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Comment by panta | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this.

uBlock Origin seems to have ~15 million active users between Chrome and Firefox (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock_Origin). If it only spared us 10 seconds a day on average (probably a super conservative estimate), it would save the equivalent of an average human life (~70yrs) every 15 days! (And given that probably at least 70% of users don't use an ad blocker, it's infuriating to think what's the "human" cost of ads on the web alone...)

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uBlock saves my laptop battery and CPU when web browsing, by a lot. It has an older core2 CPU that can easily churn at 40% just staring at a page where some ads aren't blocked. That and the cpu fan spins up to high. Turn on uBlock, and CPU use goes to zero. uBlock saves electricity and is therefor good for the environment. I'd say we're all obligated to use it ;)

Try to watch a playlist on Youtube without a add blocker. Its insane the length and amount of commercials. A add blocker save you much more then 10 secs a day.

Fwiw, "ad" is short for "advertisement" which has one "D".

But it adds to the viewing time :)

You can pay for a YouTube premium account which doesn't have ads.

Or you can use youtube-dl[1] to download youtube videos without ads.

[1] - https://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

...or you can use Invidious which just serves videos from YouTube without ads and no almost no JS :)

https://github.com/omarroth/invidious https://invidio.us/ (one of the hosted instances)

Which is also expensive. In Canada, it's 12$/m, but in includes original shows, YouTube Music, and a bunch of things I would never use. I would gladly pay a couple bucks a month to remove ads, but the fact that it's more expensive than it needs to be and includes so much more than I care about makes me not want to.

$12/m is not expensive for most people living in Canada.

It's expensive when the alternative is free. Particularly since that free alternative is WAY better. Paying youtube only stops the ads on youtube. uBlock Origin does much much more than that. I'd sooner give gorhill 12/month, but he won't take my money.

This stuff adds up fast. $10/mo for YT Premium, $15/mo for Spotify, $15+/mo for Netflix. You are looking at almost $500 per year in subscription services alone, not even counting your phone bill.

That's why I use YouTube Music for $15/mo which includes Ad free Youtube + Music streaming for 5 family members.

I fully expect google to decouple the YT ad free portion (they already decoupled YT Red), but until then it's a reasonable value prop.

Not in all countries.

Don't forget the added stress adverts cause.

it is way more. more like up to 50 million.

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