Technology

Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.

It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don't do it.

Good 🖕🏻

Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.

I'm wondering if Gopher should make a comeback ? Gemini is a thing so, well you know.....

For those who don't know, they're alternative internet protocols similar to HTTP

Damn people, enshitifying the internet for the advertisers.

I switched to GrapheneOS which uses Vanadium browser by default, which doesn't support any content blocking yet. I use ProtonVPN which seems to block everything.

If we could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I'm the mean time, fuck 'em, they're too rich as it is.

I confess that I don't have the money to frequently donate and fund the services that I use (if they allow to donate) and recognize long time ago ads would be an okay alternative. but like everyone said, ads just became a lot more cancerous and have to block it. despite the shortcomings of the FBI, even they advise to use adblockers.

though I guess I just have to suck it up and donate once in a while as well.

Whatever number it is, it ain't big enough yet.

More power!

I run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when I’m not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.

what is with p.i.p video everywhere. hate it. can't figure out how to block it. firefox

Praise be

Well now, here's one that comes up under "other".

I started using an adblocker because I was using an elderly netbook for my studies. Ads junked up resource usage so much they used to freeze my laptop, and render most sites unusable.

Thanks to my adblock, I was able to finish my studies.

These days I use adblock because I object to virus-like code execution on my hardware. I tell others about adblock and get them set up to get free tea/coffee (and to watch their faces as sites become usable again).

The quiet mention of the 12ft.io being taken down is disturbing, it was a good tool for students to read article sources. This kind of change forces them to rely on AI (Gemini respects paywalks, Copilot just ignores them), which risks misinformation being spread!

Good. Hopefully the advertisers will realize that it's not profitable to advertise online anymore, and then we'll be left the hell alone.

I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you've voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.

Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.