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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

> The experience is so awful when I browse on my iPad, instead of my Android phone with Firefox+UBlock. I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads.

Most people don’t.

Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like:

- 1Blocker - super full featured, including custom script and css rules. business model is paid software, not ‘acceptable ads’ paying them for placement or third parties paying for your data

- AdGuard Pro - Similar to 1Blocker, less custom config friendly

- https://nextdns.io/ - pihole type blocker with unlimited configurations, custom rules, and analytics, native hooks for devices

- https://adguard-dns.io/ - similar DNS[1] service to nextdns.io with ability to upload your own rules based configurations

- Firefox Focus if using that ecosystem

- Brave if using that ecosystem

- iCab Mobile if wanting a super configurable browser with filter rules and longest history as indie browser for iOS

Folks also use ancillary quieters such as:

- Hiya - call / sms blocking

- Hushed - throwaway numbers for spam SMS

- - -

1. Note that the AdGuard public DNS server including custom DNS filtering rules has just (26 August 2022) gone open source: https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-dns-2-0-goes-open-source...

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> Most people don’t. Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like: …

“Most people” don’t have a clue what any of those things are.

The only non-tech people I know who have any of what you mentioned only have it because I installed it for them.

You quoted but didn’t reply to the rest of the owl:

> Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use

OP cited U-Block Origin and Firefox, so I’m replying to them as a persona, the sort of person that would use something, with things that can help them.

The broader point is to share a clue.

95% of users have no idea what any of this is.

Which is why the privacy measures built into iOS and Safari natively are so relevant.

But OP was talking about U-Block Origin so they’re not in that 95%.

Which is probably the only reason the measures are allowed to work (relatively) painlessly

95% of users have no idea what Firefox for Android with ublock origin is

Nobody said they did.

Or firefox

I would guess it’s more like 99%

The first random source I googled - https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users - asserts that 15% of USA users report using an adblocker on mobile - in contrast to 37% of USA desktop users using an adblocker.

Developer wages would crash through the floor and all the way down to the centre of the Earth if ad blockers really took off without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time. Maybe we should be a little bit glad that the main thing keeping massive amounts of money in tech is accepted by users.

The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on. People accept ads because they're a way of paying for things without really thinking about it. If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.

The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry. If that cash cow ends there would be a huge reduction in money for devs, and a massive flood of devs on to the market. Economics 101 should tell you how bad that would be for most HN readers.

Not necessarity. The worst ads are the lowest paying, which is why they are spammed so much in the lowest-quality places. Good ads make their money and don't need 100x the impression count.

If it's true that users place zero value on most of what the tech industry churns out, then maybe most of what the tech industry churns out really isn't that valuable.

Advertising is a type of propaganda. One of a myriad of different forms of propaganda.

One leads to the other easily. For example taking advertising money for television commercials or magazine adds leads to "Native Ads". Native ads are sort of like product placement except that it's pretending to be a news story or whatever.

Like when people on CNBC or CNN start talking about Taco Bell menu items or new type of drug that might fight cholesterol. That's paid-for propaganda that is pretending to be television news.

Pretty soon you have a entire industry based on not telling the truth about drugs or food or other products they buy because that will piss off their advertisers.

This is the basis of the modern web. It's not a good thing even though it makes a lot of people a lot of money.

The term for advertising used to literally be "propaganda".

This is some massive hyperbole and really makes me consider if online advertising should be abolished or massively kneecapped.

Maybe we should ask users for money because the alternative has become some kafkaesque hellscape where people think it's totally normal to have a dozen ad trackers when attempting to buy shoes. These trackers have an enormous costs and maybe their externalities should be taxed and regulated.

Maybe by the end of the century we will slowly realize that online advertising is the "lead" paint that was rightfully eradicated.

I think online advertising as we know it will be essentially dead by the end of the decade. Because most businesses are paying for google ads, you're basically paying a highway toll for the organic traffic you would get for free anyway, and advertisers haven't figured out the ruse. This whole idea that people search for A and are going to be willing to instead click on B if you put it at the top is super overblown -- 99% of the time they still want to and will click on A, they'll just scroll down. Impressions in search don't convert people anymore. This is why people's bounce rates have become worse and worse since the 2010s -- most ad clicks are miss-clicks.

And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022" and then go to that article and look at the breakdown. People don't click on B unless they're already sold on it, and search placement just isn't doing it for people anymore because the ad results have just been so bad for so long all trust is gone.

The modern populace has become completely innoculated against the effectiveness of search ads imo. Most people don't even see those results they have mental blinders and scroll down a bit.

The people spamming bigger dick pills, viagra, and the like back in the day made money, and in some cases quite substantial amounts of it. They did so simply for the fact that even if 99.9999% of people didn't go for it, that 0.00001% was far more than enough to show a healthy profit after 'advertising' costs.

The point is that advertising won't end until the formula of additional_ad_driven_revenue > ad_costs becomes false. And we're a long ways away from that given how inordinately expensive advertising is relative to the costs incurred by the companies selling the advertising. And each time that equilibrium price goes lower, the potential market of advertisers who may purchase ads grows.

This logic suggests that, if anything, advertising will get even worse as ad revenues decline. Go low enough and we'll be right back to square one with Google Ads promoting big dick pills and viagra. That's to say nothing of the fact that as revenues decline, both Google and advertisers will be looking for ever more insidious and forceful ways to make you watch and make you consume. Imagine, for instance, the countless dystopias things like Google Nest could enable - if such products ever managed to gain widespread adoption.

> And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022"

Which coincidentally a number of VPN "review" sites were purchased and the lists "updated" to recommend a certain owner that I'm fairly certain at this point is a honeypot.

https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn...

https://www.techradar.com/news/pc-mag-owner-j2-global-buys-s...

Kape Technologies was formerly known as Crossrider before it was acquired by Teddy Sagi, an Israeli billionaire that has spent time in jail for insider trading. Crossrider itself never had that great a reputation itself, what with their primary product being a development platform through which they were frequently used by third parties to invade ad platforms to serve up malware.

IIRC, there are quite a few review networks set up like that. John Oliver's Drug Rehabilitation episode pointed out that the same thing happened with "independent" reviews of drug rehabs.

Completely right, but my point is it's the review sites / honeypots that move the needle on whether people will choose A over B, not A or B out-bidding each other in Google Ads.

Given the choice, your average person will pretty much _always_ choose the option that doesn't involve them handing over money, even if they have plenty of it.

> social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on

> If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.

So what you're saying is if we use ad blocking technology to kill off the advertising business model, we can also kill off social media and its addictive algorithms, clickbaiting sites that generate and monetize outrage and numerous other cancers on society that the advertisers enable.

Ad blocking is now a moral imperative.

"The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on."

Then why did we build them? This seems like a massive waste of effort.

Because of scale. A few bucks value per user adds up when there are billions of users.

The things themselves are very useful. They're just not things people will pay for. It's quite weird.

Why does everything have to be something someone would pay for, to keep it from devolving into some of the most disgusting behavior? Why is money always the primary driving factor? Society will remain stuck until we realize that money should not be the driving factor for everything.

The ad market already died in 2010. Today it's just bots or big players like Google and Facebook. News sites can use placed ads that integrate into the news feed and not easily blocked. Surprisingly I pay for more and more web content. For example video and music streaming, news sites, review sites, sell/buy sites, forum boards, niche content.

A huge part of the reason society values those thing as practically zero is because they've nearly always been provided by companies for free.

If the ad-supported model fell apart, people would eventual change their understanding of the value of those services. They'd probably pay a decent amount for it.

But its a race to the bottom since someone will always offer ad-supported. It'll take an outside force (like ad-blocks by default or bans by governments) to actually kill off the ad-supported industry.

I pay $50/year for email, because it is broadly useful across many vendors, sites, and service providers.

I would not pay $0.50 for any walled garden social media account; I don't even have any with them being free. They are just too intrusive and too limited.

> Developer wages would crash through the floor and all the way down to the centre of the Earth if ad blockers really took off without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time.

Well, the problem is that there are no rules, morals, or code of conduit telling when it's too much, except for users leaving. In theory. However, unfortunately, most users adapt very easily to being thrown at their face more and more advertising every day, so we can't count on them. Just look at what advertising became since the late 90s until today: the number of ads and wasted bandwidth/storage/cpu cycles employed to send and show them grows every damn day, why should I think it's going to stop? For a while we thought that flashing banners were the root of all evil, but what about short articles ridiculously split in multiple pages so that they can show more ads at each 5 sentences ..er.. page change? Or articles altered (possibly by AI) so that they use like 3 times the necessary words so they become longer and can be split like the above? Or unskippable ads during videos, user profiling that is becoming so dangerously close to digital surveillance, etc. Just no thanks.

I wouldn't mind opening my adblockers if sites kept advertising to a reasonable minimum in which I can get some information about where to purchase a product I'm interested in: actually I want good non invasive advertising, but every time I tried to do that I quickly had to get back in disgust and set them tight closed again for almost all sites, save for the very few ones that still do the right thing: what once was a short blacklist transitioned over time to a nearly empty whitelist.

I have no trust in the system anymore. Until the day there are well defined and enforced rules, it will always keep choosing what brings more profits, that is, more and more advertising. Not holding my breath for that day.

Also, I think the current economic system would need some heavy modifications to adapt it to micropayments on a large scale for every service one could access to. What would be the expenses of a micropayments system that, say, charged one cent for daily usage of every now free or ad supported service out there? (Google, blogs, social media, etc). I mean, that would produce a huge number of extremely low value transactions; are we sure it wouldn't cost more than the profits it should produce?

Maybe we shouldnt optimize for developer salaries blindly. Surely that human effort could be better directed.

>The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry. If that cash cow ends there would be a huge reduction in money for devs, and a massive flood of devs on to the market. Economics 101 should tell you how bad that would be for most HN readers.

That's as may be, but little of value would be lost IMHO.

Well, except by those supporting (in a myriad of ways) the cesspit of advertising online and elsewhere.

I'm sure many will disagree with my assessment, but advertising as it's done today is invasive, obnoxious and alarmingly ubiquitous.

I'm not sure what a better model is, but this is not the way.

N.B: Advertising paid for my food, clothing, housing, etc. for the first 18 years of my life. And a couple years later for another five years as well.

"Developer wages would crash through the floor and all the way down to the centre of the Earth if ad blockers really took off without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time. Maybe we should be a little bit glad that the main thing keeping massive amounts of money in tech is accepted by users."

Somewhere, somebody is saying, "Maybe we shouldn't sell drugs to children?" And somebody else is saying, "Won't somebody think of the wages for chemists?"

Same argument for simplifying the tax code or even completely abolishing the IRS in favor of collection infrastructures already in place (like sales tax) - but what will happen to the multi-billion dollar tax prep industry?

I have a relative that works in the tax prep industry.

She wouldn't mind losing her job if it meant that income taxes went away.

Good for her!

without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time

I think there's chicken and egg problem here -- users aren't going to use micropayments until there's a widely used micropayments platform that is also privacy protecting. I have no desire in using a micropayments platform that's really a cross-platform analytics engine that's even more invasive than Google since they can positively identify me through my payment method.

I have no problem paying for content, but don't want to pay through intrusive ad views, and don't to use a micropayments platform that tracks all of my browsing throughout the web.

> The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on. People accept ads because they're a way of paying for things without really thinking about it. If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.

Imagine a world where the only content that survives is the one that people value enough to pay for.

What a wonderful catastrophic disruptive event that would be. Imagine no more SEO spam which are essentially devoid of information. These which are already so plentiful and sophisticated that they are threatening the core value of online search. No more vacuous blogspam, low-quality trash "newspapers" that only survive because they trick people into giving them a few morsels of attention.

Imagine a human-curated web.

Reminds me of the web in the 1990s and early 2000s before owners of sites and services really found ways to monetize every single second and click their users made with ads.

> Imagine a human-curated web.

The OG Yahoo! was ahead of its time?

It actually kinda was, Yahoo just kinda got destroyed by going public and endlessly acquiring random tech companies chasing quarterly earnings. But it's core product was actually solid.

> Imagine a world where the only content that survives is the one that people value enough to pay for.

Or that the creators value enough to create for free.

I'd still have 99.9% of my clients if online advertising went away. Turns out that there are entire sectors of the economy that are not dependent on intrusive ads at all in order to remain solvent.

> web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on.

I wonder if that’s the truth or if it’s this way because there are free alternatives.

If one search engine starts charging a monthly fee, users will just go to another one that pays for itself with ads and data.

But if the prevalent model for search engines is monthly subscription, then people will start paying for it and the value for the user won’t be 0 anymore.

Why would you pay for ice cream from the ice cream stand if you can get it for free next door for the “cost” of them keeping track of how often you come to the stand and what flavors you like, and selling that info to others?

> But if the prevalent model for search engines is monthly subscription, then people will start paying for it and the value for the user won’t be 0 anymore.

Far more likely ISPs will start providing search engines included in the cost of that service. Old ISPs like AOL and CompuServe did this in the past. Social media will never be something people have to pay for because we've already seen that people will create their own forums for free so we'd just go back to that. Hell, back in the day people paid for additional phone lines and hardware to host their own BBS which users accessed for free and that cost the sysop a hell of a lot more than webhosting these days.

They wouldn't. If anything, they'd go up since people would have to actually use their brains and set up real targeted marketing (even ads) instead of the current "show 20 ads, rake the CPM cash and hope we get some leads, too, YOLO".

There was a short period where it seemed like it would happen - context aware ads, links and affiliate products, each page was served different ads or none at all, with no privacy stuff it could also be very effetive.

Alas general ads won, and they do make more money for the platforms since they can show the same ads for stuff you have already bought/installed.

... and it would still be a great thing for mankind, especially long term.

Google et al in adspace winning is mankind losing. Not hugely, but its clearly there. But the amount of mental gymnastics elite devs have to go through every day to keep feeling OK about their jobs just because of huge paycheck or working on 'cool' problems' is staggering (ignoring how screwing fellow human beings isn't cool in any way for now).

A little sidenote - not an expert on psychology, but it seems to me practically every human being, including psychopathic mass murderers have this desperate desire to feel OK with their actions, the need to justify them so they are at peace with themselves. If I kill, I follow the word of god. If I burn jews and minorities alive in concentration camps, I am just following orders and doing it for greater good of my nation. If I work in amoral company, 1 man doesn't matter anyway, there are tons of others that would happily pick up the job, and look at what open source and cool free apps we give to the world for this little cost of privacy and annoyment. Or I just do it so my kids have better starting position, I am great parent and that s above anything else. Whatever the mental tool, always aiming for the same destination.

You are assuming that most developers work on ad supported websites and couldn't be employed elsewhere resulting in a wage crunch as supply exceeds demand. In fact most developers already work in other endeavors and there aren't enough of them to go around now.

Please cite sources backing up your original claim.

Think about what comes after this hypothetical runs its course.

Unable to profit from online advertising, what do "tech" companies do next. Are there any other commercial uses for surveillance and data collection.

>The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry.

Good. Things would be rough for many of us here but it is the better outcome for wider humanity. Advertising and adtech normalise abusive psychological manipulation.

I'll be the happiest man in this world the day when the ads industry dies in a ball of fire after experiencing the most unspeakable pains conceivable in this universe.

Ads are keeping the whole IT industry as a hostage. Even Startpage, the last ad-free search engine I used to use (and one of the oldest on the market), has recently been purchased by an ads company. They've put their filthy hands everywhere, innovation today only happens if it benefits ads revenue, and most of the bleeding edge innovation in AI comes to solve the problem "how can I maximize the odds that users will click on an ad I put in front of their eyes?". What's worse, a lot of development time nowadays is spent either to develop new ways to block ads, or new ways to evade those blockers, instead of focusing engineering resources on things that are actually useful to society.

Ads are a curse to the industry and they have to die. And I really don't give a fuck if it will cause developer wages to go down. They'll go down only in companies that have relied only on ads and data surveillance to build their revenue, and I've always stayed away from those. Developers will have a chance of moving to companies that can pay them better and have more sustainable business models, once Google and Facebook will no longer be the coolest kids in town. Two decades down the line, and not only we haven't yet figured out a better way to make money through the Web, but the ads industry HAS BECOME the Web. We need a fucking reboot and we need it now.

At some point people will start to understand that they need to either pay for services, or host them themselves, and maybe they'll be more selective on what they use and who they send their data to. If I want service A, I pay for service A (like things work in every other industry), or I run it on my own server. I don't rely on someone who allegedly provides me service A for free, just to scoop out as much data about me as possible and resell it to opaque 3rd-parties so they can place more targeted ads in front of my eyes that I'm more likely to click. How the hell did we end up so tangled up in this grotesque and creepy shit that now we are unable even of conceiving an IT industry that doesn't rely on ads?

> The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry.

You say that like it's a bad thing. If an industry relies on the abuse of their "customers" for survival, that industry needs to go.

Or, more likely, change their business model to be less abusive.

As someone with focus and attention issues due to dopamine deficiency, I consider advertising to be, in general, quite ableist. Maybe one day mental handicaps will become as respected as physical handicaps. Nobody would consider a business model that abuses wheelchair-bound people, as a key component, as valid.

Most people do this? I seriously doubt it.

Within the context of people who know what uBlock origin is, given that was the original comparison, 'most' sounds accurate.

That was not the context. 4 posts up: "I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads"

It would be great if threaded conversation was normalized to anchoring on the original context. Using every reply as a partially-yours-partially-new starting point makes the conversations treacherously convoluted until many points are concurrently true; only if you focus on the right parts.

Read the first sentence

First sentence just explains why the commenter is experiencing both adblocked vs not adblocked web.

Whoa.

Customized adblocking DNS servers?

This is definitely striking me as one of those "why didn't I think of that" and "why don't we already have a lot of this?" Any ideas? Seems like you could go wild with this and do something like "Tor"ify, or "torrentify" or dare I say "blockchain" it?

Someone can probably school me on why this is harder than it sounds.

This is what Pi-hole basically does.

And, Pi-hole is basically just dnsmasq, so you don't actually need a Raspberry Pi and the official Pi-hole software if you already have a Linux box on your home network doing other things. Just configure dnsmasq and you've got Pi-hole's functionality. With custom firmware, your Internet router can host dnsmasq, so you don't even need a separate box (this is what I use).

Yup.

I run a PiHole in the cloud so I can PiHole my phone without exposing my home network at all.

EDIT: On my phone, I do use Firefox with uBlock Origin, but the PiHole blocks ads that aren't in the browser, or use an app's browser view.

Trustworthy DNS seems so critical to security, I erred on the side of PiHole on a pi at home, self cloud hosting my DNS scarred me a bit.

My PiHole in AWS requires me to VPN into it, so DNS requests are protected by the VPN. Neither AWS or anybody in the middle can interfere with it.

I run pi hole in an x86 docker container on my NAS. No raspberry pi required, despite the name.

The reports an dynamic modifications to rule sets are a big advantage of pi hole. Sure, you can do it with dnsmasq conf files and logs, but the web UI has a lot of niceties.

Mind providing more info on how you set that up?

I think it was just this image:

https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/

I used synology's docker app. I had to enter the port numbers into their web GUI manually.

Thanks! I have Synology as well, so that's perfect.

AdGuard Home is another option along with the PiHole another commented mentioned. I have that running at home forcing all port 53 traffic to it via the firewall. So ads are blocked on all devices on the network. So easy I sometimes forget I have it running and then I browse on mobile away from home and get bombarded with ads and am reminded why I do it.

They do also have their own paid DNS service, but I haven't attempted to use it. Might be a way to deal with mobile better.

For this reason alone, I am seriously tempted by PiHole's companion, PiVPN. Browsing without this protection just seems crazy to me.

I keep my phone VPN'd to my home network via wireguard 100% of the time, pointing at my AdGuard Home hosts for DNS. This works great, the beauty of wireguard is it reconnects in under a second so it's never annoying.

You do need a reasonable upload speed to do this, though. Otherwise I guess you could use an "always free" VM at Oracle or something.

Yeah, definitely thinking about doing something similar. Was wondering about something like Zero Tier as well. I just don't use my phone all that much away from home, so it hasn't been up on the priority list.

For what it's worth, the "sometimes forget I have it running and then I browse on mobile away from home and get bombarded with ads" bothered me enough personally to attempt to smooth it over. Ended up using Tailscale DNS so that every device on my tailnet/VPN benefits. It was painless and has been solid for ~4mo now.

It's not harder than it sounds! Pi-hole is the most popular one (could it be the most individually self-hosted FLOSS service if we don't count stuff like SSH?) but you have various options and it's not that tricky to roll your own based on dnsmasq or unbound. If you're on openwrt there are two options with Luci web-UI as well.

It's not harder than it sounds. Pihole is used that way and can be totally owned by you, alternatively nextdns if you want an external solution.

It'd not hard and alternative DNS-es were there as long as the DNS itself, for various reasons. There are even commercial variants like OpenDNS. In all these cases, the control is in the hands of the entity maintaining the blocklists. There is no advantage in "torrentifying" (there's no much to hide) or "blockchaining" it.

I think I misspoke. I understand Pi-Hole.

What I'm talking about is publicly usable adblocking DNS servers. As in instead of me at home having to install anything, just (probably clear a cache or something) and change all my DNS servers to a public reachable-by-anyone DNS server. No installation.

NextDNS, which I've been using for over 2 years now, might help in your endeavor. In addition to its stock lists of lookup rules, you are allowed to customize your own blacklists/whitelists.

Thank you for mentioning this. It's so convenient to manage that kind of filtering through a service. Works for all platforms too. I can finally bteak my reddit addiction again.

I use NextDNS but I don't use it for adblock because if it breaks a website (which happens) I need a quick way around it that isn't a DNS change. I suppose I could use another browser that uses DNS over HTTPS via Cloudflare but I've chosen Firefox and uBlock origin. I use NextDNS to block actual websites like Twitter, Reddit and occasionally HN. It is nice to support a company that provides configurable DNS.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS really made this possible. I recently started using NextDNS and it simply gives you a custom URL to drop in your DNS configs. If we were just doing IP address DNS server lookup you'd have some severe limitations on matching up customers to servers.

Are you sure about this? Apple isn't really a protégé of heavy customization, especially anything relating to iOS.

1Blocker mostly operates by pumping rules into Safari's rules engine, but it also has an App Firewall feature that uses VPN profiles. I've had some compatibility problems with that, but mostly it just blocks 10,000s of requests I didn't want my device to make in the first place.

> business model is paid software, not ‘acceptable ads’ paying them for placement or third parties paying for your data

This reads like a hint at AdBlock Plus, not uBlock. Or did I miss some controversy there?

Your comment applies to people who would use Firefox+uBlock if they were ok Android (e.g. I use 1Blocker).

GP’s comment was asking about normal people who browse the internet without adblockers on any device.

I just mentally ignore ads unless they're in my way, then I just hit the back button and read something else.

Well, you think you ignore them but they still influence you.

> Most people don’t. Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like...

Citation needed.

Yup - 1Blocker is amazing and a mandatory install on an iOS device I use or provision.

> Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like:

You probably meant "Most people I know".

Duck Duck Go?

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