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Comment by boyter | Hacker News Reader

Just recently I experimented going without my pi-hole or any ad blocker software for 4 weeks to see what would happen.

My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load. Things I wanted to click that jumped when an ad loaded resulting in miss clicks. Annoying things following me around.

It was especially bad on mobile with the GDRP/Cookie notices and ad's to the point that on my iPhone SE some pages had a thin smear of the actual content no taller than a single line of text. News sites were especially bad for this.

With the experiment ended my pi-hole and ad blockers are now set to very on (and updated to this version and can confirm the block list went from 100,000 to 89,000) and I am much happier. Seems about 20% of the traffic on my network is blocked now which explains why some pages performed so awfully.

The ad industry really needs to up its game because the current state of the web is just horrible.

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IME, it really depends on the website. If the user normally has Javascript disabled, then suddenly enables it on a graphical browser while visiting a news website, look out.

Dumpster fire indeed. The user's computer resources are quickly usurped and things slow to a crawl. Users have been trained to be patient I guess, waiting for websites to "load".

Interestingly, I find that many egregiously ad/tracker-laden websites actually "work" well enough without Javascript, meaning the content is readable, sometimes even the images are displayed. For these websites, it does not appear that they are purposely designed to be "unusable" without Javascript enabled. As a text-only browser user, I sometimes perceive some websites "do not work" with Javascript enabled. Trying to view them with the "recommended browser" with Javascript enabled makes the computer so unbearably slow and janky that I give up and go back to turning Javascript off.

> many egregiously ad/tracker-laden websites actually "work" well enough without Javascript, meaning the content is readable, sometimes even the images are displayed.

Websites that can't manage to load an image without javascript are a pet peeve of mine and they are everywhere. News sites are the worst, but even popular images hosts where displaying images is their entire job fail miserably. At the very least sites that can't load the image should show a direct link to the image but they never do. I'd happily welcome back all the marquee tags and "under construction" banners of the past if we could take web development back to the point where we didn't need several massive JavaScript libraries hosted across multiple domains to do the most task like display an image.

Why four weeks? Surely you could have reached a similar conclusion in a day, or less? Or did you learn anything in that time that couldn't have been learnt in a short burst of unprotected internet activity?

Seemed like a reasonable period of time. I got to see what the difference was on different devices including desktop, laptop, tablet and phone.

I also got to see how they were affected for work, study and play over weekends and weekdays.

I did notice I started to wait longer for pages to load with the ad's so that I would not accidentally click on them while they loaded in. That and I got generally annoyed by the web experience in general.

This has always been my conclusion when I experiment with not using an ad blocker. So many websites with outwise "okayish" content are basically ruined by ads.

Some sites are littered with "targeted" ads like download buttons and similar, which I'm not even sure why that's allowed.

It's also fun on "big" websites like MS Teams, Netflix, hulu, etc, to see the "blocked" count raise into the hundreds.

> My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load.

Yeah, people always knock pi-hole for not blocking "everything" like browser-based blockers do, but even though it's not perfect it still makes a huge difference. Due to some network changes I had to go without pi-hole for a couple days after having previously used it for years, and you never really appreciate how much crap pi-hole traps until it's gone.

Is it still worthwhile to set up if I have ad blocking in all my browsers?

Not for your browsers, no. UBlock Origin is far better than any host-based adblocker.

I use pihole to block ads inside apps, it's unmatched for that.

That would be a suitable use case, but I don't think I use any apps that contain ads.

It's not just ads in apps, it blocks tracking beacons too. If I connect my (big Chinese manufacturer's) android device to my vps which has the pihole running I can watch as one or two requests per second are blocked with no browser open.

Things like sonos devices make constant requests to metrics servers. Pi-hole drops that shit in a bottomless pit.

Yep, my experience as well. There must be a better way. I think we're warming up for a war since browsers (Chrome and Safari at least) have slowly started making it harder to block ads, which I think will becoming a creeping normality.

It might work for the better in the long run. No possibility to block ads combined with advertiser's greed will eventually make the whole thing unusable. And I am okay with consuming less content. Maybe along with the fall of the internet advertising industry we'll reinvent the wheel from scratch. Paywalls are fine if you absolutely care about that content but they don't work so well alongside free content back-ed up by ads.

DoH in Firefox will bypass your pihole too and have all your DNS data go to cloudflare to boot.

Why couldn't pi-hole answer over http as well? You would also be able to use it from outside your home, without leaking your DNS traffic, or risking interception.

You can disable that; both at a network level, and in the browser itself. You can also choose a different DoH provider if you don't want to use cloudflare.

Yes, it should be disabled by default but it not the end of the world. I would hazard a guess that when Chrome implements something similar that it won't be so easy to disable.

I tried running pi-hole for a few days, but went back to pfBlockerNG. The ui is nice, but not really anything i care to look at as long as it works. AFAIK pfBlockerNG not only blocks the domains, but the IPs they resolve to as well, meaning no funny business will get around it. I realize it requires a pfsense router out similar, but don't understand why it's not brought up more alongside pi-hole.

Maybe don't use pi-hole and just stop visiting sites that disrespect their users?

You don't really miss out on anything and actually reward proper sites.

Maybe don't use something free and awesome to improve your experience and instead find whatever magical slice of the internet isn't ad driven?

It takes a few minutes to set up pi-hole, and it isn't just for websites either. It happily swallows in-app advertisements. The benefits are extended to anybody on your wifi. What possible reason would you have to not use it?

The same reason you don't pirate photoshop.

Adobe don't mind. You wouldn't buy it anyway. What suffers is the cheaper/free competition that is completely starved.

Surely you realize that avoiding disrespectful sites and seeking proper sites will send a message?

Two actually, one that that kind of shit isn't acceptable and second, that you appreciate honest people.

If you can't be bothered then maybe we actually deserve the cesspool we've created.

I wonder if the ads are now targeted more toward the idiot end of the spectrum as the only people without ad blockers...

Is there any special reason to use pi-hole + adblocker? Why just to not use one of them?

Adblockers can block specific paths/URLs, where Pi-Hole is DNS level only.

Pi-hole blocks ads for any device on your network. I consider it a courtesy for guests.

If you’re into fun experiments, you can also try putting a few pennies into a jar whenever you visit a website or write a script to simply block the sites you need to visit.

That doesn’t sounds like a fun experiment at all!

more like full time job

"But what about my business model? Don't you know I have an inalienable right to it?"

How is that any different from someone thinking they have an inalienable right to any article/website they want?

If your server sends bits back to my computer when I request them, it is perfectly within my right to decide which of those bits I do and do not want to see.

This is like the people who say they can say what they want because of free speech.

If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.

There's no ethics involved in third party ads whatsoever.

You’re getting something you value (video, article, etc.) in exchange for looking at ads instead of paying money. If you don’t want to look at ads, don’t look at the content. Don’t hide behind server requests and technicalities.

It would be fine in the 1995 version of the internet where a page served up content plus a banner ad. I might click, I might not. But now we're faced with privacy invasion, tracking, data-collection, TVs that output tones during ads that our phones pick up and report back to advertisers, pages that are slow and unreadable because the ads have taken over more real estate than the content. The list goes on, and it's not a trade we agreed to.

Anti-patterns designed to trick us into clicking, signing up, giving up more data, view another few seconds of ads. It never ends! So yeah, we block it. I don't feel sorry. If you don't think it's ethical then you're not paying attention to what's really going on. I used to go around installing Firefox for people before it was called that. Then adblockers, and now I go to people's houses and help them with a raspberry pi loaded with pi-hole. Fuck ads. Fuck that entire industry. And fuck everyone that works in that industry enabling them.

Is it ok to skip ad pages in printed magazines? Or to switch a TV channel during commercials?

Yes, it’s fine to skip ads in magazines or change the channel during commercials.

It’s not OK to get a robot that changes the channel for you or to have your magazines sent to a service who cuts the ads out and forwards them on to you.

You're setting arbitrary restrictions based on some feel-good criterion you've developed for yourself.

The implication of your ethical argument was that avoiding ads causes the content creator to fail to get paid, and that's wrong.

There's no material difference between whether I avoid ads manually, or have software do it for me automatically. The end result is the same; the creator misses out on ad revenue. You can't cherry-pick the ad avoidance methods and say some are ethical and some are not when the supposed unethical act is depriving creators of payment.

If ad networks would behave ethically, I would agree with you. But they don't, so I don't.

It's not all black and white. If you want to charge me for content, charge me for content. If I think it's worth it, I'll pay. Don't force an unusable, emotionally-manipulative, probably malware-filled experience on me from the get-go because you don't otherwise have a sustainable business model.

Make plain, no funny-business HTTP GET, server responds 200 and sends some text. Guess they wanted me to have it. I'll decide what I do with it, thanks.

Yeah I love this attitude. You know you're doing something that is unethical but you ignore that because you got 'em on a technicality.

Congrats.

Technicality? Huh? I asked for a document and you sent it so now I'd better make sure I only read it with software that also requests every link in it and runs any code it finds? LOL no. No technicality about it.

People tend to forget that websites are just documents. Especially those who are not deeply familiar with the web technology. So, to those who are not aware, I'd like to add: web is nothing more than a protocol in which a user requests a document, and a server generates and returns a text response. It is up to the user what they will do with this text response. For example, they may open it in a browser which parses special tags and turns it into a nice visual page. They also can choose to open it in a browser which cherry-picks which tags to parse and which tags not to parse. They can also just read it as an unparsed text. This is simply how web was designed.

The same argument applies to DVR ad skipping and previews on movies. If your profit model depends on people not blocking advertisements, your profit model is broken.

I much prefer the way movies and podcasts so it, as in, having the advertisement as part of the content itself. Instead of plugging in ads on the side, podcasts have a small segment where the host mentions a product and gives their personal experience with it. Moves place products in the shot, which is also a kind of approval from the studio. Webpages, however, just throw in ads with no context, and it's completely jarring.

Part of the problem is that placing ads is much easier than working ad placement into an article, and another part is that paying for things online is a painful experience. I don't mind paying to remove ads, but I'm not going to sign up for a subscription service just to read an article without ads. I really hope something like GNU Taler becomes popular to make these types of microtransactions easier to manage. Even better, I would like something like Netflix, but for quality journalism where I pay a subscription for a variety of content.

I want content producers to get paid, I just don't like advertisements and juggling subscriptions.

Unethical to do what exactly? Only consume part of it? Is it unethical to ignore the coupons you get at a supermarket?

(for people who haven't been to the US: coupons are printed on the back of the receipt)

What's unethical about reading the parts of a webpage that you want to read? It's like getting a free newspaper and then covering up the ads inside before you read it.

Well not quite. It's more like having someone else remove the ads so you're never exposed to them. Which I would say is a little unethical considering the newspaper is free for a reason.

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