Adnausem

It is built on top of unlock origin and will silently click on the ads in the background to mess with your digital footprint while costing advertisers money who use pay per click.

I genuinely don't know how people manage without ad-blockers and other declutterers. The amount of utter shit that gets in the way of what you're trying to look at is mind boggling.

Do you want cookies? Do you want to share your details with 1049 trusted data partners? How about the top half of the screen taken by a video ad with a close button that isn't going to work? How about a redirect to something else entirely? How about the back button not working unless you spam it really quick?

This is a war, and we didn't start it.

Old guy checking in. When ad blockers first became a thing, my then-teenaged boys started using one and were trying to talk me into it. I was pretty dubious. I said my concern was that the model most of the web was built on was ad-supported. That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links. If everyone started using ad blockers, I said, that model would break down and either people would stop creating content or they'd go to a new model, like subscriptions. I figured few people would take time equivalent to a full time job to create content for free.

I think that largely came to pass. A lot of great online publications have closed their doors, and the are lots of paywalls now. The things is, the sites are just as much to blame. Most people wouldn't have been driven to use ad blockers if the ads hadn't gotten so untenable. A banner or a box here or there is one thing, but when there are a giant number of pop-up windows, autoplay videos, windows you can't back out of, and all the other hellish stuff, people are going to be highly motivated to find a way to stop it.

That whole arms race was one of the things that ruined the internet, in my opinion.

The more popular ad blocking gets, the more I worry about the ad industry lobbying to criminalize blocking ads as "theft of revenue" or some insane concept along that line.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/majority-of-americans-now-use-ad-blockers/ar-BB1kEhis

That's why ads are now being tested on the OS level.

The Censuswide report indicates that 66 percent of experienced advertisers use ad blockers.

lol

I refused to use adblockers on principle - not because I thought multibillion corpos needed more money, but because I recognized that sites using ads to sustain their business model needed views to maintain their viability in our fucked capitalist system.

Then Youtube swapped to three unskippable fucking ads after every video.

Now I just whitelist decent sites and let Adblock take care of the rest.

My man, 95% of people dont even know what a browser is and you expect those to know what an adblocker does or is? even now, all people using adblockers, or extensions in general are barely a drop in a desert dry bucket

Because Ublock Origin is better than AdBlock in every way? Or maybe because they're already using PiHole?

We should be more grateful for these people. Our adblockers function because they don't bother using them.

The moment that most of society starts using adblockers is the moment they become defunct when the big corporations begin actively fighting them. I've already witnessed this with YouTube Vanced/Revanced.

Majority of society:

• "I don't see a problem"
• "I don't care, it's not like my data is that valuable"
• "But I actually like these targeted ads! I find so much good stuff this way!"

Remember in Futurama when Fry finally goes online in the future and get attacked by ads. Or similar in Altered Carbon with whatever that contact-lens-AR thing was and the character spins out.

When I see a person with no ad blockers use the web my brain breaks seeing all the ads. Advertising is a malevolent force. Anyone who works in marketing ranks just above people who join the armed forces, police, and weapons manufacturing in my book. I think of big tobacco as better people.

I don't know why people evangelize others using adblock. The more mainstream it becomes, the more likely websites use effort to stifle their use.

Just let's keep it on the dl so we benefit.

I think we don't give gradual acclimatisation enough credit here. Most of my students have never heard of Firefox and tools like ublock origin because they're acclimatised to the mobile ecosystem

"How do I install something? I use the app store."

"Oh, but I already have the internet on my phone, why would I want a 3rd party app to use the internet" (think old people who mix up AOL with the internet in reverse!)

As soon as I show them, they convert in seconds - they've forgotten web pages without adverts can exist.

I have no less than a dozen plugins in my browser to make the Internet usable. More than half is just for YouTube.

I was already sick of all the freaking Taylor Swift ads but Roku announcing that video ads are coming to the home screen was the last straw for me. Finally set up a Pi-hole and Roku ads are gone. I know it's an ongoing war and this is just one battle, but damn it's nice right now. I even became a supporter on Patreon. ❤️

I still run uBlock Origin on all my browsers, though.

Because they're not the "default". Most folks stick with whatever comes on their device by default; Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, Chrome on Android, etc. Anything beyond just picking it up and turning it on requires forethought and effort, which most users don't care about.

Y'all ever try NoScript too? Freaking wild how some sites need to use like 30 shady JavaScript modules just to function.

It's a burden, but it blocks things like the "invisible facebook pixel" for instance...

Well it's really due to the fact that most people are ignorant about computer technology. I personally use pi-hole.