201–210 of 416 posts
Your eye is constantly flicking over to the flashing lights making the ability to focus impossible. Ad blockers are the only thing that makes most ad supported sites usable.
security reasons: to prevent malware from being installed via rogue ads;
for privacy reasons: to reduce being tracked by corporations;
and for mental health reasons: to reduce being bombarded with injunctions to buy things.
The internet without an adblock is just a scary, misleading place that's trying to trick you into scams, echochambers, bad deals, bad advice, botnets and cryptolockers.
Nothing says "our entire industry[0] is a blight upon human society" like a thriving ecosystem of popular software existing for the sole purpose of shutting you the hell up . [0] advertising and marketing industry
Today though, I'd recommend skimming through uBlock Origin's Github readme: https://github.com/gorhill. Note the "Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought." in the About section. Our industry reflects our collective condition: some good, some bad, and some in between. The oft used Mr. Rogers quote about "look for the helpers" seems particularly appropriate for uBlock Origin and its creator (and maintainers :)).
P.S. In case this comes across as a lecture, I assure you that this was just as much for myself as a reminder, as it was for the community here :).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DNS filtering sucks and can't filter ads served from the same domain as content, if all you can block is a FQDN, there's an absolute shit ton of trackers and ads that are getting past you. This is why piholes are awful. I don't know why they get such high praise - it's just a crappy DNS filter that blocks like what 40% of the ads you see?
Pihole is contributes to a defense in depth strategy. Lots of android games are unplayable when I'm connected to the internet unless I'm on a network protected by pihole. Yes, I can run a firewall on my phone, but maintaining firewalls on every device that my family uses?
I have one ad supported app on my phone - the Overcast podcast player. That’s only because the author created his own non scummy ad network and I find ads on the podcast player that advertise other podcasts useful.
If I didn’t, I would pay him too to get rid of ads.
It would be nice if browser makers started bundling ad block by default.
Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and I'm sure others have built in ad blockers and even have it enabled by default. Firefox and Safari do not (they stop at built in privacy tracking). Of course every single built in blocker is vastly inferior, either intentionally (like Chrome) or just because uBlock Origin is that much better (like Vivaldi).
The most popular extension, and the 2nd most popular, just like the 6th, 7th, 9th and 10th most popular, are ad-blockers. I guess it's only marketers that love targeted ads...
I like targeted ads (if I ignore the general threats to privacy and democracy they pose). There are certainly ads I've enjoyed seeing, mostly ads for specialized software, tools or machinery that I wouldn't have known about if not for targeted ads. I still hate ads. Youtube has maybe five interesting, relevant ads a month it can show me, and I'm willing to see each one maybe twice. That's ten ads a month. But Youtube…
I prefer Ad Nauseum ( https://adnauseam.io/ ) because I don't want to just block the ads I want to ruin the profile ad companies have on me by having all the ads clicked as well.