It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.
I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.
I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.
I can't believe how normalized this stuff is. It's loud. It's incredibly stupid. It treats the viewer as unintelligent. It's really offensive if you aren't used to it.
I’ve also trained myself to recognize and not consume ads anywhere they are not blocked.
Sorta the same as the emails that went out to employees of my org telling them that we would perform network upgrades that resulted in IP addresses changing. Not one person that I've assisted updating their devices read those emails because they were mentally filtered out as noise. We sent a lot of notices, fwiw.
Even for propaganda, I am constantly made aware of my propaganda immunity being subpar for all different kinds of propaganda. Often it's just subtle seeds of propaganda that impact the choice of words that I use to be something different than what I really believe in, and sometimes it is more serious and deeper cases of propagandisation. Very unfortunate, but each time it shows me why I should be critical of everything that I read online.
I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.
I curled the page and piped it to a markdown conversion tool because I really wanted whatever information I'd searched. It's the first time I ever didn't just close the tab and move on because whatever I'd searched was a pressing issue that I wanted to solve.
What a fucking dick move by that site. Fuck them, whoever they were.
I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.
I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).