Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

This site is so thick with ads that I cannot stand to read it on my phone. I made it through a paragraph several times and weird reload-like stuff keeps happing, making me lose my place so that the obnoxious video ad stuck to the top of the viewport can replay. And that’s after solving two captcha challenges to find all the busses. The internet is terrible now.

View on HN

Reading with javascript off (UBlock Origion in default deny all JS) resulted in zero ad, and the ability to read the full article without interruption.

Not worth it to me. I was casually curious, but not curious enough to work around the fact that they’ve made their content almost inaccessible.

That's fine, but please do install UBlock Origin in any case. Future you will be thankful.

Of course I do on my laptop, but I've never really tried to improve the situation on my phone aside from installing AdGuard a long time ago. I just installed AdBlock and enabled every filter. Checked this site and the ads are gone! Thanks for the push.

While we're suggesting QoL extensions I would highly recommend both PrivacyBadger by the EFF (for blocking 3rd party trackers) and SponsorBlock for YouTube (mark and optionally auto-skip all the annoying sponsor / intro / self-promotion)

SponsorBlock is also available for YouTube Vanced on Android and I couldn't recommend it enough.

With the amount of ads I've gotten that redirect the browser to my mobile ISP's store trying to get me to buy some knockoff game or a site that causes it to constantly vibrate with a fake virus warning for my phone model, and other shenanigans, plus the stuff that happens on desktop, I no longer consider ad blockers QoL. They're a security essential like TLS and not leaving your phone unlocked.

Firefox mobile allows addons, including uBlock origin (and Dark Reader!)

You should install a blocker for security reasons.

Brickset is impossible on mobile unless you have uBlock or aggressive content blockers. You expect a punch-the-monkey popup like it's 1999.

The ads placed inside user comments, as if they are content the user included in their message themselves, is particularly obnoxious.

The site more or less emulates a memory leak for me in chrome. Have had it open for 2 minutes and I'm at 1gb ram and a constant 15% CPU use for the tab... ram use is continuing to grow and in the time it has taken me to write this comment the tab has become unresponsive.

iOS Safari is crashing, 30 seconds after opening the article, every time.

My phone got super warm and I lost a few percent just reading it a couple minutes.

Pretty terrible experience.

iOS Safari now support “content blocker” extensions which means you can download 3rd party blockers (such as Firefox Focus).

It’s pretty non-obvious feature until you know about it.

Pi-hole, my brotha

FWIW if you create an account all of the ads go away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com