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I Block Ads

coryd.dev

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Re: I Block Ads

#101

Post by omginternets »

bombcar wrote: post #89
omginternets wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite. Also, here in the US, gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump. I cannot stress how angry I am about this. One of the last places where I could just day-dream has now been deemed "up for grabs" by the lowest form of shit-peddler in the modern world. Pause for a second to consider the absurdity of being blasted with advertisements while paying for a product. T…

There is a mute button, sometimes labelled, sometimes hidden, but try pressing them all. Doesn't help much, but helps a little. And then stick some unapproved sticker on the pump of your choosing.

The stickers are a good idea. I also wonder if there's a discrete way of permanently damaging a speaker, e.g. with a magnet or something that could fit discretely in the palm of one's hand.

Re: I Block Ads

#102

Post by dreamcompiler »

alyandon wrote: post #46

I block the page visibility API. I'd love to find out more information on how to prevent web pages from knowing if they are visible or not.

Found these extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Haven't tried either of them though.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-page-visib...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-page-...

Re: I Block Ads

#103

Post by kuratkull »

chasebank wrote: post #3

Advertising is so completely intertwined with everyday life, it’s impossible to block them. The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR. The ultimate brainwash. Most of HN and Reddit content is advertisement whether you realize or not. Front page CNN, outside of weather events and sports, it’s closing in on 100%.

If HN front page is mostly advertisement then that happens to be the only kind of advertisement I'm interested in. Otherwise I'm served well by uBlock origin, uMatrix and privacy badger - zero "regular" ads.

Re: I Block Ads

#104

Post by Timber-6539 »

I hate Ads. They take up unnecessary bandwidth (pi-Hole shows me a good 15% of my total queries is ad-related noise).

Add that to autoplay videos/gifs on an limited data plan and its clear that ad content has no use for me, other than suck up data at my expense.

Re: I Block Ads

#105

Post by judge2020 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #78
judge2020 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTM tags in that sense are collected on the client side by tag manager or google analytics, which would be blocked by an ad-blocking extension anyways. UTM tags can/often are collected by the website themselves to do first-party near-100% confidence campaign analytics.

So what you're saying is that there is plenty of other spyware (some of it server-side) that freeloads off those UTM query params? Sounds like another good reason to strip them?

That may be the case for blog sites, but big companies just directly ingest it into their application or internal analytics platform for a dashboard of which sources were the biggest contributors.

For example - a company sends out a newsletter with a link to a blog post goes out to 20k subscribers with UTM params, but those UTM params end up getting 100k clicks, 80k with a referer of "news.ycombinator.com". This means that someone posted it on HN with those UTM params, which indicates that they should continue to prioritize that newsletter, since the audience is likely to cause a snowball effect of traffic and thus growth.

Is that a bad thing? Knowing that traffic came from x source so that they can properly route future resources to the those high-impact sources?

Re: I Block Ads

#106

Post by thorwagoog »

Am I the only person who thought that list was a poem? :) Here is how my mind read it:

  I block ads in the browser, I block their DNS
  I block beacons and the ping attribute in their URLs 
  I block analytics, reporting, and diagnostic logging
  I block programmatic pleas to disable ad-blocking
  I strip query strings from UTM campaign tags 
  I unshorten URLs to avoid tracking hacks
  I stop autoplay for the videos on my feed
  I block all the cookies that your websites don't strictly need
  I block the visibility API on your page 
  I block prompts to install your app in a fit of rage
  I block hidden pixels that track my email
  Which surely gets masked but to no avail
  As I unsubscribe from your mailing list, dork
  And block your address if that doesn't work
  I block and report SMS that have ads
  Phone calls get ignored if not from my contacts
  I pay a company to wrangle data brokers for the win
  And trust me, junk mail goes straight into the bin
  As I unsubscribe from it all when I can
  I block ads, and you should block too, my dear friend
(Written organically, without ChatGPT or the like)

Re: I Block Ads

#107

Post by cdme »

voisin wrote: post #50
cdme wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I debated linking solutions I use but didn’t want the post, in that way, to advertise anything.

It would be at the benefit of being more useful for readers.

I'll look at throwing together a repository in the model of the `awesome-` set that's more comprehensive than my specific use case and open it up to contribution for tools I'm not familiar with.

Re: I Block Ads

#108

Post by Hitton »

Something you can block too, but isn't mentioned in the article are sponsored content ads in videos, use SponsorBlock for that.

That said I'm far from this radical, even though it's mostly because I hate the troubleshooting when a site breaks and I'm trying to find what caused it.

Re: I Block Ads

#109

Post by schmookeeg »

inetknght wrote: post #97
mikestew wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump Just one more of the many reasons to drive electric. It's when I make the rare drive to a gas station in the ol' fossil burner that I'm reminded of what shit holes some gas stations have become. Half the pumps don't work, the card readers are full of skimmers, but by golly the video and audio work!

> Just one more of the many reasons to drive electric Oh yeah, just wait until your charging station installs ads. Then you're stuck watching an ad while your vehicle charges. That, of course, takes longer than inserting fuel into a tank. So more advertisements and more money for the charger!

I'll then have pretty good standing to ask how they got into my garage in the first place. :)

Re: I Block Ads

#110

Post by mikestew »

inetknght wrote: post #97
mikestew wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump Just one more of the many reasons to drive electric. It's when I make the rare drive to a gas station in the ol' fossil burner that I'm reminded of what shit holes some gas stations have become. Half the pumps don't work, the card readers are full of skimmers, but by golly the video and audio work!

> Just one more of the many reasons to drive electric Oh yeah, just wait until your charging station installs ads. Then you're stuck watching an ad while your vehicle charges. That, of course, takes longer than inserting fuel into a tank. So more advertisements and more money for the charger!

I don't know how that's going to work given that the charging station in my garage doesn't even connect to a network.

Beside, if you're talking about public charging stations, it's already been done (can't remember the name at the moment). The difference between those chargers and a gas station is, you charge for free (Level 2, though). It's odd, too, because the ones I've seen are at grocery stores. So, plug in, go into the store...when am I supposed to see the ads?

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