Your opinion on (not) blocking ads on websites

[Beamin]

I don't block ads on most sites that I frequent, like this one, but recently had to start blocking YouTube ads again. It was getting too obnoxious. I'm sorry for the loss in ad revenue for the content creators I subscribe to, but enough is enough.

What program do you use?

It seems like its making you watch ads without the 6 sec option (which was fine) or its becoming like commercials on cable TV, which I can't stand. One out of every three seconds you stare at the TV you are watching an ad. Pay 100 bucks a month for that? That's like paying an admission fee to get into best buy, which I'm sure if they could they would charge. I can't wait for the day when we have to pay for data like we do on our cell phones.

[technix]

My home PC uBlock blocked 1.7 million ads since installation, my work PC 900.000. If I'm spending 0.25 second to decide for something, if it is important or not, that is 31 days (743 hours) of my time, in the last 4-5 years. That is a lot of time. The real time will be of course smaller, but I just cannot afford it to go online without blocking ads.
Its like 10% of the features of all pages.
And I have a blocker for all the social media. I really dont care, how many people 'liked' a stuff. I dont. Go away, I'm not part of the herd.

I don't think AdBlock Pro have a statistics like this. However for me the AdBlock Pro + AAK-Cont + PrivacyBadger does kill most of the ads and social network buttons, and keep some anti adblock scripts at bay.

[MarkS]

What program do you use?

Through Google Chrome (how ironic):
AdBlock
AdBlock Plus
Privacy Badger
uBlock Origin
TamperMonkey
Link Redirect Trace (not really ad blocking, but useful)

And I am about to set up my Raspberry Pi as a Pi-Hole.

[Kjelt]

You'd think that more people would "get it" that the internet's greatest potential is supposed to be something like a "library" with a lot of "human knowledge and creativity".  Preserve it and make it accessible.  Educate.  Inform.

Ironic indeed that for instance a website like wikipedia, dedicated to this, that had millions of people contribute to collecting and displaying information without adds can barely survive.
Lets face it the internet only runs for one thing anymore and that is making money.
You can be in denial as long as you want this is not going to change anymore unfortunately.

The captchas and other "obstacles" are created to hinder webbots, software written by engineers to scavage any information possible even usernames, passwords and anything of value. Yup it is a pest but less than having the admins have to sort and clean out tenthousands of fake accounts each and every week.

Its the engineers that created the internet and the engineers that ruined it, so there is where you have to complain, engineers that do commercial work on the internet and the engineers that run illegal activities on the internet incl. The cybersoldiers from ten countries.

What is even worse in my eyes is the fake information and untrue theories popping up.
Before the 1600s only the elite could read and write and maintain valuable information. Luckily we are passed that era but unfortunately every dumbo can now share his disillusional theories and fake info, even whole commercial companies are setup to sent out fake information so people are again back in the dark ages, we all should be very carefull where we get our information and from who before we are re-transmitting crap and become part of the problem ourselves.

[apelly]

block ads, sure, but also re-arrange broken websites and remove other unwanted content.

[technix]

You'd think that more people would "get it" that the internet's greatest potential is supposed to be something like a "library" with a lot of "human knowledge and creativity".  Preserve it and make it accessible.  Educate.  Inform.

Ironic indeed that for instance a website like wikipedia, dedicated to this, that had millions of people contribute to collecting and displaying information without adds can barely survive.
Lets face it the internet only runs for one thing anymore and that is making money.
You can be in denial as long as you want this is not going to change anymore unfortunately.

The captchas and other "obstacles" are created to hinder webbots, software written by engineers to scavage any information possible even usernames, passwords and anything of value. Yup it is a pest but less than having the admins have to sort and clean out tenthousands of fake accounts each and every week.

Its the engineers that created the internet and the engineers that ruined it, so there is where you have to complain, engineers that do commercial work on the internet and the engineers that run illegal activities on the internet incl. The cybersoldiers from ten countries.

What is even worse in my eyes is the fake information and untrue theories popping up.
Before the 1600s only the elite could read and write and maintain valuable information. Luckily we are passed that era but unfortunately every dumbo can now share his disillusional theories and fake info, even whole commercial companies are setup to sent out fake information so people are again back in the dark ages, we all should be very carefull where we get our information and from who before we are re-transmitting crap and become part of the problem ourselves.

It takes a bit of practice and not-quite-legal-here-as-of-now censorship bypassing techniques to cross-reference the information. However citogenesis which is common and even intentional now makes cross referencing tedious and unreliable.

A lot people are lying and trying to cover it using citogenesis. When everything we can see are lies the society would collapse, and WWIII may commence.

[WastelandTek]

Before the 1600s only the elite could read and write and maintain valuable information. Luckily we are passed that era but unfortunately every dumbo can now share his disillusional theories and fake info,

oh man, you got that right

Many of us are old enough to remember when the internet was largely an academic phenomenon.  And even after that, one had to assemble a computer system, get their modem drivered and configured to talk to their ISP, and negotiate various vagaries of the TCP/IP stack to even GET on the internet.  Now we have whole generations who have known nothing but plug-and-play and every asshole-retard-pervert on the planet is out there with a megaphone.  A true tragedy of the commons.

[Beamin]

What program do you use?

Through Google Chrome (how ironic):
AdBlock
AdBlock Plus
Privacy Badger
uBlock Origin
TamperMonkey
Link Redirect Trace (not really ad blocking, but useful)

And I am about to set up my Raspberry Pi as a Pi-Hole.

A pihole?

The worst site is yahoo. It is ALL ads. Search for the windows 10 cd image. The image is free from Microsoft, EVERY link on the first page that is not an ad is trying to charge you for a free download. So after you scroll through the ads at the top bottom and sides of the page every link is actually an ad. Run the same search on google and after the 2 subliminally marked but still marked, ads you get 10 free download search results.

The other thing that drives me nuts is when the text you are trying to read is squished into a narrow column on the screen with junk all around it. Something is wrong with your site when the actual article you came there to read is just a short blurb with click bait all around. No I don't need to learn one simple trick that saves me money that car insurance companies hate. If it was that good of a trick it wouldn't be published in an ad. Just click your age to begin! where the whole thing is one link so you are not really clicking on anything.

Another bad site I won't click on quora. You see the article for about 3 seconds then a box appears asking for your email and setting up an account, with n way to close it. Once I did make an account luckily it was to a junk mailbox because they send several emails a day even though I unclicked the promotions box.

Has anyone here actually bought something much less opened up a spam email that they weren't planning on buying? Some people must other wise they wouldn't do it, but then again a lot of companies bundle in advertising packages which includes "direct marketing".

[SeanB]

At least the Gmail spam filter is good, and I do not use my other email accounts out randomly, though they also have a nice set of greylists and spamassasin on them as well from my ISP.

[madires]

My take on ads is that I block Flash (annoying as hell, and always a security problem) and also use a plugin to block user tracking. The tracking blocker blocks ads with built-in tracking too, of course. I don't mind "normal" ads, but tracking is something I really don't like. Unfortunately most companies making money with ads don't get the difference between an ad blocker and a tracking blocker.