Will we ever get enough traction on either blocking mechanisms or stop shoving ads everywhere? Will the general public experience the pleasures of an ad-less internet?
P.S. I'm on an iPhone, blockers failed me so far. Thanks for the suggestions fellas.
I don’t care at all about any of this. Give me the time they boil for ffs.
I don’t know if it’s sites paying by the word, or SEO, or some “value added” psychological trick. It is getting worse.
Of course, the time spent is cursing, and skimming and hunting to find useful info. No one is finding the story interesting, but it looks good on metrics?
I wonder if the above is accurate or not.
So forcing you to scroll through an essay on the complete history of nutmeg before you can see any of the ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie recipe may improve SEO
I guess I avoid the junk because I have good instinct, I can usually tell if something is going to be bad based on the ingredients. Also if I'm looking to make something "basic" I'll specifically look for Alton Brown's recipe for it or sometimes Chef John's recipe. I also sometimes just use recipes for "inspiration" too - just to get a basic idea of what the ingredients are.
If there was some better mobile integration of the extensions or built into the browser itself to be perhaps less intrusive adds allowed it would be appreciated.
From that, are browsers legally allowed to implement an adblock/ublock directly into their browser ? Seems like something that would be considered against fair use or something along those lines.
Yeah, they follow every dark pattern in the book, especially on mobile. 90% of the time, I'll see a video at the top that autoplays, and then if I scroll down, it will make the video hover over the 75% of the article I'm trying to read. Who is this supposed to benefit?
Alternatively check out "Paprika" which bills itself as a recipe manager but actually will scrape webpages and extract out recipes for you.
This ecosystem is now so advanced that new copycat recipe sites are based on existing copycat sites. You can easily tell if a recipe website is a copycat by comparing the supposed author bio to the quality of the English. If the author bio claims these are recipes by a born and bred Louisiana native who wants to share Southern cooking with the world, but the actual text is full of grammatical mistakes typical of Eastern Europeans or South/Southeast Asians, it is clearly a rewritten copycat site.
Then, as you note, when people do inevitably copy the recipe, they churn out new replacement text.
You'll notice, for instance, that a recipe 'database' site like allrecipes doesn't have these massive text blocks associated with user-posted recipes, because there's no need or desire to have those be copyrighted.
There are fundamentally 2 types of content, although the line is getting blurred : The hobbyist blog, and the publishers magazine.
The first exists for joy, the second only exists to deliver adverts.
THe blurring occurs because some of the blogs became such hot property the founders sold up.
Back in the day Opera with Turbo (or whatever it was called) was the peak of mobile browser usability for me.
On Android, Firefox supports a subset of extensions that includes uBlock Origin. Chrome seems to be the dominant browser on Android but regardless of how good it is, I can't imagine not using Firefox there.
I personally tend to use Chrome for "logged-in" internet use, and Firefox for "logged-out" use like browsing, news, etc. True on both desktop and mobile. Partly this is because Google's password vault has great UX across Chrome and Android apps.
I run FF+uBlock on my S21 Ultra. Works just like the desktop.
Keep that in mind next time you go to buy a phone!
Remember how cable was supposed to replace ads on over the air tv? It was about minutes before it was all ads too. Streaming services are starting to get there but then the shows themselves are ads. And you have a scenario where Netflix and YouTube couldn’t exist in scenarios that didn’t rely on our bandwidth models and massive anti-competitive models.
... so IDKMAN... I don’t know how we get to an internet where people making things aren’t expecting to get paid for their submissions, especially now that we’ve jumped in there with both feet.
I personally would pay for a no-bullshit internet, but it’s just cable tv’s promise all over again isn’t it? As great as something would start out, soon would come the influencers and the narrative pushers and the censorship and the “forum sliding” and the downvotes / echochambers / bubbles / power tripping moderation...
I’m wondering if the solution isn’t just to give it all up and use the tools only when you need them. A cabin in the woods, but a spotty dialup connection for when you need to find something.
The money is in selling you ads, on a revolving basis. Not in you ponying up a subscription fee to not see those ads.
If it's not the ads, it's the usual FBI or whatever government surveillance program tracking you.
You are right on the solution however. Some ads and tracking are so pervasive (e.g smart TVs) that the only truly effective way to mitigate against them is to cut down on or eliminate your exposure to these devices.
I’m surprised to hear that Firefox doesn’t have the option to do so.
I don’t know if it’s just muscle memory, but Safari on iOS is still my browser of choice due to the way you open and close tabs in it.
Also for Safari, Magic Lasso AdBlocker does a very good job.
I don’t notice any difference between Firefox or Chrome + ublock origin and Safari + Wipr/Firefox Focus.
The biggest benefit is that as every web view on iOS is Safari it means you get content blocking in all apps that use a web view (providing they don't disable it which I'm sure some do but I don't know of any that actually do it). E.g. in the third-party reddit app Apollo any website you load within the app also has all ads blocked.
I paid for full version of AdGuard Pro late last year after my 6 month Android/Oneplus phase ended and I went back to iOS. It has worked REAL well and allows me to just use native Safari. I'm happy with this setup. I used to use free Firefox Focus as the content blocker before, but it would go long time between updates.
The only annoyance with Adguard Pro on iOS (and probably the same for all app based content blockers on iOS) is it is clunky to whitelist a site as they aren't integrated with the browser. You have to open the app itself, dig into the whitelist area and then manually type in/paste the domain name to add it. Brave and FF Focus you can do it right from within the browser, same as it was with FF/ubo on Android.
Also, AdGuard on iOS doesn't acknowledge specific pages only within a domain. For example; mlb.com is loaded with ads, their highlight videos show a 15 sec ad for literally every highlight. I have AdGuard enabled and the experience is so much better. BUT the "Standings" page doesn't load with AdGuard enabled and I can't just disable it only for that page.
Regardless, the small price to pay for AdGuard on iOS is well worth it.
If people try to encourage too much radical change with how ads are distributed, I fear that the advertising agencies will panic and all start to do what YouTube does, which is to serve the ads from the same domain as the content, rendering all domain-based adblocking useless. At that point, the only thing between the general Internet and ads will be uBlock, and if Google obtains complete control of the WebExtension standards, I'm not sure there would be anything else we could do.
There's also a Lockdown, an open source firewall implemented using iOS VPN capabilities (though it doesn't send your requests through an external server). Lockdown is able to block trackers in any app, not just Safari.
Half a thousand bucks for this frustration, no thanks! No amount of content/entertainment is worth this.
It's not perfect and difficult to customize but works well for the most part. It even gets rid of YT video ads (mostly anyway)
I also combine it with NextDNS
I was a noscript user from 10+ years ago (I guess?) and I’ve been using uBo for as long as I can remember but isn’t Firefox on iPhone just a wrapper? Is it battery efficient?
As a workaround I use a Pi-Hole (except, not on a pi).
Mozilla has Firefox Focus for iOS, it does Ad Blocking but it's main selling point is No Tracking, No history and No synced bookmarks either
I do also use uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile though.
Sadly ios devices don't seem to have that option.