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This is 100% the fault of shitty advertisers spamming us with literal scams, malware, and spyware.
I get that ads pay for a free internet. But that doesn’t mean that 60% of my screen needs to be malware to read a local news article.
Until advertisers act in good faith, I block as much as possible.
Or those scummy click bait ads disguised as related articles? They make my blood boil with how they prey on the vulnerable.
That’s all Google discover is on my phone… Ai generated articles that are just click bait.
is a new episode of RandomShow airing tonight?
Star Trek 31 confirmed to feature major tng character (from today)
blah.
Google is so bad for this, plus the fact that they were the ones who started rewarding clickbait articles.
In my mind though, MSN will never be dethroned from having the shittiest content.
I’ve been seeing clips from Ready Player One recently and this reminded me of the main bad guy’s philosophy on advertising in the OASIS.
we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures
Can’t help but feeling there’s some parallels there.
Seems unrealistic. In reality, they’d be asking how often the seizures occur and would figure out if the increased ad revenue from going to 90% would offset any potential lawsuits.
Used to be if I found the site of a newspaper I thought I liked, I’d turn off my ad blocker to see how it goes.
I don’t even try any more. Again and again and again, every time I turn it off the page gets so cluttered that following the article becomes a chore and takes up so many resources that even scrolling slows to a crawl. Ludicrous nonsense.
The cluttered pages with “videos” running all over the place is what frustrates me the most. I go in and disable javascript and see how it goes. Javascript seems to be the herpes of the internet as far as I am concerned.
I recently noticed a feature on iOS to open all new sites in Reader mode. It’s definitely more readable but mixed results when not everything is there
There’s got to be some sort of Accessibility violation here: where’s the EU when you need someone to stand up for consumers rights
Fr. I legitimately wouldn’t mind just a few banner ads to pay for things, but as per usual, the corpos got too damn greedy. So congrats, now you get no ad viewage from me.
Don’t forget those annoying floating ads and the tiny X that doesn’t actually close the ad
And the fucking videos that auto play in the bottom corner with audio. I think the old people that recently found out about internet are trying to turn it into regular TV.
It’s been years since I would browse the web with sound on.
Plus they made the whole industry weird and obfuscated like bulk produce or something even though it didn’t need weird distribution models and dark unseen players in every corner of every ad bought and seen. Why is it this way? I honestly don’t know. How did advertisers willingly make it that way over just paying site owners or 1 aggregator or something… I guess Facebook has kind of become that now
I installed an ad blocker once I started getting unmuted video ads. I would be studying for an exam and suddenly start getting blasted with a super loud ad. This was in like 2015, before Chrome added the speaker icon next to the tab playing sound I had to look through every tab to find the source and mute it.
This is 100% the fault of shitty advertisers spamming us with literal scams, malware, and spyware.
And the shitty websites running those ads with just a shrug of their shoulders saying “oops, 3rd party. I can’t be expected to control what’s on my website.”
Nah. While that obviously sucks, I personally don’t like people selling me shit. The ads are designed to occupy as much of my mental space as they can and that’s a serious breach of what’s most valuable to me.
Tragedy of the commons
Some folks still raw dog the net? Wrap that shit up
tbh it feels like most people I know use chrome or even edge without any extensions
even without darkreader!
How do I do that on iPhone?
You can do that by selling it and buying an Android.
Can you use a blocker on Android or is per app the best we can do?
I use an adblocking DNS plus UBO on Firefox
Its as simple as setting your Private DNS to something like
dns.adguard.comin Network settings > Advanced
Tracker Control on Android works well for system-wide tracker and ad blocking, and you can configure custom blocking rules per-app. Works without root by using a VPN profile (but no data leaves your device via the VPN, it just routes the traffic through this app).
Set your DNS servers to dns.adguard-dns.com (Settings > search for DNS). Also you should install the DDG app and enable App Tracking Protection. You don’t actually have to use the browser portion of the app for it to work. After doing these two things, ads and trackers will be blocked in every app.
“an Android”
You know, like a Nintendo.
Kinda true lol.
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So Verizon gave you a phone for no upfront cost, and they’re shitty for making you pay for it if you decide to dash away early?
Fascinating threshold for shitty behavior you have.
I can’t believe people still do that. You aren’t saving money and you’re locked in 2 years. I guess if that’s that only kind of financing you can get.
I guess if that’s that only kind of financing you can get.
That’s exactly what it is. Look up the statistics on how many people can’t afford an unexpected $500 bill. Most people simply don’t have the money to pay out of pocket for what smartphones actually cost, so they’re stuck with exploitation, or nothing.
Seems odd because you can get fully functioning smartphones for like $200.
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If the phone costs $500, they simply increase your monthly bill by $500 / 24 months = $20 a month.
It’s a bit more complicated than this, and they’ll likely have some interest built in as well, but functionally, it’s no different than being given a loan to buy the phone and then paying the loan off over the two years. That’s why carriers often require a credit check before doing this.
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If the cost of not voluntarily choosing to get myself into bad contracts is being a smug asshole, so be it.
No, it’s you. Its your demeanor.
Oh no Verizon is making you do the fucking shit you signed up and agreed to do oh no the horror!
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Oh my heart is fantastic, Suzanne, but thanks for your concern.
I just don’t go online and complain about the terms of legal contracts that I signed while blaming the company for being the bad guys for setting forth the terms that you, again, agreed to.
🤦
Edit: And your downvotes mean nothing either rofl.
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With an ad blocking dns.
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
Go down to the configure manually option and follow the instructions for iPhone.
I think next guard is also supposed to be decent, but they won’t let you use it without an account.
The nice thing about the dns approach is it works for more than just your web browser. There’s a bunch of Android games that are essentially unplayable without an adblocking dns.
As a disclaimer, a bunch of sites are ramping up requiring enabling ads or they won’t let you load the content. I’m ok with just hitting back and not viewing those sites, but my MIL just asked for help removing the ad guard dns because her news sites wouldn’t let her in.
Thank you!
I use a Safari extension called Purify. It’s in the App Store. Works pretty well for me.
(I also use a pi-hole at home)
Similar for me - 1Blocker and pi-hole at home. Then I also VPN to my home when outside to continue the pi-hole filter.
I also use iCloud relay with non-precise location.
Since there are so many assholes trying to meme on you instead of trying to help you,
https://adguard.com/kb/adguard-for-ios/solving-problems/system-wide-filtering/
I bought the complete app for I think $12 and it is awesome and does exactly what I need. They give you a very generous trial time.
DAE hate iPhone!?! LOL
Thanks a lot! I’m trying to set it up now
Set your DNS to next DNS https://nextdns.io
Edit: Ah sorry didn’t realize this was already answered.
You answered better and thanks for the link. Is this a free service?
I’m using adguard but I’ve heard the owners are possibly unscrupulous.
That is a free service and I really like it make sure you read their website basically when you sign up which requires no login it’ll give you a unique dns entry to use as your DNS
The reason I like this one is it’s not just ad blocking it fixing a bunch of anti-tracking and other features
Some VPNs like Mullvad actually have an option in their app to block ads, gambling stuff, etc.
They don’t catch everything, but work pretty well.
The iCondom
I’m sorry? lol
It’s a condom for your i
Like a contact lens?
Sir, this is a
Wendy’siCream shop
Back when I had an iPhone I used Orion. It’s not perfect, but it blocked the vast majority of ads for me.
As a quick and easy alternative, you can set it to automatically open sites in reader mode. I’ve been trying that lately and it definitely helps although also mixed results where sites block part of their content from reader mode.
With automatic reader mode, I click to hide reader much less often than I formerly clicked to enable it
You can install Orion browser by Kagi and install extensions from Firefox like uBlock Origin
AdGuard works well.
AdGuard still works well but there are other safari extensions. At home I use eero ad blocking which works well for a maintenance free blocker.
I use FireFox on my phone.
Ghostery addon for safari is solid.
I’ll check it out. Thanks.
You can use https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/id1452162351
To set a DNS based adblock, it is easy to setup, opensource, and free.
I have been on Android for a long time but I still have an old iPhone that works fine for reading articles. Bonus, there is no Sim in it so no one can call me. It’s my drinking coffee device.
Unlike when your friends or parents might raw dog, you can put that adblock condom on their computers for them.
The main problem is 3rd party advertising. If the New York Times ran ads on their website like they did with the physical newspaper, we would not have this problem.
Publishers need to take direct responsibility for every ad on their platform.
Plausible deniability. Oh, a mildly sexual ad has shown to you? Someone probably approved it on the third-party site. Oh, you didn’t want to see it? Sorry, we got nothing to do with it.
Also scams and other grey-area shit.
I dislike the fact that “ads” can also include crapware being injected into my computer (viruses, tracking cookies, mysterious scripts, etc).
And there are so many scam ads that look like UI buttons and such. I can see why people get fooled sometimes. Those sort of ads should automatically be rejected by af networks and the sites that host them. But $$$
Is this still really a thing? I remember getting some viruses from ads in the very early days of the internet, like late 90s / early 2000s, but can’t remember getting anything in at least the last ten years.
It’s currently late and I am on my phone, so I can’t research this too well, but for example this thread and official Microsoft link discusses th Adrozek malware which injects you with unwanted ads and information directly from your browser.
Sure, it’s not a virus in the older sense of the term where someone either burns your drive or takes over your computer and locks you out asking for a ransom, but it’s still piloting you unsuspectingly and you don’t want it.
Many parts of the Internet has become functionally unusable without one. And given online advertising’s history as a vector for malware, as blockers are just the sensible choice.
I don’t think I could use the internet if I didn’t have an adblocker. Ads genuinely anger me. I think it’s just from the early days with pop-overs and unders, blinking, non-collapsible and the like holding content hostage. Intrusive or not, I’ll do everything I can to not see an ad.
using the internet without an adblocker is like fuckin a 5 dollar hooker behind a dumpster.
You’re gonna catch something nasty and go through a lot of misery.
ah, to the people downvoting you, you can’t even trust “legitimate” sites not to push malware. I would trust 4chan more not to push malware on it’s end users.
Without a condom.
Remember the mosquito banner? The one with the annoying mosquito sound?
I remember.
I use Mullvad so naturally, I can pick my exit country. Since I’m an iOS user (aka, no NewPipe etc) I always choose an exit country that is majority non-English-speaking. It makes the YT app adds so much more bearable if I can’t understand what they’re saying.
Yeah early days were really hard.
The internet is unusable without an adblocker… I recommend uBlock Origin and Pihole.
uBlock Origin at a minimum. But I would suggest a privacy focused browser. Librewolf, Mulvad or even Brave. Browsers leak so much information about you it is easy for sites to fingerprint and track you even with an ad blocker.
I know Librewolf is working on their DNS leakage (last section on privacytests.org), but they also allow you to select a privacy focused DNS server which is nice when you’re not on a network you own, so you can’t run PiHole.
Is there a big advantage to a pihole in addition to ublock?
Pihole will also block non-browser traffic (e.g. your OS phoning home). Adblocking extensions are typically restricted to just blocking traffic of the browser it’s installed on.
It also operates on your entire home network, so it can block junk traffic on devices that can’t run adblockers.
Got any simple guides for simpletons like me?
I used to not run an ad block. I figured the ads didn’t bother me so why bother?
Then I encountered a banner ad that screamed “HELLOOOOOOOOOO” anytime the mouse went over it and I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.
Advertising companies will do anything they can to annoy the shit out of you, then act like people running ad blockers are the problem.
I was fine with unobtrusive ads, I was fine with a minute of ads before a YouTube video. But it got so bad it was constantly interrupting everything. Also want to know what’s extremely unpleasant? Political ads calling for a moral panic against you or taking bigotry against you as a general assumption. I’m not watching that bullshit. My life is better without ads
I once watched a 60 minute ad because I wondered (what would a 60min ad even be about) and I can’t remember
That shitty Epoch Times used to do that. I was watching a bunch of satire videos and one of their commercials was on, and I legitimately thought it was part of the skit because of how stupid it was.
Then it hit me it is a real ad. And real people are watching it. And that’s how I got radicalized even more.
Wow! Pranks from 2004 are ads in 2024.
I thought the text said “stop AIDS” but practically the same thing.
Does anyone ever actually click on an ad? Like “hey thats cool I wanna check it out/buy it right here right now”?
I have adblockers active everywhere and only disable then somtimes for specific sites that really don’t work otherwise, but even if the unlikely case would come up that something is interesting I would just look it up separately? Mostly I just turn a blind eye on them anyway, but just wondering, some people gotta really click/buy from these ads? It just seems so surreal to me…
The only obvious ad I’ve ever clicked on was for a “free” IQ test. I figured I’d never done one cause they’re fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through. After 20 mins or so answering questions, it ended on a transaction page. The only way to see your “results” was by paying $20. I obviously didn’t pay, and instead tried to report the ad, only to discover that Google Ads has zero mechanism to even report scams to Google. After some research, it turned out that this blatant bait and switch scam had been operating via Google Ads for like 5 or 7 years. Google doesn’t give a fuck if scammers use it’s ad tech to scam your grandma or inject your system with malware, as long as they get paid for the privilege.
I’ve always used an ad blocker, but the whole experience reinforced how anti-consumer and pro-criminal surveillance capitalism is. Permanent absolute ad block — without exceptions — is how everyone should operate, because none of these companies deserve any trust whatsoever. Even if you trust the site you’re visiting, you can’t trust any ad company they utilize.
The only obvious ad I’ve ever clicked on was for a “free” IQ test. I figured I’d never done one cause they’re fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through.
That click should have lead you to a page that says ‘you failed’. 😂
The EU is currently testing a new payment framework that would make payments faster and easier and also enable very small payments.
This could finally enable micropayments in browsers (well, in Firefox and maybe Safari) which would eliminate intermediaries like Google and all the scummy ad companies and enable websites to work out deals directly with visitors on the spot (pay a very small amount like a cent or a fraction of a cent to read this article).
Obviously, Google will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this.
I’m still not paying a fraction of a cent for the obviously LLM-generated bullshit that has flooded the internet.
And yet for content I can be reasonably sure is actually human generated (read: niche enough to not have been flooded to the point I no longer can trust the “usual”/“big” sites) I might consider paying for server costs a little.
If you’re walking around somewhere and you see a person or people offering a “free personality test,” do not take them up on their offer. They’re Scientologists. They once refused to let my mother leave back in the 70s until she said she would start screaming “rape.”
People definitely do. CTR (click through rate) is generally pretty low, even before the majority of Americans were using ad blocks. But it’s not 0
I’ve personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don’t really have any regrets there. I’ve seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I’d never have known about otherwise.
I can’t imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.
My wife does. But she’s a sucker for “a good deal”
I dont ever click on them myself, but if I start searching for something I need/want, and I see a brand I’m familiar with thru advertising, I’m more likely to explore their product, at least. Simply just because, “of I’ve heard of this before”
Brand recognition is one of the key goals for running ads, it works.
But these are never real deals are they? At least I saw maaaaaaany bullshit fake deals, cant remember anything legit ever…
I also found my mum buying crap of instagram a while ago, but i kinda got to her to be a bit more mindful what she clicks on.
I have ad blockers everywhere, except native mobile apps. I’ve clicked on an Instagram ad for shirts. I bought the shirts. People keep complimenting me on the shirts. No regrets there
I guess that sounds reasonable. I sometimes miss seeing some of the cool stuff on instagram
I know ad rates and metrics are heavily based around click through, but does it even actually matter? I mean, TV ads are big money expensive, and nobody has ever clicked on those. I guess if you’re advertising a shitty mobile game or something then it matters, but does McDonalds or whatever even want you to buy a hamburger before you watch a YouTube video? That doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
As you’ve noticed, there are different types of ads. Not all have clicks as their goal. Some are just there to make you think about their brand, for example.
Not only did my late father-in-law click on ads, he also clicked on spam emails. Yes, his computer was super slow and I regularly had to clean off the malware.
Sometimes the sponsored links at the top of a Google search are exactly what I was looking for. I just need to quickly disable AdAway so that I can follow the link.
The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of “experienced programmers” don’t have an ad blocker. I’m not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.
There’s a surprising amount of programmers that don’t know basics of various parts of an operating system. I know people that know several languages, but get lost on installing a mod pack for a game or installing an app from within another app like a browser.
True. 100% Even today I had to screen share with our lead DB developer to show him how to create a key and ssh to a host.
Also worked with a guy who would design custom circuit boards for devices, but his windows skill was less than my mother’s (which is terrible)
Could he be Linux guy perhaps ?
Nope, just bad using any computer OS
“experienced programmers” in would have web developers fall under that umbrella, I’d guess web developers are less likely to adopt adblockers if their livelihood depends on them
experienced just means they’ve been doing it for some time, it says nothing about how well they do it.
Hence the quotations ;)
The engineer who sat next to me at my old job didn’t use an adblocker. She also would just ignore anything on the screen that wasn’t directly related to her task. There’d be “please update” OS popups or “do you want to install a plugin for markdown?” ide prompts on her screen for days. When I’d roll over to work on something at her desk I’d be like “how do you work like this?” she was like “like what?”
She was pretty good at engineering and generally smart. I don’t know how she did it.
20 years pro experience here: I run several different browsers in various states of blockedness for various reasons. But when I’m off the clock, of course, it’s firefox with ublock.
Maybe the pol was distributed via ads
My mom, in her 60s, is an experienced programmer. She programmed before she had the internet
Ads are just pure negative. There was even one study that calculated this as a direct financial negative, although unfortunately in narrow circumstances: it was calculated that for mobile users in the US, paying for the data transferred to display the ad was more expensive than what the site owner got paid for including it on his site.
That’s is indeed a pure negative - for the users. The site and the the mobile carrier both got paid.
Yes yes, capitalism good.
Don’t forget the company serving the ads, and also the company paying for them
If the ads are unobtrusive and interesting, and not clearly based on harvested personal data, I wouldn’t mind.
Unfoorrrtunately…
Exactly.
I was excited for Brave when they talked about service privacy-friendly ads and sharing revenue with sites. That obviously didn’t happen, but I think it is a good idea in general.
I don’t mind privacy-respecting ads like sponsorships and whatnot in videos, but I absolutely cannot stand the data-harvesting ads used almost everywhere, as well as ads in services I’ve paid for.
There’s a Dutch tech website called tweakers.net, a while ago they removed all tracking cookies and all ads are now just banners based on the current web page. I have adblocker disabled for that website and I’m happy with that
Back in the day, major news sites like the BBC ran ads that were infected with malware that then infected computers. These weren’t shady sites like people expect you to get viruses from.
Installed an ad blocker the day that news broke and never looked back. Ads are potentially harmful to your devices.
The WoW forums around 2012 had a virus infect thousands of computers before blizzard removed it. It was a 3rd party ad that was spreading the virus.
I remember that, thousands of people got keyloggers and their accounts compromised. Then Blizzard tried to blame those people for getting infected, from the Blizzard website.
This is still an issue today.
It’s a necessity. The internet really is unusable without it. Pop-up ads, long unskippable video ads, annoying shovelware scam ads, etc etc.
Just trying to read the news on my phone kills its battery because of all the ads and crap. I’m just reading, why is my phone’s battery draining like water? Hence Ad blocker is mandatory.
overlooking the biggest issue, the malware/virus ads.
True!
