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Honestly, just stop using your phone most of the time. You can try to keep up with the adblocking arms race, but it is ultimately a losing battle. It's not actu

Honestly, just stop using your phone most of the time. You can try to keep up with the adblocking arms race, but it is ultimately a losing battle. It's not actually difficult (in principle) to avoid mobile ads: don't use your phone in the first place, don't browse to web pages, and don't install apps. For anyone who says "but what if I'm out and I need to?" -- that's a fine exception if you're not actually using your phone the other 99% of the time.

blueboo 2y ago
Considering we have 25 years of adtech and we presently have multiple effective solutions for adblocking on mobile and desktop, I’d need some additional evidence to be sure that is “ultimately a losing battle”.
- everdrive 2y ago
  So I consider myself to be pretty aggressive compared to the normal user when it comes to adblocking. I use Pihole, pfsense (just some blocking IP lists), ublock origin + custom filters & lists, noscript, and also just have a firm household policy about unavoidable ads. (companies have a "1 strike you're out" policy in my household for anything egregious. Spotify earned a lifetime ban probably over a decade ago. It's likely the original offense has not been relevant for years, but I don't care. They're out of the running permanently.) That said, there's a lot of time and energy keeping up with what works, and what does not in the ecosystem. From the pfsense (ie, IP blocking) side of things I'm wholly dependent on filter list authors -- and of course IP blocking ads is marginally effective at best. From the pihole side of things, you have similar problems: dependency on domain lists, and the ever-looming threat of server-side ads. The only reason pihole (or any DNS-based blocking in general) is not wholly useless is because it represents a minority of users. If the technique were even marginally popular, the industry would move on and render it almost totally useless. uBlock origin suffers similar problems, and of course Google has moved to neuter it via Manifest v3. They are also in something of a tug of way with Youtube, and I get the sense that if they really wanted to, they could easily circumvent the plugin. As could any other website. I'm not really worried about losing Youtube, mind you, but it feels pretty clearly that the door is closing on the ad-free internet. And worse, the time when the users on the internet had more power than corporations is dying with it.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Well, I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head where I see ads these days on mobile outside of the odd news site that takes up <1% of my browsing. So I can't relate to this battle you paint that's so dire that we should stop using our phones.
bmicraft 2y ago
> You can try to keep up with the adblocking arms race, but it is ultimately a losing battle I've never felt that way with uBlock in Firefox for Android. Installed it years ago and don't even need to give it a second thought.
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  Yep, it's just completely frictionless and just works. Haven't really seen an ad in Firefox for over a decade. I don't know why anyone would put up with anything less. The only ads I have to deal with are the ones on my TV YouTube and ones in apps, which I try to use the websites for instead anyway because I consider installing some app usually a sign of defeat. If someone isn't trying to scam you out of at least some attention and some personal data, they'd have a functional website.

blueboo 2y ago

Considering we have 25 years of adtech and we presently have multiple effective solutions for adblocking on mobile and desktop, I’d need some additional evidence to be sure that is “ultimately a losing battle”.

everdrive 2y ago
So I consider myself to be pretty aggressive compared to the normal user when it comes to adblocking. I use Pihole, pfsense (just some blocking IP lists), ublock origin + custom filters & lists, noscript, and also just have a firm household policy about unavoidable ads. (companies have a "1 strike you're out" policy in my household for anything egregious. Spotify earned a lifetime ban probably over a decade ago. It's likely the original offense has not been relevant for years, but I don't care. They're out of the running permanently.) That said, there's a lot of time and energy keeping up with what works, and what does not in the ecosystem. From the pfsense (ie, IP blocking) side of things I'm wholly dependent on filter list authors -- and of course IP blocking ads is marginally effective at best. From the pihole side of things, you have similar problems: dependency on domain lists, and the ever-looming threat of server-side ads. The only reason pihole (or any DNS-based blocking in general) is not wholly useless is because it represents a minority of users. If the technique were even marginally popular, the industry would move on and render it almost totally useless. uBlock origin suffers similar problems, and of course Google has moved to neuter it via Manifest v3. They are also in something of a tug of way with Youtube, and I get the sense that if they really wanted to, they could easily circumvent the plugin. As could any other website. I'm not really worried about losing Youtube, mind you, but it feels pretty clearly that the door is closing on the ad-free internet. And worse, the time when the users on the internet had more power than corporations is dying with it.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Well, I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head where I see ads these days on mobile outside of the odd news site that takes up <1% of my browsing. So I can't relate to this battle you paint that's so dire that we should stop using our phones.

bmicraft 2y ago

> You can try to keep up with the adblocking arms race, but it is ultimately a losing battle I've never felt that way with uBlock in Firefox for Android. Installed it years ago and don't even need to give it a second thought.

grues-dinner 2y ago
Yep, it's just completely frictionless and just works. Haven't really seen an ad in Firefox for over a decade. I don't know why anyone would put up with anything less. The only ads I have to deal with are the ones on my TV YouTube and ones in apps, which I try to use the websites for instead anyway because I consider installing some app usually a sign of defeat. If someone isn't trying to scam you out of at least some attention and some personal data, they'd have a functional website.