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

Tragedy of the commons

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.”

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.

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 $$$

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.

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?

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

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.

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

Yes yes, capitalism good.

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.

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.

I suspect 98% of Apple users don’t block ads