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And they wonder why people use an ad blocker???
- Thread starter romanof
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Yeah mate...I truly, really feel you pain. That's THE one single reason I use adguard in ALL of my connected gadgets. Those ads are all suxxx.
Not really need to run at the background.
Are you using it for iphone or MacBook?
For web browsing, AdGuard offers a free Adblock DNS, with which you could configure your MacBook network connection to use it as the default DNS.
With iPhone, as it is not possible to configure its DNS setting, you need to purchase AdGuard Pro App which simply relay DNS requests via iPhone VPN setting.
100% Agree with this.
AdBlock on Chrome makes the internet useable — one of those small apps that I happily pay for as it makes my digital life better.
It even works on YouTube…
If I could only replicate the experience on iOS. I just about never use my iPhone for browsing — unless I genuinely have to. The experience is just such a cluster**** of juggling wiggling, flashing frames within frames.
How anyone manages to actually make sense of the content is beyond me.
Modern life, eh?
AdBlock on Chrome makes the internet useable — one of those small apps that I happily pay for as it makes my digital life better.
It even works on YouTube…
If I could only replicate the experience on iOS. I just about never use my iPhone for browsing — unless I genuinely have to. The experience is just such a cluster**** of juggling wiggling, flashing frames within frames.
How anyone manages to actually make sense of the content is beyond me.
Modern life, eh?
“Awwh would you look at that? Spring’s made our pastures look so verdant and lush with all the melted winter snows. And our apple orchard right over ther… wait up! — are those our horses? They’re supposed to be in the bar…” ::looks at the opened barn doors:: “…oh, no.
”Settling on just a protocol without an ARPA/DARPA initiative for a second, discrete infrastructure out-build, with no cross-over to the existing internet and the backing of institutions like universities, CERN, national governments, and so on — is remedial and about as impactful now as reviving gopher on the existing internet.
There would need to be a different, incompatible protocol — maybe one to emerge with the evolution of quantum computing, idk.
I loathe ads too so I nuke them from orbit in a variety of ways. I feel no shame either. If ads were based on things I like on the site I’m on, that’s one thing. But showing me ads for random crap all over the web is a huge pass for me.
Remember NetZero and that huge banner you had to see at the bottom of the screen? 😑
Remember NetZero and that huge banner you had to see at the bottom of the screen? 😑
Would any of you who hate ads so much be willing to make a monthly donation to the websites you use most to help support them? Because they're not free to run. There's hosting fees, salaries for the writers, editors, cloud storage fees, and it costs money to do things like SEO and analytics, etc. It adds up to a lot.
If web sites and the ad platforms they use had shown even a modicum of restraint or common sense with regard to the volume, placement, and data requirements of served ads over the years, I don’t think we would be having this conversation. Even web sites I would otherwise support sooner or later blow it by splashing some obnoxious ad in the middle of what I’m trying to read.
These days I run PiHole in my home network and make it available to my devices away from home via VPN. It’s not perfect and does not block 100% of ads, but it’s convenient and I don’t have to mess with plugins on whatever browser I use. I’m ok with whatever ads get through as long as they are not obnoxious and get in the way of reading. If I do encounter a particularly annoying ad I sometimes take the time to track down the source and add it to my PiHole blocklist.
JK, 😆 it's a choice -- nothing wrong if allowing ads completes the deal for you. That said, the system got how it is because lots of folks are getting paid. The question is whether there's actually value for money, and to whom.
The developers are getting paid. The graphic artists are getting paid. And the site admins, staff journalists, editors (jeeze, there's a craft in decline). In crowd sourced sites, content creators are getting paid, though perhaps pathetically little.
Government officials are getting paid for allowing legally questionable tracking methods. Yeah, the EU got a burr up its keester; I guess they were forced to recalibrate "Big-Tech's" collective budgets to purchase favorable legislation. "Nice phone empire you got there, shame if something happened..."
Telecoms and content distribution networks are getting paid by ISPs (plus shaking down content providers for prioritized bandwidth), and the ISPs are getting paid by us users.
Running a popular site ain't cheap. And the site owners have to make money by
- selling targeted ad placements based on tracking of your clicks and attention span, extrapolated PII, and feeding forum posts for LLMs (you can bet Reddit ain't the only one; they were just the first busted for talking about it). ORRR
- Selling ad-free tiers (with tracking still engaged).
Exactly! Site owners can't afford not to sell every rotating square inch, or to stop at a certain threshold of perceived aggravation. They do, f'real need the money, and they need to stockpile money to deal with ups and downs. And the choices are:
- Relax and chill about all the distracty blasty ads and data theft. OR
- Take opportunities to PAY sites and creators more directly whenever we can.
- Block the **** out of everyone else, and, of course, keep blockers in place anyway to minimize non-ad tracking and exfiltration.
Magazines and newspapers were paper things where the words and pictures were printed on pages. Pages didn't scroll, per se, rather, they had to be flipped using your arm, hand, wrist and fingers all working together. Don't worry if only the side of one pinky has any motility now, you can practice pages in front of a mirror to get your tik-tok flip.)
Pages don't go away because batteries, and don't squirm around while you're reading because the ads are printed with the same ink as the words and pictures. And the paper things don't blast audio when you read them in the quiet-car on the commuter train.
Commuting is something old people did when there were jobs for regular pay in offices where you could plausibly ignore bae's calls and texts because meetings.
Offices were facilities where rodents were trained to locate left over food, while other operatives scraped the bottoms of desks and chairs to complete the Human Genome project.
Meetings were things where you went to a specific rooms to work and sat down with your co-workers to speak NSFW jokes that would have been logged in chat, and to enhance teamwork and exchange Covid.
Regular Pay was what you got before gig hustles, so you didn't have to co-rent someone's basement and wash in abandoned shopping malls until the meter inspector missed a bribe that one time, and shut off the water (and then called the power guy) and then... geeze, it was back to grandma's. Again.
Washing was what you did before Lume all-body-part deodorant, applied like frosting, so the neighborhood dogs don't mistake you for rotting fish, killed by paper mill runoff. See Above...
What we DON'T have to do is let web sites make us feel bad for protecting ourselves from the general ruination of web experience. There's no tort claim here, no provable harm one way or the other. Do what's right for you.
They're getting paid, unless you worked for Sports Illustrated, Vice, Buzzfeed News, and Deadspin among others.
The more people that run ad blockers, the more likely your favorite sites are going to end up behind a paywall. Good content sites require a lot of revenue to operate.
Yeah, it was always headed back around to this. The paywall used to be newsstands, bookstores, or tax funded libraries. It was always an illusion that media production and publication was free - it was never free; the cost was merely deferred and pushed around until the last sucker ended up holding the bag, and that enterprise collapsed. As @dannyyankou pointed out "Sports Illustrated, Vice, Buzzfeed News, and Deadspin among others." And I'll add DP Review (for which Miracle Max (Gear Patrol) swooped in).
When that finally happens, the true downside will be that poor folks, who can't toss dollas around for frivolous media stuff are SOL; no downcycling or redistributing digital media when you're done with it. Class divides seem to be among human-kind's worst, yet intrinsic, societal hobbies.
Same for folks rediscovering that about television programming, too. Yeah, the tech has changed, but folks up and down the production and delivery chain still gots to make a living. When you optimize cost per deliverable at scale, the price is the price, and that's @ $100 a month for broad enough range of agreeable programming. Somehow manage to defeat ads, targeting and tracking, and the free models will implode.
Early in the formation of a bubble, the **** weasels disrupted a business model, with their Streaming this, Cable-Cutting that, Crowdsourcing the other. They harvest easy venture capital and suckers' IPOs, only to find out they had NO friggin' idea what it takes to provide a pipeline and perpetually pump popular product for progressively pickier people now persnickety about pricing.
Music production and distribution? Check.
Cryptocurrency? Pfft, IDK.
When anyone offers a free lunch, just remember it's a cookbook.
Currently, I do pay for Macrumours and Ars Technica. I am also subscribed to Stratechery, AboveAvalon and Macstories. In the latter, I value the insight that the writers provide and feel they provide content that is sufficiently differentiated from what I find on more mainstream tech blogs such as TheVerge. For Macrumours, it's really the community.
I get that ads do help to keep content free, but I also feel that the internet appears to now be built on a foundation of rot. I hate multiple ad popups plus random videos playing when I am trying to read something, and I don't know how any advertiser thinks that annoying their customer is the best way of trying to get them interested in your product and buy something.
I won't shed a tear if this entire house of cards comes tumbling down, but at the same time, I don't really know what might replace it, and I can't be certain that it will be inherently better either. Like I can afford to pay for nice stuff because I do have a bit of disposable income to play around with each month (yay for singlehood) but I also realise that many people are not in the same boat as me.
Worst are these auto play videos in a small window while you just try to read an article
The bottom line here is I don't see any ads or popups, I'm fairly certain after 3 years that I'm not being tracked and apart from choosing DuckDuck Go as a search engine all I do is use Brave. Nothing else.
They have no issue taking your data and selling it. I have no issue to use ad blockers, and don’t feel sorry for one bit. When they blast us with ads, cookie pop ups, etc I refuse to see ads
Exactly, so I block all ad's. Far too much of a one way street with companies these days so is the only reasonable solution...
Q-6
I do subscribe to the sites I find useful and give me that option.
You'd be surprised (or not) how many still try and throw a shed load of ads at me.
100%!
I have no idea how people actually sbsorb the content of the piece they are reading with all that movement going on.
I cannot.
But then again… I still prefer to read books. The ones made of dead trees. No distractions… just some music in the background.
God! I'm so old fashioned! 🙂
I had been using Vinegar, but EweTube figured out a way around it (for me); hmmm. Am now using SwizzTube (from the App Store, free) but it has some irritations.