Recommended Posts

I hate and love adblocker at the same time.

Love reason: Because it gets rid of all the messy ads on the web page.

Hate reason: Because if you own your own site, it decreases your chance to earn money by A LOT.

Damn, I wish the internet would remove adblocker.

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1124428-i-hate-love-adblocker/
Share on other sites

I'm talking about random sites you visit. I'm pretty sure you don't whitelist all sites you visit?

All ads can **** off, if there is a blocker, I`ll block them

If a site deserves supporting (such as Neowin which I will be re-sub'ing to soon) then they'`ll get my money, ads will not.

I hate and love adblocker at the same time.

Love reason: Because it gets rid of all the messy ads on the web page.

Hate reason: Because if you own your own site, it decreases your chance to earn money by A LOT.

Damn, I wish the internet would remove adblocker.

You can't have it both ways, YOU block sites to get rid of the messy ads, then complain about it costing YOU money on your site?

I'm talking about random sites you visit. I'm pretty sure you don't whitelist all sites you visit?

I don't trust most of the people I know to put things on my computer, why would I trust some random website to have my best interest in their minds/hearts/site?

I'm of the mentality of block everything. I get that you won't earn much money, but as said ads are not the only way to make money.

Ads drive people away IMO. Good content brings them in and possibly makes them pay if good enough.

I use adblock on everything (except my own sites for testing - just in case it blocks something it shouldn't. The sites i've made have never had an ad. Not one put there by me anyway!)

Also, do people really click ads nowadays? I always tell my computer-illiterate family members/friends "NEVER click ads, especially ones that say you win something"

Do what buyandsellads does.. Disable the CSS for pages with Adblock. Cell your CSS file "ad.css" and I bet it disables it. You can also include a message that you shouldn't use Adblock on your browser to view the site correctly.

  • Like 3

Do what buyandsellads does.. Disable the CSS for pages with Adblock. Cell your CSS file "ad.css" and I bet it disables it. You can also include a message that you shouldn't use Adblock on your browser to view the site correctly.

Yeah was thinking about that, thanks for the reminder!

Ad blockers are a must-have for me - it's the first plugin I install. They save bandwidth, and reduce browser/plugin CPU load. And no more annoying animated ads on web pages.

Seriously, who clicks on ads? I've never seen the reason to. And a lot of them, I wouldn't trust anyway - especially how they track users.

I even tape shows on TV so I can fast forward the ads. Ads and myself - we just don't mix.

  • Like 3

I'm talking about I'd rather have no adblocker at all and make everyone see the ads.

I'd rather have adblocker and avoid all the flashing/blinking/loud/moving/distracting/ and on and on... and let's not forget all the security problems that go with them. Ads probably drive people away from sites faster than bad content, broken links and bad layouts combined.

I understand why sites need ads, but if you can't survive using text ads, then ads aren't going to save your site from extinction. The more you try and force ads onto people, the more they try and figure out a way around them. Avoiding ads has been going on since the remote control was invented, think about it, listening to the radio or watching TV - ad comes on - station changed. It will always be that way, I don't want to buy what they or you are selling, so I don't want or need to listen/see your ad.

^ Yeah excellent way to make people avoid your site entirely!

:rolleyes:

No kidding, ask Ars how breaking their site for the ad blockers went.

I love adblockers because they

speed up site load times, (Modern advertisements are essentially videos)

decrease CPU use, (No need for browser to render some animated flashy thing)

create a better distinction between content and advertisement, (Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between content and spam)

don't waste bandwidth on a video about some car/Viagra/Lenovo/etc, (I don't care)

protect my computer from malicious scripts, (De-facto #1 infection vector are advertisements)

make my head hurt less (flashy, annoying, etc).

I hate adblockers because,

Hulu doesn't work as well as some other websites.

I'm talking about I'd rather have no adblocker at all and make everyone see the ads.

Nobody is forcing you to use an adblocker. if i am forced to view ads then they go "Blocked". Give users a choice.

I use admuncher to block ads, i wouldn't be clicking them even if i could see them so they are of no use too me. The gigabytes of data i save monthly by NOT loading them is of actual value though given the bandwidth constraints we australians contend with!

Another admuncher user here though i also have adblock installed for the ads that admuncher will not remove (facebook).

As said ads are nothing more than bandwidth eaters, i never click them so there is no need for them to be on the page, making a website look ugly and slowing down its overall response time because its loading some crappy ad! Plus as bitbucket said not everyone is on unlimited internet like myself, for example my grandad is on 2gb a month and is finding it hard to keep under that limit and he barley uses it other than ebay, email and searching for holidays and checking out what the areas look like.

Here are my stats for this month, normally higher but ive been on xbox.

Statistics for Ad Muncher v4.93.33707/4341

Adverts removed: 42,289

Bandwidth saved: 1,244 MB

Counter started: November 16, 2012

I hate and love adblocker at the same time.

Love reason: Because it gets rid of all the messy ads on the web page.

Hate reason: Because if you own your own site, it decreases your chance to earn money by A LOT.

Damn, I wish the internet would remove adblocker.

White list your own site, and implement an anti-adblock script?

And be forced to get one of those annoying pop-up ads that blocks you from closing the windows with javascript or even the ones that redirect you and block you from hitting back, then open another window with the same thing and irritate you?

No way. There's better ways of monetizing web content on the internet that annoying ads. I mean some sites punish users for blocking ads by making it inconvenient but those sites end up driving people away.

Some websites have gotten ridiculous (like Salon I believe) with whole page ads that block the article when you visit the site. Those sites just end up not being visited. If you really need the revenue then maybe you should rethink your strategy.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Posts

    • Yup, that's a doozy right there 😄
    • It's a bundle of tools created by a variety of people, so things can go wrong sometimes. It's a great addition to Windows, and I use a lot of the tools on a daily basis. Also, it's still a 0.**** release so quick updates are to be expected 😉
    • Oh, I did. And it's even worse than I was hoping! Besides a lot of techno-babble jargon (yes I understand 100% of it but it's still all just techno-babble) there's 2 key points that make me super-weary about even considering testing this out. -- By default, after installation, a relay is automatically set up, so you do not need to care about that. * Non-chatmail apps use email servers as a long-term message archive while chatmail clients use email servers for ephemeral instant message relay. * Supporting the full variety of classic email setups would require considerable development and maintenance efforts, and complicate making chatmail-based messaging more resilient, reliable and fast. -- Basically, the end-user device is the 'server' (relay) so there is NO ARCHIVING whatsoever because every message is necessarily ephemeral. Great for techno-paranoia (and for illicit activities preferring no tracks to cover) but terrible for everybody else. It's also ironically contradictory to engineering principles of redundancies besides the transport layers due to the explicit absence of any persistent storage. Instead of 'classic email address' retaining multi-GB messaging archives on its server, now every device must retain 100% of those storage demands. (Email messages were originally meant to be short correspondences, not the multi-MB attachments boondoggle that now exists with unlimited spam engines flooding every potential recipient.) Any device swap or reset (or loss) makes the entire message history go bye-bye forever... lest there's an off-device auto-archival "relay" mechanism that's really a separate server that holds onto all transported messages (an email server) that utilizes 'chatmail email address' identities (like an email server) and its own persistent storage archive (like an email server). But... this solution is hoping to exist alongside real-world email address identities (based on the email server relay pathway) but simply render messages in chat thread format in an ephemeral manner (with contents being encrypted, and messages auto-expiring) ... In the end, it's a chat app/experience for the Web3/P2P-at-all-costs zealots. (I have accts on all sorts of federated web3 services so I understand the technical and non-technical alike.) For any practical users, however, it's just another service to download/install, register, cross-share id cards/qr codes, but know that there's no history/archive whatsoever (by design) so no account/message recovery whatsoever... update the device, install a bummed update patch, or dare upgrade your device... all history, poof, gone. Ya gotta start everything over again like they're a brand new person.
    • You've tried DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, now get serious with SearXNG by Paul Hill Over the last decade, it has become quite trendy to dump Google Search in favor of privacy-preserving alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave Search. These search engines have done a very good job at highlighting dodgy practices by Google, such as adjusting search results based on what it thinks you’ll like (filter bubble) and stalking you around the web to advertise to you. While these search engines are good starting points when compared to non-private services like Google, there are still quite a few issues with them. For example, both DuckDuckGo and Brave Search require running non-free JavaScript in your web browser, which is comparable to running proprietary software on your computer, meaning you can be sure about what it’s actually doing in the background. Another issue is that these search engines are hosted on the respective companies’ servers, and you are using a service that you don’t control. Finally, DuckDuckGo, while offering privacy features, relies heavily on Microsoft’s infrastructure for its results and, in the past, has permitted Microsoft tracking scripts. If you are looking for a more private search solution than DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and Startpage, then I recommend taking a look at SearXNG. It is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine that can be used via different public instances, which is useful for mobile users, or you can install it on your computer or server and run it locally with maximum control. Unlike Google, Bing, or Brave Search, which crawl the web and have their own search indexes, SearXNG is a metasearch engine, meaning it taps other search engines, stripping your identifying data, such as IP address, user agent, and cookies, in the process. Your search query is sent to the other search engines you enable before aggregating the results. SearXNG has deployment flexibility. If you are a casual user or a mobile user and don’t want to run SearXNG locally, you can use a public instance that is hosted by someone else. The main problem with this is that you are putting trust in the maintainer of the instance regarding stuff like logs that they may keep; good hosts should have a privacy policy explaining their policies. If you are trying to use SearXNG, you can also install the software on your device and then head to 127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser and search from there. While you don’t have to worry about a third-party admin like the public instances, search engines could ultimately block your IP address if they frown on you pulling in their search results locally. If you want to run it locally, it’s a good idea to use proxies or VPNs to hide your actual IP. You don’t have to worry about this with a public instance, as search engines never see your IP address. The main privacy benefit of using SearXNG is that it isolates your identity from the underlying engines that it’s capable of searching, such as Google and Bing. These search engines will only see requests coming from a generic server, so they can’t profile you and create a bubble filter that influences what results you see. This also ensures that your search engine doesn’t turn into an echo chamber that prevents you from reading alternative points of view. As a free software project, you are allowed to inspect SearXNG to make sure there are no negative features bundled inside. This sets it apart from the privacy search engines mentioned earlier because you can’t check their source code. As a meta search engine, you are not restricted to getting results from one source. Due to the fact that it scrapes content from other websites, your SearXNG instance will periodically get blocked from different providers, so it’s good to select a range of sources as a backup. While enabling all of the services will give you great results, this can make searching slower. I am personally happy with slower searches for the best results, but you can always check which providers are slowing down your search from the search results page and disable them to speed things up. If you want decent results quickly, enable the main search providers such as Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Bing, and Yahoo. This way, you get wide coverage without the latency. On the Engines tab in Preferences, do note that there are different tabs, such as General, Images, and Videos, with their own providers that can be toggled and are not covered by "Enable all" while on the General tab, so be sure to dig into each. Just a note, if you want to enable everything, press "Enable all" in one tab, then hit save at the bottom of the page, then do the next tab, and so on. If you press "Enable all", then do that in each tab, and then save, nothing will stick. When I had just some of the search engines enabled, I searched “define nefarious” and results came back with the definition of “define” - obviously that was a sucky result. However, when I had everything enabled, it found dictionary pages for the word “nefarious” and even had an inline definition on the sidebar, which is quite nice too - that was delivered by WolframAlpha for anyone wondering! Probably the worst thing about this meta search engine is that the engines you select are saved with a cookie, so you must enable them on every new device you use SearXNG on, including if you decide to go into incognito mode with your web browser. Honestly, I would say this is the most annoying aspect, and perhaps if your browser lets you choose a separate private browsing search engine, then it would be best to use DuckDuckGo for this portion of your browsing. Another weakness of SearXNG is the random blocking of it by search providers. When you are on the results page, expand the “Response time” box, and it will show things like “Suspended: too many requests” or “access denied”. This is why it is good to enable several providers so that there is always a fallback to get results from. I won’t pretend SearXNG will be for everyone, however, if you enable all of the providers and put up with the slower response time, the results can be really amazing. Even if you don’t want to use it as your daily driver, keeping a bookmark handy that links to it is a good idea if you ever feel like doing a deep dive into a niche topic where other search engines are just failing to bring up any good result, due to the amount of sources it looks on. If you’re interested in radical user control over the software you use, installing SearXNG locally can also be a good idea, but be prepared to be temporarily blocked from sites if you trigger bot sensors without a VPN. Personally, I’ve opted to use a public instance, rather than install it myself. If you want to use it via a public instance, head over to searx.space to find a provider. Let us know in the comments if you have used SearXNG or its predecessor, Searx. What do you think about the quality of the results?
    • Dear Neowin, If it is not too much trouble, can you start using the new-ish designations for Insider Preview? "Experimental" is different than "former Dev" as it can apply to different models, eg 26H1 or 26H2 etc, right? No need to seed confusion IMHO. And, please "finally" update your graphics. OK?
  • Recent Achievements

    • Week One Done
      flexorcist earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Woland13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Woland13 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      bernmeister earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Week One Done
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Week One Done
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      503
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      226
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      158
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      75
    5. 5
      FloatingFatMan
      71
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!