to defend ads, which is really something, given that this is a tech site and a whole lot of the sector is ad-driven. Hopefully this indicates that there will be room for something better soon. Or maybe it just indicates that the ad guys have so throughly beat us that they don’t even feel the need to come argue anymore.
  - petercooper 3y ago
    Different topics suit different venues. HN, like any similar forum, is not suited to objective debate on all topics. On any forum, there are some topics where a broad consensus is held and maintained by participants. Advertising is one of those topics on HN.
    - jader201 3y ago
      I defended ads (to an extent) in a comment above [1], but it hasn't been received well (unsurprisingly). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36048236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36048236
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        It doesn’t look greyed out on my side at least, so I guess you must be sitting at around 0 at least as far as votes go. Which is nice, it is good to at least have someone representing the position, even if I disagree with it.
javajosh 3y ago
"No communication with me without my consent," is something I want in society, and that is violated by virtually all advertising, everywhere. I wish this was the social norm. The compromise is what the OP did, reactive, only-really-available-to-tech-folk measures. This is unfortunate. Personally, I would not consent to any communication that was paid for. In that case it's money talking, not the person, and this is quite confusing for people including me.
- anonporridge 3y ago
  > No communication with me without my consent That's not practically possible unless you choose to live alone in a controlled box. Even the infrastructure you're forced to interact with is a form of communication that manipulates you into certain behaviors. But then, maybe that's where we're headed as a society with the explosion of one person households, remote work, and delivery services. It's increasingly possible for the majority of people to actually live a completely solitary life, controlling their information input by restricting it only to a screen. https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    You can get pretty close. Turn on do-not-disturb and ignore your mailboxes. Become unreachable. Become ungovernable.
    - anonporridge 3y ago
      And become irrelevant and uninfluential to the Human Colossus. https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part1 https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part1 The tradeoff to extricating yourself from being influenced without your consent, is that you lose the ability to you yourself influence how society and civilization progresses.
      - TechBro8615 3y ago
        That's an interesting and important point. I suppose if everyone takes this attitude then society would fall apart, unless people are spontaneously feeling the need to connect with each other. But I'm skeptical that you need to acquiesce to the increasingly corporate communications vying for your attention, just to stay available for real human connection. The internet is a medium that facilitates asynchronous communications with like minds. You can leave a comment on a website, or link to your blog post, as a beacon to anyone who's opted into a similar filter bubble. They can find it and contact you. Yes, it will be unsolicited, but not in the same way as a marketing email or billing notice is unsolicited. Nobody is communicating without consent when publishers and readers are participating in a shared community. If I publish a blog post on my hobby, and someone I've never met emails me about partnering on a project for the hobby, then although it's unsolicited, I would still appreciate the email and follow up. It might take me a while to notice it since I only check my email every few days, but I will almost certainly reply. A personal connection is a welcome respite from a noisy onslaught of automated communications.
ra1n 3y ago
How do you automatically remove UTM tracking parts of the URLs by default ? Is there a browser extension ?
- judge2020 3y ago
  UTM tracking is probably the least of your concerns - all it does is aid in campaign analytics for the website you're visiting, it would do nothing to the third-party behavior and activity trackers that you're likely trying to avoid.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    UTM is Google Analytics and also helps Google do ad targeting even if they don't want to admit it.
    - judge2020 3y ago
      UTM tags in that sense are collected on the client side by tag manager or google analytics, which would be blocked by an ad-blocking extension anyways. UTM tags can/often are collected by the website themselves to do first-party near-100% confidence campaign analytics.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        So what you're saying is that there is plenty of other spyware (some of it server-side) that freeloads off those UTM query params? Sounds like another good reason to strip them?
        judge2020 3y ago
        That may be the case for blog sites, but big companies just directly ingest it into their application or internal analytics platform for a dashboard of which sources were the biggest contributors. For example - a company sends out a newsletter with a link to a blog post goes out to 20k subscribers with UTM params, but those UTM params end up getting 100k clicks, 80k with a referer of "news.ycombinator.com". This means that someone posted it on HN with those UTM params, which indicates that they should continue to prioritize that newsletter, since the audience is likely to cause a snowball effect of traffic and thus growth. Is that a bad thing? Knowing that traffic came from x source so that they can properly route future resources to the those high-impact sources?
Mistletoe 3y ago
People say that we won’t have any of the stuff we have on the new internet if we block ads and “don’t pay for it somehow” but I liked the old internet better, so this is win/win.
gigel82 3y ago
I mean, all that is the min-bar, isn't it?
waboremo 3y ago
Short simple and to the point (unlike my comment, but alas). I recently tried a little experiment, where I would use the internet without adblocker (or similar like DNS filtering, extensions to remove annoyances, etc). I thought to myself I was in my little sheltered bubble a bit too long having access to these things that make browsing seamless, even enjoyable. I wasn't shocked by what I found, but I was disturbed by how universally unusable it has become. No wonder people stick to their containment zones on Reddit or Instagram. You search something up, you get a bunch of ads to scroll through. Fine for me, I know what link to look for, but most don't. Huge issue. You visit the website, you're bombarded with a video ad in the corner, banner ads on the side, a notification banner up top, a chat bubble in the other corner, and a cookie banner in the middle with garbage defaults. You get through all of that miraculously on your phone, but the article disappears to show a giant ad as a background, before reappearing again if you keep scrolling. Again, I know these horrible patterns I can navigate through them, but how does somebody's grandma? The internet is so frustrating because so much of it has been horribly tainted by the ad industry. Every single aspect, every single feature, gets misused by the ad industry. You thought deeper GPU access would mean fully fledged games in the browser? Nah we're just using it to profile you better. We're spending billions of dollars on developing a new social app, oh but it's not to improve communication, no we just want you to get hooked on it to see more ads. Block all the ads and annoyances you want. Until we get thorough data privacy laws, it's your duty to block them. Go on, I know how it impacts me directly/indirectly, as I'm a web developer who spends far too much time persuading clients not to load up their sites with this BS. You should still block them.
submeta 3y ago
Whenever I'm sitting in front of a computer that isn't using ad blockers, I'm shocked to see how polluted websites are, practically yelling at me, vying for my attention. How can folks concentrate on an article without ad blockers? Then there are those ads in YouTube videos and blog articles purporting to offer the reader something valuable when, in fact, they're packed with falsehoods ("xyz changed my life, and if you want to check it out, please click on this affiliate link"). While I can't block ads on the radio, on the internet, I make a point of blocking every ad I can. There are other ways to reward an author or a website. For instance, I block ads on sites like Haaretz, but I do subscribe to them because I believe quality content deserves compensation.
- ollien 3y ago
  I haven't used an ad blocker in years. The short answer: you get used to it. Banner blindness is a real thing
  - V1ndaar 3y ago
    Might you explain /why/?
    - lemper 3y ago
      he works for ad company, is what crossed in my mind.
      - ollien 3y ago
        Hah, nope. Not my cup of tea :)
    - eimrine 3y ago
      Maybe he does not surf websites with low-quality content.
    - ollien 3y ago
      Sorry for the late reply, I didn't think to check back on this :) A couple reasons: Back when I did use them, I got really bothered by sites breaking, and I'd rather have the ads than dealing with "is this broken because of my ad blocker or is the site broken". Now, I've just gotten to the point where I don't really mind. The other part is there's enough content I consume that is supported by ads that I would like to continue supporting, without having to consciously opt into it (e.g. news sites; I don't want to pay a subscription for every newspaper but am happy to contribute to what little money they get from ads)
Animats 3y ago
I block ads in Google search results. And I don't use Microsoft operating systems.
alyandon 3y ago
I block the page visibility API. I'd love to find out more information on how to prevent web pages from knowing if they are visible or not.
- alex_lav 3y ago
  I didn’t check, so they may have already accommodated me, but I’d really love a detailed write up of how the person that wrote this blog post solved each listed problem.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  Found these extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Haven't tried either of them though. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-page-visibility-a/eecfoibnnhheckhfokpihgefmlnenofb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-page-visib... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-page-visibility/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-page-...
  - stragies 3y ago
    "Pausing playback of a video or other processing in a background tab is useful to save energy. So only enable this add-on if you can afford it. There are other ways to detect if a webpage is visible, e.g. onblur/onfocus. This add-on does not disable any of those other ways. So do not assume that this add-on will enhance your privacy." From the Readme of the FF addon.
omginternets 3y ago
I occasionally tear down ads in public spaces. I'm sure many will disagree with me, but I do think we should be able to move through public spaces without the incessant assault on one's attention and head space. I haven't been caught yet, though I'm sure I someday will, at which point I'll pay the fine and keep doing it anyway.
- jurassicfoxy 3y ago
  I find highway billboards and store signage to be a particularly awful display, and I'd be overjoyed for them to be banned entirely. I have often thought about cutting down highway billboards, although I'm not quite intense enough for that.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    Quite. Also, here in the US, gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump. I cannot stress how angry I am about this. One of the last places where I could just day-dream has now been deemed "up for grabs" by the lowest form of shit-peddler in the modern world. Pause for a second to consider the absurdity of being blasted with advertisements while paying for a product. Talk about double-dipping... Suggestions welcome.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      There is a mute button, sometimes labelled, sometimes hidden, but try pressing them all. Doesn't help much, but helps a little. And then stick some unapproved sticker on the pump of your choosing.
      - omginternets 3y ago
        The stickers are a good idea. I also wonder if there's a discrete way of permanently damaging a speaker, e.g. with a magnet or something that could fit discretely in the palm of one's hand.
Pxtl 3y ago
I used to avoid blocking ads on principle -- a sort of "social contract" thing since I'm consuming ad-supported content. Then one day I found my kids' PC had its homepage changed to some scamware site. Now I block ads on all my family machines. They broke the social contract.
globular-toast 3y ago
Me too. In addition I physically look away if I'm confronted with ads in real life. For example, when watching Youtube at a friends house or something. I purposely talk loudly over ads in the cinema etc. I am annoyed by ads I can't block such as billboards and the like. Unless I ask you, I do not want your product. I am happy. I do not want whatever you want me to want. Kindly fuck off. Thanks.
numbsafari 3y ago
I was stuck at an airport. I downloaded a free backgammon app on my iPhone, to kill some time. It showed me ads between every game. The ads were mostly for other apps. Most of those apps were games. Games that involved implied incestuous rape, non-consensual voyeurism, and other highly repulsive things. I just wanted to play backgammon. I uninstalled the app (thankfully, that's an easy thing to do on iOS, for now...). My main reason for blocking ads at this point, is because the ads that get served on what should be otherwise inoffensive websites, contain vile imagery or otherwise offensive content. Seriously, I get that they put one ad for toe fungus next to the ad they really want you to click on because the toe fungus draws your eye in, but I don't need this shit in my life.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I just want simple games you pay your $2-5 for and you never see any ads. Apple should offer "App Store Plus" where you pay $10/20/30 whatever a month and all the ad-infested apps just show nothing.
  - zmnd 3y ago
    like.. apple arcade?
  - stalfosknight 3y ago
    It's called Apple Arcade.
- zmnd 3y ago
  If you don't want to see ads, why you didn't want to pay a couple of dollars for an app? Or how do you see developers compensated in this case?
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Paying doesn't actually solve the problem. Some time ago I bought "Angry Birds classic" app on iOS - it's a paid app that promised to bring back the "old" Angry Birds before it turned to crap. On first launch I was met with a mandatory "privacy" policy I couldn't decline that was asking me to consent to being spied upon. I ended up getting a refund through Apple.
redleggedfrog 3y ago
Surprised to encounter someone more vehemently against ads than me. But I appreciate the sentiment, and bookmarked the site so I can try some of those things myself. I pay for what I want to look at, not with my time and attention, but money, the way God intended it.
tkuraku 3y ago
I use ublock origin with Firefox on Android and desktop plus a pihole. On my phone I have setup wireguard to VPN back to my house so I have pihole everywhere I go.
Timber-6539 3y ago
I hate Ads. They take up unnecessary bandwidth (pi-Hole shows me a good 15% of my total queries is ad-related noise). Add that to autoplay videos/gifs on an limited data plan and its clear that ad content has no use for me, other than suck up data at my expense.
maest 3y ago
Yes, ads suck. However, here's my take on advertising: Modern economic markets are a decentralized process via which we decide how to best allocate resources. For this to work, we need a mechanism that allows information to be broadcasted through the system to ensure local decisions make sense. (In fact, information asymmetry is one of the main failure modes of modern markets). So, yeah, advertising sucks, but 1. it's an important part of our market economy and 2. it therefore adds a lot of value to the world. I actually have a hard time reconciling the reasoning above with how icky, insidious and unpleasant marketing feels when I get subjected to it.
- abenga 3y ago
  Relevant, non-obtrusive ads are kinda sort of fine, or at best bearable. What sucks is inability to opt out of specific ads due to inappropriateness or irrelevance. I need to to tell YouTube every couple of weeks that I don't want to see betting company ads just because I watch NBA and soccer videos. No matter how much I say this is "Not Appropriate" or "Not Relevant", every two weeks, there is Emmanuel Adebayor telling me to use some betting app (it's always the same ad). I finally caved and installed Smarttube on my Android TV.
shortformblog 3y ago
As someone who has worked in marketing … I think adtech created stances like this. If advertising worked like it did before about 1994 or so, I think we’d see fewer complaints of this nature. Adtech overplayed its hand for a quarter-century. The thing that sucks about this, IMHO, is that it makes no room for above-board players. Doesn’t matter that it supports millions of jobs. Doesn’t matter that there are lots of well-intentioned people out there who just happen to work in advertising. This guy is 100% within his right. And honestly, the sector deserves it. Bad actors destroyed a lot of goodwill in the name of performance and better numbers. But I wish it didn’t.
- deepspace 3y ago
  For me, specifically, Forbes destroyed the line between bad actors and above board players. Back when sites started to detect ad-blockers, Forbes asked users to disable their blockers, for the usual reasons. Trusting them, beings respectable breed source, I and others whitelisted Forbes, and promptly got hit by malware distributed by ads on their site. Because Forbes could not be bothered to screen the ads on their site, I now relentlessly block ads just like the author of the article.
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    I should note that Forbes is probably the traditional media outlet that has been most willing to mix advertising and editorial in questionable ways. It has gotten better about its approach in recent years, but it is certainly not perfect.
    - 93po 3y ago
      Product placement and native advertising is rampant across all media.
      - shortformblog 3y ago
        And I said Forbes was one of the worst examples of it. They pioneered a lot of the darker patterns among major media outlets.
elwell 3y ago
As much as I hate ads, as a thought experiment I wonder how much less or more the world would have progressed without that form of information dissemination (paid advertising specifically).
thorwagoog 3y ago
Am I the only person who thought that list was a poem? :) Here is how my mind read it: I block ads in the browser, I block their DNS I block beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs I block analytics, reporting, and diagnostic logging I block programmatic pleas to disable ad-blocking I strip query strings from UTM campaign tags I unshorten URLs to avoid tracking hacks I stop autoplay for the videos on my feed I block all the cookies that your websites don't strictly need I block the visibility API on your page I block prompts to install your app in a fit of rage I block hidden pixels that track my email Which surely gets masked but to no avail As I unsubscribe from your mailing list, dork And block your address if that doesn't work I block and report SMS that have ads Phone calls get ignored if not from my contacts I pay a company to wrangle data brokers for the win And trust me, junk mail goes straight into the bin As I unsubscribe from it all when I can I block ads, and you should block too, my dear friend (Written organically, without ChatGPT or the like)
- _rs 3y ago
  I would argue the post already is a poem
- jraph 3y ago
  Someone needs to write a melody for this
  - greenyoda 3y ago
    The words, as grouped above, somewhat match the cadence of the "Major-General's Song": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major-General%27s_Song#Lyrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major-General%27s_Song#Lyrics Just needs a few more syllables to make it fit, e.g., I block ads in the browser, and I also block their DNS I block the beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs ...
- sunshadow 3y ago
  I find it amusing that you felt you had to write "written organically" to claim authorship.
Hitton 3y ago
Something you can block too, but isn't mentioned in the article are sponsored content ads in videos, use SponsorBlock for that. That said I'm far from this radical, even though it's mostly because I hate the troubleshooting when a site breaks and I'm trying to find what caused it.
SergeAx 3y ago
Hi, Cory! I brush my teeth.
jader201 3y ago
There’s a lot of ad hate in this thread — and on HN in general — that sometimes feels a bit naive. In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own. So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far, so I eventually— and begrudgingly — added ads. I was very intentional about keeping them as unobtrusive as possible: just some banner ads at the top and bottom of each thread and forum, and a square next to the first unread comment. I hated pop-ups (the kind that opened in a new window — very common at that time), and I didn’t have them on any other page on the site (just forums). This gained me about 10x the revenue I got from donations alone, and was able to scale the site’s hardware, allowing me to keep the site up and running for nearly 20 years, and provided some modest passive income for a time. (I just recently sold it to someone else, but it’s still up and running.) My point is, that wouldn’t have been possible without ads. I agree with most of you: sites today have a ridiculous number of ads and are very intrusive. But for sites that don’t go overboard, or for small independent YouTube channels, I don’t mind allowing the ads, because I know they probably wouldn’t make it otherwise. Yes, I hear the comments saying “maybe they shouldn’t exist if they can’t monetize without ads”, but I’m not sure I agree. There are many that just wouldn’t survive with donations alone, and a subscription model may not make sense. There are just some cases where ads make sense for them, and I’m ok with that (with the caveat they don’t go overboard), and because I’ve been on the other side, I don’t block ads.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  > In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own. > So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far A site that has to rely on ads to survive doesn't have a viable business model, or in your case interesting enough/in demand enough content. It's as simple as that. Ads are largely a false economy anyway.
  - stevenwliao 3y ago
jacooper 3y ago
Personally my issue with ads aren't the ads themselves, its the tracking and digital stalking that big tech does for ad targeting.
tombert 3y ago
You know, I don't even want to deprive people of money; as a yuppie who has money nowadays I am not opposed to paying for things I use if I could avoid the tracking and propaganda of ads. YouTube Premium, for example, is pretty solid for the most part, and I'm happy to spend some money to support the creators I like, but they kind of fucked that up because now I have to deal with the endless ads for RayCon or ExpressVPN or SkillShare. It's a bit frustrating because I though I paid for "no ads", when in reality I paid for "we're hiding the ads you could have easily blocked for free".
- satysin 3y ago
  SponsorBlock is what you want to auto-skip all in-video sponsored segments/ads https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
  - tombert 3y ago
    Sure, but what I'm kind of getting at is that I would like to pay money for the ad to not be there in the first place. What annoys me is that YouTube Premium only gets you halfway.
    - satysin 3y ago
      Yeah it is a difficult place for YouTube as they would need to enforce rules that say the video maker cannot have sponsored content/ads within the video and I can't see that going down well as I highly doubt YouTube would be in the position to pay similar to cover the ad placement loss.
      - npteljes 3y ago
        From what I have heard, sponsorships are well worth for the creators. Usually bringing in at least the amount that YT otherwise gave them, and often more.
- npteljes 3y ago
  You have to understand where the ad is coming from. With Premium, you play YouTube to not interject extra ads. They can't really do anything with the content itself.
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tomrod 3y ago
I completely agree with the content. Perhaps ironically, the blogpost itself shares many attributes common to advertising: (1) audience relevance (2) branding the author (3) Crucially -- a call to action for a change (though in this case, it doesn't enrich a specific corporation AFAICT).
t0bia_s 3y ago
Author block ads and unsubscribe mails, don't answer phone for uknown numbers, but also use 9 social networks as shown in footer.
jredwards 3y ago
What mechanics are people using to unsubscribe to mailing lists? My understanding is that attempting this is mostly hopeless.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Surprisingly enough this is not the case, at least in Europe. I sign up for the majority of websites/apps using my primary email but make an effort to go to the account settings and immediately opt-out of any BS emails/notifications. Every once in a while something slips through (which I make sure to email their DPO as per the GDPR and ask what's going on, and they make up an excuse on how a misconfiguration/etc resulted in me getting spammed, but at least it puts downwards pressure on this behavior), but it's manageable - my inbox is clean and averaged over a few years I get a spam maybe once a month.
gingerlime 3y ago
Great post! I can tick many boxes off that list as well. Wonder about fighting data brokers however. Any tips?
magic_hamster 3y ago
That was an incredible list. And then at the bottom of the page, referral links.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Even though large tracts of the 'net and many old and famous sites have fallen or may fall into the grip of the ad industry and all the odious apparatus of ad tech, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the web, we shall fight on the browsers and apps, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the routers, we shall defend our privacy and sanity, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on our phones, we shall fight on PCs, we shall fight in the OS space and in the repositories, we shall fight in the internet of things; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this project or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our users beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the power of free software, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new decentralised 'net, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. Free after Sir Winston Churchill
dventimihasura 3y ago
Sounds like a lot of work blocking all those ads.
Nextgrid 3y ago
I wonder why so many people feel the urge to justify blocking ads? Did we have the same reaction over a decade ago for installing antivirus software and depriving the poor malware makers of their revenue, or email server admins blocking spam and depriving the spammers of their revenue? There is no difference between ads and malware - both are code that uses your machine to make it do something undesirable, and often stalk you (modern adtech is often way more powerful than the spyware of the old days) in addition. It is your absolute right to block all malicious code. Operating systems mostly wisened up to their earlier vulnerabilities and patched most of the avenues malicious code could load itself on your machine. Browsers countered the early abuses of the pop-up window feature by blocking them and nobody complained. Operating systems and browsers should include ad- and spyware-blocking by default just like they block conventional binary viruses. The only reason the above is no longer possible (despite it being technically - like pop-up window blockers were implemented almost 2 decades ago) is that ad- and spyware-tech has now consumed browsers and operating systems. The business model of IT is no longer to provide valuable functionality to the user in exchange for payment, it's to provide first-party spyware and spam platform, with "functionality" being merely a necessary evil to keep the user coming back (which they'd rather remove if they had another way of convincing you to keep looking at the screen).
- 93po 3y ago
  > I wonder why so many people feel the urge to justify blocking ads? because the "ad blocking is unethical and stealing!" crowd is really annoying, as I'm sure the pro-ad blocking side is to them
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  we had ad blockers installed 10 years ago too...
Dirak 3y ago
Targeted Advertising serves a valuable role in free markets by giving exposure to innovative and novel products that improve people's lives. Without advertising, there would be no playing field for new products to challenge incumbents. Everybody would end up sticking to products they know without ever knowing about superior alternatives like in some kind of communist dystopia. Food for thought.
anotherevan 3y ago
Ever since I read Blindsight[1] I have been more choosy about what I allow to take up real-estate inside my head. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52225003-blindsight https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52225003-blindsight
buzzert 3y ago
Nearly all of the things in this list can be blocked by simply disabling JavaScript, or selectively enabling it for certain origins. NoScript is a fantastic extension for this. I don't even have any other ad blockers installed. Just blocking JS and I don't get any of this.

281 points by cdme 3y ago

If you ever heard your friends complaining about the amount of ads they get on their phones and computers, gladly spend a while to help them install something like Ublock Origin. Let the less techy public know there is a way out.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Or they could boycott sites and services with the most intrusive ads. Ad blocking just encourages escalation, whereas a boycott of the hosting site sends a stronger and more ethical signal.
- alexhsamuel 3y ago
  I disagree with the implication that there is anything at all unethical (so that anything else could be "more ethical") about blocking ads.
Buttons840 3y ago
This will also help add to the outrage if ad blockers are ever taken from us by some means.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  There isn’t really a way to take away ad blockers. Of course, a site can be made to not work with ad blockers, but then that’s their decision I guess. I’m happy to not use a service in that case.
mgbmtl 3y ago
Yep (and be pragmatic/emphatic, a lot of this stuff can seem obscure to non-techies). My partner/wife is a long-time iPhone fan. I never tried to convert her, but she is on the point of switching to Android because she can't use Firefox on iOS. It's completely absurd too - to discard a perfectly fine device otherwise, just because it cannot block ads, or at least, cannot run uBlock Origin (for blocking cookie-banners, social annoyances, etc).
- judge2020 3y ago
  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/id989804926 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i... ? Or is it not "can't use Firefox on iOS" but "doesn't have x feature from Firefox on Desktop"?
  - mgbmtl 3y ago
    Last time I checked, it was just a Safari webview, and missed a lot of features compared to Firefox on Android. Has that changed recently? Other nice thing of Firefox on Android: being able to listen to Youtube videos even when the screen is turned off. (I'm sure there are solutions, but many seemed sketchy or didn't work well)
    - judge2020 3y ago
      What are the features missing then? The main one I can see is edit PDFs directly[0], but I'd bet money that Mozilla wouldn't implement that on iOS anyways. FF can largely do exactly the same thing they do on Desktop to attract people: create a privacy-focused browser (if that's even what they're doing) and things like syncing your bookmarks, passwords, using Firefox VPN, and blocking ads. 0: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
      - Larrikin 3y ago
        No proper ad blocking. Firefox Privacy has some limited blocking but Cloudflare has rendered it useless and gets me into infinite captcha loops. Tailscale plus Adguard has finally brought sanity to all my mobile devices thankfully.
    - realityloop 3y ago
      You can play yt videos with screen off using vinegar if you pop the video out to pip view it will be able to keep playing when you turn the screen off. https://apps.apple.com/au/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303229 https://apps.apple.com/au/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
intelVISA 3y ago
Recently setup a W11 VFIO VM, even on its own MITM'd vNIC with DPI and custom heurestics to cut most out the naughty MSFT traffic: it was still a dizzying assault of ads and noiseware; being transported from serene LTSC W10 to the cyberpunk advertisment plaza of W11 was like my brain segfaulting. I won't lie: I could barely think with all the attention-grabbing, adtech bloat. Scary! Is there a way we can help people who don't know they're being exploited like this?
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
I'm almost afraid that if the userbase of effective ad blocking gets big enough, large firms like google will put even more resources into the anti-ad blocking like what is happening with Chrome's new plugin api. I feel like letting people enjoy the ads if they don't know any better is a little smoke screen for people who do know better.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  Isn't it already "big"? Over 25% in US according to https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/#topicOverv...
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Oh dang, yeah that's a decent chunk.

chasebank 3y ago

Advertising is so completely intertwined with everyday life, it’s impossible to block them. The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR. The ultimate brainwash. Most of HN and Reddit content is advertisement whether you realize or not. Front page CNN, outside of weather events and sports, it’s closing in on 100%.

bee_rider 3y ago
What do you mean by “HN and Reddit content?” I think most of the people here are real (not ad bots) and most of the comments are just their opinions. I mean you can sometimes see folks who are clearly either super-fans or actual paid shills, but if they were the majority, I think people would give up on the sites.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Some of the HN content is explicitly advertising (the posts you see you can't comment on) but some percentage of the "native/organic" content posts are just advertising - which may not be bad mind you, I'd much rather have company X put $Yk dollars into well written posts that are actually useful than have them buy a stadium. But other are pretty thinly veiled, and some commenters are pretty obviously pushing something. It gets cleaned up decently well.
- 93po 3y ago
  It's wild how often I click the comments on a reddit post and there's a link to buy something within the first full screen display of comments. Most recently it was some random dish towel in the background of a staged couples-prank video.
ltbarcly3 3y ago
I find product placement and 'organic' ads annoying, but I don't think they are as effective as regular old advertisements. If they were, the fraction of the advertising budget would be heavily shifted towards 'product placement' and away from '30 second pre-roll ads' and banner ads.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

I'm about to reach this peak of enlightenment. I'm almost there. And yes, many family friends (non-technical and even a tad technical ones) are super happy with me setting up some form of ad-blocking, at least in their browsers. The internet has become a scary place.

npteljes 3y ago
Always have been. Online ads were obnoxious since the existence of them. And in the before times, there were no ad blockers, and there were popups, then pop-unders, I had no idea WTF was going on. And the first ad blockers made browsing noticeably slower too.

stalfosknight 3y ago

I wish it were possible to thoroughly ban all advertising and marketing. I have been that fed up with all of this crap for a long time now.

rahidz 3y ago
Yes, or at least all third-party marketing and advertising.

ltbarcly3 3y ago

Advertising based 'free' things cost you far more than a subscription ever would. This is because Advertising Works and it works on you too. You are being manipulated into buying things you wouldn't buy, manipulated into making poor decisions you wouldn't otherwise make. Generations of people lost decades with relatives from smoking and drinking that would not have happened but for advertising. Advertising makes people poorer by leading them to allocate their funds in a worse way. I'm not saying we should outlaw advertising, there is no realistic way to do so that respects rights. However, you should absolutely refuse to consume advertising whenever possible. Block it, mute it, and refuse to consume content or use services where avoiding advertising is not possible!

paulryanrogers 3y ago
That depends on the cost of the subscription, the things being advertised, and the audience's will power.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  I see what you are saying, but you are not correct on any of these points. 'depends on cost': It can't actually depend, on average. Advertisers keep spending money because they make more back overall than they spend on advertising. Only a small fraction of that increase in income is paid in fees to the platform that is funded by the advertising. To make the same amount of money, the platform would only have to charge you a small fraction of what advertisers are making off of those same users. Advertising isn't a battle of wills, it is leveraging psychology to manipulate you in ways you aren't even aware of. It works on you just as well as it works on everyone else, if you don't think so it probably works better than average.
  - mawise 3y ago
    Ehh, the ad networks want advertiser to believe that but they also do sketchy things like intercepting (and taking credit for) customers who already had an intent to purchase. There was a big story about Uber cutting lots of ad spending with little impact a while ago: https://thehustle.co/01072021-uber-ad-spend/ https://thehustle.co/01072021-uber-ad-spend/

moolcool 3y ago

“Advertisement is the rich asking for more money. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.” — G.K. Chesterton

Atlas22 3y ago
While I would agree the vast majority of the time, ads are also used heavily by small businesses and independent developers to gauge interest and even just to keep the lights on sometimes. Mostly referring to online ads, billboards and TV ads are much more expensive and are far more risky for small businesses.
- moolcool 3y ago
  I don't like this argument. As if an indie shoemaker should be grateful to have the privilege to get in a bidding war against Nike for who can give Facebook more money to get noticed.
- DirkH 3y ago
  Just want to point out I think there's a big difference between using tracking to "gauge interest" and using ads. You can do one without the other. In fact, there are even privacy-respecting alternatives for businesses to track online traffic.
  - nickwritesit 3y ago
    I tend to agree, even though the line can be blurry. I was more anti this kind of stuff until I used Google Analytics for the first time and saw how you could fiddle with just a few things on a page and decrease bounce rate or increase how long people stayed on page (reading the article, one hopes). I always assumed it'd involve more quality compromise or something but it's often just changing a headline and showing more before the fold. Seems like it benefits everyone to enable those kinds of iterations.
    - DirkH 3y ago
      But can't you use services that provide the exact same analytics benefit without Google's abysmal privacy policy? Privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives include: Matomo, Plausible, Umami, Nullitics, Shynet, Pirshc, Swetrix, Cabin, Aptabase I haven't used these and would use Google Analytics if it were indeed just too much better than everything else out there. But if another service gives me everything Google Analytics provides and more, why continue using Google Analytics? I wouldn't know though since I've never tried using these. I just know about them.

solarist 3y ago

I fully on agree on all the points and I try to protect my home (network), but I feel that’s a lost cause both from technical (e.g. dns on http/3) and psychological (more subtle and mixed with the actual content) aspects. My only hope is to try to digitally vaccinate my kids that they become more self aware on what they are exposed to.

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rexreed 3y ago

Good list. Is there anything not included on this list that should be?

houseatrielah 3y ago
Browser-fingerprinting.
morning-coffee 3y ago
Would love to see links to information on how to block some of the particular avenues mentioned. Some I haven't heard of yet. I use a pi-hole and uBlock Origin, but am always up to learn more...
- cdme 3y ago
  I debated linking solutions I use but didn’t want the post, in that way, to advertise anything.
  - voisin 3y ago
    It would be at the benefit of being more useful for readers.
    - cdme 3y ago
      I'll look at throwing together a repository in the model of the `awesome-<tool>` set that's more comprehensive than my specific use case and open it up to contribution for tools I'm not familiar with.
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- rahidz 3y ago
  I pay for AdGuard (not an ad, I promise!) for Android. Other than that unlock Origin like you said, plus SponsorBlock on mobile and PC. ReVanced patch of Twitter and YouTube on mobile to block ads there (though I also pay for YouTube Plus), and "Orange TV Ad Free" for Twitch.

sergiotapia 3y ago

Use Brave Browser for insta-blocking all ads. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ Install Sponsorblock to remove sponsored content and fluff from videos. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y... Install SmartTubeNext on your Android TV device to watch youtube with no ads + sponsorblock support baked in. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext/blob/master/README... Install Revanced on your android mobile phone to watch youtube with no ads + sponsorblock support baked in. https://old.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/ https://old.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/

stragies 3y ago
And then pay for Youtube Premium, so they (hopefully) don't 'oops' your GoogleMail account 'by accident' one day?

pachico 3y ago

Damn, I was reading this hoping it was the page of the ultimate browser/mobile app or extension... How did we get so far without having all this by default?

chconsults 3y ago

This guy blocks.

micromacrofoot 3y ago

Imagine how much would be gained if advertising were lost.

aidenn0 3y ago

I don't block adds, I only block tracking cookies, and yet I am told repeatedly by websites that I am blocking ads on a daily basis, and that they will go out of business if I don't disable my "ad blocker." Meanwhile I am quite content with pages that show me full-width banner ads without tracking me.

judge2020 3y ago
How do you block tracking but not ads? As in, do you let adsense ads show up, which track you? If not, why do you think the site wouldn't think you are blocking ads?
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  This is a complaint that virtually every single ad out there is actually spyware that tracks you, with the "ad" part being almost like an afterthought.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- jagged-chisel 3y ago
  Blocking cookies. As in, the cookie gets ignored instead of being stored. No cookie returned to the server on future requests. Of course there’s also “use the cookies for this session and delete them later.” In any case, “blocking” cookies is not the same as blocking ads.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    Blocking just cookies isn't necessarily achieving the goal of blocking tracking, though, since the idea is that ad networks commonly fingerprint you and combine any of those signals with your IP address to enable cookie-less tracking and ad targeting.
    - 3y ago

jdthedisciple 3y ago

In before the "do you also steal from restaurants?"-clowns join the discussion. lmao They're simply the funniest And yes it's the most common "retort" to ad-blocking I always hear.

bee_rider 3y ago
I think there will be almost no posters here to defend ads, which is really something, given that this is a tech site and a whole lot of the sector is ad-driven. Hopefully this indicates that there will be room for something better soon. Or maybe it just indicates that the ad guys have so throughly beat us that they don’t even feel the need to come argue anymore.
- petercooper 3y ago
  Different topics suit different venues. HN, like any similar forum, is not suited to objective debate on all topics. On any forum, there are some topics where a broad consensus is held and maintained by participants. Advertising is one of those topics on HN.
  - jader201 3y ago
    I defended ads (to an extent) in a comment above [1], but it hasn't been received well (unsurprisingly). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36048236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36048236
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      It doesn’t look greyed out on my side at least, so I guess you must be sitting at around 0 at least as far as votes go. Which is nice, it is good to at least have someone representing the position, even if I disagree with it.

javajosh 3y ago

"No communication with me without my consent," is something I want in society, and that is violated by virtually all advertising, everywhere. I wish this was the social norm. The compromise is what the OP did, reactive, only-really-available-to-tech-folk measures. This is unfortunate. Personally, I would not consent to any communication that was paid for. In that case it's money talking, not the person, and this is quite confusing for people including me.

anonporridge 3y ago
> No communication with me without my consent That's not practically possible unless you choose to live alone in a controlled box. Even the infrastructure you're forced to interact with is a form of communication that manipulates you into certain behaviors. But then, maybe that's where we're headed as a society with the explosion of one person households, remote work, and delivery services. It's increasingly possible for the majority of people to actually live a completely solitary life, controlling their information input by restricting it only to a screen. https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  You can get pretty close. Turn on do-not-disturb and ignore your mailboxes. Become unreachable. Become ungovernable.
  - anonporridge 3y ago
    And become irrelevant and uninfluential to the Human Colossus. https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part1 https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part1 The tradeoff to extricating yourself from being influenced without your consent, is that you lose the ability to you yourself influence how society and civilization progresses.
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      That's an interesting and important point. I suppose if everyone takes this attitude then society would fall apart, unless people are spontaneously feeling the need to connect with each other. But I'm skeptical that you need to acquiesce to the increasingly corporate communications vying for your attention, just to stay available for real human connection. The internet is a medium that facilitates asynchronous communications with like minds. You can leave a comment on a website, or link to your blog post, as a beacon to anyone who's opted into a similar filter bubble. They can find it and contact you. Yes, it will be unsolicited, but not in the same way as a marketing email or billing notice is unsolicited. Nobody is communicating without consent when publishers and readers are participating in a shared community. If I publish a blog post on my hobby, and someone I've never met emails me about partnering on a project for the hobby, then although it's unsolicited, I would still appreciate the email and follow up. It might take me a while to notice it since I only check my email every few days, but I will almost certainly reply. A personal connection is a welcome respite from a noisy onslaught of automated communications.

ra1n 3y ago

How do you automatically remove UTM tracking parts of the URLs by default ? Is there a browser extension ?

judge2020 3y ago
UTM tracking is probably the least of your concerns - all it does is aid in campaign analytics for the website you're visiting, it would do nothing to the third-party behavior and activity trackers that you're likely trying to avoid.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  UTM is Google Analytics and also helps Google do ad targeting even if they don't want to admit it.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    UTM tags in that sense are collected on the client side by tag manager or google analytics, which would be blocked by an ad-blocking extension anyways. UTM tags can/often are collected by the website themselves to do first-party near-100% confidence campaign analytics.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      So what you're saying is that there is plenty of other spyware (some of it server-side) that freeloads off those UTM query params? Sounds like another good reason to strip them?
      - judge2020 3y ago
        That may be the case for blog sites, but big companies just directly ingest it into their application or internal analytics platform for a dashboard of which sources were the biggest contributors. For example - a company sends out a newsletter with a link to a blog post goes out to 20k subscribers with UTM params, but those UTM params end up getting 100k clicks, 80k with a referer of "news.ycombinator.com". This means that someone posted it on HN with those UTM params, which indicates that they should continue to prioritize that newsletter, since the audience is likely to cause a snowball effect of traffic and thus growth. Is that a bad thing? Knowing that traffic came from x source so that they can properly route future resources to the those high-impact sources?

Mistletoe 3y ago

People say that we won’t have any of the stuff we have on the new internet if we block ads and “don’t pay for it somehow” but I liked the old internet better, so this is win/win.

gigel82 3y ago

I mean, all that is the min-bar, isn't it?

waboremo 3y ago

Short simple and to the point (unlike my comment, but alas). I recently tried a little experiment, where I would use the internet without adblocker (or similar like DNS filtering, extensions to remove annoyances, etc). I thought to myself I was in my little sheltered bubble a bit too long having access to these things that make browsing seamless, even enjoyable. I wasn't shocked by what I found, but I was disturbed by how universally unusable it has become. No wonder people stick to their containment zones on Reddit or Instagram. You search something up, you get a bunch of ads to scroll through. Fine for me, I know what link to look for, but most don't. Huge issue. You visit the website, you're bombarded with a video ad in the corner, banner ads on the side, a notification banner up top, a chat bubble in the other corner, and a cookie banner in the middle with garbage defaults. You get through all of that miraculously on your phone, but the article disappears to show a giant ad as a background, before reappearing again if you keep scrolling. Again, I know these horrible patterns I can navigate through them, but how does somebody's grandma? The internet is so frustrating because so much of it has been horribly tainted by the ad industry. Every single aspect, every single feature, gets misused by the ad industry. You thought deeper GPU access would mean fully fledged games in the browser? Nah we're just using it to profile you better. We're spending billions of dollars on developing a new social app, oh but it's not to improve communication, no we just want you to get hooked on it to see more ads. Block all the ads and annoyances you want. Until we get thorough data privacy laws, it's your duty to block them. Go on, I know how it impacts me directly/indirectly, as I'm a web developer who spends far too much time persuading clients not to load up their sites with this BS. You should still block them.

submeta 3y ago

Whenever I'm sitting in front of a computer that isn't using ad blockers, I'm shocked to see how polluted websites are, practically yelling at me, vying for my attention. How can folks concentrate on an article without ad blockers? Then there are those ads in YouTube videos and blog articles purporting to offer the reader something valuable when, in fact, they're packed with falsehoods ("xyz changed my life, and if you want to check it out, please click on this affiliate link"). While I can't block ads on the radio, on the internet, I make a point of blocking every ad I can. There are other ways to reward an author or a website. For instance, I block ads on sites like Haaretz, but I do subscribe to them because I believe quality content deserves compensation.

ollien 3y ago
I haven't used an ad blocker in years. The short answer: you get used to it. Banner blindness is a real thing
- V1ndaar 3y ago
  Might you explain /why/?
  - lemper 3y ago
    he works for ad company, is what crossed in my mind.
    - ollien 3y ago
      Hah, nope. Not my cup of tea :)
  - eimrine 3y ago
    Maybe he does not surf websites with low-quality content.
  - ollien 3y ago
    Sorry for the late reply, I didn't think to check back on this :) A couple reasons: Back when I did use them, I got really bothered by sites breaking, and I'd rather have the ads than dealing with "is this broken because of my ad blocker or is the site broken". Now, I've just gotten to the point where I don't really mind. The other part is there's enough content I consume that is supported by ads that I would like to continue supporting, without having to consciously opt into it (e.g. news sites; I don't want to pay a subscription for every newspaper but am happy to contribute to what little money they get from ads)

Animats 3y ago

I block ads in Google search results. And I don't use Microsoft operating systems.

alyandon 3y ago

I block the page visibility API. I'd love to find out more information on how to prevent web pages from knowing if they are visible or not.

alex_lav 3y ago
I didn’t check, so they may have already accommodated me, but I’d really love a detailed write up of how the person that wrote this blog post solved each listed problem.
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Found these extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Haven't tried either of them though. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-page-visibility-a/eecfoibnnhheckhfokpihgefmlnenofb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-page-visib... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-page-visibility/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-page-...
- stragies 3y ago
  "Pausing playback of a video or other processing in a background tab is useful to save energy. So only enable this add-on if you can afford it. There are other ways to detect if a webpage is visible, e.g. onblur/onfocus. This add-on does not disable any of those other ways. So do not assume that this add-on will enhance your privacy." From the Readme of the FF addon.

omginternets 3y ago

I occasionally tear down ads in public spaces. I'm sure many will disagree with me, but I do think we should be able to move through public spaces without the incessant assault on one's attention and head space. I haven't been caught yet, though I'm sure I someday will, at which point I'll pay the fine and keep doing it anyway.

jurassicfoxy 3y ago
I find highway billboards and store signage to be a particularly awful display, and I'd be overjoyed for them to be banned entirely. I have often thought about cutting down highway billboards, although I'm not quite intense enough for that.
- omginternets 3y ago
  Quite. Also, here in the US, gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump. I cannot stress how angry I am about this. One of the last places where I could just day-dream has now been deemed "up for grabs" by the lowest form of shit-peddler in the modern world. Pause for a second to consider the absurdity of being blasted with advertisements while paying for a product. Talk about double-dipping... Suggestions welcome.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There is a mute button, sometimes labelled, sometimes hidden, but try pressing them all. Doesn't help much, but helps a little. And then stick some unapproved sticker on the pump of your choosing.
    - omginternets 3y ago
      The stickers are a good idea. I also wonder if there's a discrete way of permanently damaging a speaker, e.g. with a magnet or something that could fit discretely in the palm of one's hand.

Pxtl 3y ago

I used to avoid blocking ads on principle -- a sort of "social contract" thing since I'm consuming ad-supported content. Then one day I found my kids' PC had its homepage changed to some scamware site. Now I block ads on all my family machines. They broke the social contract.

globular-toast 3y ago

Me too. In addition I physically look away if I'm confronted with ads in real life. For example, when watching Youtube at a friends house or something. I purposely talk loudly over ads in the cinema etc. I am annoyed by ads I can't block such as billboards and the like. Unless I ask you, I do not want your product. I am happy. I do not want whatever you want me to want. Kindly fuck off. Thanks.

numbsafari 3y ago

I was stuck at an airport. I downloaded a free backgammon app on my iPhone, to kill some time. It showed me ads between every game. The ads were mostly for other apps. Most of those apps were games. Games that involved implied incestuous rape, non-consensual voyeurism, and other highly repulsive things. I just wanted to play backgammon. I uninstalled the app (thankfully, that's an easy thing to do on iOS, for now...). My main reason for blocking ads at this point, is because the ads that get served on what should be otherwise inoffensive websites, contain vile imagery or otherwise offensive content. Seriously, I get that they put one ad for toe fungus next to the ad they really want you to click on because the toe fungus draws your eye in, but I don't need this shit in my life.

bombcar 3y ago
I just want simple games you pay your $2-5 for and you never see any ads. Apple should offer "App Store Plus" where you pay $10/20/30 whatever a month and all the ad-infested apps just show nothing.
- zmnd 3y ago
  like.. apple arcade?
- stalfosknight 3y ago
  It's called Apple Arcade.
zmnd 3y ago
If you don't want to see ads, why you didn't want to pay a couple of dollars for an app? Or how do you see developers compensated in this case?
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Paying doesn't actually solve the problem. Some time ago I bought "Angry Birds classic" app on iOS - it's a paid app that promised to bring back the "old" Angry Birds before it turned to crap. On first launch I was met with a mandatory "privacy" policy I couldn't decline that was asking me to consent to being spied upon. I ended up getting a refund through Apple.

redleggedfrog 3y ago

Surprised to encounter someone more vehemently against ads than me. But I appreciate the sentiment, and bookmarked the site so I can try some of those things myself. I pay for what I want to look at, not with my time and attention, but money, the way God intended it.

tkuraku 3y ago

I use ublock origin with Firefox on Android and desktop plus a pihole. On my phone I have setup wireguard to VPN back to my house so I have pihole everywhere I go.

Timber-6539 3y ago

I hate Ads. They take up unnecessary bandwidth (pi-Hole shows me a good 15% of my total queries is ad-related noise). Add that to autoplay videos/gifs on an limited data plan and its clear that ad content has no use for me, other than suck up data at my expense.

maest 3y ago

Yes, ads suck. However, here's my take on advertising: Modern economic markets are a decentralized process via which we decide how to best allocate resources. For this to work, we need a mechanism that allows information to be broadcasted through the system to ensure local decisions make sense. (In fact, information asymmetry is one of the main failure modes of modern markets). So, yeah, advertising sucks, but 1. it's an important part of our market economy and 2. it therefore adds a lot of value to the world. I actually have a hard time reconciling the reasoning above with how icky, insidious and unpleasant marketing feels when I get subjected to it.

abenga 3y ago
Relevant, non-obtrusive ads are kinda sort of fine, or at best bearable. What sucks is inability to opt out of specific ads due to inappropriateness or irrelevance. I need to to tell YouTube every couple of weeks that I don't want to see betting company ads just because I watch NBA and soccer videos. No matter how much I say this is "Not Appropriate" or "Not Relevant", every two weeks, there is Emmanuel Adebayor telling me to use some betting app (it's always the same ad). I finally caved and installed Smarttube on my Android TV.

shortformblog 3y ago

As someone who has worked in marketing … I think adtech created stances like this. If advertising worked like it did before about 1994 or so, I think we’d see fewer complaints of this nature. Adtech overplayed its hand for a quarter-century. The thing that sucks about this, IMHO, is that it makes no room for above-board players. Doesn’t matter that it supports millions of jobs. Doesn’t matter that there are lots of well-intentioned people out there who just happen to work in advertising. This guy is 100% within his right. And honestly, the sector deserves it. Bad actors destroyed a lot of goodwill in the name of performance and better numbers. But I wish it didn’t.

deepspace 3y ago
For me, specifically, Forbes destroyed the line between bad actors and above board players. Back when sites started to detect ad-blockers, Forbes asked users to disable their blockers, for the usual reasons. Trusting them, beings respectable breed source, I and others whitelisted Forbes, and promptly got hit by malware distributed by ads on their site. Because Forbes could not be bothered to screen the ads on their site, I now relentlessly block ads just like the author of the article.
- shortformblog 3y ago
  I should note that Forbes is probably the traditional media outlet that has been most willing to mix advertising and editorial in questionable ways. It has gotten better about its approach in recent years, but it is certainly not perfect.
  - 93po 3y ago
    Product placement and native advertising is rampant across all media.
    - shortformblog 3y ago
      And I said Forbes was one of the worst examples of it. They pioneered a lot of the darker patterns among major media outlets.

elwell 3y ago

As much as I hate ads, as a thought experiment I wonder how much less or more the world would have progressed without that form of information dissemination (paid advertising specifically).

thorwagoog 3y ago

Am I the only person who thought that list was a poem? :) Here is how my mind read it: I block ads in the browser, I block their DNS I block beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs I block analytics, reporting, and diagnostic logging I block programmatic pleas to disable ad-blocking I strip query strings from UTM campaign tags I unshorten URLs to avoid tracking hacks I stop autoplay for the videos on my feed I block all the cookies that your websites don't strictly need I block the visibility API on your page I block prompts to install your app in a fit of rage I block hidden pixels that track my email Which surely gets masked but to no avail As I unsubscribe from your mailing list, dork And block your address if that doesn't work I block and report SMS that have ads Phone calls get ignored if not from my contacts I pay a company to wrangle data brokers for the win And trust me, junk mail goes straight into the bin As I unsubscribe from it all when I can I block ads, and you should block too, my dear friend (Written organically, without ChatGPT or the like)

_rs 3y ago
I would argue the post already is a poem
jraph 3y ago
Someone needs to write a melody for this
- greenyoda 3y ago
  The words, as grouped above, somewhat match the cadence of the "Major-General's Song": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major-General%27s_Song#Lyrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major-General%27s_Song#Lyrics Just needs a few more syllables to make it fit, e.g., I block ads in the browser, and I also block their DNS I block the beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs ...
sunshadow 3y ago
I find it amusing that you felt you had to write "written organically" to claim authorship.

Hitton 3y ago

Something you can block too, but isn't mentioned in the article are sponsored content ads in videos, use SponsorBlock for that. That said I'm far from this radical, even though it's mostly because I hate the troubleshooting when a site breaks and I'm trying to find what caused it.

SergeAx 3y ago

Hi, Cory! I brush my teeth.

jader201 3y ago

There’s a lot of ad hate in this thread — and on HN in general — that sometimes feels a bit naive. In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own. So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far, so I eventually— and begrudgingly — added ads. I was very intentional about keeping them as unobtrusive as possible: just some banner ads at the top and bottom of each thread and forum, and a square next to the first unread comment. I hated pop-ups (the kind that opened in a new window — very common at that time), and I didn’t have them on any other page on the site (just forums). This gained me about 10x the revenue I got from donations alone, and was able to scale the site’s hardware, allowing me to keep the site up and running for nearly 20 years, and provided some modest passive income for a time. (I just recently sold it to someone else, but it’s still up and running.) My point is, that wouldn’t have been possible without ads. I agree with most of you: sites today have a ridiculous number of ads and are very intrusive. But for sites that don’t go overboard, or for small independent YouTube channels, I don’t mind allowing the ads, because I know they probably wouldn’t make it otherwise. Yes, I hear the comments saying “maybe they shouldn’t exist if they can’t monetize without ads”, but I’m not sure I agree. There are many that just wouldn’t survive with donations alone, and a subscription model may not make sense. There are just some cases where ads make sense for them, and I’m ok with that (with the caveat they don’t go overboard), and because I’ve been on the other side, I don’t block ads.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago
> In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own. > So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far A site that has to rely on ads to survive doesn't have a viable business model, or in your case interesting enough/in demand enough content. It's as simple as that. Ads are largely a false economy anyway.
- stevenwliao 3y ago

jacooper 3y ago

Personally my issue with ads aren't the ads themselves, its the tracking and digital stalking that big tech does for ad targeting.

tombert 3y ago

You know, I don't even want to deprive people of money; as a yuppie who has money nowadays I am not opposed to paying for things I use if I could avoid the tracking and propaganda of ads. YouTube Premium, for example, is pretty solid for the most part, and I'm happy to spend some money to support the creators I like, but they kind of fucked that up because now I have to deal with the endless ads for RayCon or ExpressVPN or SkillShare. It's a bit frustrating because I though I paid for "no ads", when in reality I paid for "we're hiding the ads you could have easily blocked for free".

satysin 3y ago
SponsorBlock is what you want to auto-skip all in-video sponsored segments/ads https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
- tombert 3y ago
  Sure, but what I'm kind of getting at is that I would like to pay money for the ad to not be there in the first place. What annoys me is that YouTube Premium only gets you halfway.
  - satysin 3y ago
    Yeah it is a difficult place for YouTube as they would need to enforce rules that say the video maker cannot have sponsored content/ads within the video and I can't see that going down well as I highly doubt YouTube would be in the position to pay similar to cover the ad placement loss.
    - npteljes 3y ago
      From what I have heard, sponsorships are well worth for the creators. Usually bringing in at least the amount that YT otherwise gave them, and often more.
npteljes 3y ago
You have to understand where the ad is coming from. With Premium, you play YouTube to not interject extra ads. They can't really do anything with the content itself.

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tomrod 3y ago

I completely agree with the content. Perhaps ironically, the blogpost itself shares many attributes common to advertising: (1) audience relevance (2) branding the author (3) Crucially -- a call to action for a change (though in this case, it doesn't enrich a specific corporation AFAICT).

t0bia_s 3y ago

Author block ads and unsubscribe mails, don't answer phone for uknown numbers, but also use 9 social networks as shown in footer.

jredwards 3y ago

What mechanics are people using to unsubscribe to mailing lists? My understanding is that attempting this is mostly hopeless.

Nextgrid 3y ago
Surprisingly enough this is not the case, at least in Europe. I sign up for the majority of websites/apps using my primary email but make an effort to go to the account settings and immediately opt-out of any BS emails/notifications. Every once in a while something slips through (which I make sure to email their DPO as per the GDPR and ask what's going on, and they make up an excuse on how a misconfiguration/etc resulted in me getting spammed, but at least it puts downwards pressure on this behavior), but it's manageable - my inbox is clean and averaged over a few years I get a spam maybe once a month.

gingerlime 3y ago

Great post! I can tick many boxes off that list as well. Wonder about fighting data brokers however. Any tips?

magic_hamster 3y ago

That was an incredible list. And then at the bottom of the page, referral links.

the_third_wave 3y ago

Even though large tracts of the 'net and many old and famous sites have fallen or may fall into the grip of the ad industry and all the odious apparatus of ad tech, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the web, we shall fight on the browsers and apps, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the routers, we shall defend our privacy and sanity, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on our phones, we shall fight on PCs, we shall fight in the OS space and in the repositories, we shall fight in the internet of things; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this project or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our users beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the power of free software, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new decentralised 'net, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. Free after Sir Winston Churchill

dventimihasura 3y ago

Sounds like a lot of work blocking all those ads.

Nextgrid 3y ago

I wonder why so many people feel the urge to justify blocking ads? Did we have the same reaction over a decade ago for installing antivirus software and depriving the poor malware makers of their revenue, or email server admins blocking spam and depriving the spammers of their revenue? There is no difference between ads and malware - both are code that uses your machine to make it do something undesirable, and often stalk you (modern adtech is often way more powerful than the spyware of the old days) in addition. It is your absolute right to block all malicious code. Operating systems mostly wisened up to their earlier vulnerabilities and patched most of the avenues malicious code could load itself on your machine. Browsers countered the early abuses of the pop-up window feature by blocking them and nobody complained. Operating systems and browsers should include ad- and spyware-blocking by default just like they block conventional binary viruses. The only reason the above is no longer possible (despite it being technically - like pop-up window blockers were implemented almost 2 decades ago) is that ad- and spyware-tech has now consumed browsers and operating systems. The business model of IT is no longer to provide valuable functionality to the user in exchange for payment, it's to provide first-party spyware and spam platform, with "functionality" being merely a necessary evil to keep the user coming back (which they'd rather remove if they had another way of convincing you to keep looking at the screen).

93po 3y ago
> I wonder why so many people feel the urge to justify blocking ads? because the "ad blocking is unethical and stealing!" crowd is really annoying, as I'm sure the pro-ad blocking side is to them
lost_tourist 3y ago
we had ad blockers installed 10 years ago too...

Dirak 3y ago

Targeted Advertising serves a valuable role in free markets by giving exposure to innovative and novel products that improve people's lives. Without advertising, there would be no playing field for new products to challenge incumbents. Everybody would end up sticking to products they know without ever knowing about superior alternatives like in some kind of communist dystopia. Food for thought.

anotherevan 3y ago

Ever since I read Blindsight[1] I have been more choosy about what I allow to take up real-estate inside my head. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52225003-blindsight https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52225003-blindsight

buzzert 3y ago

Nearly all of the things in this list can be blocked by simply disabling JavaScript, or selectively enabling it for certain origins. NoScript is a fantastic extension for this. I don't even have any other ad blockers installed. Just blocking JS and I don't get any of this.