I don’t know if it’s just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It’s getting to the point where adblocking isn’t an optional luxury - it’s a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.
Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.
I use an ad blocker on my notebook, always have. When I browse on my phone I am often shocked by the amount of ads on websites. I clicked on a link from Lemmy yesterday and the website was 95% ads. It was one sentence of the story followed by one or two large ads, then another sentence of the story and another one or two ads. The whole site was like that. I don’t want to read your story that badly. Unfortunately, many of the ads had already impressed by the time I left so the shitty website got their $0.001 of ad revenue from my visit.
This is why iPhones are an immediate nonstarter for me. Can’t run Firefox with ublock origin on iPhone while you can on Android.
AdGuard has a good Safari plugin. There’s also stuff like Consent-o-Matic for cookie popups and Amplosion to get rid of AMP pages (if they’re still a thing - completely forgot about them after installing Amplosion).
I run uBlock Origin on my desktop in Chrome. I use the Chrome browser on my Pixel.
You’re on borrowed time until the end of the month:
RIP uBlock Origin? Google Proceeds With Plan to Shake Up Chrome Extensions
Yup. The enshitification for profit of their stuff is proceeding apace. I suspect that they’re going to get some push back from the EU given how utterly fucking shitty their ad vetting is but we’ll see.
Why do you not adblock on your phone?
AdAway is good and has both root and non-root modes
Firefox now supports uBlock Origin on mobile too
No solution for Apple I’m aware of though, since it’s forced to be a shitty reskin of Safari
iPhones have had AdGuard for years and it works on apps outside the web browser as well.
Plus you can configure to default to reader mode. Generally no ads, no stupid formatting, just what you want to read!
Unfortunately that’s why so many sites have their “click to continue” button, so I don’t see the full article unless I click to hide reader mode
And has for a few years now.
Yea, but doing it at the system level is WAY better. I’m always rooted, so I can’t speak for how well it works on non-root phones. But my phone is like 99% ad-free even across apps, the Google news feed and browsers incl Chrome
Between that on my phone, network level ad blocking, and ad blocker browsing extensions I can go days or even weeks without seeing an ad. And when I do, it’s usually because it was on a TV at a store or something and rarely the odd ad that somehow leaked through
deleted by creator
Thank you! Had no idea this existed. Just downloaded and donated so you just helped the dev!
The last time I looked there wasn’t anything worth running on my Pixel. I haven’t looked since.
The website didn’t get money from views. They only get money from clicks. The ad company, though, yup.
I actually had a similar experience with the BBC today, of all sites!
Oh…I thought they got a fraction of a cent for impressions and more for clicks.
Well, it’s been a while since the last time I looked into it. Maybe things have changed, but I doubt it.
Video platforms may operate that way, though.