Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

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.

Don't forget those annoying floating ads and the tiny X that doesn't actually close the ad

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

tbh it feels like most people I know use chrome or even edge without any extensions

How do I do that on iPhone?

Unlike when your friends or parents might raw dog, you can put that adblock condom on their computers for them.

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.

Ad tech IS the tracking, so if you're not blocking ads, you're not actually refusing said tracking. I think you might be conflating cookies with being tracking (they are), but that's only a part of it.

I use them on my personal systems but not my work laptop. I have to use an ad blocker on my phone because so many sites, including "respected" news organizations, are an absolute mess when ads are enabled.

It's bad when you go to one of the top news company's websites in the US and there's a pile of content covered by advertisements. I guess I didn't need to read those sentences anyway.

I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.

There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.

There are times that people can't throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don't have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of "render those advertisements".

I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.

If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn't mind Trojans! /s

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.

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.

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.

Remember the mosquito banner? The one with the annoying mosquito sound?

I remember.

Yeah early days were really hard.

Is there a big advantage to a pihole in addition to ublock?

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.

https://privacytests.org/

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.

Had my boss trying to grab a pdf (crosswords, colouring pages, printed for kids in a pub) while using Chrome without any adblock extensions.

The volume of ads, trick links, and shite on that one website in particular was outstanding. She asked me if a link was OK to click. Promptly pointed out she should use Firefox (which has unlock and other extensions added) instead of chrome as the link she had clicked was for some sketchy software and not a crossword.

I can't imagine the internet without ad blockers. Ublock is a great addition, removing elements from pages is a huge advantage. So many sites sling rubbish wherever they can.

Do you only use a DNS ad-blocker or also a client-side ad-blocker?

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

Wow! Pranks from 2004 are ads in 2024.

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.

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"

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 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.

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.

I mean, many (several?) sites tried optional subscriptions where you pay to get rid of ads, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Judging by the fact that most sites that have subscriptions instead of ads use pay walls.

People have come to expect free access, so if you can easily use an ad blocker, why would you choose to pay to remove the ads that a blocker removes for free.

The problem is they’re trying to double down on infinite spam by implementing infinite subscriptions alongside it.

Security knowledge and ethical concerns are two separate things. Whether we like it or not, we pay online creators through private data we must give to entities who will use it against our best interests.

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.

"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

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

That's is indeed a pure negative - for the users. The site and the the mobile carrier both got paid.

Yes yes, capitalism good.

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

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.

This is still an issue today.

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.

Or learn about hot Milfs in your area.

none of my classmates or teachers use adblockers. i didn't expect this in a university. most don't even know what i'm talking about when i recomment ublock...

Had a front end dev who didn't use adblocker.