And I'm one or them. Every time I turn it off things become legitimately unusable.

Proud to be part of a growing tradition.

I still whitelist sites with sensible, unobtrusive ads. Axios for instance, which are mostly 1st party. But that’s increasingly the exception.

I had to rip APNews out when Google Ads tried to serve me malware.

Praise be

Also, aren’t most folks using apps these days? I have elders and younger relatives that literally don’t know how to use a web browser.

I wouldn’t want to be a web publisher right now…

The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”

Lol. Fuck off.

Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone's time.

Yeah. As if hacking into someone's mind is their right. Talk about entitlement...

I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

It's an interesting stance, but ask yourself, where is the line between advertising and promotion or sponsorship.

I think that requiring that advertising is factual might be a better way to address the issue.

Ultimately as a society we haven't come up with a better way to communicate the existence of products and services to each other, and we've been using advertising for 5,000 years or so.

The oldest advertisement in the world found in Thebes, Egypt | Did you know that

Did you know that first ever written advertisement took place around 3000 BC? The particular sign appeared on the ruins of the Egyptian city of Thebes.

Trip and Travel Blog (tripandtravelblog.com)

Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception

Obligatory xkcd 624:

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.

Once the data enters my network it's my fucking data and I can do with it what I please.

Adblockers the heroes we need.

Marketing is society's cancer.

When a company has a good product/idea, they grow organically. If I'm looking for something, it should be enough to have information available through manufacturers websites and customer opinions, there is ZERO need to shove ads down people's throats, which usually translates onto overconsumption and buying the best marketed (not the optimal) product.

So yeah, fuck marketing in general, big corporations greed and their entitlement to control the web.

It's not about blocking ads for me, that's a happy side-effect, it's about owning your computing and taking the necessary protection against tracking. Before "ad blockers" existed I spent a lot of time manually configuring my browser to block websites from connecting me to unnecessary, potentially intrusive third party servers, after all it's my browser and my internet connection. Now uBlock Origin does that for me, it's not an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum content blocker and the user should have the final say on what they connect to. I think we should stop calling them ad blockers.

Likewise, I can prevent anything from even entering my network that I don't want on it.

the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads

Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit

But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post

Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).

The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened