Ask HN: Do you use an Ad/Content blockers?

I personally find the web without ublock origin to be unbearable. Especially youtube and newspapers make use of ads that really disrupt the user experience.

Ads are a distraction, a waste of bandwidth and CPU (and memory, and battery —- and energy and thus harmful to the environment), a privacy nightmare, and worst of all a malware vector.

Ad blocking is the first thing I install on a new device.

Yes, and I feel like the internet is no longer a place I can visit without some form of protection. Things got so bad recently, that I had to switch from GNOME Web to Firefox, because I simply needed more protection than the default GNOME Web blocker could offer.

Right now I run a Pi-Hole[1] for my entire network, and on Firefox I use Clear URL[2], Decentraleyes[3], HTTPS Everywhere[4], Old Reddit Redirect[5], Privacy Redirect[6], and uBlock Origin[7], configured to block third-party fonts, and JS as well — which I whitelist when needed.

When I just want to read something, without having any form of interaction with the page, and I know it works well, I usually just use w3m[8] on the terminal, which I found out because of aerc[9]. Pretty cool browser for the terminal.

Am I super duper secure because of all these hoops I jump through? No. But it does not get in my way, and make me enjoy browsing the internet again, so why not?

[1] I have it set up on a dedicated server with Hetzner, with the server itself being the DNS provider for Pi-Hole using DNSCrypt.

[2] https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls

[3] https://decentraleyes.org/

[4] https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

[5] https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect — not really privacy, or blocker related, but I find the new Reddit interface a dumpster fire

[6] https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

[7] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

[8] https://github.com/tats/w3m

[9] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc

Yes. In theory ads could be a good thing, in practice they are obnoxious and only advertise bad products (perhaps because we have stopped inventing new good things, or perhaps because they don't need advertising).

I tend to use a javascript block as well, because I can't stand websites that are slow or take a up a lot of computer resources. Those do kill some of the ads but not all.

I don't really do it for privacy reasons, I use Temporary Containers in Firefox for that.

I set up a pi-hole and just use that to block at the DNS level. I don't use any browser addons or extensions for blocking ad/content.

It's completely unbearable without one. I have thousands of manually added domains as malicious ad providers and invasive, abusive scripts try to bypass adblock too.

Definitely. The internet is almost unusable without it nowadays, especially when it comes to large and more corporate sites and media outlets.

On a related note, this makes me wonder how many people both run ads on their own sites and use adblockers at the same time. I'm certainly guilty of that one, and I wouldn't be surprised if the people running these media sites and social networks were in the same situation.

I don't use any of the described blockers, but I do block them in other ways, such as disabling JavaScripts, blocking specific requests in certain domains, redirecting certain requests in certain domains, and applying custom CSS to hide things and change other stuff. This tends to have the effect of blocking ads too, even though I do not actually have a ad blocker installed.

Unfiltered internet is too annoying to use. Got a Pi-hole equivalent for whole network filtering, and uBlock Origin for the browser.

Absolutely.

I have had very restrictive quotas while travelling (2 gig per month, = 60 megabytes per day!) and to have a large proportion of your daily allowance being taken up with megabyte after megabyte of unnecessary downloads is a pain.

And that's apart from the clutter of unwanted crap that's scattered all over your browser screen.

Definitely. When I browse the web without blocking for 10 minutes I already go insane because of the inane and intrusive ads for bullshit I don’t want and need. To not speak of the immoral tracking.

I use NextDNS + AdGuard, which filters out a good 99.5% of shit.

I use wipr on safari and nextdns at the OS level, uBlock Origin on other browsers. When i have to turn one off to unbreak a site and then proceed to the rest of the web I’m seriously appalled.