This is 100% the fault of shitty advertisers spamming us with literal scams, malware, and spyware.
I get that ads pay for a free internet. But that doesn't mean that 60% of my screen needs to be malware to read a local news article.
Until advertisers act in good faith, I block as much as possible.
Or those scummy click bait ads disguised as related articles? They make my blood boil with how they prey on the vulnerable.
That's all Google discover is on my phone... Ai generated articles that are just click bait.
is a new episode of RandomShow airing tonight?
Star Trek 31 confirmed to feature major tng character (from today)
blah.
Google is so bad for this, plus the fact that they were the ones who started rewarding clickbait articles.
In my mind though, MSN will never be dethroned from having the shittiest content.
It can't, just check the windows thing which appears as a left sidebar in windows 11 or the edge default homepage
I've been seeing clips from Ready Player One recently and this reminded me of the main bad guy's philosophy on advertising in the OASIS.
we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures
Can't help but feeling there's some parallels there.
Seems unrealistic. In reality, they'd be asking how often the seizures occur and would figure out if the increased ad revenue from going to 90% would offset any potential lawsuits.
Used to be if I found the site of a newspaper I thought I liked, I'd turn off my ad blocker to see how it goes.
I don't even try any more. Again and again and again, every time I turn it off the page gets so cluttered that following the article becomes a chore and takes up so many resources that even scrolling slows to a crawl. Ludicrous nonsense.
The cluttered pages with "videos" running all over the place is what frustrates me the most. I go in and disable javascript and see how it goes. Javascript seems to be the herpes of the internet as far as I am concerned.
I recently noticed a feature on iOS to open all new sites in Reader mode. It’s definitely more readable but mixed results when not everything is there
There’s got to be some sort of Accessibility violation here: where’s the EU when you need someone to stand up for consumers rights
Fr. I legitimately wouldn't mind just a few banner ads to pay for things, but as per usual, the corpos got too damn greedy. So congrats, now you get no ad viewage from me.
Don't forget those annoying floating ads and the tiny X that doesn't actually close the ad
And the fucking videos that auto play in the bottom corner with audio. I think the old people that recently found out about internet are trying to turn it into regular TV.
It’s been years since I would browse the web with sound on.
Plus they made the whole industry weird and obfuscated like bulk produce or something even though it didn't need weird distribution models and dark unseen players in every corner of every ad bought and seen. Why is it this way? I honestly don't know. How did advertisers willingly make it that way over just paying site owners or 1 aggregator or something... I guess Facebook has kind of become that now
I installed an ad blocker once I started getting unmuted video ads. I would be studying for an exam and suddenly start getting blasted with a super loud ad. This was in like 2015, before Chrome added the speaker icon next to the tab playing sound I had to look through every tab to find the source and mute it.
This is 100% the fault of shitty advertisers spamming us with literal scams, malware, and spyware.
And the shitty websites running those ads with just a shrug of their shoulders saying "oops, 3rd party. I can't be expected to control what's on my website."
Nah. While that obviously sucks, I personally don't like people selling me shit. The ads are designed to occupy as much of my mental space as they can and that's a serious breach of what's most valuable to me.
Tragedy of the commons
Some folks still raw dog the net? Wrap that shit up
tbh it feels like most people I know use chrome or even edge without any extensions
How is that even possible when I see plenty of extensions with millions of users? 😅
even without darkreader!
How do I do that on iPhone?
You can do that by selling it and buying an Android.
Can you use a blocker on Android or is per app the best we can do?
I use an adblocking DNS plus UBO on Firefox
Its as simple as setting your Private DNS to something like dns.adguard.com in Network settings > Advanced
Tracker Control on Android works well for system-wide tracker and ad blocking, and you can configure custom blocking rules per-app. Works without root by using a VPN profile (but no data leaves your device via the VPN, it just routes the traffic through this app).
Set your DNS servers to dns.adguard-dns.com (Settings > search for DNS). Also you should install the DDG app and enable App Tracking Protection. You don't actually have to use the browser portion of the app for it to work. After doing these two things, ads and trackers will be blocked in every app.
“an Android”
You know, like a Nintendo.
Kinda true lol.
Instead of selling, you could also just throw it in the trash
Go down to the configure manually option and follow the instructions for iPhone.
I think next guard is also supposed to be decent, but they won't let you use it without an account.
The nice thing about the dns approach is it works for more than just your web browser. There's a bunch of Android games that are essentially unplayable without an adblocking dns.
As a disclaimer, a bunch of sites are ramping up requiring enabling ads or they won't let you load the content. I'm ok with just hitting back and not viewing those sites, but my MIL just asked for help removing the ad guard dns because her news sites wouldn't let her in.
Thank you!
I use a Safari extension called Purify. It’s in the App Store. Works pretty well for me.
(I also use a pi-hole at home)
Similar for me - 1Blocker and pi-hole at home. Then I also VPN to my home when outside to continue the pi-hole filter.
I also use iCloud relay with non-precise location.
Since there are so many assholes trying to meme on you instead of trying to help you,
Edit: Ah sorry didn't realize this was already answered.
You answered better and thanks for the link. Is this a free service?
I'm using adguard but I've heard the owners are possibly unscrupulous.
That is a free service and I really like it make sure you read their website basically when you sign up which requires no login it'll give you a unique dns entry to use as your DNS
The reason I like this one is it's not just ad blocking it fixing a bunch of anti-tracking and other features
Can you install Firefox?
In Firefox you should be able to install the add-on "uBlock origin". No additional tweaking of settings required.
With Firefox you can browse the web including pages like YouTube.
Can't use add-ons for iOS Firefox as far as I can find
You can soon in the EU
Only if you agree to giving your first-born child to Apple.
You can use “extensions” for Safari, and there are at least a couple ad blocking extensions. I use Purify, and it works pretty well at blocking ads
The iCondom
I’m sorry? lol
It's a condom for your i
Like a contact lens?
Sir, this is a Wendy’s iCream shop
At least, you can change your DNS to one who blocks ads. It's not as efficient as uBlock origin and system wide on Android. But, it's better than nothing.
Definitely look into Next DNS. There are also some Safari extensions that can block ads.
I also suggest buying refurbished unlocked phones in the future instead of going for the carrier freebies which you can see are scams designed to lock you into paying for their overpriced service each month for over a year.
Back when I had an iPhone I used Orion. It's not perfect, but it blocked the vast majority of ads for me.
As a quick and easy alternative, you can set it to automatically open sites in reader mode. I’ve been trying that lately and it definitely helps although also mixed results where sites block part of their content from reader mode.
With automatic reader mode, I click to hide reader much less often than I formerly clicked to enable it
To set a DNS based adblock, it is easy to setup, opensource, and free.
I have been on Android for a long time but I still have an old iPhone that works fine for reading articles. Bonus, there is no Sim in it so no one can call me. It's my drinking coffee device.
AdGuard still works well but there are other safari extensions. At home I use eero ad blocking which works well for a maintenance free blocker.
I use FireFox on my phone.
AdGuard works well.
Ghostery addon for safari is solid.
I'll check it out. Thanks.
You can install Orion browser by Kagi and install extensions from Firefox like uBlock Origin
The main problem is 3rd party advertising. If the New York Times ran ads on their website like they did with the physical newspaper, we would not have this problem.
Publishers need to take direct responsibility for every ad on their platform.
Plausible deniability. Oh, a mildly sexual ad has shown to you? Someone probably approved it on the third-party site. Oh, you didn't want to see it? Sorry, we got nothing to do with it.
Also scams and other grey-area shit.
I am surprised the reason for blocking ads doessn't include making sites somewhat readable. I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it's more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.
I tend to not use adblockers, or when I do it's on a black list system for worst offenders rather than by default. However, I absolutely refuse tracking, and if it's the only option I go to firefox reader mode immediately.
The usual false dichotomy of "personalised ads or you're killing us!" is not acceptable.
Ad tech IS the tracking, so if you're not blocking ads, you're not actually refusing said tracking. I think you might be conflating cookies with being tracking (they are), but that's only a part of it.
I wonder why ad tech can‘t be „Let‘s show ads that correspond to what‘s being talked about on that website.“ Kinda like what Google suggested with Topics but without following me through the internet.
There is no real technical challenge in displaying ads that are based on the page content. But ads based on tracking users is much more profitable. Plus they can sell the data collected to anyone else that is interested.
Look, you need to understand that advertisers are Hell-bent on forcibly extracting as much money from you as possible. If they could strap you to a chair, hold your eyes open like in A Clockwork Orange, and then charge you for everything you so much as glanced at, they absolutely would.
If that's not how you want to live, then they are your enemy.
You know i think i understand companies sometimes but then i keep being baffeld at how evil a company can be.
Apple for example had me surprised with the reaction to the DMA and i previously thought that they couldn‘t possibly suck harder wirh alö their anti-repair stuff.
I still have a bone to pick with Tim Cook himself for rendering my well working Mac Mini 2012 unusable for my app development job by simply not updating Xcode and introducing a breaking change that prevented me from adding support for new iOS versions to old Xcode.
Because that’s not as profitable. That’s it. That’s the reason.
Don‘t you just hate it when
When capitalism
I wonder why ad tech can‘t be „Let‘s show ads that correspond to what‘s being talked about on that website.“ Kinda like what Google suggested with Topics but without following me through the internet.
They could be. Sites could talk directly to advertisers, and put the ad directly into the page itself instead of asking the ad server for a random ad. Most ad blockers probably wouldn't notice it because it's part of the actual page.
But then they'd lose out on the tracking data and would be responsible to make sure the ad doesn't annoy the shit out of you, so they're not going to do that.
I use them on my personal systems but not my work laptop. I have to use an ad blocker on my phone because so many sites, including "respected" news organizations, are an absolute mess when ads are enabled.
It's bad when you go to one of the top news company's websites in the US and there's a pile of content covered by advertisements. I guess I didn't need to read those sentences anyway.
I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.
There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.
There are times that people can't throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don't have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of "render those advertisements".
I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.
I dislike the fact that "ads" can also include crapware being injected into my computer (viruses, tracking cookies, mysterious scripts, etc).
If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn't mind Trojans! /s
And there are so many scam ads that look like UI buttons and such. I can see why people get fooled sometimes. Those sort of ads should automatically be rejected by af networks and the sites that host them. But $$$
Is this still really a thing? I remember getting some viruses from ads in the very early days of the internet, like late 90s / early 2000s, but can’t remember getting anything in at least the last ten years.
It's currently late and I am on my phone, so I can't research this too well, but for example this thread and official Microsoft link discusses th Adrozek malware which injects you with unwanted ads and information directly from your browser.
Sure, it's not a virus in the older sense of the term where someone either burns your drive or takes over your computer and locks you out asking for a ransom, but it's still piloting you unsuspectingly and you don't want it.
I don't think I could use the internet if I didn't have an adblocker. Ads genuinely anger me. I think it's just from the early days with pop-overs and unders, blinking, non-collapsible and the like holding content hostage. Intrusive or not, I'll do everything I can to not see an ad.
using the internet without an adblocker is like fuckin a 5 dollar hooker behind a dumpster.
You're gonna catch something nasty and go through a lot of misery.
I use Mullvad so naturally, I can pick my exit country. Since I'm an iOS user (aka, no NewPipe etc) I always choose an exit country that is majority non-English-speaking. It makes the YT app adds so much more bearable if I can't understand what they're saying.
Remember the mosquito banner? The one with the annoying mosquito sound?
I remember.
Yeah early days were really hard.
Many parts of the Internet has become functionally unusable without one. And given online advertising's history as a vector for malware, as blockers are just the sensible choice.
The internet is unusable without an adblocker.. I recommend uBlock Origin and Pihole.
Is there a big advantage to a pihole in addition to ublock?
Pihole will also block non-browser traffic (e.g. your OS phoning home). Adblocking extensions are typically restricted to just blocking traffic of the browser it’s installed on.
It also operates on your entire home network, so it can block junk traffic on devices that can’t run adblockers.
Got any simple guides for simpletons like me?
uBlock Origin at a minimum. But I would suggest a privacy focused browser. Librewolf, Mulvad or even Brave. Browsers leak
so much information about you it is easy for sites to fingerprint and track you even with an ad blocker.
I know Librewolf is working on their DNS leakage (last section on privacytests.org), but they also allow you to select a privacy focused DNS server which is nice when you’re not on a network you own, so you can’t run PiHole.
I've been using an ad blocking DNS for years and would not consider using the internet without it. Since it's a DNS it works everywhere on mobile or Wi-Fi. I just figured that an ad blocker of some sort is basically a digital condom and must be used. When I see people who don't use one, I think they are crazy.
Had my boss trying to grab a pdf (crosswords, colouring pages, printed for kids in a pub) while using Chrome without any adblock extensions.
The volume of ads, trick links, and shite on that one website in particular was outstanding. She asked me if a link was OK to click. Promptly pointed out she should use Firefox (which has unlock and other extensions added) instead of chrome as the link she had clicked was for some sketchy software and not a crossword.
I can't imagine the internet without ad blockers. Ublock is a great addition, removing elements from pages is a huge advantage. So many sites sling rubbish wherever they can.
Do you only use a DNS ad-blocker or also a client-side ad-blocker?
Both, I use a DNS level ad blocker on my entire network and use UBlock origin on my browser. That way most ads are killed outside of the browsers as well and it keeps my system from contacting malware servers by domain name at least.
Edit: Mind you, most of my apps are open source and have no ads to begin with, but for the few that are closed source. That's what the blockers are for.
I used to not run an ad block. I figured the ads didn't bother me so why bother?
Then I encountered a banner ad that screamed "HELLOOOOOOOOOO" anytime the mouse went over it and I couldn't download an ad blocker fast enough.
Advertising companies will do anything they can to annoy the shit out of you, then act like people running ad blockers are the problem.
I was fine with unobtrusive ads, I was fine with a minute of ads before a YouTube video. But it got so bad it was constantly interrupting everything. Also want to know what’s extremely unpleasant? Political ads calling for a moral panic against you or taking bigotry against you as a general assumption. I’m not watching that bullshit. My life is better without ads
I once watched a 60 minute ad because I wondered (what would a 60min ad even be about) and I can't remember
That shitty Epoch Times used to do that. I was watching a bunch of satire videos and one of their commercials was on, and I legitimately thought it was part of the skit because of how stupid it was.
Then it hit me it is a real ad. And real people are watching it. And that’s how I got radicalized even more.
Wow! Pranks from 2004 are ads in 2024.
I thought the text said "stop AIDS" but practically the same thing.
Does anyone ever actually click on an ad? Like "hey thats cool I wanna check it out/buy it right here right now"?
I have adblockers active everywhere and only disable then somtimes for specific sites that really don't work otherwise, but even if the unlikely case would come up that something is interesting I would just look it up separately? Mostly I just turn a blind eye on them anyway, but just wondering, some people gotta really click/buy from these ads? It just seems so surreal to me..
The only obvious ad I've ever clicked on was for a "free" IQ test. I figured I'd never done one cause they're fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through. After 20 mins or so answering questions, it ended on a transaction page. The only way to see your "results" was by paying $20. I obviously didn't pay, and instead tried to report the ad, only to discover that Google Ads has zero mechanism to even report scams to Google. After some research, it turned out that this blatant bait and switch scam had been operating via Google Ads for like 5 or 7 years. Google doesn't give a fuck if scammers use it's ad tech to scam your grandma or inject your system with malware, as long as they get paid for the privilege.
I've always used an ad blocker, but the whole experience reinforced how anti-consumer and pro-criminal surveillance capitalism is. Permanent absolute ad block — without exceptions — is how everyone should operate, because none of these companies deserve any trust whatsoever. Even if you trust the site you're visiting, you can't trust any ad company they utilize.
The only obvious ad I’ve ever clicked on was for a “free” IQ test. I figured I’d never done one cause they’re fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through.
That click should have lead you to a page that says 'you failed'. 😂
The EU is currently testing a new payment framework that would make payments faster and easier and also enable very small payments.
This could finally enable micropayments in browsers (well, in Firefox and maybe Safari) which would eliminate intermediaries like Google and all the scummy ad companies and enable websites to work out deals directly with visitors on the spot (pay a very small amount like a cent or a fraction of a cent to read this article).
Obviously, Google will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this.
I'm still not paying a fraction of a cent for the obviously LLM-generated bullshit that has flooded the internet.
And yet for content I can be reasonably sure is actually human generated (read: niche enough to not have been flooded to the point I no longer can trust the "usual"/"big" sites) I might consider paying for server costs a little.
If you're walking around somewhere and you see a person or people offering a "free personality test," do not take them up on their offer. They're Scientologists. They once refused to let my mother leave back in the 70s until she said she would start screaming "rape."
People definitely do. CTR (click through rate) is generally pretty low, even before the majority of Americans were using ad blocks. But it’s not 0
I've personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don't really have any regrets there. I've seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I'd never have known about otherwise.
I can't imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.
My wife does. But she's a sucker for "a good deal"
I dont ever click on them myself, but if I start searching for something I need/want, and I see a brand I'm familiar with thru advertising, I'm more likely to explore their product, at least. Simply just because, "of I've heard of this before"
Brand recognition is one of the key goals for running ads, it works.
But these are never real deals are they? At least I saw maaaaaaany bullshit fake deals, cant remember anything legit ever..
I also found my mum buying crap of instagram a while ago, but i kinda got to her to be a bit more mindful what she clicks on.
I have ad blockers everywhere, except native mobile apps. I've clicked on an Instagram ad for shirts. I bought the shirts. People keep complimenting me on the shirts. No regrets there
I guess that sounds reasonable. I sometimes miss seeing some of the cool stuff on instagram
I know ad rates and metrics are heavily based around click through, but does it even actually matter? I mean, TV ads are big money expensive, and nobody has ever clicked on those. I guess if you're advertising a shitty mobile game or something then it matters, but does McDonalds or whatever even want you to buy a hamburger before you watch a YouTube video? That doesn't really make a lot of sense.
As you've noticed, there are different types of ads. Not all have clicks as their goal. Some are just there to make you think about their brand, for example.
Not only did my late father-in-law click on ads, he also clicked on spam emails. Yes, his computer was super slow and I regularly had to clean off the malware.
Sometimes the sponsored links at the top of a Google search are exactly what I was looking for. I just need to quickly disable AdAway so that I can follow the link.
I've always thought that the ad supported internet is something people will eventually get sick of and the financial foundation would evolve over time to find models that don't rely on infinite spam. Instead efforts are focussed on forcing us to view them. At this point I'm expecting the next version of Chrome to require the Ludovico technique while browsing.
I mean, many (several?) sites tried optional subscriptions where you pay to get rid of ads, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Judging by the fact that most sites that have subscriptions instead of ads use pay walls.
People have come to expect free access, so if you can easily use an ad blocker, why would you choose to pay to remove the ads that a blocker removes for free.
Let's just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It's not 1954. I'm not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I'm reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?
As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.
IMHO the problem is the same one as everywhere. Companies are no longer interested in creating products, they are only interested in creating revenue streams. I've been working on my finances lately and it's incredible how many 'products' have become subscriptions over time.
I'd love to be able to buy a day's access, or access to an article. If I want to share it, I'm willing to pay a small fee to show it to certain folks. I feel like there could be a market there but in the current financial climate it would never get any interest or backing because it wouldn't be a method to capture people into a reoccurring billing cycle.
Something I think is interesting is that, in order for companies to adopt these better non ad reliant models, they would have to dramatically scale down.
In a climate where ad and clicks = revenue, your solution is to scale as large as you can and pump out content to maximize views. But that wouldn't work under normal models
if I ran the world, these tech companies would get the ma bell treatment, heck the current phone companies need a round 2.
As does the entire financial sector
I'm not visiting any of those sites regularly. I'm not subscribing to any outlet without sampling their content, either. So that was always going to fail.
In the before times you were able to purchase one edition of a paper and be done with it. Now it's subscription only, so they won't see a dime from me.
Not only do people expect free access, they feel entitled to endless free content.
God forbid YouTube charge a subscription fee to help pay creators or show ads. No no, we all gotta jump on whatever app makes it free of ads and denies anyone a single cent for the content consumed.
Even if YouTube is the actual devil, other platforms exist that do a better job of paying creators but we don't talk about Nebula, we just talk about getting around the ads at YouTube without letting YouTube ever see a cent. As if having millions of videos available at the touch of a finger to anyone with an Internet connection is somehow free.
The problem with YouTube is they will keep adding more ads until people stop tolerating it.
It used to be a single ad at the start of the video you could skip after 5 seconds. Now it's multiple unskippable ads before the video starts. Often you don't know if this is the video you want anyway, and if it's not you spent more time on the ads than the video itself.
Once you do find the video you want you get random interruptions mid sentence for more unskippable ads. If people just shrug and say "they have to pay for it somehow" then YouTube rubs their hands together and puts more ads in until they find the point where more ads = less viewership.
If the single "skip after 5s" ad was untenable long term then they shouldn't have started with a service they couldn't actually provide. I'm sick of these companies purposely running an unprofitable business just to get users, and then when they change the model to try to become profitable act like it's the users fault that the company sold them on something they can't maintain.
If you want to support a creator do it through Patreon. The amount they get from YouTube is garbage. If I didn't have a way to block YouTube ads I just wouldn't watch YouTube anymore, so they aren't losing any money from me running an AdBlock.
Nebula is good. Maybe different models besides YouTube are in order.
The problem is they’re trying to double down on infinite spam by implementing infinite subscriptions alongside it.
Yeah, can you take a "Veteran cybersecurity expert" who doesn't generally use an adblocker serious?
Security knowledge and ethical concerns are two separate things. Whether we like it or not, we pay online creators through private data we must give to entities who will use it against our best interests.
Fuck that. We don't have to give them anything. They need to show they actually have put in the effort to protect their viewers. Until then, I refuse to do anything less than use everything available to me to block their ads. The days of whitelisting websites is over.
The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of "experienced programmers" don't have an ad blocker. I'm not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.
There's a surprising amount of programmers that don't know basics of various parts of an operating system. I know people that know several languages, but get lost on installing a mod pack for a game or installing an app from within another app like a browser.
True. 100%
Even today I had to screen share with our lead DB developer to show him how to create a key and ssh to a host.
Also worked with a guy who would design custom circuit boards for devices, but his windows skill was less than my mother's (which is terrible)
Could he be Linux guy perhaps ?
Nope, just bad using any computer OS
"experienced programmers" in would have web developers fall under that umbrella, I'd guess web developers are less likely to adopt adblockers if their livelihood depends on them
experienced just means they've been doing it for some time, it says nothing about how well they do it.
Hence the quotations ;)
The engineer who sat next to me at my old job didn't use an adblocker. She also would just ignore anything on the screen that wasn't directly related to her task. There'd be "please update" OS popups or "do you want to install a plugin for markdown?" ide prompts on her screen for days. When I'd roll over to work on something at her desk I'd be like "how do you work like this?" she was like "like what?"
She was pretty good at engineering and generally smart. I don't know how she did it.
I'm wondering about her reason for not using one too. What is the advantage?
She thinks the web can't exist without ads? It can, because it did once.
20 years pro experience here: I run several different browsers in various states of blockedness for various reasons. But when I'm off the clock, of course, it's firefox with ublock.
Maybe the pol was distributed via ads
My mom, in her 60s, is an experienced programmer. She programmed before she had the internet
Ads are just pure negative. There was even one study that calculated this as a direct financial negative, although unfortunately in narrow circumstances: it was calculated that for mobile users in the US, paying for the data transferred to display the ad was more expensive than what the site owner got paid for including it on his site.
That's is indeed a pure negative - for the users. The site and the the mobile carrier both got paid.
Yes yes, capitalism good.
Don't forget the company serving the ads, and also the company paying for them
If the ads are unobtrusive and interesting, and not clearly based on harvested personal data, I wouldn't mind.
Unfoorrrtunately...
Exactly.
I was excited for Brave when they talked about service privacy-friendly ads and sharing revenue with sites. That obviously didn't happen, but I think it is a good idea in general.
I don't mind privacy-respecting ads like sponsorships and whatnot in videos, but I absolutely cannot stand the data-harvesting ads used almost everywhere, as well as ads in services I've paid for.
There's a Dutch tech website called tweakers.net, a while ago they removed all tracking cookies and all ads are now just banners based on the current web page. I have adblocker disabled for that website and I'm happy with that
Says a company that makes an ad blocker
Back in the day, major news sites like the BBC ran ads that were infected with malware that then infected computers. These weren’t shady sites like people expect you to get viruses from.
Installed an ad blocker the day that news broke and never looked back. Ads are potentially harmful to your devices.
The WoW forums around 2012 had a virus infect thousands of computers before blizzard removed it. It was a 3rd party ad that was spreading the virus.
I remember that, thousands of people got keyloggers and their accounts compromised. Then Blizzard tried to blame those people for getting infected, from the Blizzard website.
This is still an issue today.
It's a necessity. The internet really is unusable without it. Pop-up ads, long unskippable video ads, annoying shovelware scam ads, etc etc.
overlooking the biggest issue, the malware/virus ads.
True!
Just trying to read the news on my phone kills its battery because of all the ads and crap. I'm just reading, why is my phone's battery draining like water? Hence Ad blocker is mandatory.
Yea that shit didn’t have the hold on millennials like it did the chain letter sending dummies of the previous generation.
In my day ads were vectors for viruses AND were dumb and annoying as fuck.
Some would agree they still are.
Highly unlikely, but hopefully one day.
Ad blocker is kind of a sad name for a content/spam filter, a vital security tool, but that's what we got. Especially since browsers naively didn't include filtering and block lists by default and they only became common as add-ons.
I never get to be the 1 millionth visitor anymore
Or learn about hot Milfs in your area.
Theres people who dont use ad blocker? Do they also not use the internet?
none of my classmates or teachers use adblockers. i didn't expect this in a university. most don't even know what i'm talking about when i recomment ublock...
Had a front end dev who didn't use adblocker.
Sometimes I temporarily disable mine to make sure it's not silently breaking any of my layout or anything, but not using one at all? That's bonkers.
I suspect 98% of Apple users don't block ads
That's because ads fucking suck
Don't a majority of them also use Chrome? Because they're going to find that their adblockers are less and less effective.
That’s yet another reason to use a DNS as blocker, and not let your browser use DNS over https.
I haven’t done it myself yet, but I figure that sooner or later I’ll need to update my router to block all outbound DNS that doesn’t go through my DNS ad blocker. Some devices try to use their own hardcoded DNS to get around them…
I mean... you could just use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Works great.
DNS blocking is about the only way to block ads & tracking on things like streaming devices. You can’t install Firefox or uBlock on an Apple TV for example. You can block ads on many of the apps on the Apple TV as well as all the telemetry they try to collect with a well configured pi-hole and selected DNS blocklists.
True, but using a computer with an adblocker and a second gen Chromecast (which you don't need Chrome for) also eliminates that.
DNS-based ad blocking is unfortunately much less effective. It's still better than nothing though, that's for sure.
A multi-layered approach is the best approach. My pi-hole blocks advertising domains, malware domains, etc. That helps tremendously with all the “smart” devices that include DVRs, streaming devices, etc. where you can’t install something like ublock. I also make sure something like ublock is installed wherever possible.
Yup. I've got DNS, IP lists, zenarmor, and browser extensions
Why shouldn't you let your browser use DNS over HTTPS?
Because then it can bypass your ad-blocking DNS
DNS over HTTPS was a great idea for privacy if left in your hands, but immediately ran into the reality of intrusive advertising
Because dns ad blocking is typically done with something like dnsmasq which doesn't support DNS over HTTPS, though it's easy enough to setup a resolver/forwarder that does
No, it's another reason to use Firefox. A Brower that is not owned and managed by an advertisement company.
and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters
Leopards, face etc
yeah, the internet without an ad blocker seems mostly unusable.
It's eye bleach
I remember the good ol days when the ads would lag up the loading of the page
Now they all load first and cover the entire content of the page because screw usability
Looking at you, every news outlet site ever
I doubt these numbers. Almost nobody I know uses one on mobile
Then there's those of us who uninstalled the YouTube app and installed Kiwi so we can install the uBlock Origin chrome plug-in 😅
Firefox has plug-ins available out of the box on Android, including uBlock Origin.
Kiwi is a browser with plug-in support out of the box but it's always good to have options, thanks :)
Oh, I seem to have misinterpreted your message then. That's pretty neat
I really doubt the numbers. It's so common to see people complain about ads online, even in places like here where you'd expect most people to use adblockers.
All adblockers are not created equally and some of basically trojan horses to let some specific ads through or track the user in other ways.
I've definitely noticed when my adblocker of choice misses a youtube add or popup, the comments of that day specifically will be about how bad some ads are.
Even if nobody used ads, ads just don't work anymore. Kids can't even percieve them anymore, old people who click on everything are a shrinking market segment, and most people in the middle seek to learn about market offerings from influencers they've chosen to trust.
ads are the worst. block them all! Would be great if an advertising company did not have the most popular browser.
That's why I use firefox, never going to downgrade to manifest v3 ever
FWIW, the manifest v3 implementation in firefox is not user-hostile. They made it compatible, but the limitations on filtering are not there.
People themselves have turned into ads since ads themselves don't do their job.
Look at influencers.
Instagram used to be fun for someone to share their journey, now it's ad...influencer...double ad...Triple influencer...Another ad...a real person sharing their journey...55 more influencer ads mixed with 29 actual ads.
Oh and the occasional OF girl who managed to flash some puss without it getting taken down.
I love when i bought something...(i assume) google thinks it's a great idea to advertise that exact combination of products from the exact webshop on the next website i visit.
How much did tiktok ruin google's brain to make them think that is going to be effective marketing?
Mankind truly is on the way down.
Asked how likely big companies would be to abuse their data, Americans were most wary of TikTok (59 percent), followed by: Meta (56 percent), X/Twitter (49 percent), OpenAI (48 percent), Google (44 percent), Apple (41 percent), Amazon (40 percent), Microsoft (38 percent), Comscore (32 percent), and Adobe (31 percent).
I'm surprised people trust Microsoft and Amazon more than Apple; Amazon needs all the data they can get on you to build "better" profiles on what to sell you, ties your Alexa requests to feed advertising (you can opt out) and Microsoft, especially with Edge (post advertising and services team takeover) has been trying to send everything to Microsoft to feed both ads and their AI. FFS, even Outlook warns you now that they'll share your data with >800 "partners".
Apple is no saint, far from it, but people trust a conglomerate over it?
Apple is just less used
Apple
doesn’t have advertising as a core part of their business
is using privacy as a selling point.
pretty much every release has privacy features.
Yes I trust them more than most.
They don't need adv, users are locked inside their platform - so they protect their users from the outside while they use them from the inside (in the end not much different from the others)
with Microsoft though its less of a problem for users because that would require you to daily use those applications. not many people that I know of personally use outlook, so they would be unavfevted ny outlook ads when compared to the other platforms, which they physically spend more time in.
I'm still surprised so many people don't use them.
Ublock: Origin plugin on each browser, and/or a proper piHole style DNS blocker. Anything else is probably capturing your data to sell.
Jeez, don't report on it. Now there's going to be an even bigger crackdown on them.
It isn't a secret
Adblockers get better the more they are battled
I've been blocking ads since 1998, thanks to WebWasher. That acted as a local proxy that blocked all known ad urls. No heuristics, no algorithms, no nothing. Back in the good old days that was plenty.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.
More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.
"People who know how the internet works – because they work as developers or in security or in advertising – they've all over the years decided that it was a good idea to use a tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it," said Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, in an interview with The Register.
"It's pretty unanimous that people who work in this industry and know how these things function want to protect themselves."
Schmetz said one surprising finding had to do with the extent to which people trust various companies that collect online data.
But truly the best way to support The Register is to sign up for a free account, comment on stories, share our links, and spread the word of our honest independent IT journalism.
The original article contains 681 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Many websites, especially on the sketchy side of the internet, are completely unusable without adblockers
Not entirely surprised.
The numbers were already up there, but I imagine YouTube's recent campaign only drove them higher. More people than before are now aware that adblockers exist and they love using them.
PiHole + WireGuard FTW
And uBlock Origin
Using opnsense with zenarmor and wireguard. Basically same idea. Works great.
Read it as BLOCK AIDS
It's the same
Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
Most of them don't even know what phone they have. This article is completely false lol
Ublock Origin, privacy badger, pihole for home DNS.... Can't live without them
What does pihole do that Ublock does not?
Every non-PC, non-web browser on your network also reaps the benefit.
A DNS blocking system like Pihole can block ads on platforms you don't control, like smart TVs or mobile apps.
I was told YouTube is excluded from said benefit.
Yes the way YT loads ads it won't work to simply block them with a simple DNS pattern match, you need a proper adblocker or third party app. But you can block all the other nuisance clutter on the smart TV, at least.
My TV is hooked to my PC now as a monitor, so I just watch YT on it right in Firefox.
For smart tv there is smarttuve, its complete replacement of youtube and acts like youtube revsnced or youtube with ublocknon pc.teybit out
"tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it" ah yes expert
I am shocked that its that low. But I manage a website for a sports league and they want to display sponsor logos on the front page. They were all getting caught by my adblocker. When I talked to other board members, none of them used ad blockers. I debated if I should try and adjust the urls or not.
Great ad I saw recently was a Charlie Day Mt Dew commercial. He said one word and a Mt Dew sign dropped over him and he yelled in his Charlie Day voice, "Hey I didn't even take a drink yet!" And that was the commercial.
Short. Sweet. Funny.
Getting really sick of the “hurr hurr ads bad only idiots don’t use adblockers” circlejerk on here. I pay $8 for YT Premium which seems super fair for the 10-15 hours of content I get on there a week. I like supporting creators, a lot of which rely on ad revenue to continue making their channels.
For the rest of you that thinks you have the moral high ground from blocking ads, what do you think the solution is? Subscriptions don’t work, paywalls are easily bypassed, and more reasonable ads don’t generate enough revenue to keep sites in business. Content shouldn’t just be free, people deserve to be paid for their work.
Should the free internet just die and become a series of subscription silos? It seems to be going that way, and more ad blocking will just accelerate that more.
Using adblockers and paying to use YT premium aren't inherently seperate, if you feel that's a fair price and are willing to pay that (like I am) no one should call you stupid for it. But people feel that isn't a fair price (which is also fair considering the amounter of users, $1 per month per user would bring in $2bn per month for YouTube afaik).
My big issue with paying for an ad free experience is that there are ads on videos of stolen content, and that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. I have this issue with SoundCloud as well. Random people will upload mixtapes of other artists that were originally released for free, but SoundCloud will run ads over it. It's obvious the creators aren't getting paid. I don't understand how that's even legal. Even if you argue that the service of using the website shouldn't be completely free, they are profiting off of stolen content.
pays a subscription
Subscriptions don't work
Little confused by this one, but yeah. I can't afford subscriptions, and I also can't afford the products and services the ads are for. Ads are just pollution in my consciousness, so why should I reduce my QoL for no benefit to anyone? If a creator says that if you use adblock, don't watch me, I won't. Site blocks adblockers, I don't use it. What else am I supposed to do, when I make less than a living and don't really have better options?
This is 100% the fault of shitty advertisers spamming us with literal scams, malware, and spyware.
I get that ads pay for a free internet. But that doesn't mean that 60% of my screen needs to be malware to read a local news article.
Until advertisers act in good faith, I block as much as possible.
Or those scummy click bait ads disguised as related articles? They make my blood boil with how they prey on the vulnerable.
That's all Google discover is on my phone... Ai generated articles that are just click bait.
blah.
Google is so bad for this, plus the fact that they were the ones who started rewarding clickbait articles.
In my mind though, MSN will never be dethroned from having the shittiest content.
It can't, just check the windows thing which appears as a left sidebar in windows 11 or the edge default homepage
I've been seeing clips from Ready Player One recently and this reminded me of the main bad guy's philosophy on advertising in the OASIS.
Can't help but feeling there's some parallels there.
Seems unrealistic. In reality, they'd be asking how often the seizures occur and would figure out if the increased ad revenue from going to 90% would offset any potential lawsuits.
Used to be if I found the site of a newspaper I thought I liked, I'd turn off my ad blocker to see how it goes.
I don't even try any more. Again and again and again, every time I turn it off the page gets so cluttered that following the article becomes a chore and takes up so many resources that even scrolling slows to a crawl. Ludicrous nonsense.
The cluttered pages with "videos" running all over the place is what frustrates me the most. I go in and disable javascript and see how it goes. Javascript seems to be the herpes of the internet as far as I am concerned.
I recently noticed a feature on iOS to open all new sites in Reader mode. It’s definitely more readable but mixed results when not everything is there
There’s got to be some sort of Accessibility violation here: where’s the EU when you need someone to stand up for consumers rights
Fr. I legitimately wouldn't mind just a few banner ads to pay for things, but as per usual, the corpos got too damn greedy. So congrats, now you get no ad viewage from me.
Don't forget those annoying floating ads and the tiny X that doesn't actually close the ad
And the fucking videos that auto play in the bottom corner with audio. I think the old people that recently found out about internet are trying to turn it into regular TV.
It’s been years since I would browse the web with sound on.
Plus they made the whole industry weird and obfuscated like bulk produce or something even though it didn't need weird distribution models and dark unseen players in every corner of every ad bought and seen. Why is it this way? I honestly don't know. How did advertisers willingly make it that way over just paying site owners or 1 aggregator or something... I guess Facebook has kind of become that now
I installed an ad blocker once I started getting unmuted video ads. I would be studying for an exam and suddenly start getting blasted with a super loud ad. This was in like 2015, before Chrome added the speaker icon next to the tab playing sound I had to look through every tab to find the source and mute it.
And the shitty websites running those ads with just a shrug of their shoulders saying "oops, 3rd party. I can't be expected to control what's on my website."
Nah. While that obviously sucks, I personally don't like people selling me shit. The ads are designed to occupy as much of my mental space as they can and that's a serious breach of what's most valuable to me.
Tragedy of the commons
Some folks still raw dog the net? Wrap that shit up
tbh it feels like most people I know use chrome or even edge without any extensions
Most Firefox users have never used extensions either. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/extensions-addons/heres-whats-going-on-in-the-world-of-extensions/
How is that even possible when I see plenty of extensions with millions of users? 😅
even without darkreader!
How do I do that on iPhone?
You can do that by selling it and buying an Android.
Can you use a blocker on Android or is per app the best we can do?
I use an adblocking DNS plus UBO on Firefox
Its as simple as setting your Private DNS to something like
dns.adguard.comin Network settings > AdvancedTracker Control on Android works well for system-wide tracker and ad blocking, and you can configure custom blocking rules per-app. Works without root by using a VPN profile (but no data leaves your device via the VPN, it just routes the traffic through this app).
Set your DNS servers to dns.adguard-dns.com (Settings > search for DNS). Also you should install the DDG app and enable App Tracking Protection. You don't actually have to use the browser portion of the app for it to work. After doing these two things, ads and trackers will be blocked in every app.
“an Android”
You know, like a Nintendo.
Kinda true lol.
Instead of selling, you could also just throw it in the trash
With an ad blocking dns.
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
Go down to the configure manually option and follow the instructions for iPhone.
I think next guard is also supposed to be decent, but they won't let you use it without an account.
The nice thing about the dns approach is it works for more than just your web browser. There's a bunch of Android games that are essentially unplayable without an adblocking dns.
As a disclaimer, a bunch of sites are ramping up requiring enabling ads or they won't let you load the content. I'm ok with just hitting back and not viewing those sites, but my MIL just asked for help removing the ad guard dns because her news sites wouldn't let her in.
Thank you!
I use a Safari extension called Purify. It’s in the App Store. Works pretty well for me.
(I also use a pi-hole at home)
Similar for me - 1Blocker and pi-hole at home. Then I also VPN to my home when outside to continue the pi-hole filter.
I also use iCloud relay with non-precise location.
Since there are so many assholes trying to meme on you instead of trying to help you,
https://adguard.com/kb/adguard-for-ios/solving-problems/system-wide-filtering/
I bought the complete app for I think $12 and it is awesome and does exactly what I need. They give you a very generous trial time.
DAE hate iPhone!?! LOL
Thanks a lot! I’m trying to set it up now
Some VPNs like Mullvad actually have an option in their app to block ads, gambling stuff, etc.
They don’t catch everything, but work pretty well.
Set your DNS to next DNS https://nextdns.io
Edit: Ah sorry didn't realize this was already answered.
You answered better and thanks for the link. Is this a free service?
I'm using adguard but I've heard the owners are possibly unscrupulous.
That is a free service and I really like it make sure you read their website basically when you sign up which requires no login it'll give you a unique dns entry to use as your DNS
The reason I like this one is it's not just ad blocking it fixing a bunch of anti-tracking and other features
Can you install Firefox?
In Firefox you should be able to install the add-on "uBlock origin". No additional tweaking of settings required.
With Firefox you can browse the web including pages like YouTube.
Can't use add-ons for iOS Firefox as far as I can find
You can soon in the EU
Only if you agree to giving your first-born child to Apple.
You can use “extensions” for Safari, and there are at least a couple ad blocking extensions. I use Purify, and it works pretty well at blocking ads
The iCondom
I’m sorry? lol
It's a condom for your i
Like a contact lens?
Sir, this is a
Wendy’siCream shopAt least, you can change your DNS to one who blocks ads. It's not as efficient as uBlock origin and system wide on Android. But, it's better than nothing.
Definitely look into Next DNS. There are also some Safari extensions that can block ads.
I also suggest buying refurbished unlocked phones in the future instead of going for the carrier freebies which you can see are scams designed to lock you into paying for their overpriced service each month for over a year.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047223162
Thanks!
Back when I had an iPhone I used Orion. It's not perfect, but it blocked the vast majority of ads for me.
As a quick and easy alternative, you can set it to automatically open sites in reader mode. I’ve been trying that lately and it definitely helps although also mixed results where sites block part of their content from reader mode.
With automatic reader mode, I click to hide reader much less often than I formerly clicked to enable it
You can use https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/id1452162351
To set a DNS based adblock, it is easy to setup, opensource, and free.
I have been on Android for a long time but I still have an old iPhone that works fine for reading articles. Bonus, there is no Sim in it so no one can call me. It's my drinking coffee device.
AdGuard still works well but there are other safari extensions. At home I use eero ad blocking which works well for a maintenance free blocker.
I use FireFox on my phone.
AdGuard works well.
Ghostery addon for safari is solid.
I'll check it out. Thanks.
You can install Orion browser by Kagi and install extensions from Firefox like uBlock Origin
Unlike when your friends or parents might raw dog, you can put that adblock condom on their computers for them.
The main problem is 3rd party advertising. If the New York Times ran ads on their website like they did with the physical newspaper, we would not have this problem.
Publishers need to take direct responsibility for every ad on their platform.
Plausible deniability. Oh, a mildly sexual ad has shown to you? Someone probably approved it on the third-party site. Oh, you didn't want to see it? Sorry, we got nothing to do with it.
Also scams and other grey-area shit.
I am surprised the reason for blocking ads doessn't include making sites somewhat readable. I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it's more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.
I tend to not use adblockers, or when I do it's on a black list system for worst offenders rather than by default. However, I absolutely refuse tracking, and if it's the only option I go to firefox reader mode immediately.
The usual false dichotomy of "personalised ads or you're killing us!" is not acceptable.
Ad tech IS the tracking, so if you're not blocking ads, you're not actually refusing said tracking. I think you might be conflating cookies with being tracking (they are), but that's only a part of it.
I wonder why ad tech can‘t be „Let‘s show ads that correspond to what‘s being talked about on that website.“ Kinda like what Google suggested with Topics but without following me through the internet.
There is no real technical challenge in displaying ads that are based on the page content. But ads based on tracking users is much more profitable. Plus they can sell the data collected to anyone else that is interested.
Look, you need to understand that advertisers are Hell-bent on forcibly extracting as much money from you as possible. If they could strap you to a chair, hold your eyes open like in A Clockwork Orange, and then charge you for everything you so much as glanced at, they absolutely would.
If that's not how you want to live, then they are your enemy.
You know i think i understand companies sometimes but then i keep being baffeld at how evil a company can be.
Apple for example had me surprised with the reaction to the DMA and i previously thought that they couldn‘t possibly suck harder wirh alö their anti-repair stuff.
I still have a bone to pick with Tim Cook himself for rendering my well working Mac Mini 2012 unusable for my app development job by simply not updating Xcode and introducing a breaking change that prevented me from adding support for new iOS versions to old Xcode.
The saddest part is, companies used to be required to act in the common good, but the courts have gradually jettisoned that concept for mostly bullshit reasons.
Because that’s not as profitable. That’s it. That’s the reason.
Don‘t you just hate it when
When capitalism
They could be. Sites could talk directly to advertisers, and put the ad directly into the page itself instead of asking the ad server for a random ad. Most ad blockers probably wouldn't notice it because it's part of the actual page.
But then they'd lose out on the tracking data and would be responsible to make sure the ad doesn't annoy the shit out of you, so they're not going to do that.
I use them on my personal systems but not my work laptop. I have to use an ad blocker on my phone because so many sites, including "respected" news organizations, are an absolute mess when ads are enabled.
It's bad when you go to one of the top news company's websites in the US and there's a pile of content covered by advertisements. I guess I didn't need to read those sentences anyway.
There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.
There are times that people can't throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don't have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of "render those advertisements".
I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.
I dislike the fact that "ads" can also include crapware being injected into my computer (viruses, tracking cookies, mysterious scripts, etc).
If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn't mind Trojans! /s
And there are so many scam ads that look like UI buttons and such. I can see why people get fooled sometimes. Those sort of ads should automatically be rejected by af networks and the sites that host them. But $$$
Is this still really a thing? I remember getting some viruses from ads in the very early days of the internet, like late 90s / early 2000s, but can’t remember getting anything in at least the last ten years.
It's currently late and I am on my phone, so I can't research this too well, but for example this thread and official Microsoft link discusses th Adrozek malware which injects you with unwanted ads and information directly from your browser.
Sure, it's not a virus in the older sense of the term where someone either burns your drive or takes over your computer and locks you out asking for a ransom, but it's still piloting you unsuspectingly and you don't want it.
I don't think I could use the internet if I didn't have an adblocker. Ads genuinely anger me. I think it's just from the early days with pop-overs and unders, blinking, non-collapsible and the like holding content hostage. Intrusive or not, I'll do everything I can to not see an ad.
using the internet without an adblocker is like fuckin a 5 dollar hooker behind a dumpster.
You're gonna catch something nasty and go through a lot of misery.
ah, to the people downvoting you, you can't even trust "legitimate" sites not to push malware. I would trust 4chan more not to push malware on it's end users.
Without a condom.
I use Mullvad so naturally, I can pick my exit country. Since I'm an iOS user (aka, no NewPipe etc) I always choose an exit country that is majority non-English-speaking. It makes the YT app adds so much more bearable if I can't understand what they're saying.
Remember the mosquito banner? The one with the annoying mosquito sound?
I remember.
Yeah early days were really hard.
Many parts of the Internet has become functionally unusable without one. And given online advertising's history as a vector for malware, as blockers are just the sensible choice.
The internet is unusable without an adblocker.. I recommend uBlock Origin and Pihole.
Is there a big advantage to a pihole in addition to ublock?
Pihole will also block non-browser traffic (e.g. your OS phoning home). Adblocking extensions are typically restricted to just blocking traffic of the browser it’s installed on.
It also operates on your entire home network, so it can block junk traffic on devices that can’t run adblockers.
Got any simple guides for simpletons like me?
uBlock Origin at a minimum. But I would suggest a privacy focused browser. Librewolf, Mulvad or even Brave. Browsers leak so much information about you it is easy for sites to fingerprint and track you even with an ad blocker.
https://privacytests.org/
I know Librewolf is working on their DNS leakage (last section on privacytests.org), but they also allow you to select a privacy focused DNS server which is nice when you’re not on a network you own, so you can’t run PiHole.
I've been using an ad blocking DNS for years and would not consider using the internet without it. Since it's a DNS it works everywhere on mobile or Wi-Fi. I just figured that an ad blocker of some sort is basically a digital condom and must be used. When I see people who don't use one, I think they are crazy.
Had my boss trying to grab a pdf (crosswords, colouring pages, printed for kids in a pub) while using Chrome without any adblock extensions.
The volume of ads, trick links, and shite on that one website in particular was outstanding. She asked me if a link was OK to click. Promptly pointed out she should use Firefox (which has unlock and other extensions added) instead of chrome as the link she had clicked was for some sketchy software and not a crossword.
I can't imagine the internet without ad blockers. Ublock is a great addition, removing elements from pages is a huge advantage. So many sites sling rubbish wherever they can.
Yep, i use UBlock as well as a second layer of defense. As Asher Roth says "when it comes to condoms, put two on".
Edit: Just in case, do not actually use two condoms. They will break each other and you will end up a father.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
"when it comes to condoms, put two on"
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Do you only use a DNS ad-blocker or also a client-side ad-blocker?
Both, I use a DNS level ad blocker on my entire network and use UBlock origin on my browser. That way most ads are killed outside of the browsers as well and it keeps my system from contacting malware servers by domain name at least.
Edit: Mind you, most of my apps are open source and have no ads to begin with, but for the few that are closed source. That's what the blockers are for.
I used to not run an ad block. I figured the ads didn't bother me so why bother?
Then I encountered a banner ad that screamed "HELLOOOOOOOOOO" anytime the mouse went over it and I couldn't download an ad blocker fast enough.
Advertising companies will do anything they can to annoy the shit out of you, then act like people running ad blockers are the problem.
I was fine with unobtrusive ads, I was fine with a minute of ads before a YouTube video. But it got so bad it was constantly interrupting everything. Also want to know what’s extremely unpleasant? Political ads calling for a moral panic against you or taking bigotry against you as a general assumption. I’m not watching that bullshit. My life is better without ads
I once watched a 60 minute ad because I wondered (what would a 60min ad even be about) and I can't remember
That shitty Epoch Times used to do that. I was watching a bunch of satire videos and one of their commercials was on, and I legitimately thought it was part of the skit because of how stupid it was.
Then it hit me it is a real ad. And real people are watching it. And that’s how I got radicalized even more.
Wow! Pranks from 2004 are ads in 2024.
I thought the text said "stop AIDS" but practically the same thing.
Does anyone ever actually click on an ad? Like "hey thats cool I wanna check it out/buy it right here right now"?
I have adblockers active everywhere and only disable then somtimes for specific sites that really don't work otherwise, but even if the unlikely case would come up that something is interesting I would just look it up separately? Mostly I just turn a blind eye on them anyway, but just wondering, some people gotta really click/buy from these ads? It just seems so surreal to me..
The only obvious ad I've ever clicked on was for a "free" IQ test. I figured I'd never done one cause they're fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through. After 20 mins or so answering questions, it ended on a transaction page. The only way to see your "results" was by paying $20. I obviously didn't pay, and instead tried to report the ad, only to discover that Google Ads has zero mechanism to even report scams to Google. After some research, it turned out that this blatant bait and switch scam had been operating via Google Ads for like 5 or 7 years. Google doesn't give a fuck if scammers use it's ad tech to scam your grandma or inject your system with malware, as long as they get paid for the privilege.
I've always used an ad blocker, but the whole experience reinforced how anti-consumer and pro-criminal surveillance capitalism is. Permanent absolute ad block — without exceptions — is how everyone should operate, because none of these companies deserve any trust whatsoever. Even if you trust the site you're visiting, you can't trust any ad company they utilize.
That click should have lead you to a page that says 'you failed'. 😂
The EU is currently testing a new payment framework that would make payments faster and easier and also enable very small payments.
This could finally enable micropayments in browsers (well, in Firefox and maybe Safari) which would eliminate intermediaries like Google and all the scummy ad companies and enable websites to work out deals directly with visitors on the spot (pay a very small amount like a cent or a fraction of a cent to read this article).
Obviously, Google will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this.
I'm still not paying a fraction of a cent for the obviously LLM-generated bullshit that has flooded the internet.
And yet for content I can be reasonably sure is actually human generated (read: niche enough to not have been flooded to the point I no longer can trust the "usual"/"big" sites) I might consider paying for server costs a little.
If you're walking around somewhere and you see a person or people offering a "free personality test," do not take them up on their offer. They're Scientologists. They once refused to let my mother leave back in the 70s until she said she would start screaming "rape."
People definitely do. CTR (click through rate) is generally pretty low, even before the majority of Americans were using ad blocks. But it’s not 0
I've personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don't really have any regrets there. I've seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I'd never have known about otherwise.
I can't imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.
My wife does. But she's a sucker for "a good deal"
I dont ever click on them myself, but if I start searching for something I need/want, and I see a brand I'm familiar with thru advertising, I'm more likely to explore their product, at least. Simply just because, "of I've heard of this before"
Brand recognition is one of the key goals for running ads, it works.
But these are never real deals are they? At least I saw maaaaaaany bullshit fake deals, cant remember anything legit ever..
I also found my mum buying crap of instagram a while ago, but i kinda got to her to be a bit more mindful what she clicks on.
I have ad blockers everywhere, except native mobile apps. I've clicked on an Instagram ad for shirts. I bought the shirts. People keep complimenting me on the shirts. No regrets there
I guess that sounds reasonable. I sometimes miss seeing some of the cool stuff on instagram
I know ad rates and metrics are heavily based around click through, but does it even actually matter? I mean, TV ads are big money expensive, and nobody has ever clicked on those. I guess if you're advertising a shitty mobile game or something then it matters, but does McDonalds or whatever even want you to buy a hamburger before you watch a YouTube video? That doesn't really make a lot of sense.
As you've noticed, there are different types of ads. Not all have clicks as their goal. Some are just there to make you think about their brand, for example.
Not only did my late father-in-law click on ads, he also clicked on spam emails. Yes, his computer was super slow and I regularly had to clean off the malware.
Sometimes the sponsored links at the top of a Google search are exactly what I was looking for. I just need to quickly disable AdAway so that I can follow the link.
I've always thought that the ad supported internet is something people will eventually get sick of and the financial foundation would evolve over time to find models that don't rely on infinite spam. Instead efforts are focussed on forcing us to view them. At this point I'm expecting the next version of Chrome to require the Ludovico technique while browsing.
I mean, many (several?) sites tried optional subscriptions where you pay to get rid of ads, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Judging by the fact that most sites that have subscriptions instead of ads use pay walls.
People have come to expect free access, so if you can easily use an ad blocker, why would you choose to pay to remove the ads that a blocker removes for free.
Let's just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It's not 1954. I'm not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I'm reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?
As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.
IMHO the problem is the same one as everywhere. Companies are no longer interested in creating products, they are only interested in creating revenue streams. I've been working on my finances lately and it's incredible how many 'products' have become subscriptions over time.
I'd love to be able to buy a day's access, or access to an article. If I want to share it, I'm willing to pay a small fee to show it to certain folks. I feel like there could be a market there but in the current financial climate it would never get any interest or backing because it wouldn't be a method to capture people into a reoccurring billing cycle.
Something I think is interesting is that, in order for companies to adopt these better non ad reliant models, they would have to dramatically scale down.
In a climate where ad and clicks = revenue, your solution is to scale as large as you can and pump out content to maximize views. But that wouldn't work under normal models
if I ran the world, these tech companies would get the ma bell treatment, heck the current phone companies need a round 2.
As does the entire financial sector
I'm not visiting any of those sites regularly. I'm not subscribing to any outlet without sampling their content, either. So that was always going to fail.
In the before times you were able to purchase one edition of a paper and be done with it. Now it's subscription only, so they won't see a dime from me.
Not only do people expect free access, they feel entitled to endless free content.
God forbid YouTube charge a subscription fee to help pay creators or show ads. No no, we all gotta jump on whatever app makes it free of ads and denies anyone a single cent for the content consumed.
Even if YouTube is the actual devil, other platforms exist that do a better job of paying creators but we don't talk about Nebula, we just talk about getting around the ads at YouTube without letting YouTube ever see a cent. As if having millions of videos available at the touch of a finger to anyone with an Internet connection is somehow free.
The problem with YouTube is they will keep adding more ads until people stop tolerating it.
It used to be a single ad at the start of the video you could skip after 5 seconds. Now it's multiple unskippable ads before the video starts. Often you don't know if this is the video you want anyway, and if it's not you spent more time on the ads than the video itself.
Once you do find the video you want you get random interruptions mid sentence for more unskippable ads. If people just shrug and say "they have to pay for it somehow" then YouTube rubs their hands together and puts more ads in until they find the point where more ads = less viewership.
If the single "skip after 5s" ad was untenable long term then they shouldn't have started with a service they couldn't actually provide. I'm sick of these companies purposely running an unprofitable business just to get users, and then when they change the model to try to become profitable act like it's the users fault that the company sold them on something they can't maintain.
If you want to support a creator do it through Patreon. The amount they get from YouTube is garbage. If I didn't have a way to block YouTube ads I just wouldn't watch YouTube anymore, so they aren't losing any money from me running an AdBlock.
Nebula is good. Maybe different models besides YouTube are in order.
Some seem to do OK with:
Peertube + LiberaPay
The problem is they’re trying to double down on infinite spam by implementing infinite subscriptions alongside it.
Yeah, can you take a "Veteran cybersecurity expert" who doesn't generally use an adblocker serious?
Security knowledge and ethical concerns are two separate things. Whether we like it or not, we pay online creators through private data we must give to entities who will use it against our best interests.
Fuck that. We don't have to give them anything. They need to show they actually have put in the effort to protect their viewers. Until then, I refuse to do anything less than use everything available to me to block their ads. The days of whitelisting websites is over.
Hahahaha!
The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of "experienced programmers" don't have an ad blocker. I'm not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.
There's a surprising amount of programmers that don't know basics of various parts of an operating system. I know people that know several languages, but get lost on installing a mod pack for a game or installing an app from within another app like a browser.
True. 100% Even today I had to screen share with our lead DB developer to show him how to create a key and ssh to a host.
Also worked with a guy who would design custom circuit boards for devices, but his windows skill was less than my mother's (which is terrible)
Could he be Linux guy perhaps ?
Nope, just bad using any computer OS
"experienced programmers" in would have web developers fall under that umbrella, I'd guess web developers are less likely to adopt adblockers if their livelihood depends on them
experienced just means they've been doing it for some time, it says nothing about how well they do it.
Hence the quotations ;)
The engineer who sat next to me at my old job didn't use an adblocker. She also would just ignore anything on the screen that wasn't directly related to her task. There'd be "please update" OS popups or "do you want to install a plugin for markdown?" ide prompts on her screen for days. When I'd roll over to work on something at her desk I'd be like "how do you work like this?" she was like "like what?"
She was pretty good at engineering and generally smart. I don't know how she did it.
I'm wondering about her reason for not using one too. What is the advantage?
She thinks the web can't exist without ads? It can, because it did once.
20 years pro experience here: I run several different browsers in various states of blockedness for various reasons. But when I'm off the clock, of course, it's firefox with ublock.
Maybe the pol was distributed via ads
My mom, in her 60s, is an experienced programmer. She programmed before she had the internet
Ads are just pure negative. There was even one study that calculated this as a direct financial negative, although unfortunately in narrow circumstances: it was calculated that for mobile users in the US, paying for the data transferred to display the ad was more expensive than what the site owner got paid for including it on his site.
That's is indeed a pure negative - for the users. The site and the the mobile carrier both got paid.
Yes yes, capitalism good.
Don't forget the company serving the ads, and also the company paying for them
If the ads are unobtrusive and interesting, and not clearly based on harvested personal data, I wouldn't mind.
Unfoorrrtunately...
Exactly.
I was excited for Brave when they talked about service privacy-friendly ads and sharing revenue with sites. That obviously didn't happen, but I think it is a good idea in general.
I don't mind privacy-respecting ads like sponsorships and whatnot in videos, but I absolutely cannot stand the data-harvesting ads used almost everywhere, as well as ads in services I've paid for.
There's a Dutch tech website called tweakers.net, a while ago they removed all tracking cookies and all ads are now just banners based on the current web page. I have adblocker disabled for that website and I'm happy with that
Says a company that makes an ad blocker
Back in the day, major news sites like the BBC ran ads that were infected with malware that then infected computers. These weren’t shady sites like people expect you to get viruses from.
Installed an ad blocker the day that news broke and never looked back. Ads are potentially harmful to your devices.
The WoW forums around 2012 had a virus infect thousands of computers before blizzard removed it. It was a 3rd party ad that was spreading the virus.
I remember that, thousands of people got keyloggers and their accounts compromised. Then Blizzard tried to blame those people for getting infected, from the Blizzard website.
This is still an issue today.
It's a necessity. The internet really is unusable without it. Pop-up ads, long unskippable video ads, annoying shovelware scam ads, etc etc.
overlooking the biggest issue, the malware/virus ads.
True!
Just trying to read the news on my phone kills its battery because of all the ads and crap. I'm just reading, why is my phone's battery draining like water? Hence Ad blocker is mandatory.
Yea that shit didn’t have the hold on millennials like it did the chain letter sending dummies of the previous generation.
In my day ads were vectors for viruses AND were dumb and annoying as fuck.
Some would agree they still are.
Highly unlikely, but hopefully one day.
Ad blocker is kind of a sad name for a content/spam filter, a vital security tool, but that's what we got. Especially since browsers naively didn't include filtering and block lists by default and they only became common as add-ons.
I never get to be the 1 millionth visitor anymore
Or learn about hot Milfs in your area.
Theres people who dont use ad blocker? Do they also not use the internet?
none of my classmates or teachers use adblockers. i didn't expect this in a university. most don't even know what i'm talking about when i recomment ublock...
Had a front end dev who didn't use adblocker.
Sometimes I temporarily disable mine to make sure it's not silently breaking any of my layout or anything, but not using one at all? That's bonkers.
I suspect 98% of Apple users don't block ads
That's because ads fucking suck
Don't a majority of them also use Chrome? Because they're going to find that their adblockers are less and less effective.
That’s yet another reason to use a DNS as blocker, and not let your browser use DNS over https.
I haven’t done it myself yet, but I figure that sooner or later I’ll need to update my router to block all outbound DNS that doesn’t go through my DNS ad blocker. Some devices try to use their own hardcoded DNS to get around them…
I mean... you could just use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Works great.
DNS blocking is about the only way to block ads & tracking on things like streaming devices. You can’t install Firefox or uBlock on an Apple TV for example. You can block ads on many of the apps on the Apple TV as well as all the telemetry they try to collect with a well configured pi-hole and selected DNS blocklists.
True, but using a computer with an adblocker and a second gen Chromecast (which you don't need Chrome for) also eliminates that.
DNS-based ad blocking is unfortunately much less effective. It's still better than nothing though, that's for sure.
A multi-layered approach is the best approach. My pi-hole blocks advertising domains, malware domains, etc. That helps tremendously with all the “smart” devices that include DVRs, streaming devices, etc. where you can’t install something like ublock. I also make sure something like ublock is installed wherever possible.
Yup. I've got DNS, IP lists, zenarmor, and browser extensions
Why shouldn't you let your browser use DNS over HTTPS?
Because then it can bypass your ad-blocking DNS
DNS over HTTPS was a great idea for privacy if left in your hands, but immediately ran into the reality of intrusive advertising
Because dns ad blocking is typically done with something like dnsmasq which doesn't support DNS over HTTPS, though it's easy enough to setup a resolver/forwarder that does
No, it's another reason to use Firefox. A Brower that is not owned and managed by an advertisement company.
Leopards, face etc
yeah, the internet without an ad blocker seems mostly unusable.
It's eye bleach
I remember the good ol days when the ads would lag up the loading of the page
Now they all load first and cover the entire content of the page because screw usability
Looking at you, every news outlet site ever
I doubt these numbers. Almost nobody I know uses one on mobile
Then there's those of us who uninstalled the YouTube app and installed Kiwi so we can install the uBlock Origin chrome plug-in 😅
Firefox has plug-ins available out of the box on Android, including uBlock Origin.
Kiwi is a browser with plug-in support out of the box but it's always good to have options, thanks :)
Oh, I seem to have misinterpreted your message then. That's pretty neat
I really doubt the numbers. It's so common to see people complain about ads online, even in places like here where you'd expect most people to use adblockers.
All adblockers are not created equally and some of basically trojan horses to let some specific ads through or track the user in other ways.
I've definitely noticed when my adblocker of choice misses a youtube add or popup, the comments of that day specifically will be about how bad some ads are.
Even if nobody used ads, ads just don't work anymore. Kids can't even percieve them anymore, old people who click on everything are a shrinking market segment, and most people in the middle seek to learn about market offerings from influencers they've chosen to trust.
ads are the worst. block them all! Would be great if an advertising company did not have the most popular browser.
That's why I use firefox, never going to downgrade to manifest v3 ever
FWIW, the manifest v3 implementation in firefox is not user-hostile. They made it compatible, but the limitations on filtering are not there.
People themselves have turned into ads since ads themselves don't do their job.
Look at influencers.
Instagram used to be fun for someone to share their journey, now it's ad...influencer...double ad...Triple influencer...Another ad...a real person sharing their journey...55 more influencer ads mixed with 29 actual ads.
Oh and the occasional OF girl who managed to flash some puss without it getting taken down.
I love when i bought something...(i assume) google thinks it's a great idea to advertise that exact combination of products from the exact webshop on the next website i visit.
How much did tiktok ruin google's brain to make them think that is going to be effective marketing?
Mankind truly is on the way down.
I'm surprised people trust Microsoft and Amazon more than Apple; Amazon needs all the data they can get on you to build "better" profiles on what to sell you, ties your Alexa requests to feed advertising (you can opt out) and Microsoft, especially with Edge (post advertising and services team takeover) has been trying to send everything to Microsoft to feed both ads and their AI. FFS, even Outlook warns you now that they'll share your data with >800 "partners".
Apple is no saint, far from it, but people trust a conglomerate over it?
Apple is just less used
Apple
Yes I trust them more than most.
They don't need adv, users are locked inside their platform - so they protect their users from the outside while they use them from the inside (in the end not much different from the others)
with Microsoft though its less of a problem for users because that would require you to daily use those applications. not many people that I know of personally use outlook, so they would be unavfevted ny outlook ads when compared to the other platforms, which they physically spend more time in.
I'm still surprised so many people don't use them.
Ublock: Origin plugin on each browser, and/or a proper piHole style DNS blocker. Anything else is probably capturing your data to sell.
Jeez, don't report on it. Now there's going to be an even bigger crackdown on them.
It isn't a secret
Adblockers get better the more they are battled
I've been blocking ads since 1998, thanks to WebWasher. That acted as a local proxy that blocked all known ad urls. No heuristics, no algorithms, no nothing. Back in the good old days that was plenty.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.
More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.
"People who know how the internet works – because they work as developers or in security or in advertising – they've all over the years decided that it was a good idea to use a tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it," said Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, in an interview with The Register.
"It's pretty unanimous that people who work in this industry and know how these things function want to protect themselves."
Schmetz said one surprising finding had to do with the extent to which people trust various companies that collect online data.
But truly the best way to support The Register is to sign up for a free account, comment on stories, share our links, and spread the word of our honest independent IT journalism.
The original article contains 681 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Many websites, especially on the sketchy side of the internet, are completely unusable without adblockers
Not entirely surprised.
The numbers were already up there, but I imagine YouTube's recent campaign only drove them higher. More people than before are now aware that adblockers exist and they love using them.
PiHole + WireGuard FTW
And uBlock Origin
Using opnsense with zenarmor and wireguard. Basically same idea. Works great.
Read it as BLOCK AIDS
It's the same
Most of them don't even know what phone they have. This article is completely false lol
Ublock Origin, privacy badger, pihole for home DNS.... Can't live without them
What does pihole do that Ublock does not?
Every non-PC, non-web browser on your network also reaps the benefit.
A DNS blocking system like Pihole can block ads on platforms you don't control, like smart TVs or mobile apps.
I was told YouTube is excluded from said benefit.
Yes the way YT loads ads it won't work to simply block them with a simple DNS pattern match, you need a proper adblocker or third party app. But you can block all the other nuisance clutter on the smart TV, at least.
My TV is hooked to my PC now as a monitor, so I just watch YT on it right in Firefox.
For smart tv there is smarttuve, its complete replacement of youtube and acts like youtube revsnced or youtube with ublocknon pc.teybit out
"tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it" ah yes expert
I am shocked that its that low. But I manage a website for a sports league and they want to display sponsor logos on the front page. They were all getting caught by my adblocker. When I talked to other board members, none of them used ad blockers. I debated if I should try and adjust the urls or not.
This isn't already the case?
@boem good.
W
Great ad I saw recently was a Charlie Day Mt Dew commercial. He said one word and a Mt Dew sign dropped over him and he yelled in his Charlie Day voice, "Hey I didn't even take a drink yet!" And that was the commercial.
Short. Sweet. Funny.
Getting really sick of the “hurr hurr ads bad only idiots don’t use adblockers” circlejerk on here. I pay $8 for YT Premium which seems super fair for the 10-15 hours of content I get on there a week. I like supporting creators, a lot of which rely on ad revenue to continue making their channels.
For the rest of you that thinks you have the moral high ground from blocking ads, what do you think the solution is? Subscriptions don’t work, paywalls are easily bypassed, and more reasonable ads don’t generate enough revenue to keep sites in business. Content shouldn’t just be free, people deserve to be paid for their work.
Should the free internet just die and become a series of subscription silos? It seems to be going that way, and more ad blocking will just accelerate that more.
Using adblockers and paying to use YT premium aren't inherently seperate, if you feel that's a fair price and are willing to pay that (like I am) no one should call you stupid for it. But people feel that isn't a fair price (which is also fair considering the amounter of users, $1 per month per user would bring in $2bn per month for YouTube afaik).
My big issue with paying for an ad free experience is that there are ads on videos of stolen content, and that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. I have this issue with SoundCloud as well. Random people will upload mixtapes of other artists that were originally released for free, but SoundCloud will run ads over it. It's obvious the creators aren't getting paid. I don't understand how that's even legal. Even if you argue that the service of using the website shouldn't be completely free, they are profiting off of stolen content.
Little confused by this one, but yeah. I can't afford subscriptions, and I also can't afford the products and services the ads are for. Ads are just pollution in my consciousness, so why should I reduce my QoL for no benefit to anyone? If a creator says that if you use adblock, don't watch me, I won't. Site blocks adblockers, I don't use it. What else am I supposed to do, when I make less than a living and don't really have better options?