this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Don't claim your relationship with ads is "actively hostile" if your actions can be described as "skipping" and "muting".
You should be blocking. I don't skip or mute anything, ever, because I don't allow ads into my life.
PiHole is a thing of beauty =)
I started to get mine set up, and was almost done. Then we moved and it got put in a box and i haven't found it yet. You bet your bottom dollar im reconfiguring that thing as soon as i find it
The only ads I still have to skip are podcast sponsor segments. And sometimes YouTube sponsor segments; I have SponsorBlock but that only works on very popular videos.
be the change you want to see in the world, and mark sponsor segments yourself
Isn't there an argument that it's better to get them to waste money sending the ads? Does blocking prevent the adverters paying? I'm not sure how that works.
I got almost everything blocked, but one thing I can't totally is podcasts, so there I skip em.
Sadly with adverts literally everywhere, there's no single solution!
https://adnauseam.io/
There was a browser extension which both blocked ads and simulated clicks iirc. That comes with a processing power cost though.
But that only benefits the advertisement agency (eg. google ads) and doesn't do much harm to the advertiser imo
I don't allow serial killers into my life, but they keep trying to smash through my windows and tackle me on running trails.
Feels like a guy in a horror movie snidely insisting "Just don't dream about Freddie Krueger and you'll be fine".
Except blocking them is trivial, and they must be requested by the browser/client, so it's much more like vampires than serial killers.
Just because a website gives your computer instructions to initiate requests to an ad server doesn't mean your computer has to execute those instructions. It's your computer, your electricity, your network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising
Significantly more difficult to block ads that woven into the observed content.
Like, there are definitely ads that are easy to block. And ads that are more intrusive by design. And software that's better at getting the more embedded ads. And ads that are better at evading the software.
But it's a game of cat and mouse. There's no panacea, just moments when the anti-ads guys have an edge.
If you're watching ET and you get to the scene where he's eating a line of Reese's Pieces to get lured into the kid's room, you're watching an ad.
There's no way to not watch the ad other than to stop watching the movie.
And this high tech advancement in advertising was pioneered over 40 years ago.
Yeah, no. Ad servers are not initiating incoming network requests to your devices. Your devices are openly asking for the ads, and it's not an obfuscated secret, it's a standard network request. This evasion is imagined fiction. It isn't an arms race, there's never been a time when ad blockers stopped working and had to change how they function to beat the ads again.
Your terms are acceptable.
Huh? What exactly is the "high tech advancement" you're referring to? Filming a product in a movie? Seems kinda low tech...
They're piggybacking in on intended content. Or they're gating content behind ad walls. Or they're initiating requests on channels not yet flagged as ad servers. Or just permeating your electronics through the OS vendor, the SMS protocol, email, you name it.
Sarcasm, mate. You simply include the commercial as part of the main body of media.
You're misinformed. Reality is they aren't initiating requests at all.
I guess ads just show up on your system by magic, then? They've overcome the need for IP protocols?
Are you just trolling? The client initiates the requests, not the ad server. Might want to brush up on those IP protocols.
And then the server feeds data to the client with AJAX calls and similar functions to fetch additional material.
And ad blockers try to distinguish between secondary calls gathering real content and calls that are just serving ads (YouTube ad blocking being the epitome of this challenge).
But I'm sure you're a smart, sophisticated computer guy who doesn't need to play dumb on this.
I'm glad we're on the same page now 👍
Except you're still wrong, a server cannot make an AJAX call to a client. The client has to make it. You keep incorrectly trying to frame it like the server initiates these connections, instead of just admitting you didn't know what you were talking about.
I never said it did.
The server feeds the HTML/JavaScript/etc which contains AJAX calls that automatically launch
Great lol, so we are in agreement with my original comment.
Give them bad data. Click on ads you're totally disinterested in, ignore ones you're interested in. Flip that sometimes. That's actively hostile.
In that case use this: https://adnauseam.io/
muting is the correct action on tv, or even change channel temporarily
I should really invest in a PiHole. I'm just inherently lazy at times and always feel like I'm short on funds.
Pihole is open source software, so it is free and can run on basically any hardware. You could use an old laptop, a raspberry pi or other cheap SoC, and I think it might even be possible to run on something like an old Android phone.
Aye but I don't have any old hardware lying around to use, so I'd need a Raspberry Pi for it. Again, money just feels like it's getting tighter everyday that such a rather trivial purchase makes me think twice now.
If your router is OpenWRT it might be possible to run right on the router itself, but I'm not 100% sure
The router actually has DNS options for working to block ads built in it, I might give that try after work today.
You can use something like NextDNS at the router level and it works well.