Here’s a rant from Charles White, AKA Cr1TiKaL, AKA penguinz0, about the pain of using the web without an ad-blocker.
I have dialed in my ad-blocker so that the only time I see the damn things is when using my iPhone, when they make some sites unusable.
“There’s a few things that everyone knows human beings can’t live without water, air, a nice smile. But there’s actually something that’s often overlooked that’s a necessity for life on this planet, and it’s an ad blocker when using the worldwide web.”
He made the mistake of turning off adblock to look at something…and unleashed an unspeakable horror!
“It’s just a massive headache, just this visual nuisance, all this clutter with an inundation of ads that seems like it’s some kind of scene from a 90s movie where you get hacked, where it just has, like, ‘Virus Detected!'”
“If you try and watch a video on some of these mainstream media sites, you get an ad every 2 or 3 seconds, and I’m not exaggerating. I don’t mean you get a banner ad, I mean you get a full 20 to 30 second video ad that pauses your video to play that ad. So a 2-minute video that I was trying to watch about a bobblehead heist ended up taking over 10 minutes, and I still didn’t even finish the video.”
“It is absurd, it’s unusable.”
“I would argue it’s like a basic human right at this point to have an ad blocker when using the internet. It is that fucking atrocious.”
He then demonstrates, and it’s every bit as horrifying as described. “This can’t be legal.”
He mentions YouTube’s war on ad-blockers, which I seem to have defeated with a combination of scripts.
Which sites do you particularly find unusable without adblock?
This entry was posted on Monday, March 18th, 2024 at 8:44 PM and is filed under Military, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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8 Responses to ““The Internet Is Unusable Without Ad Block””
Simple. I don’t turn off ad block unless it’s a site I trust, visit regularly and want to support…those are few and far between.
If I go to a site for an article just because someone linked to it and they demand that I turn off ad block to read the content, I just close the tab and move on to the next. I don’t need to read their stuff that much and I already have a general idea of what they were saying from the content of the site that linked them. I don’t need the details enough to endure the incessant, obtrusive ads.
Their content isn’t interesting, insightful or groundbreaking enough for me to endure that, so, no thanks.
I use the Brave browser and the Proton VPN on my tablet. Both have ad block capabilities. If that isn’t enough, I can use my desktop that has the Pale Moon browser. That seems to block more junk, but can also break some website functionality.
Sailorcurt: “If I go to a site for an article just because someone linked to it and they demand that I turn off ad block to read the content…”
In this case I copy the full url, open a new tab and paste the url following “https://removepaywall.com/” (no quotes, obviously). Granted you have to be motivated enough to read the thing, but RemovePaywall works most of the time to deliver the article.
On Android, look for a PlayStore app called “Reading Mode”. This places a small “bug” on the side of your phone’s screen (which can be irritating until you get used to it) so that when you open a webpage you just click the “bug” and it extracts only the page’s text and leaves everything else behind. You get a readable scroll of the article’s text and nothing else.
These two things have made my browsing a lot more satisfying and stress free. Maybe these are well known but I considered them worthwhile to share.
Don’t have an ad blocker on my school computer because they own the hardware we use. Found a great website built by another teacher, with all sorts of cool activities but… she makes money off her work by allowing ads. It is almost impossible to do or find anything quickly since at any given time there are four ads visible, including a pop up video, one embedded between rows of text, one covering the bottom of the screen, and one embedded in the sidebar. It’s a nightmare. Scroll down and there are more embedded in the text.
I don’t use an ad blocked. I do tend to be very selective of what sites I visit because of the problem with ads, and therefore I don’t tend to have problems. But, I admit I am limiting my sources.
However, I’ll note a similar phenomenon that I think is much worse. I can no longer pick up my cellphone without tons of notifications about things I don’t give a shit about. I turned off notifications for various applications, but now the OS just provides notifications. And it isn’t just my cellphone, windows on my work computer notifies of me of every little thing that happened within the company. Someone accessed a file I was looked at it, it will let me know. Someone wants to talk about the lunch offerings in the cafeteria, windows thinks I should know. A meeting started that I should attend, thanks for burning that behind all the unimportant information.
There is not a hell bad enough for the marketing genius that decided to use every device and activity we do to get our attention.
I generally use Brave’s ad blockers and there’s a humor site I’ll visit when I’m bored that won’t show updates until I turn the ad blocker off. I’ll generally suffer through ads on YT videos, although there was one video I had to abandon because the unskippable ads were getting too long.
The ‘uBlock Origin’ browser extension on every browser I run, which atm is four. Mainly browse with Brave Browser with Brave’s filtering turned off and uBlock Origin doing the heavy lifting. I’ve been using an ad-blocking browser extension for so long now that wasn’t even aware that those intrusive ads were polluting yt vids until recently someone mention it being an issue they were having with yt.
.
Simple. I don’t turn off ad block unless it’s a site I trust, visit regularly and want to support…those are few and far between.
If I go to a site for an article just because someone linked to it and they demand that I turn off ad block to read the content, I just close the tab and move on to the next. I don’t need to read their stuff that much and I already have a general idea of what they were saying from the content of the site that linked them. I don’t need the details enough to endure the incessant, obtrusive ads.
Their content isn’t interesting, insightful or groundbreaking enough for me to endure that, so, no thanks.
I use Brave. No intrusive ads, no popups…
I use the Brave browser and the Proton VPN on my tablet. Both have ad block capabilities. If that isn’t enough, I can use my desktop that has the Pale Moon browser. That seems to block more junk, but can also break some website functionality.
Sailorcurt: “If I go to a site for an article just because someone linked to it and they demand that I turn off ad block to read the content…”
In this case I copy the full url, open a new tab and paste the url following “https://removepaywall.com/” (no quotes, obviously). Granted you have to be motivated enough to read the thing, but RemovePaywall works most of the time to deliver the article.
On Android, look for a PlayStore app called “Reading Mode”. This places a small “bug” on the side of your phone’s screen (which can be irritating until you get used to it) so that when you open a webpage you just click the “bug” and it extracts only the page’s text and leaves everything else behind. You get a readable scroll of the article’s text and nothing else.
These two things have made my browsing a lot more satisfying and stress free. Maybe these are well known but I considered them worthwhile to share.
Don’t have an ad blocker on my school computer because they own the hardware we use. Found a great website built by another teacher, with all sorts of cool activities but… she makes money off her work by allowing ads. It is almost impossible to do or find anything quickly since at any given time there are four ads visible, including a pop up video, one embedded between rows of text, one covering the bottom of the screen, and one embedded in the sidebar. It’s a nightmare. Scroll down and there are more embedded in the text.
I don’t use an ad blocked. I do tend to be very selective of what sites I visit because of the problem with ads, and therefore I don’t tend to have problems. But, I admit I am limiting my sources.
However, I’ll note a similar phenomenon that I think is much worse. I can no longer pick up my cellphone without tons of notifications about things I don’t give a shit about. I turned off notifications for various applications, but now the OS just provides notifications. And it isn’t just my cellphone, windows on my work computer notifies of me of every little thing that happened within the company. Someone accessed a file I was looked at it, it will let me know. Someone wants to talk about the lunch offerings in the cafeteria, windows thinks I should know. A meeting started that I should attend, thanks for burning that behind all the unimportant information.
There is not a hell bad enough for the marketing genius that decided to use every device and activity we do to get our attention.
I generally use Brave’s ad blockers and there’s a humor site I’ll visit when I’m bored that won’t show updates until I turn the ad blocker off. I’ll generally suffer through ads on YT videos, although there was one video I had to abandon because the unskippable ads were getting too long.
The ‘uBlock Origin’ browser extension on every browser I run, which atm is four. Mainly browse with Brave Browser with Brave’s filtering turned off and uBlock Origin doing the heavy lifting. I’ve been using an ad-blocking browser extension for so long now that wasn’t even aware that those intrusive ads were polluting yt vids until recently someone mention it being an issue they were having with yt.
.