Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 377 posts

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#231

Post by raguuu »

jancsika wrote: post #23

Some adtech startup should just quit playing games and go full creeper mode: * simple text-only ads * give the advertisers the tools to generate text content that is minimally distracting, maximally invasive, maximally creepy, and maximally personally-identifying "$35,000 in debt, unemployed, recently dumped and insecure about your male sexual identity? You deserve this special price on Axe Body Spray..." The buzz al…

They would still find themselves in the filter lists. It's hard to trust any ad company, that is unfortunate truth. I did text only Amazon links sort of advertising but it triggers some unlock filters because of the affiliate link.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#232

Post by raguuu »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #165

Advertisers need to fuck off. Ads are never going to work on the web - the ad bubble needs to pop already! Advertising on the web is a horrifying web of fraud, psuedoscience, and invasive tracking and sensitive data hoarding. Frankly, it should have been outlawed by now.

While everything that is going on with ads is horrible, it does work. This is very wrong side to hope for things get better. There is fraud but companies pay premium for ads because of it and in the end customers.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#233

Post by raguuu »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #39

Okay, here's a crazy idea for advertisers. Tie the advertisement to the type of content that the user is already there to read about. Then you can serve ads from the content web server and make it indistinguishable from content, completely unobtrusive, completely noninvasive, and maybe even welcome.

It's not crazy idea, they could serve it using the subdomain but serve themselves, but they are either too lazy or incompetent.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#234

Post by RandomInteger4 »

paulcole wrote: post #76
RandomInteger4 wrote: post #67

I use an ad blocker, because otherwise the web is unusable. Maybe if (1) fewer ads pumped up CPU and memory usage for a page, and (2) companies didn't give their non-technical asshole free reign over placing scripts on the page, then maybe many of these sites wouldn't be so bad to visit without an ad blocker.

>I use an ad blocker, because otherwise the web is unusable. This is extremely hyperbolic. Why not just, you know, not visit those websites if their business model is so abhorrent to you? Do you feel entitled to something for nothing?

Do you not know how to read? Unusable means not usable, as in dysfunctionally slow. Literally can not use the web in many instances.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#235

Post by RandomInteger4 »

MikkoFinell wrote: post #104
paulryanrogers wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I use an ad blocker, because otherwise the web is unusable" What sites are unusable? Aside from some click-bait destinations like BuzzFeed I've found the web without ad blockers works well enough.

>What sites are unusable? Youtube.

On YouTube in particular, I'd be mostly fine with pre-roll ads if it weren't for those World of Tank ads above the recommended sidebar. Those ads slow my machine down to a crawl some times. No clue why they allow webgl animations in their ads.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#236

Post by b3lvedere »

sebazzz wrote: post #219
zzleeper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you recommend for mobile? Browsing on Android with Chrome is a nightmare, and the last time I tried FF it was a bit sluggish (although it did allowed me to install extensions!)

Not exactly an adblocker, but on your local network you could use pi-hole.

I've been running a pi-hole vm for a very long time now. It's awesome not having a ton of ads on mobile devices.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#238

Post by snarfy »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #165

Advertisers need to fuck off. Ads are never going to work on the web - the ad bubble needs to pop already! Advertising on the web is a horrifying web of fraud, psuedoscience, and invasive tracking and sensitive data hoarding. Frankly, it should have been outlawed by now.

I've been browsing the web since Mosaic and have never bought a product by clicking on an ad.

I may learn of a new product by seeing an ad, and in that sense it worked, but never by clicking on it.

The point being there is absolutely no reason for any ad to have javascript associated with it.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#239

Post by klibertp »

ascorbic wrote: post #210
mobilemidget wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all suck. Period. Block any outgoing connection you don't trust instead of simply taking some 3rd party list with URLs, unverified, no quality control etc, and only blacklist these KNOWN bad urls. Ad parties don't sit still, they don't keep their ads on the same url when they found out they are blocked or maybe already preventive rotate through new urls etc. In the end you'll end up with some bizar long list whi…

> Block any outgoing connection you don't trust instead of simply taking some 3rd party list with URLs, unverified, no quality control etc, and only blacklist these KNOWN bad urls. Right, and how is that supposed to happen in practice? Manually inspect every CDN domain loaded on every page that you visit? Or just live without scripts, images, fonts, video?

> Manually inspect every CDN domain loaded on every page that you visit?

Basically, yes, see uMatrix. It's not for non-web-devs, I feel, but if you can easily recognize unnecessary connections it works pretty well.

Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

#240

Post by abhishek0318 »

shandor wrote: post #211
zzleeper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you recommend for mobile? Browsing on Android with Chrome is a nightmare, and the last time I tried FF it was a bit sluggish (although it did allowed me to install extensions!)

Firefox for Android is wonderful after Quantum. uBlock Origin works fine with it, and you can even use the custom filters to purge the scourge of the so called "dickbars" from your browsing experience. It's not as streamlined to use as with a mouse, but never having to see those Medium banners again makes my Internet life so much better.

Though Firefox on Android has improved a lot with the recent quantum update, you can still feel it's a little laggy as compared to Chrome.

Specifically, scrolling on Firefox feels very laggy. Also, Firefox doesn't play videos on same tab. That becomes very frustrating.

Post reply on HN