I don’t know if it’s just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It’s getting to the point where adblocking isn’t an optional luxury - it’s a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.
Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.
Yea, but doing it at the system level is WAY better. I’m always rooted, so I can’t speak for how well it works on non-root phones. But my phone is like 99% ad-free even across apps, the Google news feed and browsers incl Chrome
Between that on my phone, network level ad blocking, and ad blocker browsing extensions I can go days or even weeks without seeing an ad. And when I do, it’s usually because it was on a TV at a store or something and rarely the odd ad that somehow leaked through