alt Hacker News> this is why I run ad blockers.
It's pretty wild that we live in a world where the actual FBI has recommended we use ad blockers to protect ourselves, and if everyone actually listened, much of the Internet (and economy) as we know it would disappear. The FBI is like "you should protect yourself from the way that the third largest company in the world does business", and the average person's response is "nah, that would take at least a couple of minutes of my time, I'll just go ahead and continue to suffer with invasive ads and make sure $GOOG keeps going up".
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The crazier part is that its an official government position, and we (people at large / the government) aren't immediately slapping down the actions of these companies.
Majority of people use their mobile devices these days to browse the Internet. Installing an ad blocker on your iPhone is a significantly bigger challenge than on desktop.
Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed onto tracking for the slim improvement it provides.
Every browser should have ad blocking technology included and enabled by default. I do not understand why Apple in particular has not pushed this with Safari, as they like to portray that they care about privacy.
I get why Chrome doesn't, and that's why you should not use it. But Netscape? Edge? What is stopping them?
Browsing the web without an ad blocker is a miserable experience. Users who have never tried or don't know how to set one up would be delighted.
It’s worse than that. My mom wants to see ads. I thought I was doing her a favor adding her to my pihole but she really likes ads, especially Facebook ads.
> the average person's response is ... I'll just go ahead and continue to suffer with invasive ads
The real reason is that the average person neither suffers with ads nor finds ads invasive, despite what a vocal online minority would have you believe. We just ignore them and get on with life. ::shrug::
The FBI also recommended people use commercial VPNs… coincidentally they don’t need a warrant to spy on communications that leave the country
> and if everyone actually listened, much of the Internet (and economy) as we know it would disappear.
Would it really? It seems to me that most normal users spend most of their time and attention on apps, not in browsers.
YT made sure adblockers ruin the experience. We really need a good YT alternative, as it has become AI slop (shorts) and most new videos are of real poor quality.
Half the population are fucking idiots. Possibly more than half.
They need to be protected by the state because they can't think for themselves.
The problem is in most countries and especially America the state is a corrupt cesspool.
I asked an LLM to create a plan for a 'digital rebirth' in order to minimize privacy harms. It's a lot of work, but increasingly: a worthwhile endeavor.
>the average person's response is "nah, that would take at least a couple of minutes of my time,
As a data point I, a technical person who tweaks his computer a lot, was against adblocking for moral reasons (as a part of perceived social contract, where internet is free because of ads). Only later I changed mi mind on this because I became more privacy aware.