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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

• led76 5y ago
  I have no Adblock on my phone and it’s unbelievable how many ads some sites put up. Many times I have to hunt for the second half of the article past five or six full image ads and sponsored content. This feels like a death spiral - the more Adblock the more ads they’ll put up to get seen by a smaller segment of users.
  • coldpie 5y ago
    Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin. Works great, highly recommended. iPhone solutions seem less advanced, unfortunately, but they exist. Personally I use one called "Adblock Pro," but that's not an endorsement, just the one I tried that has stuck.
    • vehemenz 5y ago
      Adguard for Safari does the trick for Safari on both iOS and macOS. I've tried others, and they don't seem to do much. Adguard works as well as uBO 90% of the time. I only see a difference when visiting actual malicious sites, like pirated sports streams, where Adguard might occasionally lets a pop-under through.
• duxup 5y ago
  What I find interesting is that in my experience people with lots of add blocking are more likely to pass on HORRIBLE links. They don't know and thus pass on garbage sites (full of ads and such) where the folks I know without ad blockers are more careful of what they subject their friends to. It's a weird situation.
  • DangitBobby 5y ago
    It's not just ads that contribute to link sharing nightmares. If you leave certain query parameters in a Twitter link you get a hard login wall after about 10 seconds if you aren't logged in. Other sites such as Quora do something similar: redirect you to a login wall if you click to expand an answer (only if some url query param is present). On Twitter that behavior is much worse, of course. To view a reply thread you must click the share button and manually copy and paste it into a new tab or you'll get a login wall. It's truly amazing how hostile big players are to UX when they aren't getting their way.
• Apreche 5y ago
  To answer the question posed by the site. How can they afford 261MB page load instead of 5MB? Because the largest expense of delivering video, the bandwidth, is still very cheap. We're talking less than one cent per gigabyte. Even if ad rates are really low, they're bringing in more than 1 cent per ad play.
  • aukhfauwhf 5y ago
    > the bandwidth, is still very cheap. This is yet another example of US/BayArea Privilege blindness. It is NOT cheap in most places to the User. Including in the unprivileged-USA. The user pays a lot for that bandwidth. Specially now that everyone will unknowingly move to predatory 5G home services but let me try to stay on topic. People out of the Empire Center will pay both bandwidth and processing power. Where do you think all those old phones you trade in for the latest apple/Samsung ends up? Everyone is running phones that barely gets any security update anymore and is already slowed to the maximum by the OS itself. Trying to load and then display video ads is just evil. And that is not web only, Apps are worse. If you install Apps, all of them are following the standard set by amazon, newegg, etc... you will get video ads along your usual usage. Ads in between search listings, ads in your cart! and you have to be much more technical to block those. There's no escape paying the BayArea-cost.
    • sixothree 5y ago
      The very article ends with the following: "But even so, again: video is expensive! And I simply can’t see how it’s worth their while to autoplay video on their site. Can anyone explain this to me?!" I'm sure this was an answer to the article this thread references. Bandwidth is cheap and it only gets cheaper.
    • throwaway744678 5y ago
      The article and your parent are talking of the cost for the producer, not the user.
• whistl034 5y ago
  I don't use any "ad blocker" plugins, but I do use EFF's Privacy Badger, which blocks all cookies it determines are tracking cookies. Many websites deduce it'ss blocking their ads, because they're addicted to tracking us, but I feel no guilt. I wouldn't risk browsing without it.
• Quigglez 5y ago
  Open ended question, is there a solution? Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads. Advertisers inherently want their ads to be seen/heard, which means there is pressure to make their ads more intrusive. Yet the more intrusive the ads become, the more annoyed the person accessing the content becomes (and thus perhaps becomes more likely to get an ad blocker). The more people that block ads, the more the website needs to make from each person who isn't blocking ads (likely meaning additional pressure to make ads more intrusive). What path are we headed down? What happens when so many people are blocking ads that the amount of value needed to be extracted from those who don't block ads is impossible to achieve? Does the internet consolidate more? I personally use ad blockers. Right now I'm browsing with Ghostery and AdBlock. I'm surprised that only 27% of people use them currently. Makes me want to check out my parents computers when I visit next and make sure they have an ad blocker installed. But back to the questions, does this mean that the contract between websites their visitors is inherently broken? Is the current situation a race to the bottom? Is that tenable? What's the alternative?
  • xyst 5y ago
    yea - it's called offering a product that is actually useful. Not this clickbait bullshit we see now. "Cops hate these 10 tips that save you money. #6 will surprise you" "Take a quiz to find out which Taylor Swift boyfriend you are"
  • coldpie 5y ago
    > Open ended question, is there a solution? Well, let's find out. Ads suck all of the air out of the room. If you provide your content through another business model, someone else can just copy your content and slap ads on it and make a few bucks. And because search engines function on those same ads, they're incentivized to send you to the spam sites instead of the real source of the content. If we kill ads as a business model, then we can start to explore other business models and find out what actually works. > Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads. No. There are other options. One example is the Patreon model. I pay for several creators who do not gate their content to payment. They make their content available to everyone, for free. I could view their content for free, but I want to encourage them to continue creating, so I pay them for it. Is it a viable option for every situation? I don't know. But the mere existence of ad-based business models means it's very difficult to explore non-ad-based solutions. For this, and a whole host of other reasons, using an ad-blocker is more ethical than not.
• karxxm 5y ago
  Am try to raise my 3yo daughter completely ad free. When watching a show, we exclusively use paid providers like YT, Netflix, Disney where no ads are present. Additionally, AdGuard helps removing some annoying Ads from minigame-Apps. For now, she is very young and it doesn't matter so much. But still, I want to keep up with this as long as possible. No free TV and no ads on web for her!
• sam0x17 5y ago
  I use Brave which somehow (not sure how) still does a much better job than whatever adblocking extensions I can find. I am also behind a PiHole firewall anyway, so most ad servers are blocked in the first place. Hundreds of websites that are completely unusable normally are completely usable as a result.
• nathias 5y ago
  yea, I can't use the web on mobile, its insane how patient people are with exploitative tech
  • Zak 5y ago
    Adblockers are available for several mobile browsers; system-wide adblocking exists, but tends to be more work. What is keeping you from using an adblocker on mobile?
    • nathias 5y ago
      are there good system-wide adblockers for ios? I hate the whole mobile experience, tbh so I didn't invest much time into it and just don't use it.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Content blockers. Firefox Focus is free. Wipr is paid option I use. Adguard is another free and paid option.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• ronnier 5y ago
  I run adblockers on the browser and block tracking/ad networks at the DNS level. My kids really notice when they use internet elsewhere.
• KoftaBob 5y ago
  I'm very curious what would happen if Apple suddenly announced that for the next version of Safari (20% of browser market share when combining mobile and desktop), adblocking would be included and ask the user if they want it on.
• makecheck 5y ago
  Frankly I have no problem with ads that are simple (text/images/untracked). The ad industry has made it clear they would rather be utterly obnoxious and creepy so therefore as far as I’m concerned they can wither and die. Firefox+addons seem to work best for blocking ads which is why I am increasingly concerned about that browser being marginalized.
• marcodiego 5y ago
  I wanted to show a video on YouTube to a friend. He passed me his cellphone. I searched and found the video and then something very strange happened: a completely unrelated something started playing. I said "Sorry I don't know what is this. This has nothing to do with what I wanted to show you." He then explained me that was just an advertisement and the video would play soon. People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.
  • pwython 5y ago
    Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?
    • hbgl 5y ago
      By building a profile of each user based on their viewing history and then when they use the search engine that I also own I would show them personalized results with sponsored links to products to buy. Plus I would be selling that information to third parties. And then I would of course also show some ads to all of the the normies that surf without an adblocker.
      • danuker 5y ago
        Why not both? I get nothing but ads on Google lately. I often bypass to Wikipedia, because it shows me what something is, not only where I can buy it.
      • pwython 5y ago
        You wouldn't even come close to breaking even from display/search ads like you mentioned. Advertisers would rather pay a lot more for pre-roll video ads, even if the user doesn't click. Those video ads usually result in a much higher ROAS. And people searching for funny cat videos on YouTube is a hell of a lot harder to categorize and monetize than traditional SERP.
    • 5y ago
• hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  I have Ad-block but still see a lot of Ads. I started to shun certain websites (major news sites particularly) a while ago. The only occasions I turn it off is when I legitimately believe that authors deserve a bit of extra revenue from Ads.
  • timbit42 5y ago
    Try Ublock Origin instead of Ad-block.
    • hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
      Thanks, will try it out.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  At some point we need to decide as a culture to reject advertising. Stop putting ads on our own websites and apps, stop linking to sites that advertise. Either charge me money for the content or give it for free. The world will become a better place. Less compromises and capitulations to advertising companies, less mindless consumerism, less distractions. More funding for actually good content (thus a monetary incentive to create it), lower consumer prices (from less money spent on advertising).
• robomartin 5y ago
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    > In exchange for being exposed to advertising at a restaurant, you get free pizza. Are you required to sign a contract for this exchange to happen? In that case, you would be breaching a contract, which is not the same as theft. If there's no contract, then I am free to go into a restaurant, plug in my earphones, keep my eyes glued to my laptop/phone and focus on whatever I want & ignore whatever else might be going on in the restaurant. While I sip my free pizza. If they have a problem with that, they could ask me to leave or not give me a pizza next time, but I most definitely haven't stolen anything. If they continue to offer me free pizza despite the fact that I don't give a shit about all the ads in the restaurant, that's their choice. Hardly any different from websites that continue to serve me despite the fact that I block ads. I've never signed a contract with a website where I agree to view ads.
    • robomartin 5y ago
      You can twist and turn your way around arguments and convince yourself that you are not a thief. That's fine. Good for you. Enjoy. Behind all of this there are businesses, which consist of people with jobs who have families and responsibilities. Just because you don't see the effects of your actions it does not mean there are no effects. You are stealing something that costs money to create and support and you have convinced yourself that you are entitled to that something. Few people enjoy advertising. I don't. And yet I understand that most of what's on the internet is financed this way. If everyone ran ad blockers the internet would collapse overnight. I have friends with small businesses who's families depend on being able to find customers through online advertising. Ad blockers have consequences for families just like theirs.
      • cartesius13 5y ago
        No need to twist and turn anything. No contract, no obligations whatsoever. It's literally as simple as that. The content provider is free to stop providing the content at any time
• 28304283409234 5y ago
  Schools. If you have kids that go to school chances are the teacher regularly uses youtube. Without adblockers. Do everyone a favor: talk to your kid's school, the IT guys there, and have then install ublock. All parents, teachers and kids will adore you.
• golemiprague 5y ago
• drusepth 5y ago
  The only reason I occasionally use an adblocker is to try to experience the web how what seems like a sizable subset of users experience it, for that shared experience. Honestly, the two don't seem that different in most cases outside of the worst ad-ridden sites. Side-note: I don't run ads on any of the sites I manage, yet deal with dozens of bug reports each year as adblockers aggressively find new ways to break sites. IME, ad blockers are about as much as a nuisance as the ads themselves.
• Freak_NL 5y ago
  Server may have melted into a left-handed puddle: https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthanded.com/2022/adblocking-people-and-non-adblocking-people-experience-a-totally-different-web/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthan...
• blakesterz 5y ago
  In FireFox I have my ad blockers disabled in Private Mode so nothing is getting in the way if I'm testing or some site is being weird. Sometimes it's SHOCKINGLY different how a page looks with the blockers in place. I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. The web is a much better place with a blocker in place. (Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. I don't use an advert blocker but I know what they look like. Why? The adverts don't really bother me and I also think they're dubiously moral.
    • bee_rider 5y ago
      Do you also read all the spam flyers and emails you get?
      • chrisseaton 5y ago
        No? I'm not sure that's the gotcha you think it is - I also don't read random web pages that I'm not interested in, and I don't sit and 'read' adverts on pages I am reading.
        • bee_rider 5y ago
          I guess I assumed too much, then -- where's the dubious morality come from?
          • chrisseaton 5y ago
            Because the implicit agreement of a site with adverts is that the content's available to you with the adverts on it. If you don't like that you don't have to read it, but if you remove them automatically then I think it's hard to argue you aren't breaking an implied agreement.
• djoldman 5y ago
  webarchive cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthanded.com/2022/adblocking-people-and-non-adblocking-people-experience-a-totally-different-web/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthan... outline.com: https://outline.com/5HuFGj https://outline.com/5HuFGj
• Damogran6 5y ago
  The site appears to be hugged to death...but the thrust of the idea seems pretty obvious on the surface...I'd add that it also probably follows financial, if not technically savvy groups. The person with a $50 Walmart Burner phone's experience will be a WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT from the person with the $1100 smartphone with ad blocking turned on.
  • knaik94 5y ago
    Thankfully, with android, firefox still has addon support so ublock origin can still be used regardless of price point.
    • Macha 5y ago
      I wish it had full addon support though, rather than just Mozilla's curated selection of 20 or so. I have to install an app to do twitter -> nitter redirection when it could just be a browser extension.
      • contravariant 5y ago
        It is possible to use your own list of addons, but it's needlessly difficult [1]. I hope they will support a slightly less insane workaround eventually. [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
      • Zak 5y ago
        I switched to Kiwi because of this. I occasionally check to see if Firefox has unbroken extensions on Android and won't be back to using it as my primary browser on my phone until it does or Kiwi ceases to be an option.
    • tomrod 5y ago
      They took that away awhile ago. Is it back now?
      • 5y ago
• zuminator 5y ago
  I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.
  • titzer 5y ago
    I bet! I run an adblocker and it's a cat and mouse game with YouTube ads slipping through. Last breakage, before I reinstalled it, I was getting ad interruptions for the same two stupid adds literally every 45 seconds.
    • shadowgovt 5y ago
      Problem is once an ad blocker's in the loop, the ad architecture's dataflow is damaged and it'll have to run fallback content. So you'll get whatever's in the B-list of ads and that may be just two.
      • Macha 5y ago
        Yeah, google can circumvent the ad blocker's attempts to block the ad playback from beginning, but if the first thing the ad does is have double verify check if you're a bot, and double verify's domain is in your adblocker's list, then the ad is going to fail and Google will try load some other ad once it errors out.
        • tasha0663 5y ago
          > double verify check if you're a bot I hate when they do this. I just leave and go somewhere else. I'm not submitting to Voight-Kampff just to see a LinkedIn profile.
          • shadowgovt 5y ago
            That's win-win for the server. Servers start doing this because automated traffic is cutting into their ability to provide service to humans. If you're freeing up their traffic to serve other humans you're doing them a favor.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ameister14 5y ago
  As to the reason it's worth it, here are a couple of reasons: When legacy media companies sell ad space, often they do not do so through an auction mechanism but through a direct purchase model. That means someone paid anywhere from a few hundred to thousands to be on that page. That gives them more of a client relationship and so they can feel more burdened to make sure advertising clients get 'visibility' and bang for their buck. Also, they can sell ads in their videos with estimated view/impression counts. If they autoplay, the view count goes up even if you're not watching the video so an unsophisticated ad consumer thinks the ad spend is justified. I don't run ad campaigns anymore, but I did for eight years and I always preferred no autoplay because intentional viewing is much more valuable for what I was selling. Use adblock.
• rabuse 5y ago
  I have this moment when I have to use Youtube on my phone for some reason (such as a tutorial for how to fix something), and get blasted with 3 ads for a 1 minute video. I would never use it for long periods without an ad blocker.
  • MaxikCZ 5y ago
    youtube vanced or newpipe
    • rabuse 5y ago
      I'll try those out. Thanks!
      • lanuk 5y ago
        also FYI, neither of these 2 apps are on the play store
  • nfriedly 5y ago
    If you're on Android, try out https://vancedapp.com/ https://vancedapp.com/ - it's an "Advanced" YouTube player, but they removed the "Ad"s (get it?) Also, there's an option to enable SponsorBlock, which can automatically skip over ads, introductions, etc. that are part of the original video. Vanced and Firefox's addons are two of the main things keeping me off of iOS.
    • aniforprez 5y ago
      I'm a dumb dumb. Didn't realise that about the name. That's really neat
      • nfriedly 5y ago
        Same, I didn't get it until someone on reddit explained it to me :)
    • arcastroe 5y ago
• intsunny 5y ago
  With Chrome's crippling of adblockers via their Manifest V3 mandate, I wonder if Chrome users are in for a rude awakening of how hostile and repugnant the ad laden web has become.
  • gketuma 5y ago
    That is why I've been getting cozy with Firefox again. When Manifest V3 happens, FF hopefully will be our saviour.
  • ronnier 5y ago
    I've switched to Brave, plus DNS level blocking with pihole.
  • aembleton 5y ago
    Doubt it - with manifest V3, most of the adverts will still be blocked. I expect more are getting through with Chrome already because of CName cloaking and uBO not being able to uncloak on Chrome.
• Karsteski 5y ago
  I have friends who still don't use some sort of adblocking, no fucking idea how they browse websites without it in 2022. Anytime I've had to use a computer without uBlock Origin, they are horrible to use. Now I just recommend everyone Ublock Origin :)
• caaqil 5y ago
  I got so used to having uBlock that I couldn't relate to the memes about YouTube adding multiple unskippable ads recently. I'm like "they did?". It is like I browse a different web and it's awesome.
• anonymousab 5y ago
  >autoplaying videos I'm still looking for a block list that simply removes all video content from various franchise and local news sites. It is rarely actually relevant to the article, and is often vastly less information dense.
  • ameister14 5y ago
    you can update your own block list, can't you?
    • anonymousab 5y ago
      Yeah, it's more that I will run into an article on some local news site I've never visited before far more frequently than I'll end up on one I looked at previously. They all seem to implement an ever-so-slightly different player, which means manually blocking the unique element (s) each time. Definitely a use case for a standard community sourced list.
  • coldpie 5y ago
    NoScript fixes this (and a whole hell of a lot of other webdev sins).
  • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    Doesn't Firefox block autoplaying videos by default as of recently? It does for me anyways.
• AlwaysRock 5y ago
  I am shocked every time I use my wife's computer and the ad blocker isnt there. I don't even understand how you could use the web on a regular basis where you have to duck, dodge, and weave better than Ali to avoid some type of disturbance.
• _wldu 5y ago
  A friend (who does not use an ad blocker) showed me something on a website a few weeks ago and I was shocked by the invasiveness and aggressive nature of the ads. I asked him how he was able to use the web like this and he said it was annoying and that he was interrupted a lot, but he had sort of gotten use to it. There's no way I would use a browser without an ad blocker. Doing so is counter-productive and also a major security risk.
• itvision 5y ago
  I also have NoScript installed - it significantly decreases the amount of crap your web browser fetches and renders and thus makes browsing faster and consume less energy. And as mentioned by blakesterz in Private mode I have both uBlock Origin and NoScript disabled because multiple websites refuse to work otherwise.
  • huhtenberg 5y ago
    You don't need NoScript with uBlock. It has an option for disabling JS (</> in its main drop-down menu).
    • Workaccount2 5y ago
      I still use NoScript because you can quickly enable bare minimum scripts to get a site working. After a while you develop a good intuition for what is making things not work. At first it is pretty daunting and I generally don't recommend it for the less savvy. If you just blanket turn off Js the internet basically is not useable.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    By default I visit with NoScript enabled. It usually works fine. Sometimes it doesn't, so I selectively enable scripts. As often as not, it doesn't help. If it's at all hard to make the site work for me, I give up - it's not as if there's a shortage of websites to visit. I know when I'm not welcome.
  • theandrewbailey 5y ago
    I use uMatrix so I can enable scripts (and other resources) on a per-domain basis.
• TheIronMark 5y ago
  No one likes ads, but the belief that you're owed content for free is absurd.
  • skummetmaelk 5y ago
    How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. They'd pay for that. Instead we have the majority of content creators engaged in an arms race to hijack your attention and produce the most outrageous, rather than best, content possible because more outrage = more eyeballs = more ads.
    • TheIronMark 5y ago
      > How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.
      • skummetmaelk 5y ago
        That's not my point. My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really. If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
      • commoner 5y ago
        When the content provider offers the content for free, the viewer obtains the right to consume any portions of the content they want for free. If a website wants to require the viewer to consume all of the content when they view it, they can do that in their terms of service, though it might not be legally enforceable. Most sites don't.
    • 5y ago
• MarkusWandel 5y ago
  I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now). The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads. The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
  • Macha 5y ago
    > But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see. Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?
    • Fice 5y ago
      This is not enough if we don't stop DRM (which Firefox also supports). DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
    • sneak 5y ago
      If a browser doesn't render the web properly, that's the browser's fault, not the web's.
      • npteljes 5y ago
        Not really, no. It's the publisher's fault if they targeted the browser in the first place. If they didn't, and it didn't render properly, then it's nobody's fault, just something that happens.
      • 5y ago
• jhoelzel 5y ago
  I use ublock and have setup a dns blocker through openwrt and have even added my own items to the blacklist. I am astoundished how much traffic leaves my machine "just sitting there". At this point my blocklist has something like 77.614 domains blocked and I do not believe that its going to get less. what is intersting is that I grew up with the uncensored internet and the things i found are not on the list of things that I definitly will block for my children. Its kind of the opposite approach of a censored web for children because to be honest im not so much worried about their activities, but far more concious of the bad actors out there.
• davio 5y ago
  I'm in some weird Facebook limbo where I get zero ads (native app, browser with adblock turned off, etc.) Please don't tell Mark My wife is blown away when she sees my feed. It's like we've been using completely different apps for years.
  • timbit42 5y ago
    Are you using FBPurity?
• zwog 5y ago
  I hate auto-playing videos. Several news websites in Germany embed an auto-playing video in a news article. Often these videos have nothing to do with the article. And then there are some that even turn into a pop-up player when you scroll down. What's the best way to block these videos (in Chromium)? I wouldn't mind a solution where videos are completely blocked with a whitelist, since I rarely consume videos except on dedicated video sites (e.g Youtube).
  • theandrewbailey 5y ago
    uBlock Origin works well for me in Chromium. It knows to autoplay on Youtube out of the box.
• danShumway 5y ago
  It's almost unbelievable how big the gap is. Sometimes I try to turn it off and check links before I share them to find out if they're actually good reading experiences. I've got a couple of sites that I used to reflexively share on social media that I've since learned not to because without an adblocker they auto-play videos at the top of the page - but I never ran into that behavior when I was using them, so I thought they were fine. I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so. Maybe it's an ADHD thing and I'm overstating this, but I personally see really tangible effects on my ability to concentrate based on how many ads I'm surrounded with. Even stuff like Sponsorblock, which is honestly mostly removing intros/outros has helped a lot with how I interact with Youtube. Sure there's data savings, page load time, etc... but I also vaguely suspect that constant web advertising just flat-out affects people's mood and ability to focus more than is commonly talked about. Seriously, ask your family members about whether they adblock, and install Ublock Origin for them if they don't. If they're on Android, consider (with their permission) swapping out their browser for Firefox (or some equivalent) and installing Ublock Origin again. If they don't mind some very minor UI differences (and in my experience many people don't), then it's an immediate speedup and data savings at the cost of maybe 3 minutes of work and explanation. The article suggests that roughly 73% of users don't use an adblocker. Some of those users are making a conscious choice, and that's fine, but a lot of them just don't know how to install one or don't know how they work. You don't need to be actually evangelizing ad blockers to still occasionally ask someone who's complaining about ads whether or not they realize that there's a really easy way to get rid of them.
  • xyst 5y ago
    > I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so. I have done this in the past. However, I have discovered that most of the people I introduce to ad blocking will turn it off later. This is because some sites are able to detect when you are using an ad blocker and even provide steps to turn it off. While there are ways to get around this, most of the people just preferred to turn it off. It's quite sad, really.
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• pea 5y ago
  An interesting thought experiment is how feasible and expensive would it be to run a large-scale PR and marketing campaign to get that 25% of adblockers to 50%, and how would this disrupt the current hegemony. If you were given the task "Remove $1BN of ad revenue. Here is $100M to spend.", how would you do it? I'd imagine it could be reasonably high leverage.
  • anonymousab 5y ago
    > and how would this disrupt the current hegemony. You would immediately see many more billions spent on making it illegal wherever it's feasible to do so. And, of course, an accelerated push to 1) neuter the ability for browsers to block content, how they block content, and what content they can block and 2) a push towards big bundles and blobs of content that can't feasibly be adblocked in realtime with the way current extensions work.
    • TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      With Chrome being about 66% of the browser market, it's a really short trip to get to this future. I sure hope that Apple considers it a strategic imperative to continue developing Safari.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        It is mostly why I support their restriction of only allowing Safari on iOS. Even though it might be an evil, it is a lesser evil than letting Chrome dominate, which seems all but guaranteed if they did not have iOS Safari to stop them.
• Geee 5y ago
  Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad before I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.
  • notapenny 5y ago
    Youtube is the reason I installed an adblocker in the first place. I don't mind watching an ad, but at some point they went from an ad every other video, to unskippable ads in-front of every video (love a 1m ad on every 10s video when I'm just browsing clips) and mid-content ads that literally just cut in and disrupt what I'm watching.
    • xemdetia 5y ago
      I think the other thing that pushed me to put it back on after experimenting with it off was the absolute dearth of inventory Youtube apparently thought was appropriate to show me. I watch a lot of content of various lengths in a lot of various fields but I would get the same one or two ads for days. Then I started getting the 10m+ ads that seem to be randomly OK for some reason? I don't think I could stomach another experiment.
      • stonecharioteer 5y ago
        Vanced even has SponsorBlock, which is insanely good
    • lopis 5y ago
      During the holidays, YouTube was showing me 2 15-second ads every single video. I stopped using the app and stuck to the browser. Then I found out about vanced from HW. I'm sorry to my followed channels but it became unbearable.
    • reaperducer 5y ago
      love a 1m ad on every 10s video Christmas 2020 I tried to watch midnight Mass from Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York on YouTube. (Not live; after.) SIX MINUTES of commercials at the start, and the rest of the program had TWENTY-SIX commercial breaks. I haven't watched YouTube since.
• parsd 5y ago
  I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers. I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process. Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.
  • whoibrar 5y ago
    This has to be the most unpopular opinion so far I have a few questions for you 1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?
    • CubsFan1060 5y ago
      Not OP, but I find your questions interesting. I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use. >3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we even consider "I don't like your terms so I'm taking the content anyway" an option.
      • WA 5y ago
        Your printed newspaper can neither build a profile of you. Nor mine shitcoins. We have to consider this in the digital age, because in the analog world, ads have very limited impact.
      • thewebcount 5y ago
        > I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use. Nonsense. Broadcast TV and radio are the same. I use a TiVo for broadcast TV and use the skip ads function.
• theshrike79 5y ago
  PiHole is the first thing I install on my network and configure it as DNS via DHCP. Makes everything bearable. It doesn't get rid of every ad, but it still lightens the load.
• vlunkr 5y ago
  The other thing they didn't get into here is that the quality of ads online is generally trash. In the old advertising world there was at least some thought and work put into ads. Now they are auto-generated nightmares. Check out this article from a few years ago if you want to see the worst of the worst: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/ https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
• beebeepka 5y ago
  Better yet, go all the way in with No script and experience an even better email. A lot faster, too. Enabling us even on a handful of sites has a measurable impact on battery life on underpowered devices such as phones. HN is working perfectly fine without js. For obvious reasons, most non video/chat/app sites work just fine as well. I write us for a living so I'm not against in the least. It works for me. My mind is blown every time I see what regular people experience. Horrible, though I am not sure it's worse than what we had to deal with back in the flash and days a decade ago. Could be.
• MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  "I’ve been browsing the web with an adblocker for so long that I’d totally forgotten about the existence of ads being spliced into video content" Relatable. YouTube Vanced is a bigger feature for Android than iMessage is for iOS.
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• taildrop 5y ago
  Ad blocking is a security issue. When web sites start taking responsibility for their ad content, we can have a discussion on if it is "theft" or not. As long as they farm their ads out to third party providers and wash their hands of any of the security implications and responsibilities, I will continue to block them.
• btdmaster 5y ago
  This may be an extreme take, but recently I've been removing websites with Google Analytics et al. from my bookmarks. If the user is not being respected when it comes to tracking what that does hint at when it comes to content?
• cercatrova 5y ago
  I have a list of adblockers I use, hope it helps other people here: Desktop: - Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking) - AdGuard (device wide adblocking) Web browsers: - uBlock Origin - uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript) - SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube) Mobile: - Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension support so you can install uBlock Origin) - YouTube Vanced (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock) - NewPipe (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock via a fork [0], different UI than main YouTube app) - YouTube++ (for iOS, similar feature set as Vanced) TV: - SmartTubeNext (ad-free YouTube) [0] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
  • DavideNL 5y ago
    There's also an iOS app for SponsorBlock now (safari extension.)
  • sm4rk0 5y ago
    I can add https://blokada.org/ https://blokada.org/ to the "Mobile" section.
  • Fiahil 5y ago
    How do I block Youtube ads on LG web OS ? Pihole doesn't work, they serve the ads on the same domain as the video content.
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      Invidious. https://invidious.snopyta.org/feed/popular https://invidious.snopyta.org/feed/popular
      • Fiahil 5y ago
        I would be happy to try it, if it was available on the LG content store...
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• WallyFunk 5y ago
  > I would imagine margins are pretty thin these days if you run a magazine website. Advertising revenue isn’t what is used to be and the money they make for each visitor is probably the lowest it has ever been Webmasters need to diversify their income streams. Obviously AD revenue doesn't cut it anymore. You need to implant affiliate links, do paywalls, paid subscriptions to content, and sell merch on a Shopify-powered site that is separate from the main magazine/blog. Ghacks for example sells software and services on their deals subdomain[0], but I'm not sure if it's that profitable. [0] https://deals.ghacks.net/ https://deals.ghacks.net/
• indymike 5y ago
  The real question is, if you are going to autoplay a huge video is do video ad units perform better than anything else? Last I looked, video ads were pretty cheap, and didn't have good stories on conversion. Has that changed?
• oldiphone 5y ago
  I used to use adblockers but then certain websites stopped working and displayed banners saying to turn of my adblocker, so i did, and then it all seemed kind of pointless.
  • commoner 5y ago
    Have you tried uBlock Origin recently? In the settings, you can turn on the Unbreak and Annoyances filters to eliminate these anti-adblock banners. I haven't encountered one in a long time.
  • timbit42 5y ago
    Try Ublock Origin and learn how to use it's element picker to block any part of a webpage you want.
• oblio 5y ago
  People have probably forgotten. Old media had (has) about 20% of its space (newspaper pages or media time) taken up by advertising. That was the steady state for media. I don't think it was accidental, it was the equilibrium needed to fund the media. Plus advertising frequently was one of the flashiest bits. We're going to go back there, it's just going to take a few decades until the new media companies stabilize. Netflix has already started to ramp up its subscription prices, just give it some more time and more pressure to shareholders to increase revenue, ads will come and new subscription tiers will appear. C'est la vie, I guess. That's who and what we are as humanity.
• standardUser 5y ago
  If companies chose to run simple, clean, quiet advertisements there would be no need to block ads. They have only themselves to blame for creating a nightmare user experience.
• voidfunc 5y ago
  I haven't seen an ad on the internet in at least a decade so this sounds about right. My mom recently somehow managed to disable the ad-blocker I have setup on her computer and was blown away by how much advertising is on the internet.
• ratsmack 5y ago
  I have never used an add blocker. If the page is too intrusive with toxic adds, I just close the page. Also, if I go to any page that launches a pop-up to subscribe or some other stupid crap, I again just close the page, never to return. I wish more people would do this.
  • iamwpj 5y ago
    I'm with you on this. Toxic internet is toxic even if you block the bad stuff. Don't go there.
  • xboxnolifes 5y ago
    > I wish more people would do this. Different people view different webpages due to different interests. And different people also have different thresholds for what would be "toxic adds". I know a lot of articles posted here would fail that threshold for me.
• jedberg 5y ago
  For the longest time I refused to install an adblocker. I worked at a company that made most of its money from ads, and it felt hypocritical to run an ad blocker. Also I wanted to experience the website the same way as the users do. For a long time I told people "my brain is my ad blocker I just ignore it". But after a while I just couldn't stand the web without it anymore. Websites got so bad I couldn't find the content anymore. My CPU would spike to 100% on some web pages and my laptop fans would spin like crazy. It makes me sad but now I install an ad blocker on every place I can.
  • schnevets 5y ago
    I'm very surprised the article went into the technical (web site sizes) instead of the psychological. People using the advertised web cannot visit a page without being bombarded by political surveys ("Are your gas prices higher under Biden? WE WANT TO KNOW"), extraneous goods (Show your love with a "My husband is a Rick and Morty fan born in March whose area code is 212!" t-shirt!), and deceptive practices ("Everyone in your area is saving on real estate taxes with this one weird trick!") I was shocked when uBlock got flack for arranging an "Acceptable advertising" practice on their filter. It seems very similar to centralized regulations in broadcast to me. Larger, more established firms agree to a set of rules for the benefit of consumer and provider.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • commoner 5y ago
      > I was shocked when uBlock got flack for arranging an "Acceptable advertising" practice on their filter. The Acceptable Ads program started in AdBlock Plus (owned by Eyeo) in 2011. In 2018, uBlock (not to be confused with the highly recommended uBlock Origin) was acquired by AdBlock (which was itself acquired by an anonymous buyer in 2015, not to be confused with AdBlock Plus) and then implemented Eyeo's Acceptable Ads program by default. The complaint against the program is that it turns Eyeo* into a rent-seeking middleman that profits from giving its users a degraded experience compared to ad blockers that block without selling exceptions, such as uBlock Origin. Eyeo is acting just like an ad seller, taking money from advertisers in exchange for its users' attention. * And other companies? We don't know for sure who acquired AdBlock and uBlock, but it wouldn't be surprising if Eyeo did or if they have a common owner.
• massysett 5y ago
  "But I think without the help of an adblocker I would find it much worse." Not at all. Because I don't use an adblocker, I don't visit websites that are infested with ridiculous numbers of ads. These sites are not worth reading anyway. I read sites I pay for, I go to my bank, I pay bills, I read Haskell API docs, etc etc. If I used an adblocker, I'd waste even more time on Internet garbage.
• ipaddr 5y ago
  I keep ads on. It allows me to see content like the average person. I feel that gives me a better perspective.
• ryangittins 5y ago
  On an adjacent note, my mother is someone who doesn't do any streaming—just regular old cable TV with constant commercials. I've asked her why she puts up with it and she just says the commercials give her a nice break to get up and go to the kitchen, the bathroom, do chores, etc. In reality, I think it's just inertia more than anything. Recently though, she's been spending more time with my grandpa who streams everything. Last I talked to her, she said she felt very spoiled being able to watch whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with no ads. I'd tried explaining how great it is to her before, but I guess she had to live it to really understand how much better the other side is. Blocking or avoiding ads in every facet of my life is almost a point of pride for me. I'm always alarmed when other people are just cool with it.
• ryangittins 5y ago
  "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you." - Banksy
  • TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    I guess, like the old bully adage, they're also being bullied themselves by the very same thing, but, as also with the adage, that's hardly consolation.
    • cpeterso 5y ago
      I read that supposedly Google had to rename elements of their website that advertisers use to manage their ad campaigns because the website would break when ad blockers blocked elements mentioning ads. So the people running these ad campaigns were themselves using sad blockers!
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• vhiremath4 5y ago
  I wish I had a better way to support content sites without paying for individual websites. I’m guessing this would never happen, but I would definitely pay a single monthly fee to get access to all the major news sites and if it helped ensure some level of journalistic integrity.
  • volkse 5y ago
    Apple news, youtube, netflix, disney+hulu+hbo, and amazon prime. All of this together is more than enough content to satisfy a lot of tastes in my opinion. And you wont have to look at a single ad
• tunesmith 5y ago
  It's interesting working for a large employer that relies on ad revenue. Among employees there's understanding that ad blocking bites into our revenue. I'm sure some of the employees use ad blockers themselves, though. And when we get customer complaints about the site acting wonky, they're pretty open about using ad blocking. Sometimes it's possible that the ad blocker itself is what causes the issue. There are be a couple of opinions that folks that use ad blockers are on their own and that we won't cater to them, but the more dominant position is that the people complaining are our most active users and help drive engagement, so there's still a strong argument for the site working well in a "degraded" (ad-blocked) mode. There's still a sweet spot to aim for that is ad-compatible. For one thing, limit CLS, because I think content that jumps around due to ads has got to be one of the biggest drivers toward reaching for an ad blocker. Also, some widely-used ad systems are not all that compatible with single-page apps. (Looking at you, gpt.js.) Even if you call their cleanup methods after destroying an ad, you'll have a memory leak on the browser side if you don't completely reload the page/app. So users complain about the SPA "bogging down" as they use it, and they'll often (correctly, even if accidentally) blame the ads. So the ad systems have got to buckle down and fix their own problems if they don't want to drive users toward ad blockers.
• siskiyou 5y ago
  The reason I use an ad blocker and noscript is because focused reading is impossible without these countermeasures. It's as if they don't want me to read and pay attention what they wrote.
  • timbit42 5y ago
    Well, technically, they're not making money from what they wrote so yeah, they only care that you see the ads, and they only care about the headline insomuch as it draws you in to click so you can see the ads.
• divs1210 5y ago
  that's... the whole point?
• raz32dust 5y ago
  Curious - why does Youtube not figure out how to outsmart ad blockers? Is it technically not possible to embed ads into the video such that the ad blocker cannot detect it?
  • sxv 5y ago
    Good question. It is a cat and mouse game but certainly possible for YouTube to (at least) only release part Y of the video after a certain amount of time has elapsed since part X was released. And if YouTube really wanted to seamlessly glue the ads and video together, I think it would be insurmountable from an adblocker's perspective.
    • timbit42 5y ago
      Have you used SponsorBlock?
  • alkonaut 5y ago
    Some script has to pay attention to whether you watch it so presumably there will always be a browser state that knows whether an ad is being watched.
• irthomasthomas 5y ago
  Yep, I had a weird experience at a friends house when his smart TV youtube was playing ads every few minutes, while I was trying to listen to the Dead. Really killed my vibe maan. Apparently it's the uploader's fault for choosing to monetise. I cannot tolerate ads at all now. Part of my issue with them is that you have no control over what you are being shown, obviously. It's the same problem with all the new social media platforms, in general. Anything can popup. And once you've seen something, to cant unsee it.
• lokimedes 5y ago
  Aside from the manipulative and downright unproductive type of economy we are left with, how much energy (in terms of Wh) is wasted by video ads? Energy doesn’t lie, even if a publisher can seemingly offset their costs with a CDN. The real trouble is that energy pricing is not correlated with total cost of production in most countries. Could energy pricing that accounted for pollution, resource depletion as well as the production cost itself, help us as a species in removing such counterproductive businesses?
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    I believe there's also a substantial cost as e-waste when people dump devices that are no longer powerful enough to display ad-filled garbage without terrible lag and stutter.
• manishsharan 5y ago
  What will be the long term consequences of majority of us using AdBlocks? And who will fill the void when running a website is economically unfeasible? Think of it like this : a majority of well respected publications are behind paywalls ; so people are consuming information from Facebook memes or WhatsApp posts or worse. And we know how well that is going for us as a society? YouTube ads are freaking annoying. But I know that the creators of those channels I watch depend on those to make a decent living and overwhelming majority of them are not rich.
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    > And who will fill the void when running a website is economically unfeasible? You mean who will fill the internet with SEO-optimized garbage and other trash that only exist to serve ad impressions? I sure hope nobody will.
• sebastien_b 5y ago
  I call it a malware blocker, rather than an adblocker - here's my reasoning: One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari (the newer useless extension-neutered version), on what I considered a reputable site. I tested again to make sure it was indeed the site that produced this, and sure enough reproduced it after browsing a few pages of listings. I advised the site that they likely had a rogue advert in rotation causing this, but as usual, the blame got put on me instead, claiming that it was probably some extension (didn't have any - they're basically useless on Safari now) or it was my ISP, blah blah blah That's the day I decided to use a real browser ("If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser"), so I switched to Firefox and installed uBO. This is also when I decided to call such utilities as uBO "malware blockers" rather than "ad blockers". Websites can try to deflect the blame all they want[2], but in the end if visiting your website results in any attempts to compromise my computer, it's your site doing it as far as I'm concerned. If the website industry can't regulate itself to prevent such things, then I'm going to do it myself, and I'll push back on any claims that I'm using an "ad" blocker when I'm really guarding against malware attacks. [1] I'm loathe to name it since I don't recall which site it was specifically, but it was a classifieds-style site, with the reputation of, say, eBay-level recognition. [2] https://www.imore.com/content-blockers-bad-ads-and-what-were-doing-about-it https://www.imore.com/content-blockers-bad-ads-and-what-were...
  • recursive 5y ago
    If it's not detecting malware, then it's not a malware blocker. As far as I know, ad blockers work based on host name and css selectors. If there was an actual anti-malware that was so trivially bypass-able, it would be laughed out of the room. uBO blocks hosts of advertisers. AFAIK they don't distinguish between malware and non-malware, nor do they detect malware from other sources.
    • account42 5y ago
      The people embedding the ads or even delivering them are not neccessarily malicious (in the malware sense at least). Also, as long as most people don't block ads they don't have as much incentive to counteract ad blockers. So at least for now ad blocking remains effective for both malicious and benign ad payloads.
• hoppla 5y ago
  I swear the ad industry are in bed with cellular operators. Data usage from ads taps directly into peoples data plans, why would not there exist a kickback scheme for this?
• Havoc 5y ago
  Yeah it is quite a jarring experience when Adblocking breaks for whatever reason. Actually built a small internal api end point that checks whether filtering works every 60s and that goes onto status tracker (Kuma)
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  It would be nice if we had the option to ask for $1 to our visitors, but we don't because the credit card and payments racket works its magic. Just what are websites supposed to do to survive? Shutting down is not a valid answer Of course the #1 culprits are the advertisers themselves, because they don't care about their craft, they are lazy and just push all their money to google. But the web should be like an arcade machine where people can pay to get content, and current regulation makes that impossible
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    Destroying the advertising industry would provide market pressure to make a viable micropayment system.
• Firehawke 5y ago
  Even if the ads weren't obnoxious and in your face, there's still the elephant in the room of malware. Every ad group has been the carrier of at least one malware ad in the last few years-- it's simply not safe to browse the web without an ad blocker. The only way that'll change is if they go back to static images/text, and there's no way in hell the ad industry would ever allow that.
• fleddr 5y ago
  Until a decade ago, I've always tried to be the better person. I did not block ads and for sites that I liked, I even intentionally clicked on ads. I can tolerate ads. Also 10 on a page. And they can even blink. What I cannot tolerate is malware, personal data theft, and ads destroying the performance of any website. Ads have become a liability and advertisers have made it loud and clear that I'm not a human being, instead a resource to be exploited, and no tactic is below their standards.
• mwattsun 5y ago
  I started watching Adam Curtis' Century of the Self [1] recently, then decided to fact check [2]. Curtis makes out Sigmund Freuds nephew Edward Louis Bernays as the inventor of modern advertising, but he exaggerates for effect as usual. I've been a fan of busting ads for a long time, at least since I learned as a boy that I was being psychologically manipulated. We're an activist hub and the headquarters of Adbusters magazine, the journal of the mental environment. Since 1989, our international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts has been smashing ads, fighting corruption and speaking truth to power. [3] [1] The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom [3] https://www.adbusters.org/about-us https://www.adbusters.org/about-us
• Double_a_92 5y ago
  I experience this on my phone where adblock doesn't work that well. It's absolutely horrible to use the web there. The screen is already small, and then it gets filled with overlays getting me to use an app, ads, autoplaying videos, ... I'm at the point where my phone is just an alarm, instant messenger and casual camera, since other apps are also full of annoying ads.
  • timbit42 5y ago
    If you're using Android, install Firefox and the Ublock Origin plugin. I use it for watching ad free YouTube videos as well, instead of the YouTube app.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  For a while I didn't bother with an adblocker. After countless data breaches and tracking that can still be done even with an adblocker, so I was mostly apathetic about the privacy factors. That was 3-4 years ago. But I had a fast computer, lots of ram etc., yet still I noticed that websites were getting progressively slower and slower. And, as mentioned in the article, auto-playing video ads proliferated and became massively annoying. So I took the time to setup uBlock Origin, and gradually zapped elements on sites when they still made it through. The difference was huge. Yes, the annoying auto-play ads (mostly) went away, but even more was the overall browsing speed was a huge improved. It was almost like the very early 00's when I went from dial-up to broadband. It was only at this point that I realized just how much ads massively bogged down the internet.
• benlumen 5y ago
  I've used adblockers since they were invented and rarely experience the unfiltered internet. In recent years, though, I've wondered if it might actually be better to turn that all off. Are we adblockers just getting a more purified stream of clickbait "news" and enraging social media posts, without the ads there to remind us that it's all trash? I suspect so.
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    Yep. Most of the things you find with a Google search are obvious SEO trash even if you don't see the ads. The quality of the content reminds you that it's all trash.
    • benlumen 5y ago
      Exactly.
• jordanpg 5y ago
  Ads are such a strange cancer on the internet. So ugly, so without value, such a waste of time, such a sinkhole of precious attention. And yet -- would the modern internet even exist but for ads? I'm not so sure. It seems there is a bifurcation, even among those of us with the technical know-how and resources to live ad-free lives: those who tolerate ads, and those who do not. I count myself in the latter group. I will be happiest if I go the rest of my life and never see another ad, in any form, again. I will go to great lengths and expense to avoid them. It is self-evident to me that they are toxic, to my own psychology, at least. The dichotomy brings to mind the "edit streams" in Neal Stephenson's latest, Fall: an internet essentially stratified by class. Who has the money and resources to filter the shit out and who doesn't.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • lopis 5y ago
    I believe that in an Internet without ads, services would be either state sponsored utilities for their citizens or cost something to use. The economy would be vastly different and careers like YouTuber or Blogger would not be possible. But also depends what kind of ads we're talking. "Influencers" are human ads.
• every 5y ago
  I find the EFF Privacy Badger to be a nice compromise: https://privacybadger.org/ https://privacybadger.org/
• agilob 5y ago
  I always had adblocker since I got internet, someone told me to use it to reduce my internet bill when I paid per Mb. I always had AdBlock+ , it was the first thing I installed on my PC, always. I started seeing people complaining on too many ads on random websites and youtube, but I never noticed YT had ads until I saw discussions on it on reddit. Now I'm full time adblocker, Brave, µblock and DNS ad-blocks in OpenWRT. I think my habits and me installing adblockers for everyone resulted in worse web for everyone else, the more people block ads, the more ads there will be for the rest.
• mmettler 5y ago
  Vaguely related: I’ve been using NextDNS for a while now, and it’s wonderful. I subscribed to a paid plan just to support the company. Recommended, if you haven’t already checked them out.
• smiley0r 5y ago
  Insane when people tell me they pay for crunchyroll and youtube
• kryz 5y ago
  Yeah, why would you not be entitled to that content for no commercial consideration… Frankly I don’t understand the ethical position of people who use ad-blockers.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • commoner 5y ago
    The publisher offered the content to the viewer at no cost, so why would the viewer be obligated to provide commercial consideration? It's not illegal or immoral to consume only part of the content that is provided. This applies to print, radio, and TV, and there's no reason it shouldn't apply to the internet.
• schleck8 5y ago
  The irony of the community complaining about ads that pins paywall circumvention methods in each thread about a paywalled article
• jcpham2 5y ago
  Adblock on my openwrt router is like my bare minimum to surf the web. I’m aware of pi-holes and per device ad blocking via add-ins/vpns/whatever but it’s so dead simple to handle this at the gateway level it’s difficult to imagine doing it any way else.
• dclaw 5y ago
  I remember one time I was talking about web ads with a few friends and said something along the lines of 'you have to be stupid as fuck not to use an adblocker on the internet these days' and literally 3 out of 5 people immediately popped up and said they don't use them. All were using one within a week, lol.
• asteroidp 5y ago
  Without aggressively blocking the hundred or more ads on a webpage, I honestly don't think the web would be that useful now a days Advertising has gone absolutely bonkers and filled the web with complete trash SEO farms with 40 links to some shitty slideshow I don't believe the web would have caught on like it did if this current condition was v1.0 I wonder how much the website designer even views their own site. It's astounding anyone would approve of this. It now represents the brand as extremely low quality
  • nicbou 5y ago
    When you live from your website, incentives can change.
• crumbits 5y ago
• HeavyStorm 5y ago
  I doubt very much the author experiences the web he claims to. There are many websites that requires ad blockers to be disabled, and unless you really don't care about a large part of the web (incidentally, the one he's talking about, the one with ads), there's no way to get that experience.
  • MrStonedOne 5y ago
• aasasd 5y ago
  Well I'll tell you more: if you're not buying anything from the website and you're blocking ads, then you're not the target audience and your opinion is irrelevant to the site's owners. You're just burning electricity and occupying the CPU. Which means that by using an ad-blocker, people are removing themselves from the audience that has any vote in how content sites develop. You're miffed that sites are becoming dumber while ads are all over the place and uglier every day? You don't like video ads, modal calls-to-action and dark patterns? Well, the audience that actually brings in the money seems to have no problem with all of that, so ad-blocking people will proceed to take a hike right past the attention of site designers.
• throwaway81523 5y ago
  No one has linked https://xkcd.com/624 https://xkcd.com/624 yet? It's straight on target.
• rokahnhn 5y ago
  If Google priced Premium to replace the very small revenue they must receive for adverts (at least for the small amount I use YouTube), that would be one thing. But they're asking for a lot more. Two parents w 6 Google logins between them (2 personal, 4 work entities) and 4 kids, each w a personal and school account. This would require 14 YouTube Premium accounts. Um...no.
  • jbc1 5y ago
    Do you need to log in to youtube with every google login? Youtube premium family plan covers 6 accounts iirc. So if you could make that work you'd be looking at the cost of one and a half premium accounts.
• unixbane 5y ago
  > Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web This could be solved if the web was non-interactive as it should be.
• stakkur 5y ago
  Isn’t that the idea?