Ah this brings back the memories of the race to close pop-ups as you can hear your parents coming home. For every one you close, three pop up to take it’s place. You can hear the key in the lock. Sweat pouring down your face you finally do it, you hit the last X and nothing new pops up. You have defeated the pop-ups… this time.
All the better to track you with so you have no choice but to agree and agree to their arbitration clauses if you want to use their and their competitors’ products with no alternative to avoid it. Sometimes you can’t even use the mobile site when so many services and businesses have flat out broken their mobile sites just to force the app. I don’t like DuckDuckGo’s browser but I use it to block trackers in the background.
This is correct. I use ddg for the same reason, and the “Desktop site” option for those little shits that broke their mobile site to force the app. If that option doesn’t work, I leave the site.
I found that Firefox mobile with adblocker solves 100% of my advlock issues, and usually fixes format and display issues with websites. Half the websites I view on chrome mobile don’t even fit on my screen anymore!
Last time I tried ff mobile, it was sluggish, and had no extensions. I’m guessing they fixed those issues? I like ddg mobile browser well enough, but I’d love to use ff on my mobile, too. And, yes, I did notice those formatting issues. I thought it was just bad design, but it’s the chrome engine? Interesting. Not at all surprising, though, but interesting.
Yes, typical screens from these years, from a user who, as a newbie in the Internet, clicked on these beautiful banners and animations that were on certain pages with nice freeware stuff, screensavers, games, funny Powerpoints, etc… Nowadays these things do not appear and you can only notice that the PC goes every time slower and you know that you belong to the big family of the botnet community.
I have spent a lot of time around a lot of IT workers and I am literally the only person I’ve ever seen on a project that has an ad blocker installed in their browser.
Honestly, just don’t go to that part of the Internet unless you absolutely have to. YouTube is a great resource for information, but it sucks as entertainment.
That sounds like a you problem, honestly. Tons of great channels out there for basically any interest. Do you just, like, only ever look at the front page without logging in? Like just at the absolute lowest common denominator clickbait stuff?
How did you get that from that? You said it sucks for entertainment, I said it doesn’t and you get from that that I can’t fathom not being on YouTube 24/7?
Because the uploaders are doing it for free and it’s been working the way it currently has been, free for 20 years.
If YT had made it their monetization scheme to charge users for an account - by all means. They did not, they set up the expectation of their product that it is free*.
with ads, which they show on repeat and do nothing but waste the users time. There’s no reason why we can’t use an adblock. If the uploader or YT wants compensation, they have ways of obtaining that, either via donations, patronship, or premium accounts.
There is no reason that YouTube should suddenly be for pay or forced ads to use it. If they wanted that, they should have started out like that. If they wanted to not run at a loss, they should have planned for that. They did not, and it’s not on the users to suddenly make up for that shortsightedness.
Tl;Dr, while you can set up a foundation and decide to change it decades later doesn’t mean anything. The expectation from the users has already been set.
But YouTube DOES have advertising and they have had advertising for a decade, everyone that uploads content knows this and accepts it and in many cases is able to monetize their own content. You are arguing that you are entitled to use third party software to personally avoid ads, and your only argument for it is that you’ve been doing it a long time.
Then google should have done a better job vetting the ads so they don’t have malicious redirects or malware so that users wouldn’t feel the need to run adblocks to be safe.
In fact, Google as the most pervasive advertiser should probably have done that for all ads. I imagine if they weren’t so terrible, ad-blocks wouldn’t be so prevalent.
It shouldn’t necessarily be free, but the information about whether or not I’ve seen their ad is privileged. AdBlock detection is an invasion of my privacy and therefore AdBlock blocking must be circumvented.
You forgot the endless popups in the 2000s, which led to every browser integrating a popup blocker since then (and which often fail to stop actual malicious popups, no less)
Yes, in these years are a lot of pop ups, pop unders among other crap in some pages, but normally in most pages there was, apart of an ocassinal Banner not much else to justify an adblocker. But nowadays, between ads, clickbaits, cookie consent, adblocker detections and ant-adblocker, paywalls and other shit like these, you need a lot of extensions and scripts if you don’t want that the page fills your browser and HD with all kind of PUPs and unwanted scripts, apart of an ad/trackerblocker. It’s a cats and mouse game between companies which want to track and profile you with all kind of dirty tricks, and the user and devs continuos searching contrameasures to show them the middle finger.
Once I was using a girlfriend’s laptop and I told her very casually “I’m adding an adblock” when she replies me “no don’t block them, I like them because sometimes I find nice offers in the ads” and I froze. I wasn’t expecting that and I was so baffled like “what do you mean you like them, how do you live seeing more ads than what you originally came for” lol
I once had a user whose PC would freeze every time they tried to see their desktop. Like, you minimise something full screen and the PC would freeze for a few minutes and crawl while the desktop was in view.
Turns out they had more than 4,000 items on their desktop.
That day I learned where Windows puts icons that don’t fit on the desktop (it stacks them all on the first icon’s place, lol). And this wasn’t even the problem they called about! They were just grumpily blaming Microsoft and working around it for years.
I guess my point is computer illiterate/belligerent people will find a way around the problems they cause and just blame something/someone else.
I used this scene in a cybersecurity training session. I knew it got the point across, when our resident ad-clicker asked me for advice to avoid that situation.
E: she asked for advice for her home computer, as she didn’t understand that “at home and at work” meant “at home and at work with any device, not just work’s”
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