I was on a fresh setup recently and caught a glimpse of the raw internet on my way to install uBlock Origin and uMatrix. There are still fake download buttons everywhere. I can't understand how the non-ad-blocking world tolerates that stuff - no choice and no voice I guess? The amount of autoplaying videos was disturbing as well.
I kept forwarding Worldometers’ COVID-19 data site [1] to friends and families, then later realized it’s full of banner ads if viewed without ad blocking.
I send my friend a link a while ago and he complained to me. I tried it with ads off and it was horrible.
Google actually got that right with their ads - they were non intrusive and fitted in. Facbook started ads well, but these days they are getting annoying.
This is exactly why I insist on using adblocks. Trying to find the actual download link on pages is an absolute nightmare without them. The fact these sites allow ads like this and then complain if you use an adblocker is beyond me. If ads were not so hurtful to the experience of websites, I would have no reason to block them. The problem is that I feel I am forced to use an adblocker just to be able to navigate a webpage without aggressive bombardment of wasted bandwidth, visual garbage, misleading marketing, videos I don't want playing, noises I don't want to hear, and other aggressive tactics.
The other part of it is that I will never ever click a link from an ad. If I want cheaper insurance, I'll look up my rates myself. If I want a bigger penis, I'll go see a doctor. If I want some such product, I'll look into it on my time. I'm just not a targetable demographic for advertising, but I feel I have to block them merely because of how relentless they are on so much of the internet.
So the reason I block ads, or at least started is a book I read called Pre-suasion by Robert Caldini. In it he points out that internet ads are dismissed and ignored by our conscious mind but because of that often will produce an effect on our unconscious mind. Think like the subliminal messaging type thing. People who were shown Kodiak ads on a webpage in an experiment couldn't recall seeing any Kodiak ads simply because we are so used to internet ads we ignore them; however later for the subjects favored purchasing a Kodiak camera over competitors products.
The books final chapter concluded by explaining an experiment they did where simply by showing a particular image in the background, combined with a spaced follow up and increased incentive, they were able to sucessfully manipulate people's political and voting preferences in a manner that lasted over a year.
I decided at that point no one gets to screw with my subconscious but my immense amount of childhood trauma. In my mind every other reason pales in comparison to this one for why I adblock and put it on my wife's computer, and every computer a family member owns.
Your imperfect recall of the brand name "Kodak" makes your cautionary message about the insidious effects of ads deliciously ironic. Or is that repeated misspelling actually part of an astroturf campaign to ensure that the notoriously detail-oriented minds of Hacker News readers latch onto the apparent typo, firmly embedding it in the forefront of awareness?
Even without the psychology, advertisers aren't charities giving money away as many people seem to believe, they want a return on their investment and that return comes from users giving them money. Manipulating you into giving them money is the sole reason that 99% of ads exist and if it didn't work there would be no ads.
> however later for the subjects favored purchasing a Kodiak camera over competitors products.
Even worse is that when they were purchasing the camera the cost of the ads was embedded in that price. They weren't just manipulated into buying that brand, they paid for the manipulation itself. I now make a conscious effort to avoid advertised products, at least the ones in meatspace where there are no ad blockers. I can't wait for the day that AR is advanced enough to let me block them too.
Totally agreed. Ads compromising my brain is far more dangerous to me than ads compromising my computer. The effect of modern ads on individuals and society are tremendously negative.
It's our responsibility as parents in tech to teach our children to block all ads. My son hasn't browser the web without an adblocker, ever. I showed him what his favorite sites look like without an adblocker and he was really surprised.
How many people actually disable their adblockers when sites don't allow you to access them if you have one enabled? It's just much easier to close the tab.
I am almost never in a situation where the content is worth the trouble of disabling my ad-blocker. Information is so-readily available that is it laughable that a website would be essential enough for me to bother turning my ad-blocker off, and the few times I've had it has nearly-universally resulted raw clickbait. Furthermore, that sort of behavior displays an arrogance from the publisher that makes me question the overall integrity of the article I was trying to read in the first place.
I do use my adblocker disable button, but not in response to sites pleading for me to do so. I just find that sometimes it helps when a web app is being wonky. (Usually, the adblocker has misidentified one of the app’s main first-party JS files as an ad script and prevented it from loading.) Of course, since we’re talking about web apps, no ads usually result from this.
Back in the day, Forbes was one of the first sites asking users to disable their ad blockers. I whitelisted them, seeing that they asked nicely. But then it came to light that they were not screening the ads, resulting in users being served with pop-under malware.
Ever since then, I just close the tab when a sites asks me to unblock. It is not worth the risk.
It depends. If I'm trying to refill my prescription on my pharmacy's web-site, or complete the paying of road tolls through my state government site, I turn it off... Temporarily... for that site.
If it's to read an article, see a video, or find information: never.
Also: Firefox with Multi-Account Containers is great.
Well - all of my ad-blocking is through a Pi-Hole - and I am not in the habit of logging into it's management interface and whitelisting sites unless absolutely necessary.
So... tab gets closed, site loses my eyeballs completely.
> How many people actually disable their adblockers when sites don't allow you to access them if you have one enabled? It's just much easier to close the tab.
Some sites intentionally break if you're using an adblocker. It's really easy to argue to not use those sites.
But...
What about government sites? Government sites don't work with strong ad blockers.
What about bank sites? Bank sites don't work with strong ad blockers.
What about your work related sites? My employer's HR site doesn't work with strong ad blockers. Many of my employer's internal sites don't work with strong ad blockers.
Yeah it's much easier to just close the tab. Unless the site is literally required for your continued living.
I don't remember ever disabling my blocker in response to such a request. What I do do is look for donation options when it's a valuable resource, but it's often hidden or nonexistent.
Honestly, whenever a site doesn't allow me to access it with an adblocker active, all I do is look up the right adblocker rules to remove that restriction and continue on my merry way. Usually not that tricky to do so, most rely on JavaScript and HTML elements for this stuff.
Alternatively, if it's a single page, then either reader view, an archiving service, or flat out editing the offending elements with the inspector works fine.
I have the same approach to sites that require JavaScript.
If a page loads blank, or contains a single line of text "this applications requires javascript", it's an insta-close.
The unintended benefit of this is I nearly always realize I was procrastinating when I clicked the link anyway... so now I regard NoScript as a productivity tool!
If sites have a wall come up complaining about my ad blocker or cookies, I can usually get around it using my ad blockers content filtering to block the paywall itself. If it starts to take more than three seconds, I close the tab and move on.
Some sites can be fooled using tools such as uMatrix which block elments at finer granular level, but is tedious to configure and not very friendly to non technical users. If I can't stop junk on a site that way, unless the information is really vital, I usually close the tab and forget about it.
Ad blocking is a security issue now. When the ad networks started serving malware, what were the websites response? Basically nothing, they just said it's not their problem and pointed the finger at the ad networks. Ad blocking is now vital to having a safe web experience. This is not some trivial issue. Computers and the web are critical for modern life now. The same computer that people use for browsing news sites is also used to do online banking, pay bills, apply for unemployment, do work with sensitive data (for example a work laptop), and so many other things.
And computers are also used by minors. Some of these ads are really disturbing and not something minors should see. Again, when this started happening, how did the websites respond? They did nothing.
I just disable them via /etc/hosts because I can't tolerate any more useless javascript putting load on my CPU.
My workstation (E5-2640) has seen multiple generations of operating systems, video editing software, DAWs.
Browsers and web browsing in general is the only thing that I can tell it's getting consistently worse year after year.
I know it's an odd metric but 10-15 seconds to fully render a newspaper homepage is more than it takes for my full DAW setup (Cubase + FL Studio as VST plugin) to fully come up with tracks loaded and play button ready. I don't even recall dialup being this bad.
I've had better luck with AdGuard for Safari than 1Blocker. I use AdGuard on both macOS and iOS, and I just use their content-blocking Safari extensions, not any of their other products. I had paid for 1Blocker but found it increasingly let ads through. I wanted a product based off of EasyList instead (which AdGuard filters are).
I used to use AdGuard until they switched to an Electron app that needs to constantly run in the background…now I just have a homegrown content blocker I whipped up once and should polish and release someday but am just too lazy to finish.
This is missing what in my opinion is the biggest reason: advertisers create perverse incentives where pages are rewarded based on visits and ad-clicks rather than quality of content. This results in extreme forms of clickbait, misleading extreme headlines, and shallow low-information-density content.
The answer is obviously yes. You externalize the pain (lost revenue isn't a thing felt by you) and internalize the gain (no ads to view, etc.). It's just like the answer to:
* Should you pirate your school textbooks? Yes, obviously. I did it all through uni and I'm a good software engineer. Oh sorry, that's not right. I meant "It's a travesty that a university I pay money to would force me to spend money on books I could just get from the previous year. The writer barely makes any money on the book anyway".
* Should you pirate games? Yes, obviously. A game that's free is better than a game you pay for. If it's sufficiently cheap then the advantage of discovery and your library makes Steam or Epic worth it. "Store-bought games include intrusive DRM that messes with your system files and is a security nightmare"
* Should you pirate software? Yes, obviously. That's why most paid software is SaaS now. You can't pirate SaaS. "Same DRM argument as above".
Ultimately, the answer to "Should I get something for free which I would otherwise pay for" is always yes.
I mean we still have DRM and shit and once upon a time people grumbled that they pirate games because they don't like always on DRM. Well, Steam is always on DRM and folks love that. To paraphrase big Bill C, "It's about the money, stupid".
I could probably invent a plausible smoke screen for everything from riding on trains for free (why are cars so subsidized?) to not paying for parking (I already pay so much in road tax and income tax) to taking all the Halloween candy someone left outside in a bowl (I never had this stuff as a child, all these kids already have way more than they need).
For some time I tried to fight the tide by continuing to publish ads and not using an adblock myself. By being an amateur blogger, I understand that even beer money helps to keep the moral high. However a couple of years ago I gave up and just embraced reality: deactivated adsense and started to use an adblock. I finally acknowledged that nobody likes ads - myself included - specially the ones not related with the content. Did my blogging suffered with it? Certainly it did.
If you'd like to run decent ad blocking extensions (or any extensions) on the Chromium side of things, give Kiwi a shot.
Afaik the current Play Store/XDA Labs release is out of date on the security patches' side of things, but the developer is currently working on catching up.
Also, the project went open-source not too long ago and apparently the dev's been working together with some devs of a different browser, so you can expect more Chromium browsers to implement support for extensions in the near future.
https://kiwibrowser.com
And, well... There's also Yandex with their extension support, they deserve at least a mention. iirc uBO is broken there, but Nano works fine
I have actually turned off my Adblocker for LinkedIn and Facebook ad they ads can actually be quite relevant.
I would be willing to on the news sites as well if they didn’t spam them so heavily into the page and they didn’t shift content to load them. The news sites also allow a surprising number of low quality ads. I’m willing to see ads for Tide or a bank, but no fake download buttons please.
If anyone is interested in how to set up a network-wide tracker blocker then I've written some guides on how to configure Pi-hole as a router and Wi-Fi range extender. This means you can force all traffic through your custom DNS, even devices from Google and Amazon that don't respect DHCP.
It's still worth installing privacy add-ons to Firefox but this helps with some profiling intrusions in mobile apps and Chromecasts etc. It also helps protect your less technical family members a little, although it obviously can't keep them completely safe from surveillance. Education is an important aspect too.
It's a pretty simple equation for me. If you're too lazy to curate ads and rely on a third party service to show any random ad to your users and run any random javascript in their browsers, your ad is probably on an adblock list and will therefore be blocked on my devices. If, however, you give half a shit about your users and therefore choose what ads they see, it probably won't be on a blocklist and won't be blocked on my devices. It's simple, either both of us care or neither of us do and it's up to the content provider which path they take with me.
Should you ever find yourself travelling in a foreign country with a monthly quota of just 2 gigs of data, you realise extremely quickly that every ad is an ad too many.
I wish instead of calling them "ad blockers", we had used something like "tracking blockers". The tracking/automation of ad networks is what the issue is, not the ads, yet we've made it more confusing for those that don't understand how these things work.
This is a really well put-together site with very reasonable arguments describing the problem with web ads. I'm glad they put this together. It's refreshing to see something in this space that just has the facts without being preachy or screechy.
[+] [-] gfody|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] divbzero|5 years ago|reply
I kept forwarding Worldometers’ COVID-19 data site [1] to friends and families, then later realized it’s full of banner ads if viewed without ad blocking.
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[+] [-] EForEndeavour|5 years ago|reply
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Gellar_Field
[+] [-] collyw|5 years ago|reply
Google actually got that right with their ads - they were non intrusive and fitted in. Facbook started ads well, but these days they are getting annoying.
[+] [-] DigitallyFidget|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xCMP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hpoe|5 years ago|reply
The books final chapter concluded by explaining an experiment they did where simply by showing a particular image in the background, combined with a spaced follow up and increased incentive, they were able to sucessfully manipulate people's political and voting preferences in a manner that lasted over a year.
I decided at that point no one gets to screw with my subconscious but my immense amount of childhood trauma. In my mind every other reason pales in comparison to this one for why I adblock and put it on my wife's computer, and every computer a family member owns.
[+] [-] EForEndeavour|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|5 years ago|reply
> however later for the subjects favored purchasing a Kodiak camera over competitors products.
Even worse is that when they were purchasing the camera the cost of the ads was embedded in that price. They weren't just manipulated into buying that brand, they paid for the manipulation itself. I now make a conscious effort to avoid advertised products, at least the ones in meatspace where there are no ad blockers. I can't wait for the day that AR is advanced enough to let me block them too.
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discardable_dan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepspace|5 years ago|reply
Ever since then, I just close the tab when a sites asks me to unblock. It is not worth the risk.
[+] [-] slowmovintarget|5 years ago|reply
If it's to read an article, see a video, or find information: never.
Also: Firefox with Multi-Account Containers is great.
[+] [-] jjkaczor|5 years ago|reply
So... tab gets closed, site loses my eyeballs completely.
[+] [-] inetknght|5 years ago|reply
Some sites intentionally break if you're using an adblocker. It's really easy to argue to not use those sites.
But...
What about government sites? Government sites don't work with strong ad blockers.
What about bank sites? Bank sites don't work with strong ad blockers.
What about your work related sites? My employer's HR site doesn't work with strong ad blockers. Many of my employer's internal sites don't work with strong ad blockers.
Yeah it's much easier to just close the tab. Unless the site is literally required for your continued living.
[+] [-] Aachen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|5 years ago|reply
Alternatively, if it's a single page, then either reader view, an archiving service, or flat out editing the offending elements with the inspector works fine.
[+] [-] mrspeaker|5 years ago|reply
If a page loads blank, or contains a single line of text "this applications requires javascript", it's an insta-close.
The unintended benefit of this is I nearly always realize I was procrastinating when I clicked the link anyway... so now I regard NoScript as a productivity tool!
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arendtio|5 years ago|reply
uBlock Origin + DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is the combination I am using.
[+] [-] pesfandiar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bit_logic|5 years ago|reply
And computers are also used by minors. Some of these ads are really disturbing and not something minors should see. Again, when this started happening, how did the websites respond? They did nothing.
[+] [-] dillutedfixer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laurentdc|5 years ago|reply
My workstation (E5-2640) has seen multiple generations of operating systems, video editing software, DAWs.
Browsers and web browsing in general is the only thing that I can tell it's getting consistently worse year after year.
I know it's an odd metric but 10-15 seconds to fully render a newspaper homepage is more than it takes for my full DAW setup (Cubase + FL Studio as VST plugin) to fully come up with tracks loaded and play button ready. I don't even recall dialup being this bad.
[+] [-] qppo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stblack|5 years ago|reply
A really nice Chrome and FF extension to scrub overlays is named Behind The Overlay:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/l...
[+] [-] js2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nick_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dooglius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
* Should you pirate your school textbooks? Yes, obviously. I did it all through uni and I'm a good software engineer. Oh sorry, that's not right. I meant "It's a travesty that a university I pay money to would force me to spend money on books I could just get from the previous year. The writer barely makes any money on the book anyway".
* Should you pirate games? Yes, obviously. A game that's free is better than a game you pay for. If it's sufficiently cheap then the advantage of discovery and your library makes Steam or Epic worth it. "Store-bought games include intrusive DRM that messes with your system files and is a security nightmare"
* Should you pirate software? Yes, obviously. That's why most paid software is SaaS now. You can't pirate SaaS. "Same DRM argument as above".
Ultimately, the answer to "Should I get something for free which I would otherwise pay for" is always yes.
I mean we still have DRM and shit and once upon a time people grumbled that they pirate games because they don't like always on DRM. Well, Steam is always on DRM and folks love that. To paraphrase big Bill C, "It's about the money, stupid".
I could probably invent a plausible smoke screen for everything from riding on trains for free (why are cars so subsidized?) to not paying for parking (I already pay so much in road tax and income tax) to taking all the Halloween candy someone left outside in a bowl (I never had this stuff as a child, all these kids already have way more than they need).
[+] [-] kgraves|5 years ago|reply
I think you should block ALL ads entirely, internet and everywhere. They are time sinking distraction and you definitely don't need them in your life.
A specific adblocker somebody needs to develop is podcast ad blocker, just auto-skip or have no sponsored message please.
[+] [-] duck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galfarragem|5 years ago|reply
For some time I tried to fight the tide by continuing to publish ads and not using an adblock myself. By being an amateur blogger, I understand that even beer money helps to keep the moral high. However a couple of years ago I gave up and just embraced reality: deactivated adsense and started to use an adblock. I finally acknowledged that nobody likes ads - myself included - specially the ones not related with the content. Did my blogging suffered with it? Certainly it did.
[+] [-] nishnik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TechniKris|5 years ago|reply
And, well... There's also Yandex with their extension support, they deserve at least a mention. iirc uBO is broken there, but Nano works fine
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fxtentacle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
I would be willing to on the news sites as well if they didn’t spam them so heavily into the page and they didn’t shift content to load them. The news sites also allow a surprising number of low quality ads. I’m willing to see ads for Tide or a bank, but no fake download buttons please.
[+] [-] jsingleton|5 years ago|reply
https://unop.uk/pi-hole-extended-part-1/
https://unop.uk/pi-hole-extended-part-2/
It's still worth installing privacy add-ons to Firefox but this helps with some profiling intrusions in mobile apps and Chromecasts etc. It also helps protect your less technical family members a little, although it obviously can't keep them completely safe from surveillance. Education is an important aspect too.
[+] [-] causality0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonblack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgwxd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewebcount|5 years ago|reply