I don’t know if it’s just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It’s getting to the point where adblocking isn’t an optional luxury - it’s a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.

Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.

  • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
    20·
    6 months ago

    I use an ad blocker on my notebook, always have. When I browse on my phone I am often shocked by the amount of ads on websites. I clicked on a link from Lemmy yesterday and the website was 95% ads. It was one sentence of the story followed by one or two large ads, then another sentence of the story and another one or two ads. The whole site was like that. I don’t want to read your story that badly. Unfortunately, many of the ads had already impressed by the time I left so the shitty website got their $0.001 of ad revenue from my visit.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
      161·
      6 months ago

      When I browse on my phone I am often shocked by the amount of ads on websites.

      This is why iPhones are an immediate nonstarter for me. Can’t run Firefox with ublock origin on iPhone while you can on Android.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
      10·
      6 months ago

      Why do you not adblock on your phone?

      AdAway is good and has both root and non-root modes

      • solarvector
        18·
        6 months ago

        Firefox now supports uBlock Origin on mobile too

        No solution for Apple I’m aware of though, since it’s forced to be a shitty reskin of Safari

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
            2·
            6 months ago

            Plus you can configure to default to reader mode. Generally no ads, no stupid formatting, just what you want to read!

            Unfortunately that’s why so many sites have their “click to continue” button, so I don’t see the full article unless I click to hide reader mode

        • cm0002@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 months ago

          Yea, but doing it at the system level is WAY better. I’m always rooted, so I can’t speak for how well it works on non-root phones. But my phone is like 99% ad-free even across apps, the Google news feed and browsers incl Chrome

          Between that on my phone, network level ad blocking, and ad blocker browsing extensions I can go days or even weeks without seeing an ad. And when I do, it’s usually because it was on a TV at a store or something and rarely the odd ad that somehow leaked through

    • El Barto@lemmy.world
      21·
      6 months ago

      The website didn’t get money from views. They only get money from clicks. The ad company, though, yup.

      I actually had a similar experience with the BBC today, of all sites!

        • El Barto@lemmy.world
          21·
          6 months ago

          Well, it’s been a while since the last time I looked into it. Maybe things have changed, but I doubt it.

          Video platforms may operate that way, though.