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Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

These ads specifically were the ads that drove me to ad blockers. I resisted for years, as I took the stance I simply didn't visit sites that had overly obnoxious ads. I've had flash turned off for years so that likely cut down on a lot of that garbage anyway.

Then these fake "Other things you might like" ads started appearing around many sites. Occasionally somewhat relevant, but always click-bait headlines. I was even tricked once or twice early on, since I hadn't yet recognized those as ads.

Then they started becoming outright obnoxious, and everywhere, and one day I just lost it and installed an adblocker. Now I can't imagine how I'd ever go back.

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Yup. And I blocked Taboola and Outbrain in my hosts file years ago after some particularly unpleasant ads of rotting teeth. To me they're a symbol of low-quality misleading advertising.

I think there might be a place for good cross-advertising of articles, but that seems to not be what the public clicks on.

It has less to do with what the public clicks and more to do with the level of quality competition amongst advertisers. As more and more brands get smart about native, the networks will push out the arbitrage sites and other bad actors.

Bad advertisers is a sign that an ad network actually works but hasnt matured yet.

Even without these types of ads, mere performance compels me to use an ad blocker.

I've recently been playing around with different Linux distros, and so installed Firefox multiple times if it wasn't already there. I'm the type of person who queues up a number of tabs for reading.

At the NYT, at about four or five tabs open, the laptop becomes unusable, because of all the ad downloading.

And now, the absolute first thing I do after opening FF the first time is to install ublock origin. The web is all but unusable for me without it.

I'm not one of those people that actively does much about ads or online privacy. I have friends that obsess over the stuff and probably spend as much time as I do online just adjusting custom uBlock/whatever else lists.

But I finally switched off of Chrome on Android and over to Firefox where I could install uBlock because of these fucking Taboola ads. Trying to read sites and the entire page would be jumping around as my phone slowly struggled its way into loading and displaying them.

Sorry, ad industry, I'm not going to take the time to weed out the bad actors. As soon as you annoy me enough that I feel I need to do something I'm taking the nuclear option and blocking everything - it's just easier.

U-Block Origins. Always.

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