Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker? • Hacker News Board

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#21

Post by e40 » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:44 PM UTC

spats wrote: post #9

no, don't be parasite

Every time I try and go back to not using one, I last less than a day. The number of really annoying animated ads is astounding.

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#22

Post by majidfn » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:44 PM UTC

Some ads are creative and I enjoy them, but majority are very annoying. I use Chrome/Firefox and Safari, each for specific purposes. I use ad-blockers on Chrome. So I still get to see some ads but not all the time.

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#23

Post by khoury » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:45 PM UTC

I use adblock on every site which doesn't require me not to, like on the pages where you create google ads and things like that, github also. In those cases I allow ads. Why make life complicated?

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#24

Post by js2 » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:47 PM UTC

Ghostery, AdBlock and ClickToPlugin. If ads were static and sites didn't have 10-15 social widgets, etc, I wouldn't bother. Animated ads and the slow load times of the many social widgets drive me over the edge.

And this is on desktop. Many sites today are so heavy I avoid them entirely on my first gen iPad mini as they crash Safari about half the time.

Once upon a time, you could just disable javascript as a workaround, but that almost completely cripples the web these days.

Javascript wankers.

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#25

Post by lquist » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:49 PM UTC

I don't because I want to be able to track competitor advertising :)

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#26

Post by sp332 » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:50 PM UTC

I block as much as possible. I run with Ghostery, RequestPolicy, and Adblock Plus (with "unintrusive ads" disabled). I also don't have Flash installed, and most other plugins are "click to run" in Firefox. It's occasionally annoying but I've really gotten used to it. I see a lot fewer pictures on the web, and enabling a CDN domain is just a right-click away when I really want to see something on a site I haven't white-listed yet.

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#27

Post by sheetjs » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

Is there any good solution for blocking ads on iOS? Many sites are flat out unusable on my iPhone thanks to the obnoxious ads that take more screen real estate than the content

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#28

Post by edgyswingset » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:53 PM UTC

spats wrote: post #9

no, don't be parasite

http://www.nber.org/papers/w20171.pdf

Just one example, but there's plenty of stock in the hypothesis that online ads really don't do anything to begin with.

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#29

Post by arenaninja » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

Absolutely, but I do regularly whitelist sites that I would like to support. I browsed without an ad-blocker because I always figured I would stand ads in exchange for free content, but the obnoxiousness has increased over the years: autoplay audio/video, HUGE flash banners (I remember my PC choking on the Yahoo! homepage on the first day I decided it was time to install an ad-blocker: it was an oversized flash ad for a car). I think I was less annoyed by popups than I was by these.

Re: Poll: Do you use an ad-blocker?

#30

Post by hughes » Wed, Sep 17, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #24

Ghostery, AdBlock and ClickToPlugin. If ads were static and sites didn't have 10-15 social widgets, etc, I wouldn't bother. Animated ads and the slow load times of the many social widgets drive me over the edge. And this is on desktop. Many sites today are so heavy I avoid them entirely on my first gen iPad mini as they crash Safari about half the time. Once upon a time, you could just disable javascript as a workaro…

For Chrome users looking for ClickToPlugin, it's already in the Chrome settings[0] under Plugins

[0] chrome://settings/content