Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Side comment - can I just observe how modern web has become an absolute hellscape of ads? The article was very interesting but literally in between every paragraph there's a giant ad, at least for me every time it's for the same thing - some random garbage from Temu. When the site opened I had three full-screen ads that I had to dismiss to read the article, and two more popped up as I was scrolling down. It's just.......too much.

View on HN

I’m more surprised that you are browsing without an adblocker. 0 ads and popups on my side

Mobile chrome. Not sure if there is even an option for an adblocker here. I used to just have a PIA VPN always enabled with the built in ad killer, that worked well system wide but it kept tripping up my bank apps so I stopped using it.

On Android you can use Firefox which have extensions so you can use uBlock Origin

On iOS you can use Adguard Pro which works with all browsers (I use this) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-pro-adblock-privacy/id...

NextDNS is an ok option - there’s semi decent ad lists, and I rarely go over the free 300k requests per month tier on mobile. You can also set it to ignore wifi networks if you’ve got PiHole or whatever at home.

Not for everyone I guess, but I haven’t perused the privacy policy in great detail.

Yeah I’m on iOS Firefox - never going to happen to get an ad blocking browser

Brave IOS

I use 1Blocker on IOS -- it works pretty well, but not as well as uBlock origin.

I have an adblock browser installed. Google defies any attempt to make it the default but it shows up in the options on the Chrome browser. When a site is too obnoxious I reopen it in the adblock browser for some relief.

Sounds like your problem is Chrome. Firefox and Safari are not owned by ad companies. Consider using them instead.

Vivaldi mobile native adblock works pretty ok

Nextdns gives you dns with custom blacklisting. It's very lightweight, no battery drain and you can allow certain domains if anything breaks.

Not as powerful as UBO but you can use it on almost any device.

Highly recommended

It's awful. I don't know what the threshold was for me, but after I saw enough comments like yours with replies to "just use Pi-hole," I finally gave it a shot.

I'm happy to report that it is indeed possible to enjoy the web again, even noxious sites like this--you can finally walk down the street now that the sea of garbage is gone.

Even for technical people setting up a pihole seems like a goat rope.

Did you find a tutorial or something that made it accessible?

It also only sort of works because as soon as you leave your WiFi it’s no use, unless I fundamentally misunderstand it.

I’m sure it’s a great product, but it doesn’t seem to solve the ad problem.

I was wondering why there was so much "empty space" in between, then I noticed Brave blocked 23 requests, probably all tracking and ads. smh

I consume hn mostly on mobile. Websites like TFA are almost impossible to peruse. I made it about half way through, looking for a picture of the damn thing before I gave up and came here looking for a link to an alternative article.

It's just the more businessy sites that are fucked like this. The first page of google and such.

There's still a vast ecosystem of casual sites that are quite nice.

You just gotta avoid the hell-gaze of Mammon.

Even on my iPhone (who’d test against that rare platform?) I got repeated strange delays and redraws. Granted, it’s an XR which is hardly the latest model, but… your page is unusable.

This is the internet experience of the vast, vast majority of people. Fewer than 1% of people use an adblocker. (Why don’t you?)

Part of it has to do with their ad provider. Ezoic is TERRIBLE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com