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Comment by mariusor | Hacker News Reader

For the past year I've had this ritual of clicking on every advertising tile as soon as it appears and mark it as irrelevant and that I don't want to see any more from that company. Currently this happens for a couple of days at the start of some months.

So far I feel like this strategy has worked fine, 90% of the time I don't get served any unwanted content and I can view a decent timeline.

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You're still served ads though. To me it doesn't matter if the advert is relevant or not - I still have zero interest in clicking on it or pausing to read it. Little point in wasting time "marking" adverts.

For Instagram the web based app has no adverts, at least not on iOS/Firefox/NextDNS.

I don't know if or how it could be leveraged, but marking something as irrelevant is also providing information to the ad system. Even if that data is "Less of this, please".

Is this really about wanted vs unwanted ads?

How about tracking, aggregation, selling and reselling your data, and abandoned privacy therefrom? Malware? Bandwidth from downloading all the non-content? Burning cpu's to run the teraquads of javascript?

I do not want any ads. I'm using Firefox containers for isolating Facebook on regular websites, I liked 4 total pages, I removed most of the information from my profile, I have scrubbed 90% of my past activity. The only things I deliberately allow Fb to know are my friends and my old pictures. I feel like that is an equitable exchange for me using their website.

On Twitter, I've been blocking every account that pushes ads. Slowly I think I've gotten most of them lol. I don't see as many now.

Anecdotally, this strategy does not work on Reddit: I've blocked u/madebygoogle and still get shown ads by that user account all the time.

Gonna try it on Twitter though since you say it works...

I've been doing this for several years, and it doesn't seem to reduce the number of ads I get. I just start getting absurdly irrelevant ads. A memorable one was for @7Up_Nigeria. I live near NYC.

>I just start getting absurdly irrelevant ads.

I'd count that as progress as they are easier to ignore. The ones I don't want are those that are relevant enough that they might prompt a change in my behaviour.

Is that a list that can be easily exported/imported?

I don't think so, which makes my account more precious :)

I used to do that too, then I installed Blockada. No ads anymore, even in apps.

Why not just install a good ad blocker in your browser?

I use uBlock origin and uMatrix on top of Firefox's regular tracker blocking. I never heard of regular Facebook ad tiles being blocked by anything, but maybe I just didn't look into it enough. If you have some info about it, feel free to share.

Facebook seems to have the upper hand vs UBO at the moment. For the last year or two my feed is full of ads.

do you worry any of the links are malicious?

No. I just want to see what my friends are up to, not ads.

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