At these moments that feeling that for most people getting bombarded by ads is normal hits hard. I'm always wondering when the ride will end and uBlock Origin can't protect us any longer.

How people put up with ads is a complete mystery.

Every time I use the web using 5G data or public wifi, I regret the experience. Then I immediately turn on an adblocking VPN.

I am insulted by the so-called "modern" browser controlled and distributed by (a) companies that sell internet advertising services or (b) their business partners

The ad annoyances would not be possible but for these bloated, sluggish, omnibus programs enabling data collection, ads and tracking by default^1

Every time I have to use one of these programs to access the web it is a terrible experience. Never having visited a crack den, I cannot say whether it is similar. In any event, it's bad

Sometimes I use these browsers to access files offline or on own local network, such as MP4s and PDFs; I think maybe that is all they might be good for

As "ad blockers" depend 100% on the so-called "modern" browser I would be very surprised if "ad blockers" remain effective for much longer, maybe 5-10 years at most; I dislike making predictions but I believe the end of the "ad blocker" as browser extension is inevitable

Already this prediction is starting to come true in Chrome

1. "The message won't be shown in browsers that don't support JavaScript, because those don't need adblockers to begin with." Even just a browser that did not enable Javascript by default would suffice

It really feels like being assaulted. Watching chill content only to have some ad scream at you, does not make me want to buy your product. I actively go out of my way not to buy things advertised to me on YouTube.

Do companies even care anymore? Is everyone THAT desperate for advertising revenue?

The recent PuTTY domain squatting debacle has made me suspicious, and indeed... if you look closer, you'll notice that the owner of ublockorigin.com is also advertising his completely unrelated products in a "my other tools" section.

* Autoplay videos that preemptively take my bandwidth.

* Autoplay audio that takes over my speakers unexpectedly and interrupts other things.

* Forms of pop-ups that clutter or disrupt my tab/window control.

* Being spied-on by a system that tries to aggregate and track all of my browsing habits.

* A mostly unaccountable vector for malware and phishing sites.

* Just a genuinely horrible experience whenever a page is one part content to three parts blinking blooping ever shifting ads that would make Idiocracy blush.

They try to pretend customer resistance is just over the most innocent and uncontroversial display of ads, but it's not true, and it hasn't been for decades.

That day instead, when i opened the page 3-4 other pages opened as soon as the website loaded, all serving loud and obnoxious virus alerts, porn and some other crap. But how? I disabled popups a long time ago.

That day i found out about self-clicking ads. That day i installed an ad blocker.

It is THEM that have broken the social contract. Screw them and screw ads.

(good thing that i wasn't on dialup anymore. Anybody remember that? scam sites that would make your dialup bill go up crazy, as if you were calling a courier's help line)

The context is that the courts have found Google holds two illegal monopolies within the online adtech market [1], the remedy for which has yet to be determined. Furthermore the DoJ has sued Meta for holding one as well and that trial is now underway. [2]

I don't know about you, but to me, if the counterparty breaches a contract, that contract is now null and void. Same goes for a social contract, and if someone tries to kill me or rob me, whatever social contract we may have had, is now null and void.

Fortunately Google and Meta aren't actually taking hits out on anyone as far as I know, but the fact remains that the market makers for these online ads, are either outright convicted criminals, or being sued by the government for such. I don't see that we have any social contract to respect or allow any of this. It is right, just and moral to oppose the very existence of online advertising in my opinion, until the illegal abuses are corrected.

If the court has resolved that Google's breaking the law, how about we get an injunction ordering them to halt their ad tech business until the remedies are implemented. Why are we going so easy on them?

You don't owe crooks anything, neither do I.

This isn't about being cheap or breaking a fair deal. It's about asking that law and order be restored within American business and society. What's the point of this society, what moral justification does it have to exist as it is, if it keeps on breaking its own laws to protect the most powerful?

Now it's unfortunate that publishers (websites) get caught in the crossfire of this, they might not agree with me when I say you should oppose all online ads full stop until the problem is corrected, but they are getting screwed by Google and Meta and they would be more than happy to see justice done.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/18/court-ruling-agains... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_v._Meta

Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. There is no social contract with them. They just sell your data.

If you know what they are doing, know how to block it, and refuse to, you are complicit in making the world a worse place. Corporations are not people that should be treated with the respect you are talking about.

No it isn't. Free websites exist: Wordpress, Blogger, Wix, Weebly etc. The only "ad" they show is a static banner for their own platform, not the giant scripts Google loads for Google Ads. Neocities and Digital Ocean are $5/mo for a custom domain and hosting, theme it anyway you like.

Most "content"-focused websites like Buzzfeed, The Verge, Gizmodo etc simply embed third party content (Youtube, Vimeo, Giphy, random poll generators) instead of hosting them on their domain. Much of their content is rehashing news articles with a paper-thin layer of "analysis" on top. Then they add metric tons of ads, and throw in affilliate link garbage "product reviews" on top.

This is the dropship-ification of the web and it pretty much killed the free website culture of the Geocities/Anglefire era.

An advert is an investment: someone pays money to broadcast something and hopes that will generate awareness. Any investment is allowed to fail.

If ads weren't profitable, you wouldn't find no results for your search about which kitchen knife to buy, you would would find better, less weaponised, more relevant results. If you don't block ads then you are directly contributing to a world with more ads and less content.

And the reason that business model is viable is because people don't realize how literally valuable their attention is. And most people also think they're not heavily affected by advertising. Sites are actively exploiting this to deter competition. I would not be, in the least bit, sad to see this state of affairs end.

Those are the reasons tracker blockers were created in the first place. Advertisers went too far and now they lost control and weep.

My privacy, attention and digital security is not worth sacrificing for those greedy, unregulated people.

Literally nothing prevents a blog from having static images for sponsored content. Yet, nobody does it.

These small bloggers/websites are letting the huge ad corporations take up the butcher job and cry when people use adblock.

Google provides a way to turn off ad personalization and when i turn it off you know what i see. Scam/adult/gambling ads and these small websites/bloggers are ok with showing scams to earn 0.01cents. then where they broke the social contract.

Google/meta with all the policing of billion youtube/fb videos/posts dont have same policing for ads quality. Thats where they broke the social contract.

Yes they need to make money, one alternative, I am ok with companies using my compute to run crypto mining( or scientific worlloadw ) when i use their website instead of ads. Small companies should look out of box for money rather than employing a butcher to make money.

If the ad was delivered without cookies and without tracking, as just a stationary gif, I'd be more okay with it.

But without tracking, back in 2008/9 ish before the real estate crash, the Simpsons made a reference to the dancing cowboys ad for selling mortgages. These were the adjustable rate mortgages that went sky high shortly after closing on the house.

https://trailers.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/1f73a011-858b-418b-940...

That hasn't been true for decades. In a way the race to bottom has already finished, we are at "100% clickbait" stage. I checked it very carefully and both Android build in "news" page and Microsoft's equivalent in Win11 Weather&News Widget are just that.

Yes, there is. It's, "I ask your server for bytes, and if your server gives them to me, I interpret and display them however I wish".

The idea that someone downloading a webpage from a publicly-hosted web server could be a "freeloader" is ludicrous.

If you really must extract some form of payment from literally everyone who visits your site, you'll have to put up a paywall. Otherwise, if you give me content when I request it, I'm going to display it however I want.

> If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine

The "contract" you describe is just something you made up. I've been on the internet since the early 90s, and that has never ever ever been the deal.

Advertising is malware for your brain. I won't let it in, and no one else should either.

The actual freeloaders are the ISPs, because they don't share the profits with the networks they provide access to.

In a better world, Browsers would all be peer to peer, and share their caches end-to-end, with verifiable content hashes, so that websites don't need to provide the majority of bandwidth.

But here we are, Google not giving a fuck because they actually like being a monopoly that does not need to create a healthy ecosystem because everyone involved is paying them anyways. With resources, and with money. Who would have thought?

Read any SEO blog and you will see how absurd this claim is.

It is simply not true.

Ad networks have been that invasive since the early 2000s. They now only support more channels. It is a stone old business and literal the source of Google finances for a very long time.

At this point I’d prefer it all to disappear entirely along with the content that “can’t exist” without it. I’m pretty sure we’d be ok.

[0] Sounds dramatic, but it’s basically true.

Their behavior is abusive, and our behavior is self defense.

Let the ads networks do the hard work of 1) cleaning up their act, and 2) rebuilding trust before you worry about your end of the social contract.

[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...

You know what's even uglier? The notion that because I got access to a bit of your free content, I should then be completely fine with utterly pervasive, deeply granulated parasitic tracking, measuring, watching, spying and recording of as many of my habits as possible. This is a sick notion, an idiotically, disgustingly fucked up concept of fairness and those who subscribe to it are either deluded or neatly entrenched in earning from it.

No, nobody has any "right" to expect people to submit to utter surveillance because that person created content that they can't get enough people to pay for directly. I'd rather see any sites on the web that can't sustain themselves without such ad garbage burn and die than make it somehow punishable to evade their shitty cookies and other trash.

With that said, unlike many on HN comments, I also don't think ads should be banned.

I would care much less if tracking/personalisation was not part of the ad systems and we were just shown ads based on the content of a webpage. Actually, I am ok with stuff like sponsor segments from content creators, sponsored articles etc. There are ways to serve ads without invading privacy or making it disturbing, but modern advertising industry has chosen a different path.

There are also alternative models, subscriptions, actually buying and *owning* the content (how outdated! let's have ads instead), donations, having a "pro" version with extra optional features etc. There is important stuff in the internet (eg wikipedia) that works fine without ads at all. But if you want to scale to a billion $$$ business maybe it makes sense to rely more on ads, but I do not find this compelling as an argument for users to suffer ads or part of any social contract.

This is why I don't go as far as running sponsorblock. Yes the sponsored segments can be irritatingly repetative¹ but at least they don't result in direct commercial stalking, popups, surprise audio/video, etc, and they more directly benefit the content makers.

--------

[1] sponsor segments are actually useful for juding creators: if one I would otherwise trust starts parroting the smae script as others but trying to make it sound like they wrote it themselves ("my favourite feature is …") then I know to tone my level of trust down a notch as it is then clear their opinions have a price.

If your business model is stupid, that's not my business. I don't run your accounting department, I'm not your CFO.

Figure it out, or don't. I don't have the time to handhold every corporation I interact with and make sure they're getting their money. They are not babies, and I am not their father.

My only "ad blocker" is Firefox enhanced tracking protection and walling off Facebook (Meta, but their only app I still use is Facebook), Amazon, and Google logins to separate containers and/or apps and/or private browsing tools. I feel like this is a good ethical compromise still fills my part of the social contract. If a site wants to show me the most generic, untargeted ads, I welcome that.

They don't get my data for free, that's not part of an ethical relationship with ad networks in my mind. I am happiest to keep them in the dark and feed them junk and lies, that is all I think that they deserve.

It's fascinating how the ad networks respond to this. Several, like Admiral (to especially call out at least one offender) whine loudly that I'm using an ad blocker because they've confused targeting and tracker blocking with ad blocking and ask me to disable it. They don't even try to show ads. It seems pretty clear what their real slimy game is and I don't think they deserve to exist. Ads existed for centuries without tracking and privacy violations. Ad "common sense" up until about the 1980s was the broader the message and distribution the better; demographics and targeting was about saving money with the trade off of losing potential audiences. The more you target an ad the less you benefit from people that didn't even know your product might apply to them, or to people that might buy it for others or as gifts. "Everyone knew that."

Google is nasty in its own ways. ReCaptchas get worse. YouTube ads have several levels of hell, including interruptions in parts of videos it shouldn't interrupt, all sorts of racist and intellectually disgusting groups (including but not limited to allowing outright scams, platforming disinformation, and spreading malware) it allows to buy ads, and how much it allows those groups to serve 30 minute/1 hour/2+ hour videos as "ads". It's amazing how many ads I've felt I had to report from hate groups alone. All of that seems to background radiation for everyone with access to Google's ad networks, but the less tracking data you have the fewer targeted ads you see and the more the mask off greed feeds you terrifying things that make you wonder how humanity is okay with all this and why Google isn't seen as more of a greedy, evil company for how much of this stuff they fail to vet and continue to associate their brand with.

Show me old family friendly TV advertising staples like Clorox ads and whatever the latest cereal fad is, please, I don't mind. That's a written social contract that worked for a long time, especially because it had rules like Truth in Advertising laws and followed ethics boundaries like brand contamination by association with criminals and liars. Targeted advertising is and was a mistake. Ad networks believing private data was their new playground and revenue gold mine was a mistake. Neither of those, I think fit the old social contracts about ad-subsidized content, and I think all we can do is send a message that both of them break the spirit of the contract and it is past time for a change/fix.

But that's also maybe just me and a personal crusade at this point. I don't see a lot of people going to the sort of privacy minded extremes I have and also still not install an actual ad blocker. But that's how I'm trying to square the ethics dilemma of appreciating ad-subsidized content, but also understanding that the internet is no longer safe without some sort of privacy-minded safeguards that companies like Admiral and Google are going around and calling "ad blocking", because it is starting to interfere with their real, more lucrative, and much more evil business models.

I helped my wife with something the other day, noticed the ads everywhere, while I was sure I had installed uBlock for her in the past. Went to the Chrome's addons page, and Google apparently is automatically disabling uBlock and calling it unsupported, yet you can enable it until next time you restart Chrome. But seems Chrome is actively trying to get rid of adblockers lately.

    setTimeout(() => {

        // fuck up all future javascripts

        setTimeout = setInterval = requestAnimationFrame = () => {};
        Element.prototype.appendChild = () => { throw new Error("Blocked"); };
        document.addEventListener = () => {};
        window.addEventListener = () => {};
        Object.defineProperty(document, "readyState", { get: () => { throw new Error("No JS"); } });
        document.write = () => {};

        // fuck up canvas
        if(window.HTMLCanvasElement) HTMLCanvasElement.prototype.getContext=()=>null; 

        // fuck up webgl
        if(window.WebGLRenderingContext) window.WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up webgl2
        if(window.WebGL2RenderingContext) window.WebGL2RenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up websockets
        window.WebSocket=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}}; window.EventSource=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up popups
        window.open=()=>null;

        // ...

    }, 500);

I have been thinking about some kind of render proxy that runs all the JS for you somewhere else in a sandbox and sends you the screenshot or rendered HTML instead. Or maybe we could leverage an LLM to turn the Bloated JS garbage into the actual information you are looking for.