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My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. I spend more time on YouTube than I c
by antfarm 1y ago
My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web.
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _cenw 1y agoYou are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2. https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section
- antfarm 1y agoPlease excuse my ignorance, but what is the superior way? Pi-Hole?
- stefanfisk 1y agouBlock Origin as linked.
- antfarm 1y agoI see. Your mentioning of Google distracted me, how are they involved?
- colecut 1y ago@antfarm: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/24/google_v2_eol_v3_rollout/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/24/google_v2_eol_v3_roll...
- antfarm 1y agoThanks, but this does not apply to me, not using Chrome is part of my ad blocking strategy.
- zargon 1y agoSafari is limited in the same way as Chrome manifest v3, allowing basically only a URL blacklist. They're crippled compared to uBlock Origin's various other blocking capabilities.
- gruez 1y agoSafari extensions can inject scripts/css as well. That's not as full featured as ubo, but is not "basically only a URL blacklist" either.
- jama211 1y agoI’m also going to add for now you can still manually install ublock on the latest chrome by downloading it from GitHub and installing it under manage extensions. For now.
- tmendez 1y agoAlso plugging Firefox mobile here if you do any web browsing from mobile. You can add uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile, which you can't do on Chrome mobile.
- Jalad 1y agoBut only on Android as far as I know
- Nursie 1y agoFirefox on iOS is a safari wrapper. They do what they can, but they can’t support extensions the same way the Android browser does. It’s a real shame Apple continues to block it from being full-fat.
- _cenw 1y agoOrion can. My guess is that it's just not a priority.
- Nursie 1y agoFrom a quick web search, while it supports installing firefox plugins they may not all work as expected due to limitations/differences in the browser APIs, and ublock origin fails to work properly as a result. So IMHO mozilla are probably choosing "Let's not" rather than "Let's deliver a broken experience" As one user on reddit said - "Orion supports Firefox and Chrome extensions. Yes. And you can install them. Yes. Do they work, though? No, most of them don't. Orion is lying about their extension support. "
- AStonesThrow 1y agoI have found a really amazing way to block ads on websites. It's by not visiting them in the first place. Imagine how well this could work. It's sort of like abstinence and chastity rather than contraception. "Oh you know I love you, let me just have a little for free, and not worry so much about consequences, baby!" Also I found this amazing hack for YouTube and YT Music. I am nearly hesitant to write it down here, lest everyone try it out. I figured out that if I pay them like $20/mo, all the ads disappear from both apps! Can you believe what suckers they are! I fear that this loophole may be closed soon, but for now I'm living high on the hog!
- antfarm 1y agoNothing wrong with paying for a commercial service. I rather pay with money than indirectly by losing time and being annoyed in the best case and manipulated in the worst case. With the sites that I choose to not visit (Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram) this is not possible, as the attempted manipulation of users is an integral part of the business model. Also, your attempt of being funny is not working, neither is your metaphor.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago> not working No, my friend, what is reprehensible to me is freeloaders who believe that they can just play cat-and-mouse wars by installing software and then scrape whatever web content they want, without giving the company their due expected revenue. This is cheating of the cheapest cheapskate order. It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like". Perhaps you feel a little guilty, and needed to take a dig at my comment tone in turn? I can understand needing to protect/defend yourself against malice and undue surprises. The web is wild and wooly. I can understand how intrusive and troublesome ads can become. But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone -- raising prices, jacking up the cost to deliver and maintain sites, and in fact, you're to blame for ads becoming more intrusive and more ubiquitous, because how else are they going to get past your damn blockers??? But if you're going to visit a site, and you want to see/read their stuff, then I feel it would be ethical to engage with them on a level playing field. Because how badly do you want their stuff? If the ads turn you off so much, then don't go to the site. I simply find 98% of the Web is not worth my time after this calculus. News sites don't really report news anyway; why should I waste my time. All this Hacker News ethic of cheating with ad blockers and yt-dlp and posting archive.is links to "help you bypass this evil paywall" is just ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime. It is not working and it is most definitely not funny!
- PaulKeeble 1y agoPi holes don't swallow everything, in stream ads like on Youtube and Twitch and served by the domain all make it through the Pi hole approach. It also doesn't allow you to turn it off for a particular page or site either, if you want to allow ads on Phronix you can't do it without enabling that advertiser everywhere since it lacks the context of the DNS calls. The advantage is it works with every browser on every device, its network wide and it blocks a tonne of other calls that aren't made by the browser such as telemetry.
- int_19h 1y agoUse a third-party browser with integrated ad blocker - then all this Manifest v3 stuff doesn't matter even if the browser is Blink-based. One example is Vivaldi. Pi-Hole (or better yet AdGuard) is still desirable because it will block ads for other apps and devices. Defense in depth.
- skygazer 1y agoI'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?
- grugagag 1y agoMe too but expect this to stop working though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- int_19h 1y agoWhy? Apple has a vested interest in keeping ad blocking working in Safari - it hurts Google, which is their primary competitor.
- _cenw 1y agoThey adopted declarativeWebRequest as the exclusive option for "content blocking" years ago, which requires an actual extension update to change blocked URLs. It allows for some optimizations that look nice on benchmarks, but in reality uBO makes the web faster by getting rid of a lot of tracking requests and javascript. Nobody in the ad industry cared, because Safari's share is so small and plastering Safari users that use this basic adblocking in ads probably would've made them move elsewhere. Chrome doing this however changes the value of working around adblockers, because they now lack the ability to rapidly respond or match with code (that's not regex) or even reading a bit of the response.
- Nursie 1y agoIt’s inferior AFAICT because the API is more limited, and it looks an awful lot like the world’s biggest ad company (Google) has arranged that specifically to be less effective for ad and tracker blocking. It’s a good reason to use Firefox.
- knome 1y agoOnly for chrome. I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon. I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen. It's good enough.
- kilburn 1y agoYou may have reasons to require separate profiles. However, keep in mind that firefox multi-account containers [1] address many of the use cases for separate profiles in chrome with an IMHO better UX. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/ca/kb/how-use-firefox-containers https://support.mozilla.org/ca/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
- end1snight 1y agoYou all still use the web? I've been transpiling video game frame data into shader, geometry, lighting, color gradient data, and an agent system that mix-n-matches styles. I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps. DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints. Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
- jama211 1y agoThis genuinely reads like a copypasta.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Scrounger 1y agoHow does Ublock origin compare to using Brave Browser + NextDNS (Pi-Hole in the cloud basically) tho? Because I haven't seen a YouTube ad in a looong time and I don't pay for premium. I just use this combo.
- noitpmeder 1y agoAnother tip for youtube is to use https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/ -- helps skip the ads that are increasingly embedded in the video itself.
- smusamashah 1y agoThe same author made another app that replaces click bait video titles with a cloud sourced video title. It also replaces cluck bait thumbnails.
- Jalad 1y agohttps://dearrow.ajay.app/ https://dearrow.ajay.app/ (super awesome project)
- bigyabai 1y ago> bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoIn a capitalist society, paying for software is good, actually.
- gonzo41 1y agoThat's just propaganda. Our society is more like kings and serfs that capitalist these days.
- tastyfreeze 1y agoThis is absurdly false. The serfs can become kings as evidenced by newly minted millionaires every year. However, the reverse is also true as there are plenty of fortunes lost as well.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoYes, yes, we're all temporarily-displaced millionaires.
- tastyfreeze 1y agoYou surely won't become one by griping about the unfairness of other people's success to a bunch of strangers. 500k new millionaires in 2023 in the US. Why can't you be one of them in a coming year?
- 1y ago
- toomuchtodo 1y agoI’m hopeful browsers with LLM support are the future of ad blocking for users. This enables robust and sophisticated control by users of their experience.
- passwordoops 1y agoPerplexity strongly disagrees https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...
- toomuchtodo 1y agoDon’t use their browser? Browsers existed before Perplexity, they will exist long after they’re gone. I’m advocating for deep LLM support in any browser engine, with the assumption of on device inference (but also supporting off device endpoints, as use case dictates).
- philistine 1y agoI can’t let you do that Dave.
- breatheoften 1y agoIs there anyway to fully disable youtube shorts/reels/whatever that mess is called ...? I quite like youtube long form content but have found myself occasionally in short form rabbit holes (which are both very addicting and extremely unsatisfying and which motivated me to delete instagram to escape when i realized how much a time and emotion suck they are)
- tough 1y agoIdk if they work but several extensions on the chrome web store claim to hide/block shorts like https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-shorts/mnakecimeedpoeadgfjjpipcecdnafca https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-shorts/mnakeci...
- cap11235 1y agohttps://github.com/Onsotumenh/YouTube-Cosmetic-Filters-for-uBlock-Origin/blob/main/Shorts.txt https://github.com/Onsotumenh/YouTube-Cosmetic-Filters-for-u...
- hikewkwek 1y agoTurning off youtube watch history stops the shorts tab from working. And you can use a userscript to swap the "shorts" word to "watch" in the url to convert all shorts to normal videos. For example: // ==UserScript== // @name Redirect YouTube Shorts to Regular Videos (Mobile-Friendly) // @namespace https://example.com/ // @version 1.4 // @description Redirects YouTube Shorts URLs to regular video URLs on mobile // @author YourName // @match *://*.youtube.com/* // @run-at document-end // @grant none // ==/UserScript== //Written by GPT-4o Mini (function () { 'use strict'; // Function to redirect Shorts to regular video URLs function redirect() { if (location.pathname.startsWith("/shorts")) { const videoId = location.pathname.split("/")[2]; const newUrl = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" + videoId; window.location.replace(newUrl); } } // Observe changes to the DOM and check for navigation const observer = new MutationObserver(() => { redirect(); }); // Start observing the body for changes observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true }); // Initial check in case a Shorts URL is loaded directly redirect(); })();
- financypants 1y agoUntrap is amazing. On top of that, things like removing all apps from my home screen and turning of almost all notifications has improved my focus and my life a lot.
- leoh 1y agoYou are not circumventing the most troubling aspect of all this, which is that the content itself is perverted by its monetization model.
- Animats 1y agoYes. This is visible on news sites. The title and lede are rewritten as clickbait. The actual story may not be so bad. On some sites, the title on the home page may not match the article. Yesterday there was "(something happened) in Red State" on Fox News on the home page, but the actual article begins "(something happened) in Florida".
- ornornor 1y agoFor some reason Albania gets no ads on YT. Route your YT packets over to Albania and done. NextDNS works very well on iOS for everything else.
- chneu 1y agoCheckout: Enhancer For YouTube. Sponsorblock. Dearrow. I can't use YouTube without them anymore. It's so horrible.
- jackjeff 1y agoI did not realize that worked so well. I gave up on Safari a while ago. Will give it another shot with AdBlock Pro then. Is it with the free tier? I just use ublock Origin with Firefox on Mac/Pc and Orion on iOS. The annoyance list takes care of the cookie banners.
- musicale 1y ago> I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. Safari's vestigial "never auto-play" setting has never worked, and still doesn't.