It's actually a substantive money saver in a shared compute environment. Running Windows RDS or VDA solutions, you can actually watch CPU and RAM reductions across the board by deploying uBlock Origin.

I wonder how much CO2 uBlock origin saved so far.

The "this is a huge waste of energy in scamming people" argument deployed against cryptocurrency is also valid for traditional spam, and most web advertising, it's just that it's not so visible any more. Google must have a datacenter worth of computers doing classification on email.

Me too. More broadly, I'd very much like an energy meter for web pages.

Courthouse i'm in has obviously locked browser extensions but there's no adblock.. i can't help but see ublock's logo in the toolbar and imagine how much bandwidth that frail network would grab back if it was there.

I agree to the point that I can't imagine using the internet without uBlock installed.

Absolute true.If you are reading this, i want to say BIG thank you mr Raymond!

I don’t install anything on my work computer that I can’t say 100% is used for work so I could never justify uBlock. It does make a HUGE difference. The web without it is a giant mess.

It's easy to justify as a security measure, given the amount of malicious ads trying to serve up exploits.

Maybe they don't browse the web either, I mean... unless it's 100% justified for work...

MSDN used to be on the web and more updated than the CD-ROMS they mailed out for subscribers.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/

It is the help program of Visual Studio and other apps.

Managers would check http://msn.microsoft.com/ which had their stocks in it.

I only used the web for work, nothing else. I didn't use my company email for newsgroups and website signups I used my Hotmail account instead that kept the spam there.

Yeah I work from home and have a personal device on my desk. I wouldn’t even check the weather on my office device!

My company installs uBlock on all laptops by default

Same here! I was pleasantly surprised when they set me up and it was already there.

Same. They do it as a security measure.

My company blocks addons on Chrome so I browse non-internal sites on Firefox just for uBlock.

Sadly on iOS there is no ublock

Reader mode is good though, when available

I've had decent luck with Blokada

The nice thing is that it's open source

FF Focus or 1Blocker work fine thou

I have never used an ad blocker and have resisted installing it many times. My thinking always was: I'd rather have a web with ads than a web in which I have to pay for content and sign up to 800 different websites with 800 different accounts.

A website that I've frequented a lot, the German news website spiegel.de, has converted to pay only mostly, and i now can't use it anymore. I am not saying that's the fault of ad blockers, but it certainly didn't help.

I have the opposite viewpoint about ads.

I don't think we should reward a business model which relies on the premise that humans like to watch ads. I never had someone tell me to drive slower because they wanted to take a closer look at a billboard. Never had I had to rewind a video because someone missed an ad. etc... etc...

Let's be honest. If someone told you to do any of the above things regularly and consistently, you would question their sanity.

But somehow it's normal for businesses to assume people like to watch ads and make it their primary income revenue. Well, sure, some companies succeeded using this model. But I don't see why this should result in me paying more attention to ads.

I don't hold the extremist position that all ads are bad or should be abolished. I have always tried to ignore ads. Adblockers automate what I normally do. And if your business model relies on me watching your ads, maybe you should reconsider your assumptions.

Nobody thinks that people wants to watch ads. The premise is that people hates opening their wallet more than what they hate watching an ad.

That premise is false. There's always money to be made by selling people's attention. They'd put ads under people's eyelids if they could. People who open up their wallets and spend money are worth even more money to advertisers. The more you pay, the more ads they want to subject you to.

The only way to get rid of them is to deny them any attention at all. They are not entitled to it under any circumstances. Drive their return on investment as close to zero as possible.

The other point to be made here is that the average revenue per user for even the most successful advertising companies (e.g. Google) is less than $1/day. That's not a huge amount of money even for someone with a low income. (From a first-world perspective. Incomes are lower in other parts of the world, but so are advertising revenues from users there.)

So the amount you would have to pay to deliver the same revenues to creators as advertising does is not very much. Especially if we could cut out the middle man so that all of what you pay goes to the content creator.

That's the biggest problem we have right now. You have someone write a news article, a million people read it, it cost you maybe a thousand dollars to write (assuming it's well-researched and not garbage clickbait), so to recover your costs you need one tenth of one cent per user.

We need a payment system which makes transactions that small efficient. And it needs to be anonymous for the buyer, because the whole point is to get rid of the tracking, right?

Fix that and you can sustainably pay <$300 and not have to see any ads all year.

> We need a payment system which makes transactions that small efficient. And it needs to be anonymous for the buyer, because the whole point is to get rid of the tracking, right?

Hopefully Monero will achieve this one day.

My monero investment is down so bad that a micro payment is all I will be able to afford

Monero is a good currency but a really bad investment. That's probably a good thing too. If its price remains stable relative to USD, we can start developing the habit of pricing everything in XMR instead. I've gotten paid in XMR for writing some quick code, it works pretty well. Now we just need to get people to sell oil barrels for XMR.

Man, that's really interesting

Looks like Monero hasn't been pumping or dumping quite as much as other cryptocurrencies, maybe that means its creators actually care about making it useful as currency rather than as a medium for ~~scams~~ "investments"

I'd love an ad-free future, but something tells me that there'll always just be too much pressure to make more ads. Hell, Amazon is pumping $10,000,000 per episode into a TV show that's arguably just a big ad for Amazon (subscribe to our TV service to watch this show, buy some socks and video games while you're here)

Yeah. The cryptocurrency space does have a lot of scams, especially coins created on top of ETH and BNB. However, there's a lot of good projects as well. Monero is everything bitcoin was supposed to have been. I think it's insane how people are wasting energy on bitcoin mining. That energy would be better spent securing Monero.

There will always be pressure to advertise. No matter what product or service you have or how profitable it is, you can always make even more money by selling your user's attention. That's why we need technology that makes it impossible to advertise to us. A browser extension that deletes elements, a video filter that deletes brands, augmented reality glasses that deletes billboards.

The sole advantage that I'll grant ad-funded services is that they tend to far more open-access than the alternatives. Bill Gates and homeless people get the same features from Facebook. The rich subsidize the poor without ever having to actually open their wallet.

Ads are still a net negative, but it's worth considering that requiring payment will price some people out, because the poor aren't usually subsidized with paid services.

I thought the premise is that you're predisposed to pay attention to ads, whether you enjoy it or not

Plenty of people like watching ads. Just go to youtube and see all the ads posted. There's whole channels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUBpIWz6bPk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTcV-7Ubzpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYFyruOvAnM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVwvmozG6-A&list=PLjHdPL8MeP...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdCYe4FoMRA

I had plenty of friends that hated Football but would throw a party to watch the ads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muyq2kMDFoA

The only ads I like watching are the Mafia City ones. It’s peak comedy.

Of course people watch ads. It is (or used to be#one reason outdoor watch the Superbowl. The world would actually be a boring place without ads. The problem is when they are over done or deliver malware.

My world would definitely not be boring without ads. I'm not even sure how to respond to such a blatantly false claim.

I honestly only know that from movies. I don't think I know anyone who actually watches these ads. I am not in America tho

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

It would be a lot easier if websites and advertisers actually worked to naturally integrate ads in a way that wasn't obtrusive.

Massive banners at the top, auto playing videos, throwing off the page layout etc are all terrible ad experiences that dominate.

I think carbon ads does it particularly well. Though I’m not sure this kind of ad would work in every case.

Greed doesn't stop. It doesnt say, 'this, but no more. our shareholders have enough'.

We'd be here with or without as blockers. It would just be worse without.

I liked the old internet where people posted content out of passion not for money. The quality has suffered and many think they have a right to get paid.

Probably there is even more content like that as there are more people in the internet. But we can't find the good content in the mountain of trash that we are drowning in. EDIT: can -> can't

It doesn't really help that the biggest search engine is also the biggest ad provider. Not exactly a great incentive to surface ad-free content.

Blame existing in an universe where evolution (that is, proliferation of whoever survives) happens.

It would be a lot safer if ad companies vetted their ads responsibly. After a third case of an ad on a perfectly reputable site trying to exploit my browser, an ad-blocker became just a standard part of network hygiene.

Every culture has a version of the children's story, such as "the goose that laid the golden egg." Somebody is given a machine that can produce seemingly unlimited wealth, and they use it without restraint until it breaks down and leaves them bankrupt.

I'd be fine with an ad-based internet if ads didn't impact performance so much. All of the ad network scripts require heaps more resources and bandwidth, and that's before accounting for malware!

I find this quite more complex than that. This is not just a different revenue source, it's a different business model.

If you don't click on ads, you don't bring any money so you night as well install an adblocker.

When your revenue source is ads, it becomes a conflicting content with your own content. You need people to stop paying attention to your content, lool at ads and deciding to leave your site for it. Ads network can also have an say on your content by controling your income source.

Paying a news website directly brings them independance and allows the site to focus on content, those 2 things are at the core of journalism.

If I were you, I would reconsider a subscription if you really liked the spiegel.

I on the other hand would prefer that all the commercial websites were honest about what they charge instead of trying to profit off manipulating me into spending money elsewhere.

The idea that there would be no open content on the web without ads is ridiculuous. Most content on the web, like the comments in this discussion, is "user"-generated and the users generating it are typically not paid at all. While less visible in search engines, there are still many websites - personal or otherwise - that have no profit motive and are provided without any charge or ads. Its not uncommon for them to get posted here.

And even for content that you'd want to pay for, ads are a bad way to pay for it because the cost to you (or the average person) is much greater than what the content creator gets out of the deal. Meanwhile, the incentives for ad-supported content creators and users are not really aligned payment is based entirely on engagement rather than any judgement of what value the user gets out of the content. There is so much spam that provides no value to the web (e.g. because the content is literally copied from elsewhere) but still exists because some people may land on the page and end up viewing ads. So many user-hostile features designed to keep users spending as much time as possible on ad-laden website.

Now back to spiegel.de you say you frequented it a lot. Does that not mean that you got any value out of it that you are willing to pay for? If not, is not being able to use it anymore really such a problem?

I feel completely to opposite, though admittedly I am a hardliner on ads (I think they're a scourge). I make every effort to eliminate and automate them out of my life. Some things I'll pay for, others I'll ad block, and others I'll simply eliminate.

Our lives are filled with so much which seeks to ensure we're constantly passively on autopilot, consistently following the path of least resistance. Putting a paywall in front of something forces you to really assess - "does this really offer me any value? Do I really want to be doing it?".

If it's not something you're willing to go through the motions to pay for, there's probably something more personally fulfilling you could be doing with your time.

The web is filled with so much rubbish that is "just good enough" to get users to sit through ads. I couldn't care less if all that ad-supported dreck goes under. In fact I'd welcome it.

You can take a look at american television to see how that works. There are more ads than actual content, and the quality of the content is... well, you be the judge of that. If someone says they won't do something because they can't pay the bills unless they finance it via ad revenue, I'm fine with that. I'm not convinced that the world is losing any value because of this. (Or put it in another way: would Gabriel Garcia Marquez have written One Hundred Years of Solitude, had he not received ad-revenue for it?)

On the other hand, while I'm extremely happy I don't have to watch random Google cr*p adverts before/during/after Youtube videos thanks to adblock, if the creator itself includes an advert in his/her video I usually watch it. That is acceptable to me, and more direct support than just unrelated ads.

I recently changed my YouTube app to one that skips creator ads. I am sure I saved way over a few hours in the last week's plus I really don't care about VPNs and mobile games. That time was 100% wasted before.

Nothing prevents a website from putting up ads relevant to its content, or ads that are generic enough that don't require tracking of their userbase's age/gender/marital status/what they had for lunch.

But if websites insist on doing this under the illusion that they can monetize their userbase to the last penny, then it's only fair for its users not to allow it and force the website into being more explicit about the monetization - via a paywall.

> has converted to pay only mostly, and i now can't use it anymore

You could, but you're not willing to pay for it. Fair enough. But a significant number of their userbase is now telling them that they're not ready to pay using their personal info. That's good feedback that their users have provided using an adblocker.

There's an alternative solution that enables people to produce content that doesn't require them to make an income through advertising or subscriptions.

It can be accomplished through higher taxes and a universal basic income.

Essentially: ensure that all people on earth have their basic needs met. A lot of people will produce incredible creative work, and it has been shown time and time again that government support of artists incubates incredible art.

How much UBI could we realistically afford right now? Keeping in mind that there'd be an incredibly huge reduction in economic productivity, since pretty much everyone hates working

I'm guessing we could actually keep people fed, but I'm wondering if we'd end up living in really crappy shacks without first world quality utilities

I dunno if I'd want a UBI utopia if it requires a 1700s-quality lifestyle

> Keeping in mind that there'd be an incredibly huge reduction in economic productivity, since pretty much everyone hates working

Would there be? There would certainly be some changes. Less desirable jobs would have to pay more. People would have more power to demand better working conditions. But the idea that the majority of beople would just be fine with "basic income" and then sit on their ass all day instead of trying to earn more to afford whatever shinies they want or just because there is something they enjoy doing. There are also a ton of bullshit jobs that really do not contribute anything - freeing up those people to do whatever they want might have a positive effect.

Eventually humanity will get to a point where automation can provide all of your needs as well as maintain that automation. On our way there, the hours worked per person should be going down.

I bet that website still has ads despite the paywall.

You could use a service like readly and pay (a little) for the content you read.

(But I must mention, your Spiegel is not covered there atm)

> a web in which I have to pay for content and sign up to 800 different websites with 800 different accounts

I can assure you that there will never be a future where that happens. Even if everyone that uses a browser installed an adblocker right now and never removed it again, if every website was paywalled, they would have to choose between closing down or unpaywalling again. Because as you say, you, and everyone else isn't going to pay to use every individual website that they visit.

So just use an adblocker. Fuck the ad industry.

Browsing the Web of 2021 with a mobile hotspot on a desktop is impossible without an ad blocker. There is so much shit on web pages now that: (a) site assume you're on a desktop and have infinite bandwidth, (b) on a mobile connection the pages take forever to complete, and (c) the pages use up all of your mobile data allowance.

I'm ethically against taking money away from people who want to generate revenue through advertising, but I have no choice if I want to view the content at all.

> I'm ethically against taking money away from people who want to generate revenue through advertising

Why do you say that? They're the ones who sent you HTML for free. They assumed you'd look at the ads, but you have absolutely zero moral obligation to validate that assumption. If you have a magazine, you can totally rip out the ads and throw them in the trash. If you have a newspaper, you can cut out the articles you care about and discard everything else.

Use the ad blocker and be proud. If anything, you're helping free the web from the scourge that is advertising. If they want money, they're totally free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of serving a free web page.

The assumption is that most are not ripping the ads out of the magazine without seeing them at all. The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it.

You can make all sorts of loose statements like this then draw the line where you feel it’s wrong. It will still be arbitrary.

To continue stretching examples. Developers chose to release software as is. Through some combo of your reasoning above, is it okay to pirate/crack software? Most of the time HNers will be against software piracy but for blocking ads.

I care more about the obvious social contracts in place and the obviousness of creators are supporting what they created by showing ads or charging for their software.

Another example was people getting mad at someone for wanting to split a Stratchery subscription. One big point was it’s against the TOS. Some of those people surely block ads and would not care if TOSs say you can’t. I actually find the Stratchery situation sympathetic because I believe the person was unemployed. Similarly if you have a super old computer or limited data dude to financial constraints. Yeah, that is an exception where the morals make sense.

However going against Stratchery, a pretty small time operation by splitting the cost amongst some people for one login is obviously not cool for the average middle class on up person.

> If they want money, they're free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required.

This is not true in the real world. The amount of backlash you can get for doing that will almost never be worth it. False positives are an issue as well.

Similarly, software that requires you to always be online and aggressively verifies you have paid for said software which ends up creating some friction, is frowned upon too.

Or Stratchery suspending you or sending similar headers for logging in via IPs far from one another. The false positives would be lead to a Streisand Effect

Print ads don't have any security risks, they don't track you, they're less distracting, and they don't cost you anything extra like bandwidth. I think your analogy might hold up if ads on the web weren't so intrusive.

The analogy doesn’t need to be perfect. Every excuse can be used. Others can have excuses for why they morally believe pirating software developed by you, your friends, etc, is warranted. The end result is still having your work being used without compensation.

I don't see not viewing ads on websites for products I'll never buy as equivalent to pirating software, especially considering the additional costs of compromised security, bandwidth, etc, but it's something to think about.

I'm in the camp where I'd gladly pay a fair cost to use a site, if there were a standard way to do so. The challenge here is that many people only view any given site on an ad hoc basis rather than being a devotee who's willing to pay for a subscription. If someone figures out how to solve this, especially the UI and adoption aspects, they'll be a billionaire.

>> The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it

This is the antithesis of what I want the internet to be, so opt me out of that, please, because I'm going to come hither and taketh in that which I care to taketh in, that and nothing else.

People forget that browsers are called user agents because they are supposed to operate on behalf of the user. That includes displaying the content how the user wants it and not how the server operator wants it.

Aren’t computers mean to be used the way the computer owner and user wants it to be used?

Then there should be no problem for HNers who block all ads if hypothetically some situation comes out where all paid software and SaaS is able to be used freely on a person’s computing device. Since they should operate on the person’s behalf.

I doubt most HNers who directly or indirectly work on software/SaaS/apps, and live off that income, would be cool with this.

Exactly! The browser exists to serve us, not to enable some company's abusive business model.

Right. So if there comes a day soon where every single online subscription service and SaaS is able to be used for free, we should be able to use all of it for free. The browsers exist to serve us. Not what some view as abusive business models.

I’d still be interested to know if you would be fine with pirating/getting around all paywalls and all SaaS app logins, and all other paid online things with the basis of the browser is there to serve us.

Whenever this stuff comes up on HN. there’s the initial bits of anti ad self righteousness but never a continuation to see if the general ethos continues outside ads.

My purpose of all this is to point out the inherent hypocrisy. Not every ad has spyware or adware. Are those ads unblocked? No. I understand it would take far too much time to unblock specific ads. Which doesn’t help the point of being morally in the right.

Same with disagreeing with being able to crack/pirate all paywalls and SaaS subscriptions, et al. If the browser is to serve you.

Sure that’s cool. If you develop software for a company. Or any one you know develops software and charges for it. I hope you’re equally okay with you or your friends livelihoods going away if all people decide to think like you and find charging for any software to be the antithesis of what. They want the world to be. Usually this isn’t the case.

> The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it.

Nobody ever signed any social contract. You can't even navigate to the page's actual terms of service without being subjected to ads and surveillance capitalism. As if anyone even reads those terms to begin with.

Their invalid assumptions are their problem. Nobody else needs to worry about this. It's their business model, it's up to them to make it work. If they send us ads, we're gonna delete them. It's up to them to deal with that fact.

> is it okay to pirate/crack software?

Of course. DRM is a defect and cracks literally fix products. "Pirates" have the superior version of the software. You'd think it would be the other way around. Pretty sad.

> Most of the time HNers will be against software piracy but for blocking ads.

I'm against copyright itself. "Piracy" is not a concept that should even exist. It's how things would naturally be without the illusions provided by copyright.

I should not have used software. I should have said apps, software, and services. Copyright is not what I was thinking of. I was including SaaS and so on in my thinking when I wrote my comment.

So take out copyright. Any charging of any digital service, subscription, et al, can have similar morally backed reasons to get around paying + getting everyone to get around paying. Off top of head. World is inherently unfair. Being poor is unfair. Charging money for digital subscriptions keeps the rich, rich. Keeps poor people out. We should be for figuring out how to get around all digital payments for digital services + subscriptions.

> nobody ever signed a social contract

That’s not how social contracts work. Social contracts aren’t meant to be signed. There’s no signed contract for person A to do any of the following in public: not to purposefully smell bad enough to have peoples gag reflexes kick in, for Person A not to repeatedly throw up in their hands and very dramatically repeatedly consume it all again, or for person A to laugh to themselves and loudly comment to themselves about how ugly or silly or { insert any other negativity } people near them are.

I can give other examples that are digitally focused too.

in general nearly all people adhere to a number of social contracts and expect the same of others.

This might be a bit off topic, but do you mind elaborating on your anti-copyright philosophy?

Not at all. This is something I'm passionate about.

Copyright made sense before computers existed. Back then it was still possible to infringe copyright. For example, people could copy books by hand. However, the scale of such operations was small. To operate at massive scales you had to be a major industry player and own machinery such as printing presses. It's trivial to enforce copyright against such huge targets. Therefore, artificial scarcity was easy to create and it made sense.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Networked computers exist and everything is data. Filling up an entire hard drive with copies is as easy as copy paste. It's trivial to duplicate information and transmit data to other computers. People now have worldwide networked computers in their pockets. People now infringe copyright on a massive scale without even realizing what they are doing simply because technology has changed the way people perceive copyrighted works. Nobody really thinks before downloading stuff and sending it to their friends even though this is unauthorized copying and therefore copyright infringement. Nobody thinks before editing some picture and making a funny meme out of it even though it's a derivative work. Nobody thinks before reposting someone else's work on social media. Copyright infringement has become natural.

The truth is computers make a mockery of copyright. The fundamental notion behind copyright is artificial scarcity. Computers make data infinitely abundant. It's incredibly subversive technology. Before computers you needed expensive hardware and logistics to produce and distribute a million books or a million records. With computers it's a trivial task. The world has been changed forever and there's no way to go back.

They're definitely trying to rewind the clock though. To create artificial scarcity of data in the 21st century, free computing must be destroyed. We must not be allowed to run arbitrary software or make our own software. Hacking as we know it must come to an end. They must lock down computers so that we can only run software they approve, software that obeys them instead of us, software that only copies when they authorize. This is completely aligned with government interests in banning civilian use of cryptography.

I say computers are too important to allow them to become mere tools of aging industries and oppressive governments. Copyright makes no sense in the 21st century, it's time to abolish it. The alternative is to give up our computing freedom. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than live in such a bleak future.

Copyright is also a tool that corporations use against other countries via political pressure by the US government. These corporations are extremely rich, they can afford to lobby the US government to the point it applies pressure on foreign nations. I've posted about this before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946738

I wish I could find one particular news article I remember reading years ago. It was about some MPAA official who came to my country to lobby the government on their copyright interests. Some journalist approached him and asked him point blank if he thought this should be a priority in a country that fails to offer even basic infrastructure such as sanitation to its entire population. Obviously he had no response.

Copyright holders also lobby governments in order to extend copyright duration indefinitely. They have effectively robbed us all of our public domain rights. I've written about this before too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29426856

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28813563

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28518061

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28413192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22757439

You can see everything else I've posted about this using this query:

https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=copyright%20mathe...

Again to clarify I am including SaaS, paywalls, subscriptions, everything. When I say pirating. I may be using the wrong word. My bad. Are you fine with everything code related having work arounds? I’m not familiar enough with copyright to know how it relates to getting around a SaaS monthly subscription.

I wouldn't mind ads if there was any resemblance of self-restraint what they put on there. But yes, the web has become absolutely unbearable without blockers. I guess some big sites were always bad, but now just everything is plastered.

I recently used Youtube with all the ads for the first time in a long while and its just abhorrent. From extremely low quality minutes long text-to-speech ads, some that make questionable/dangerous (and in my country illegal) health claims, videos getting interrupted more often than in the old tv days to entire sponsored music videos played before the music I actually wanted to listen to.

Maybe it is some wicked engagement strategy so people have to constantly pay attention and skip ads manually every few minutes instead of being able to just let YouTube run in the background on autoplay ...

Two things about YouTube: (1) they are different to most sites in that they'll let you pay to remove the ads (which I do), but (2) for some reason all the ads they showed me I actually found very useful and were for products I genuinely wanted - if I had infinite time in my life I would have watched the ads, but I don't, so (1).

I'm with you on the last part. I've avoided using an Adblocker for years and finally caved in a few weeks ago.

I've always wanted an opt-in blocker. One that is off by default but on the worst offender sites can be turned on by the click of a button. This has never been possible easily but I haven't looked in around five years.

Would you be against using junk mail sent to your house as fuel, or padding in a box, any other use that's not "Reading the ad"? Is that different?

Yeah, it's one of those life-changing projects. It's so important and trusted that it should actually be integrated into the browsers themselves so that it can do its job even more effectively. Sadly, conflicts of interest prevent that. It should probably come pre-installed with every browser instead.

I wish iOS Firefox had support for it. Seems Apple doesn't allow extensions. I told all my friends about uBlock Origin but so many of them use iPhones. I still install it on every browser I come across and everyone is happy with it.

I wish there was a uBlock app for iOS, similar to other ad-blockers that are available on iOS. I'd be willing to pay for such an app and be able to use any browser on iOS (including FF) w/o worrying about ads.

The new AdGuard iOS beta has a web extension component and it is now very close to ublock in terms of functionality. So it’s coming soon. Between AdGuard and NextDNS I don’t see hardly any ads.

I use Firefox Focus and the Lockdown Privacy app on iOS. Not the same experience but achieves a good result.

uBlock + PiHole = dream team.

I was surprised to see how crappy the internet has become when I accidentally left my pihole disabled the other day. Maybe we should just reset it (the internet)? Start over with a new kind of browser without ads, extensions, no JS, no CSS etc.. just a dumb renderer. The current bloat is getting embarrassing.

This is my stack too, at home.

Pi-Hole is blocking so much telemetry in my phone that I am honestly afraid of using it outside my network. I don't even take internet with me, because I want my phone to be somewhat safe as the only reason I have one are banking apps and authentifications.

I'm honestly afraid what will happen if this project dies.

And it will die...all good digital things die one day.

We'll start again with all kinds of half broken forks and fakes....scarry..

Some lists the project uses are maintained for longer than than ublock or even adblock extensions were a thing.

I remember back when building your own pihole was the only way to go and opera just rolled out native link blocking.

It won't die, only change maybe