Ads on websites are now unusably intrusive – what happened and how do we fix it?

3 pointsnon_sequitur1y ago2 comments

Was on a computer without adblock and loaded a page on sfgate - https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/daredevil-endless-skydive-over-grand-canyon-20147327.php

there's a banner ad up top, and a banner ad on the side. ok.

then a video ad starts autoplaying when you scroll, and if you scroll past it it shifts to your bottom right corner

you then hit a series of sponsored ads on the right hand column that are disguised to look like original content

then you hit another ad in between the main article

then you get to the video itself, hit play, and a youtube ad starts playing

What happened, internet? And more importantly (I understand enshittification, market forces, Google ad monster, etc), how do we get out of this? I don't understand how people can use the web without ad blockers

2 comments

potsandpans1y ago

I use a combo of in-browser ad blocking and dns level blocking. It seems to be very effective while on the home network.

Ive been waffling with setting up a vpn so i can tunnel through my home network and apply dns filtering everywhere.

Another thing I've been wondering about -- which i recognize is extreme -- is setting up a mitm proxy on my home network to strip 3p cookies out of all requests. But im not sure if I'll ever do that.

One side effect of this setup is that cloudflare seems to need to confirm that I'm a human a lot.

grajaganDev1y ago

Adblockers are part of a good security hygiene.

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