Does anybody in HN (even/especially those in the media industry) not use an adblocker of some sort to browse the web anymore? If so, can you tell us about your experiences and why?
I occasionally switch off adblockers to see what the rest of the world sees. Within seconds I am shocked every single time. Some sites I use are unusable without adblockers. The youtube experience is attrocious without adblockers. Amazon products are impossible to find without being flooded with sponsored products. Google results are ads until pages later.
Its like a whole other internet. I cannot imagine how small of a portion of the internet I'd need to use if I could not use adblockers.
If you're rooted, you can just modify your hosts file manually or use something like adaway to do it for you.
Thank you!
One issue is that it cannot work when using another VPN.
The one caveat is that it does not block ads served natively, so you will still need a specialized app for native YouTube, Instagram, and others, but those are readily available now.
On my side I use both: AdGuard on the system side to help with apps and Chrome, and uBlock Origin in Firefox for HTTPS or when another VPN is being used.
Note: for applications/services, buying the no-ad option or using an open-source application from F-Droid is the better way when possible. Even when doing so, AdGuard can be helpful for in-app web browsers that don't have ad blockers.
I have a PiHole running in EC2 and I just VPN into it. The VPN is configured so that only DNS goes through it, so I don't tunnel all my traffic through it and pay for lots of egress.
Could easily run the VPN through something local, of course, but I prefer to expose as little as possible on my home network.
But you could do it cheaper than that. A t3.nano is ~$3.60/month and could easily handle running the PiHole, and you could probably get away with only 10 GB of block storage, possibly even less. I choose to use a t3.micro and 20 gig because I do other stuff with my instance.
Are there any advantages to paying a monthly fee to do this when it can be easily done from inside your LAN?
I recommend NextDNS as a hosted, paid, custom DNS provider.
1) Android lets you install other browsers and use them as default. Some of these, like Firefox or Brave or Vivaldi, include adblocking software that works everywhere, even YouTube. Whereas on iOS, even if you install chrome, it's just a reskinned safari because Apple refuses third parties proper access to the system. https://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-wi...
2) Android allows you root access without too much trouble, and you can install system wide ad blocking tools that way. Such as AdLock.
3) There are other system wide blocking options, such as anti-ad VPN solutions, that works on system wide data traffic.
3) this can also be done on iOS.
3) Cool.
Install AdAway and use the root method; this will modify the system hosts file and redirect the requests to domains that are used to serve ads to 127.0.0.1.
Some apps refuse to function if they can't fetch ads, so AdAway has a webserver that listens on 127.0.0.1 that serves a blank webpage to those apps. Follow the directions in AdAway to install the CA certificate in your device.
## If you aren't rooted:
Go to Settings and search "Private DNS", set this to dns.adguard.com, this is AdGuard's DNS, and it blocks requests to ad sites (not sure how, but it may not return an IP address or return a bogus one). This method will work on any device as long as you can change the DNS that the device uses (including iPhones).
It then morphs into a dancing dashboard mannequin, a personal avatar, spouting nonsense, getting on your nerves, while its technoneurons spread, root-like, tapped into you. As you exit the car going into the supermarket, the supermarket is now a construct of the avatar not the bricks and mortar building it was when you were growing up. It exists for the avatar to make your life better, not for you, it robs you of choice and agency it does not agree with.
You go into a small cafe for some splice. It has a touchscreen display to order from, you must pay with a card or ApplePay.
I want the Internet to have ad supported content. I want the people who create this content to have a chance of making a fair, market-determined income instead of relying upon things like Patreon.
The saddest part for me is that I'm going to get voted down here because the support for this kind of behavior is strong here. Some day all of you will experience a business being undermined by freeloaders and thieves. This is the kind of low-trust world that you're building and it will come for your livelihood too.
The problem is that ads come with so much spying. That's what kills the trust.
I don't use an adblocker per-se, but I do stop JS and various trackers, which have the side-effect of stopping most ads. It's purely a self-defense thing on my part. I'll still see any ads which are just ads and not spying platforms.
If the use of ad blockers threatens the livelihood of web sites, perhaps that would encourage the websites to stop abusing their readers.
They could have simply not abused their position.
I have zero sympathy for sites that try to profile me, I consider personal data protection an inviolable right and act in that sense
It's a different situation today, but it's still there. Especially teenagers. I would pay $1 for a newspaper easily, but I would never pay for online news. Maybe if it charged me 8 cents and only needed a thumbprint to pay, I would. Maybe if there was a comic section, I would.
We had a business which was basically media ecommerce. Instead of making a site about football and selling ads related to footbl fans, we'd sell shoes. We'd make recipe apps then sell hard to find ingredients.
This worked great. It made money. Good profit margin. But 80% of the work became logistics. We ended up outsourcing content creation and then became a logistics company.
Saying that ad (aka surveillance) based businesses are "undermined" by adblocking carries a fallacious assertion that those businesses have some inherent right to exist as they want. In reality, nobody is entitled to a business model. From my perspective, "freeloaders and thieves" describes those who have built businesses around attempting to hijack attention spans and create surveillance profiles about users. The fundamental dynamic of the Internet has always been that servers represent the server owners' interests, and my user agent chooses how to interpret what is received in my own interests. The Schelling point of the protocol is what separates the authorities/concerns of two parties with diverging interests.
Also adblocking does reduce some experiences. Some sites will tell you to disable it, and that's more irritating than the ad banners.
I had conversation with my daughter on how games used to have no ads but now they're chock full of ads, but TV has no ads now but up to a third of TV was ads when I was her age. I think there's a bit of nostalgia to ads, that some shows were designed for it. Even if it's those dodgy Evony ads. I can watch Futurama without ads today, but it feels like something's missing. Netflix shows drag out, maybe because it's missing the "grind" of ads?
I don't think adblocking is a petty form of theft, I think it's prudent, as ads are often security risks - not to mention don't include proper privacy settings but still try to track you against your will. Which is illegal in my part (EU) of the world. I'll try to support in other ways if I think your content is worth it and you provide secondary ways to pay.
I don't see the nostalgia aspect either. Shows were only "designed for it" in such a way that they frequently take breaks from the plot to show ads,. I challenge you to point to any single show where frequent ad breaks actually made the show better.
If you feel like Netflix shows "drag out", that sounds like an attention span issue. The same episode is either much shorter without 30-40% more time being spent on ads, or it's the same air time and just has more actual episode.
Not ads, but the best example of a dramatic interruption are the first two seasons of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, where the hero is screwed and then it cuts out into the Roundabout song. This is a lot less dramatic when you can just binge watch things and don't have to wait a week for the next.
Whereas Netflix shows tend to fill it with fluff, things like side drama, background stories, and redundant plot elements. I know I can skip the ad, but I don't really know if I can skip story details. I end up watching something like Squid Game on 2x speed.
Stealing from a company that has already charged you a subscription fee might be ethical. But I don't enable adblock because it also means I'm stealing on autopilot from other sites that I may want to support.
By this rationale you should also feel obligated to buy everything that everyone advertises to you, since they paid for the ad specifically to get you to buy.
There are models where they pay per download and pay per purchase, but as long as they're not doing that, you're not obligated to do those things.
You don't owe the advertiser anything unless they're paying you directly. You owe the content creator (a youtube channel) and the content distributor (youtube).
The advertisers are aware of this and it's calculated into their rates. If it's an attentive view, the rates are much, much higher.
Good product is ad by itself.
AdBlockers just saves a lot of your time and keep you sane during content consumption.
As someone who works in the field and actively builds end-arounds to systems that thwart our ability to easily track your behaviors online, it's in your best interest to do so.
Sure, you don't have to do any of this, but seeing any particular ad is the least of your problems when one loads.
I run a blocker. But for a general user not hitting shadier corners of the web and careful what they click on - What are the larger problems people discuss, and how are they relevant in the day-to-day?
Do EVERYTHING in your power to avoid that.
Horses are out, no point worrying about the barn door now.
The question was, "Why should I care?" A nebulous 'They' have had profiles on all of us since at least the 50s regardless; what's the difference and harm?
I Admire this approach to life. I probably fall in the middle somewhere.
But, quite frankly, most sites are effectively impossible to use without one :|
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[0] https://antipaucity.com/2016/03/03/on-ads/ (though I am down to just uBlock Origin & Detect Cloudflare)
If a site's running Cloudflare, and I don't have an amazing overarching reason to hit the site (eg my dr's portal), I add it to my block list
I'm not sure where everyone got the idea that tracking and harvesting data is always bad.
In addition, it is essentially impossible to have something harmful happen to you if you refrain from entering your bank password on websites.
There are a tiny handful of use cases where it is not
I don't understand how people are not more aware of the invasiveness of such activities
All in all i spend about $30/month to not have ads while supporting the sites I use, which I think it's pretty reasonable.
These days I tend to use firefox with uMatrix for general browsing, with Javascript and CSS disabled globally. Then enabled on a site by site basis depending upon how I value the content, and if it is even worth following a link.
As software engineers many of us play a part in creating a world that we wouldn't want to live in and then exempt ourselves from it with ad blockers leaving the ignorant or less technically inclined to fend for themselves.
It unethical to use ad blockers.
I could not imagine using the internet without an ad blocker and despite trying to live an ethical life, that's one thing I can't go without. If for no other reason, raw dogging the internet without an ad blocker is a real and legitimate security risk.
I consider it part of professional ethics not to work for ad based companies, and I have started to pay services, like wikipedia in particular, so they don't have to be supported with ads.
Is it unethical to use a computer that isn’t associated with you? (And thus have no ad profile?) If I get a untargeted ad, am I stealing?
Arguably, in a black and white sense I think so. In a practical sense no. You wouldn't expect someone who's blind to get a free meal at a restaurant just because they are blind. From a practical point of view implementing ads for the visually impaired probably costs more than the ads gain, and therefore a company would rather not, but if a company implemented an accommodation so that the ad could be experienced by the impaired person, then I would argue not experiencing that ad is unethical.
> Is it unethical to use a computer that isn’t associated with you?
The point is applying Kant's categorical imperative. If we took the idea of using ad block and made it a rule that everyone must follow, websites would not be able to fund themselves because they fund themselves by showing ads which creates a contradiction and therefore using adblock is unethical.
You can equivocate to try to justify the behavior, but that doesn't change that for most of the web, you are provided a web page in exchange for ads.
Companies are taking your data and selling it because they can, and you don't know the value of your data, so that is arguably theft and almost certainly unethical too. Poorly specified contracts are also unethical. When you visit a website, you don't know what you are giving up or the price you are paying. That's wrong.
I am a little sad there is no wide spread doxxing of the owners of adtech/data broker companies to force the ethics discussion in congress.
It’s funny that many people paid for newspapers specifically to get ads. Ads were native content and sought out.
If you offer content for free, I don’t understand why I have an ethical obligation to look at or read that content, ads included. Personally, I think many of the low quality ad platforms aren’t ads at all - they are information gathering platforms
If everyone takes without giving, there is nothing left to take. If everyone gives without taking, there is enough to take when you need it.
This is fundamental to how societies operate. This was core christian ethos before it was corrupted by the GOP. This is why the west has higher trust societies, and much of the rest of the world does not.
Reciprocity is an extremely important consideration. Kantian ethics is the foundation of the west. If you take your actions and thoughts and project them onto everyone else, the websites you enjoy wouldn't exist.
If you understand that, you just don't want to feel uncomfortable and are in denial. If you do not understand that you are choosing ignorance.
You don't have to agree, but we are both effectively parasites.
What's worse is the conflict of interest.
On the topic of news papers, if content is not paid for it is that the content itself that becomes an engine of money making. Content becomes ads. If nobody pays for high quality investigative journalism you don't get high quality investigative journalism.
If you don't donate to your politicians, someone else will.
If you don't pay for your news papers, someone else will.
If you don't pay for your social media, someone else will.
You can argue these companies are taking more than they give, and they are, but your position of personal responsibility is worth considering. The sum of everyone's thoughts on their personal responsibility creates culture, and this "next quarters profits" culture that we live in is an extension of the very ideas you have expressed.
When you choose to act in a self interested way, you justify someone else acting in a self interested way. So you justify the selfish acts against you through your actions.
If you think it's ok to not experience ads, you justify people using ads to collect and sell your data.
Using an adblocker is what you can do, just like selling your data is what the company can do. It's "might makes right" in form, which is the opposite of reciprocity. Might makes right is great for the winner, but I don't think we are winning.
Can you apply this analogy on ad and data harvesting companies?
Reason: I work building ‘internet stuff’ and I want to experience the internet in the same way that the majority of people experience it.
That’s more useful to me because I consequently experience the pain (or delight) of the typical user with greater accuracy.
Learn the lesson that ads suck, don’t add any to the « internet stuff » you’re building, install an adblocker and move on?
Some sites are unusable. I don't visit them, or if I do, I'm gone almost immediately.
Some sites are hard. I will persist if I really want to read the article; otherwise, I'm gone.
Most of the sites I visit are still functional. But I mainly just go to HN, some technical sites when I need to, some news sites, actual company sites. I don't go to entertainment sites (they are mostly unusable without an ad blocker). I don't do social media (other than HN).
In general, if you make your site unusable with ads, then I won't be back. I don't need your site. But your site might want me, and if you do, knock it off with the garbage that makes it unusable.
The reason is that I now have a website and earn money through ad banners, so I understand how challenging it is to optimize ad banners. Meanwhile, we may have 60% of users using adblock in certain fields.
Now, if I do see ads for women's clothing in a deeply technical post, and notice that the clothes include some I bought as a present for my wife, then I'm amused.
I guess you still close doors while making s*it or use curtains at your window.
If you don't want to configure and maintain your own box, nextdns is a pretty solid option.
I use it on the browser from where I browse YouTube, news portals, etc. On the browser that I use 99% for work I don't use it since I want to see (yes, strange I know) ads in my Twitter feed or work related portals that I visit. This way I support those portals (at least I hope that they get paid for showing me ads).
(Un)surprisingly a strict mode in Firefox blocks most of the clutter.
Can't say when I stopped bothering (I'm on FF since 2.x) but I have other things to do.
The only exceptjon is what I got some addons to block some obnoxious things, like 'login here with Google!!!' and Google webfonts (which sometimes breaks a carefully curated look of the site made by Internet connosiers, which just gaves me a chuckle).
I was using an add-on for Firefox where I could control to which sites a page could connect. Some years ago this was a pretty good way for browsing ad-free and without being tracked because both relied on resources from external domains.
Now, I’m using a DNS resolver that blocks these domains. It’s probably not as fine-grained but works across many devices.
Some sites have annoying ad popups, but most of the time they're just embedded in the sites and I don't even notice them.
You may not like this answer but you asked and that is my reason.
I think about advertising 50 times less than I think about cookie warnings.
He pays them a monthly fee.
How is that equivalent to they are dependent on ad income?
They also receive massive amounts of money from their data moats on their Bloomberg terminals charging upwards of $20,000 a year
I want to experience web as it is.
If it's unusable I don't use it.
So I can see how ads changed over time. Used practices seem more desperate nowadays, sometimes it's like year 2K again. Even google is using interstitials with misleading controls.
After all, I'm paid with advertising money like most people in the big tech...
I don't use an ad blocker and never have. It's fine, I'm used to it. Some sites are pretty horrible (mostly low end news sites). I subscribe to a handful of news sites which don't have any ads and that works out fine, most other sorts of sites have tolerable levels of advertising. If they don't I just go back and do without.
Why: the golden rule, pretty much. Not gonna be popular, but that's how I see it. Treat others how I'd want to be treated myself. If I browse someone's site whilst blocking ads, I'm consuming their financial resources but not allowing them to consume my attention in return, which is the "deal" implicitly entered into when I visited their site. Yes yes, it's not a written deal, you can make legalistic argument about it, but fundamentally the assumption website authors make is that people use browsers that follow the specs and will thus see ads, and ad blockers cause browsers to not follow the specs. If everyone did this those sites either wouldn't exist, or would have paywalls, and I appreciate the fact that they exist and don't have paywalls.
There are a couple of other related reasons.
I've been on the other side of this. I run a company and sell a product to developers (a tool for deploying desktop apps). We have tried ads, mostly text based. They don't work at all, presumably due to high rates of ad blocking. The number one feedback we get from missed sales is that they'd have loved to know about us earlier but it was just too hard to find us at the right time, and by the time they discovered us (often by accident) they were already buried under sunk costs. Targeted advertising is at heart about informing people about a product they might need at the time they need it. Because nobody is seeing ads, devs often end up wrestling with whatever MVP-level projects they found by following links from some project created by Big Tech whether it's any good or not, because they're simply unaware any alternatives exist. In turn this discourages people from just doing ordinary selling of commercial-quality tools, which leads to frustrating developer experiences.
I live in Switzerland where there are many rules that are very lightly enforced, for example, you can just walk on and off public transport with no ticket gates, and inspections are rare (my guess, 5-10 times a year even if you use it every day). My company's product is also done in this spirit: you can download it with no account creation or signups, the code isn't obfuscated, and it's free for open source projects. That policy is basically on the honor system with a bit of manual spot checking: if you declare your project is open source then the app just unlocks without payment unless we notice that you're lying. This sort of flexible trust-but-verify society is nice to live in but for it to work, it requires everyone to follow expectations even when you can get away with not doing so. I feel like ad blocking is similar to that. Likewise I could crack the commercial software I use and use it for free without being caught, but if everyone did that then the software wouldn't exist, so I don't, and I hope others will act the same way (whilst accepting that this isn't going to be true some of the time).
Finally, given the enormous extent to which the software industry is funded by advertising, it feels a bit hypocritical to block it. Consider how much of our collective developer platform is paid for using ad revenues either directly or indirectly (anything by Google or Facebook, even HN). If everyone blocked ads then at minimum Chrome and Android probably wouldn't exist, nor would HN which is justified partly by sponsored posts by YC startups. In fact it seems likely that there'd be no competitive open source browsers or consumer operating systems. I like that there are, and if that means advertising, so be it.
Of course there is a compromise on the video quality (1080p max) and convenience of the official app.
[1]: https://kaylees.site/wipr.html [2]: https://sponsor.ajay.app