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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

Does YouTube work without JS? This might be one way to avoid ads as well as a network wide Pi Hole.

I hate it when YouTube / Google needs to exploit everyone's data and privacy in order to make money.

Does anything at all run without JS these days? I swear all I wanted was to read a blog post, and it loaded more megabytes of JS than the text and pictures combined.

One example that comes to mind is Kagi.

They makes it a design point that Kagi should work even without javascript enabled.

I thought Twitter had a no Javascript version but apparently that stopped a couple of years ago.

I ran Noscript about 10 years ago. At first I didn't notice any difference. Then, over a period of only a year or so, things started to break. I would notice that my friends' web experience seemed remarkably different to mine. Eventually I capitulated and enabled JS again. Seeing it all happen at one rather than at a trickle over time was quite shocking.

I still design web sites without JS first. In fact, I design them without even CSS. It's called progressive enhancement. Many of them have only a sprinkling of convenient but not necessary JS.

> Pi Hole

They serve the ads from the same domain, as the site itself.

Surely it's possible to block the paths to the ad on the site itself.

Not with DNS blocking, which is what the pihole is

Pi Hole just blocks on DNS level, I believe.

The problem is that it will refuse to play content if it can't play the ad.

Pihole is only intercepting DNS resolve requests. Those only resolve the domain itself. If they don't use a different domain to serve ads, then it can't be blocked that way.

Good thing the whole site is a bug, though I rarely end up on YT by accident since videos are marked in web etiquette.

For twitter.com a filter option here on HN would be nice but a domain blocker might do.

Not even close.

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