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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

So I just started using ad blockers (uBlock Origin on Chrome, adblock + ghostery on Safari) because I was finally sick of the amount of extra bandwidth, CPU and just noise they are creating with this crap.

I've intentionally not used ad blockers for years, because I get that's how companies make money, but heaven's to betsy if they don't dig their own graves with the intrusive over-intensive crap these days.

My old tactic was to just not visit sites with offensive, intrusive or band-width heavy ads. These sites, bar some outliers, no longer exist. Every tech, current events and editorial site pulls down half the fucking internet to show me some words on a screen these days.

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I started using adblocking software -years- ago, when an ad on a reputable, syndicated comics page (gocomics.com I think) minimized my browser, and popped up an ad to look like a system dialog telling me my computer was at risk. That was it for me.

Since then, uBlock occasionally gets disabled on Chrome because I don't even know, and it usually is just a few pageviews before an ad is so obnoxious that I notice and re-enable it. I don't understand how people without adblockers even use the web at this point.

I just started using ad-blockers for similar reasons. I found an increasing number of sites (especially news sites) were becoming so obnoxious with the advertising that it was causing my browser to frequently freeze and/or crash.

I really don't mind a simple, static banner ad, but this crap has gotten out of control.

I recently just hit my limit, too. The final straw was advertising videos that grabbed focus and refused to let it go. Worse, the videos were at the bottom of the page and would force my browser to scroll to those videos, refuse to yield focus until X seconds were played. Then, after I was able to scroll back to the top of the page to view the content I was after, the whole thing would start again as the next video played. AdBlock was installed after that.

I recently installed it at work due to offensive political advertising during our last elections (non-usa country)

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