I Block Ads
coryd.dev
coryd.dev
Then there are those ads in YouTube videos and blog articles purporting to offer the reader something valuable when, in fact, they're packed with falsehoods ("xyz changed my life, and if you want to check it out, please click on this affiliate link").
While I can't block ads on the radio, on the internet, I make a point of blocking every ad I can.
There are other ways to reward an author or a website. For instance, I block ads on sites like Haaretz, but I do subscribe to them because I believe quality content deserves compensation.
A couple reasons:
Back when I did use them, I got really bothered by sites breaking, and I'd rather have the ads than dealing with "is this broken because of my ad blocker or is the site broken". Now, I've just gotten to the point where I don't really mind.
The other part is there's enough content I consume that is supported by ads that I would like to continue supporting, without having to consciously opt into it (e.g. news sites; I don't want to pay a subscription for every newspaper but am happy to contribute to what little money they get from ads)
I wonder what impact they have on people's mental health.
And it even affects people that should be adapt at math too.
The difference in experience is striking. Random auto-playing videos that are stuck in the corner of your browser. Horizontally it takes up like half of my screen. It has an X button that either doesn't work, OR its hit box is just so tiny that you have to tap it multiple times to get it to actually close. Not to mention cookie banners that take up 20% of my vertical real estate.
Maybe you can get used to that shitty experience, but I certainly can't. I almost always just immediately open Google News articles in Firefox now.
I use blockers too, but they don't catch all of them, especially the stupid cookie popups.
I'm unable to concentrate on the article. And then the ads change and a new batch is rotated in. Some of them try their best to obscure the content, they are all demanding my attention like screeching birds in the nest.
Firefox has an absolutely fantastic reader view (f9) which turns the page into something resembling an ebook with the ability to resize the font and adjust the pagination. All the distracting fluff is gone. Bliss.
Dann thats a great way of putting it.
So sad that this is what the Internet's become.
I have a set designated time period to read news and never use internet for information outside that period. I disable internet and read only my saved zotero articles one after another until I'm done.
Rules are essential to not let this attention economy businesses ruin your life if you have ADHD.
Haven't turned it on since the FIFA world cup last year, though.
FTFY. I am definitely not one of them. If I'm hanging out at a TV-heavy friend's place they all chat happily over the obnoxious ads while I try+fail to ignore them.
I block ads in the browser, I block their DNS
I block beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs
I block analytics, reporting, and diagnostic logging
I block programmatic pleas to disable ad-blocking
I strip query strings from UTM campaign tags
I unshorten URLs to avoid tracking hacks
I stop autoplay for the videos on my feed
I block all the cookies that your websites don't strictly need
I block the visibility API on your page
I block prompts to install your app in a fit of rage
I block hidden pixels that track my email
Which surely gets masked but to no avail
As I unsubscribe from your mailing list, dork
And block your address if that doesn't work
I block and report SMS that have ads
Phone calls get ignored if not from my contacts
I pay a company to wrangle data brokers for the win
And trust me, junk mail goes straight into the bin
As I unsubscribe from it all when I can
I block ads, and you should block too, my dear friend
Just needs a few more syllables to make it fit, e.g.,
I block ads in the browser, and I also block their DNS
I block the beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs
...Fresh from the creator's mind, straight to your entertainment device
I surf the web with playful glee, Blocking ads, just watch and see! In my browser, they won't appear, DNS blocked, they shed a tear.
Beacons and pings, they can't track me, URLs confused, they cannot be. Analytics and logs, no data they'll find, Programmatic pleas, they're left behind.
Campaign tags, I strip them bare, UTM queries, I won't share. Unshorten URLs, a clever trick, Tracking hacks, they're in a fix.
Autoplay videos, I make them stop, No more interruptions, no more flop. Cookies, beware! I block you all, Only the necessary ones may crawl.
Visibility API, you can't spy, No prompts to install, no need to try. Hidden pixels, stay out of sight, My email's safe, try as you might.
Unsubscribe, I'll show you the door, No more emails, I'll take no more. Block your address, a final resort, No more junk in my digital fort.
SMS ads, they come my way, But I block and report, come what may. Phone calls, ignored if not my friend, Only contacts, let the ringing send.
Data brokers, they won't win, I pay a company to wrangle them in. Junk mail, it's a thing of the past, Straight into the bin, it's gone at last.
So join me, my dear friend so true, Block those ads, they're not for you! Let's surf the web with joyful cheer, No ads, no tracking, have no fear!
Privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives include: Matomo, Plausible, Umami, Nullitics, Shynet, Pirshc, Swetrix, Cabin, Aptabase
I haven't used these and would use Google Analytics if it were indeed just too much better than everything else out there. But if another service gives me everything Google Analytics provides and more, why continue using Google Analytics?
I wouldn't know though since I've never tried using these. I just know about them.
As you said. There is little reason to expose yourself to an extra risk.
From CNIls ruling (not a quote, but a summary):
> The CNIL ordered each website operator to comply with the GDPR—for example, by not using Google Analytics or “using a tool that does not involve a transfer outside the EU”.
Also, here in the US, gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump. I cannot stress how angry I am about this. One of the last places where I could just day-dream has now been deemed "up for grabs" by the lowest form of shit-peddler in the modern world.
Pause for a second to consider the absurdity of being blasted with advertisements while paying for a product. Talk about double-dipping...
Suggestions welcome.
Doesn't help much, but helps a little.
And then stick some unapproved sticker on the pump of your choosing.
Also, they're way ahead of us. They've got those monitors and speakers covered with thick plastic.
Just one more of the many reasons to drive electric. It's when I make the rare drive to a gas station in the ol' fossil burner that I'm reminded of what shit holes some gas stations have become. Half the pumps don't work, the card readers are full of skimmers, but by golly the video and audio work!
Oh yeah, just wait until your charging station installs ads. Then you're stuck watching an ad while your vehicle charges. That, of course, takes longer than inserting fuel into a tank. So more advertisements and more money for the charger!
Beside, if you're talking about public charging stations, it's already been done (can't remember the name at the moment). The difference between those chargers and a gas station is, you charge for free (Level 2, though). It's odd, too, because the ones I've seen are at grocery stores. So, plug in, go into the store...when am I supposed to see the ads?
So when I was a child, laser tag became a thing you could buy. Little kits that came with 2 or 4 sets of vests and guns that tried to simulate experiences like Q-Zar laser tag, but at home for kids.
We had a couple of sets, and one of the frustrating aspects was that firing the guns made a lot of noise - they had little speakers built in that played really, genuinely awful laser noises for about 5 seconds every time you pulled the trigger.
But... as curious kids, we found out that slipping a butter knife between the plastic grill over the speaker on the gun and giving the speaker membrane a good slashing solves the problem real quick. The speaker might vibrate, but without a membrane, no real noise is going to be made.
So I guess what I'm saying is that it would be a real shame if folks just slipped a pocket knife through the grill on those gas station pump speakers every now and then.
More to the point: this is a good idea. I have half a mind to grab a razor blade and fill up my tank...
And I can't express how much I love not feeling anxious every time I drive by a gas station to worry "do I need to fill up now"?
Filling up at home every single day is much more serene. We also have a 2nd vehicle that's non-EV for trips.
It has worked for me.
Where I read about it: https://www.thedrive.com/guides-and-gear/how-to-mute-gas-sta...
Currently, four states—Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine—have prohibited billboards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard
That said, I've been waiting for a good set of widely popular AR glasses to come out so I can write a real-life ad blocker for them.
I get what you're saying, but I'm sort of beyond this now. The invasion of personal space has reached a point where I'm prepared to fight dirty, too.
Here's a novel idea: advertisers might put a modicum of care into selecting the time, place, and manner in which to present products to the world.
Yeah I totally agree. Bombarding peoples' senses isn't even effective advertising, IMO. They can do better.
Here's another novel idea: How about make products actually good, and let third parties review them? Most of the time I choose products based on reviews, not ads. If I'm in the market for something I probably will watch reviews about the various choices.
I wonder how hard it would be to distinguish between various things while driving. Billboards are mostly useless. Traffic signs of course can’t be covered up. Then in between we have cases like signs for gas stations and fast food (which are technically ads I guess but they are actually useful).
Of course this is for version 2.
That said, when I'm a pedestrian, I wouldn't mind traffic signs being covered up as well. They completely destroy the look of the surrounding architecture and flora, but I understand they are a necessity for the cars. As a pedestrian I don't really care what the speed limit is.
So, even They Live is prophecy now?
I was walking my dog in my local forest and came across a newly installed bench for sitting. On it was a shiny brass plaque: “This bench is sponsored by [insurance company]”, along with a phone number. I went straight home and returned with a screwdriver. I posted the plaque to the insurance company.
Personally, I would not consent to any communication that was paid for. In that case it's money talking, not the person, and this is quite confusing for people including me.
That's not practically possible unless you choose to live alone in a controlled box. Even the infrastructure you're forced to interact with is a form of communication that manipulates you into certain behaviors.
But then, maybe that's where we're headed as a society with the explosion of one person households, remote work, and delivery services. It's increasingly possible for the majority of people to actually live a completely solitary life, controlling their information input by restricting it only to a screen.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part1
The tradeoff to extricating yourself from being influenced without your consent, is that you lose the ability to you yourself influence how society and civilization progresses.
The internet is a medium that facilitates asynchronous communications with like minds. You can leave a comment on a website, or link to your blog post, as a beacon to anyone who's opted into a similar filter bubble. They can find it and contact you. Yes, it will be unsolicited, but not in the same way as a marketing email or billing notice is unsolicited. Nobody is communicating without consent when publishers and readers are participating in a shared community.
If I publish a blog post on my hobby, and someone I've never met emails me about partnering on a project for the hobby, then although it's unsolicited, I would still appreciate the email and follow up. It might take me a while to notice it since I only check my email every few days, but I will almost certainly reply. A personal connection is a welcome respite from a noisy onslaught of automated communications.
You omit a wide variety of possibilities, and claim there is only one possible approach, and so construct a straw-man. Options range from introducing a protocol, to adding paid-speech disclosure.
People looking for signatures show the way: "Can I talk to you about X?" is perfectly workable offline. You can say "No" and be on your way. "Would you like to hear a presentation on a fantastic time-share investment?" again, you say no and be on your way.
One simple thing we can do is require disclosure for paid-for speech. Maybe wear a lapel pin or something on TV, and a hashtag on twitter. The details can be worked out, but "living alone in a box" is not a real or desirable possibility.
I recently tried a little experiment, where I would use the internet without adblocker (or similar like DNS filtering, extensions to remove annoyances, etc). I thought to myself I was in my little sheltered bubble a bit too long having access to these things that make browsing seamless, even enjoyable. I wasn't shocked by what I found, but I was disturbed by how universally unusable it has become. No wonder people stick to their containment zones on Reddit or Instagram.
You search something up, you get a bunch of ads to scroll through. Fine for me, I know what link to look for, but most don't. Huge issue.
You visit the website, you're bombarded with a video ad in the corner, banner ads on the side, a notification banner up top, a chat bubble in the other corner, and a cookie banner in the middle with garbage defaults. You get through all of that miraculously on your phone, but the article disappears to show a giant ad as a background, before reappearing again if you keep scrolling. Again, I know these horrible patterns I can navigate through them, but how does somebody's grandma?
The internet is so frustrating because so much of it has been horribly tainted by the ad industry. Every single aspect, every single feature, gets misused by the ad industry. You thought deeper GPU access would mean fully fledged games in the browser? Nah we're just using it to profile you better. We're spending billions of dollars on developing a new social app, oh but it's not to improve communication, no we just want you to get hooked on it to see more ads.
Block all the ads and annoyances you want. Until we get thorough data privacy laws, it's your duty to block them. Go on, I know how it impacts me directly/indirectly, as I'm a web developer who spends far too much time persuading clients not to load up their sites with this BS. You should still block them.
If advertising worked like it did before about 1994 or so, I think we’d see fewer complaints of this nature. Adtech overplayed its hand for a quarter-century.
The thing that sucks about this, IMHO, is that it makes no room for above-board players. Doesn’t matter that it supports millions of jobs. Doesn’t matter that there are lots of well-intentioned people out there who just happen to work in advertising.
This guy is 100% within his right. And honestly, the sector deserves it. Bad actors destroyed a lot of goodwill in the name of performance and better numbers.
But I wish it didn’t.
Back when sites started to detect ad-blockers, Forbes asked users to disable their blockers, for the usual reasons. Trusting them, beings respectable breed source, I and others whitelisted Forbes, and promptly got hit by malware distributed by ads on their site.
Because Forbes could not be bothered to screen the ads on their site, I now relentlessly block ads just like the author of the article.
But other are pretty thinly veiled, and some commenters are pretty obviously pushing something. It gets cleaned up decently well.
There's a borough in my city that decided to ban big billboards. Everyone hated them, they were ugly and everywhere. The advertising lobby sued, it went all the way to the supreme court of Canada, and the city won: advertising was declared a form of visual pollution and therefore banning them was an acceptable infringement to free speech (https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/sum-som-eng.aspx?ca...).
Another example is forcing influencers to disclose when content is sponsored (and apply local advertising laws). If influencers receive money, they are therefore freelancers (in most jurisdictions) and subject to many laws. I have seen them enforced in my jurisdiction.
Then the local guy can print "SHERIFF JOE SUCKS" on his fence without repercussions but large billboards are mostly banned.
You still have the gas station sign issue, but that's separate.
I've found immense value in studying media criticism to improve my literacy of what is "genuine" journalism (of course still colored by someone's ideology, just maybe not one so hamfistedly handed down from above) and advertising dressed up as "news" or conveniently shaped and styled narratives that mislead the public into believing something that will only be true if enough people believe in it.
I live out in the country. I don’t do TV, radio, newspaper¹ (including even general news websites—anything that’s important, I’ll probably hear about from siblings or parents). I don’t use any software with anything like banner ads. As for things like billboards, I know of one pair of billboards on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop in a town 40km away (Stawell)², one traffic safety billboard in a town 45km away (Avoca), a few in Ballarat, around 110km away, and finally loads in the big city 200–260+ km away, Melbourne.
Occasionally (increasingly rarely) I go down to Melbourne, where I grew up until I moved away six years ago. I hate it more and more each time I go down there, partly for things like traffic³, but much more for things trying to steal my attention, billboards, animated billboards, bright billboards, bright lights, flashing lights, &c. And this stuff has certainly got significantly worse in the last decade (I’ve written details a couple of other times here on HN).
Very rarely (like, once every year or two) I get exposed to a television in any form. I don’t know how people can tolerate them, the advertisements are just awful. If you forced me to sit down and look at them, I expect I would feel sick within a few minutes. And apart from a probable degree of autism⁴, there’s nothing particularly abnormal about me physiologically, save that I have become unaccustomed to these assaults upon the senses.
Very occasionally, I observe people using the web without an ad blocker, or use some mobile app (e.g. YouTube) and get exposed to ads thereby. Ugh. Very unpleasant stuff.
So your organic-looking paid articles and such, I don’t experience very much of them; just a few here on HN, and occasionally when I look at a mainstream news site for some weird reason, and a few sponsored articles from CSS-Tricks or Smashing Magazine which I’ll almost certainly immediately skip in my feed reader. But from the exposure I do get, I know that I hate billboards and their digital equivalents far, far more.
—⁂—
¹ The local paper is called The Weekly Advertiser. I’ve measured it a few times, and it’s consistently been about 75% ads by surface area.
² I confess I’ve been tempted to go in and ask why and how they started doing it, and how much money they make out of it, out of sheer curiosity.
³ If I drive the 40km to Stawell, I might encounter fewer than a dozen vehicles.
⁴ Note that I’m here using present definitions of autism, which have shifted pretty extremely from what the word meant fifty years ago, when it strongly suggested low function (that is, that you really were disabled by it). In my experience, someone under the age of, say, thirty, will probably be willing to accept the word roughly how it’s used diagnostically now, while people over fifty will probably understand it in the older, more extreme, more probably debilitating sense. Nowadays, most of my family could probably get a formal diagnosis without too much difficulty, but none of us see anything to be gained by the endeavour. Funny fact, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever used the word “autism” online.
I mean it's what it says on the tin. We have a local "paper" but it's not a paper, it's just an advertising flyer, and sometimes it is useful if I want to look up something local.
I'm not saying we should outlaw advertising, there is no realistic way to do so that respects rights. However, you should absolutely refuse to consume advertising whenever possible. Block it, mute it, and refuse to consume content or use services where avoiding advertising is not possible!
'depends on cost': It can't actually depend, on average. Advertisers keep spending money because they make more back overall than they spend on advertising. Only a small fraction of that increase in income is paid in fees to the platform that is funded by the advertising. To make the same amount of money, the platform would only have to charge you a small fraction of what advertisers are making off of those same users.
Advertising isn't a battle of wills, it is leveraging psychology to manipulate you in ways you aren't even aware of. It works on you just as well as it works on everyone else, if you don't think so it probably works better than average.
Let's say someone watches 1 YouTube video per month. Is it worth it to buy YouTube premium at $12/month? What if that person makes minimum wage in the US? What if that person makes the global median wage: $227/month? Free advertising-supported things provide web resources that the poor wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
YouTube creators get maybe $0.018 per view. Lets say an average video is 15 minutes long (not a crazy thought) and I watched YouTube 5 hours a day. In a 30 day month, this would mean creators are paid 30 * 5 * 60 / 15 * .018 == $10.80. Realistically, lets say I watch for 2 hours, 5 days a week. Then it's 21 * 2 * 60 / 15 * .018 == $3.02. I suspect creators making content for an Indian or Kenyan audiences get paid much less per view, so you can charge users in countries that consume that content significantly less and still make the same payments to creators. Of course the cost would be slightly higher because Youtube wants to make a profit, but advertising doesn't pay creators very well.
Compare this to a cable TV subscription which might cost someone $80 to $200 a month and still has far more advertising than YouTube (almost 1/3 of the view time) and is quite reasonable that people might pay $6 for ad-free youtube. My original point was that even if I paid $20/month just to avoid youtube advertising, I would probably save money net because I would avoid being influenced into buying things I don't need.
Unless I ask you, I do not want your product. I am happy. I do not want whatever you want me to want. Kindly fuck off. Thanks.
Meanwhile I am quite content with pages that show me full-width banner ads without tracking me.
In any case, “blocking” cookies is not the same as blocking ads.
In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own.
So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far, so I eventually— and begrudgingly — added ads. I was very intentional about keeping them as unobtrusive as possible: just some banner ads at the top and bottom of each thread and forum, and a square next to the first unread comment. I hated pop-ups (the kind that opened in a new window — very common at that time), and I didn’t have them on any other page on the site (just forums).
This gained me about 10x the revenue I got from donations alone, and was able to scale the site’s hardware, allowing me to keep the site up and running for nearly 20 years, and provided some modest passive income for a time. (I just recently sold it to someone else, but it’s still up and running.)
My point is, that wouldn’t have been possible without ads.
I agree with most of you: sites today have a ridiculous number of ads and are very intrusive. But for sites that don’t go overboard, or for small independent YouTube channels, I don’t mind allowing the ads, because I know they probably wouldn’t make it otherwise.
Yes, I hear the comments saying “maybe they shouldn’t exist if they can’t monetize without ads”, but I’m not sure I agree. There are many that just wouldn’t survive with donations alone, and a subscription model may not make sense.
There are just some cases where ads make sense for them, and I’m ok with that (with the caveat they don’t go overboard), and because I’ve been on the other side, I don’t block ads.
> So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far
A site that has to rely on ads to survive doesn't have a viable business model, or in your case interesting enough/in demand enough content.
It's as simple as that.
Ads are largely a false economy anyway.
Selfishly, it could be seen as good for those of us who block ads, that they exist. Let other folks “pay” for the services I enjoy.
And I do think there’s a real gap below what I’ll actually get the credit card out for, and the services I use. Some things are just nice to have but not really worth performing a transaction over. Various one-off informational sites, video game wikis especially. Dark souls would have been kind of a pain without fextralife!
But, ads came pretty early on the internet. And one of the annoying things about them is that the non-ad-funded didn’t fully form. Who knows what business model would be available if ads hadn’t sucked up all the oxygen?
Maybe it is impossible that an ecosystem to pay for your Animal Crossing site could have grown. But we’ll probably never know.
Many sites will shut down. A few sites would probably go Wikipedia style and ask for donations, run by the generosity of a few.
But I think the vast majority of remaining sites will become paid walled gardens, kind of like what we have with TV these days. I don't think this is a better web.
For an individual, an informational website like that has little value which is why donations or payments do not work. But some communities are so large that the total value that the sites provide is significant. Ads are the best tool to capture this value.
Without ads, there'd be much fewer sites for gaming communities because hosting and maintaining them for free is too expensive.
And also IMHO the business has changed over the 20 years you mention - back then, sufficient compute power and bandwidth to run a site were meaningful and more users directly required more expenses; but right now the hosting costs are trivial (e.g. I'm involved in a non-monetized project with a few million views/month / 100k MAU running off of a single small VM that can get hosted for free) and the primary expense is your time - so if you want to make some content and spend time on that, you don't need to monetize it; if you're willing to spend an evening or two, then paying a few dollars for a domain name won't be an obstacle; and if in some community there is no one who wants to put in their time if there's no money in it, well, then there's no big loss if that community doesn't have that site, as apparently no one cares.
It showed me ads between every game.
The ads were mostly for other apps. Most of those apps were games. Games that involved implied incestuous rape, non-consensual voyeurism, and other highly repulsive things.
I just wanted to play backgammon. I uninstalled the app (thankfully, that's an easy thing to do on iOS, for now...).
My main reason for blocking ads at this point, is because the ads that get served on what should be otherwise inoffensive websites, contain vile imagery or otherwise offensive content. Seriously, I get that they put one ad for toe fungus next to the ad they really want you to click on because the toe fungus draws your eye in, but I don't need this shit in my life.
Apple should offer "App Store Plus" where you pay $10/20/30 whatever a month and all the ad-infested apps just show nothing.
On first launch I was met with a mandatory "privacy" policy I couldn't decline that was asking me to consent to being spied upon. I ended up getting a refund through Apple.
I intentionally find products where I can pay. I like YouTube, and I gladly pay for it to not see ads. It's a simple transaction, they provide a service - I pay for it. Sure, you can complain about sponsored content and other crap, but overall YouTube premium experience is great. Whenever I want something to play on my phone - I find a cheap game and just spend 2-5 dollars. In some of the free games, I intentionally spend money on cosmetics to support developers. Without this relationship, you are just a non-paying user who brings no value, and you have misaligned incentives with the app developers.
So I don't understand the mental gymnastics of well paid people (given the audience of hackernews) for why they don't want to pay a few dollars. This way you would support people who provide value to you and dictate how the industry should evolve. Instead, we have a Guac-A-Mole game with advertisers and complain every other day on forums.
But why does every other ad have to be not only pornographic, but offensively so? Why is it okay for them to hide a little "x" for dismissing their offensiveness?
I have the same problem with blogs and news sites at this point. I wouldn't mind leaving the ads enabled, except that they are very often not only distracting, but offensive. Someone emails me a link to a work-relevant new story, I click the link, and the page is loaded with pictures of women in bikinis, toe fungus, or other gross things. Why? This perfectly safe for work news story is now a case study in hostile work environment.
Trying to maximize for the highest cpm bidder, rather than trying to maximize for actually showing the most ads, is why the publishing industry is having to deal with ad blockers. It's the same as when napster became a challenge to exploitative pricing for CDs by music publishers. iTunes broke that mold by resetting the pricing on the supply side to actually match the demand side, and sucked a lot of the wind out of the demand for piracy. Streaming only took that further.
Content publishers could find ways to make ads less offensive, less intrusive, and safer for consumers (even the FBI is now recommending ad blockers because of the risks of ad networks run amok), and they would take much of the wind out of the demand for ad-blockers. Won't eliminate it, but would certainly dial things down.
Instead, they just keep adding more layers. More ads, more interruptions, more distractions, more offensive content. And then they complain? Come on.
My partner/wife is a long-time iPhone fan. I never tried to convert her, but she is on the point of switching to Android because she can't use Firefox on iOS.
It's completely absurd too - to discard a perfectly fine device otherwise, just because it cannot block ads, or at least, cannot run uBlock Origin (for blocking cookie-banners, social annoyances, etc).
Or is it not "can't use Firefox on iOS" but "doesn't have x feature from Firefox on Desktop"?
Other nice thing of Firefox on Android: being able to listen to Youtube videos even when the screen is turned off.
(I'm sure there are solutions, but many seemed sketchy or didn't work well)
FF can largely do exactly the same thing they do on Desktop to attract people: create a privacy-focused browser (if that's even what they're doing) and things like syncing your bookmarks, passwords, using Firefox VPN, and blocking ads.
Tailscale plus Adguard has finally brought sanity to all my mobile devices thankfully.
Use whatever you want re: iOS or Android, but there are plenty of ad blockers on iOS.
I won't lie: I could barely think with all the attention-grabbing, adtech bloat. Scary!
Is there a way we can help people who don't know they're being exploited like this?
I feel like letting people enjoy the ads if they don't know any better is a little smoke screen for people who do know better.
I block the page visibility API.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-page-visib...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-page-...
There are other ways to detect if a webpage is visible, e.g. onblur/onfocus. This add-on does not disable any of those other ways. So do not assume that this add-on will enhance your privacy."
From the Readme of the FF addon.
Free after Sir Winston Churchill
Modern economic markets are a decentralized process via which we decide how to best allocate resources. For this to work, we need a mechanism that allows information to be broadcasted through the system to ensure local decisions make sense. (In fact, information asymmetry is one of the main failure modes of modern markets).
So, yeah, advertising sucks, but 1. it's an important part of our market economy and 2. it therefore adds a lot of value to the world.
I actually have a hard time reconciling the reasoning above with how icky, insidious and unpleasant marketing feels when I get subjected to it.
Install Sponsorblock to remove sponsored content and fluff from videos. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
Install SmartTubeNext on your Android TV device to watch youtube with no ads + sponsorblock support baked in. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext/blob/master/README...
Install Revanced on your android mobile phone to watch youtube with no ads + sponsorblock support baked in. https://old.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/
That said I'm far from this radical, even though it's mostly because I hate the troubleshooting when a site breaks and I'm trying to find what caused it.
Now I block ads on all my family machines. They broke the social contract.
Add that to autoplay videos/gifs on an limited data plan and its clear that ad content has no use for me, other than suck up data at my expense.
And I don't use Microsoft operating systems.
YouTube Premium, for example, is pretty solid for the most part, and I'm happy to spend some money to support the creators I like, but they kind of fucked that up because now I have to deal with the endless ads for RayCon or ExpressVPN or SkillShare. It's a bit frustrating because I though I paid for "no ads", when in reality I paid for "we're hiding the ads you could have easily blocked for free".
There is no difference between ads and malware - both are code that uses your machine to make it do something undesirable, and often stalk you (modern adtech is often way more powerful than the spyware of the old days) in addition. It is your absolute right to block all malicious code.
Operating systems mostly wisened up to their earlier vulnerabilities and patched most of the avenues malicious code could load itself on your machine. Browsers countered the early abuses of the pop-up window feature by blocking them and nobody complained. Operating systems and browsers should include ad- and spyware-blocking by default just like they block conventional binary viruses.
The only reason the above is no longer possible (despite it being technically - like pop-up window blockers were implemented almost 2 decades ago) is that ad- and spyware-tech has now consumed browsers and operating systems. The business model of IT is no longer to provide valuable functionality to the user in exchange for payment, it's to provide first-party spyware and spam platform, with "functionality" being merely a necessary evil to keep the user coming back (which they'd rather remove if they had another way of convincing you to keep looking at the screen).
because the "ad blocking is unethical and stealing!" crowd is really annoying, as I'm sure the pro-ad blocking side is to them
For example - a company sends out a newsletter with a link to a blog post goes out to 20k subscribers with UTM params, but those UTM params end up getting 100k clicks, 80k with a referer of "news.ycombinator.com". This means that someone posted it on HN with those UTM params, which indicates that they should continue to prioritize that newsletter, since the audience is likely to cause a snowball effect of traffic and thus growth.
Is that a bad thing? Knowing that traffic came from x source so that they can properly route future resources to the those high-impact sources?
I pay for what I want to look at, not with my time and attention, but money, the way God intended it.
Perhaps ironically, the blogpost itself shares many attributes common to advertising:
(1) audience relevance
(2) branding the author
(3) Crucially -- a call to action for a change (though in this case, it doesn't enrich a specific corporation AFAICT).
I use a pi-hole and uBlock Origin, but am always up to learn more...
I block web content with certain keywords from loading. (How nice would your life be if you never ever again heard about Trump?)
I block channels on Youtube.
I block ads in the real world on my AR goggles. (Soon.)
For example, for me the youtube shorts section, or the stackoverflow 'hot network questions' section are things like that; they are "almost ads" in some sense.
How did we get so far without having all this by default?
Every once in a while something slips through (which I make sure to email their DPO as per the GDPR and ask what's going on, and they make up an excuse on how a misconfiguration/etc resulted in me getting spammed, but at least it puts downwards pressure on this behavior), but it's manageable - my inbox is clean and averaged over a few years I get a spam maybe once a month.
They're simply the funniest
And yes it's the most common "retort" to ad-blocking I always hear.
Hopefully this indicates that there will be room for something better soon.
Or maybe it just indicates that the ad guys have so throughly beat us that they don’t even feel the need to come argue anymore.
Which is nice, it is good to at least have someone representing the position, even if I disagree with it.