Seriously. Says a lot about the modern internet, though. Both good and bad.
Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don’t care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
There is and isn’t one. For the add-on itself, you just need forks and more forks. For the lists it pulls from, those are already decentralized, but you’re constantly going to deal with the issue of only the best are used and only the used are maintained and only the maintained are the best.
If only, I know so many people who don’t bother with adblocking at all. I honestly have no idea how they use the Internet without going mad
My kid discovered that he can hit the “report” button on the YouTube app on the TV to skip the ads immediately. So now every ad gets reported as “inappropriate”.
I’m proud of him.
Tip: if you have an Android TV, you can install SmartTube as an alternative, privacy-friendly YouTube client. It has no ads and sponsorblock integration
And as a better option, use an actual device instead of a short lifecycle planned obsolescence embedded android device on a “smart” tv.
People just don’t know, I’ve been showing my wife the way little by little and she’s always blown away
I’m of two minds about people not adblocking.
On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they’re generating) largely because they’ve been passively trained to “tune out” ads. Also consumerism.
On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we’d definitely live in a world of WEI… and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don’t have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.
If sites wanted to run ads and host them locally without tracking that would be fine. But since they’re tracking users it’s essential to block them for privacy and security, and if someone isn’t then maybe they don’t understand the level of tracking involved. We need a better name than adblocking.
The way people talk about people who don’t block ads is so funny.
I understand and respect the reasons people choose to use blockers, but ads honestly just aren’t that problematic for me in practice and are easy to avoid and ignore.
You say with such confidence. Is it so hard to imagine people can defend themselves with means other than ad blocking?
Ads have been known to contain drive-by malware. Even if you don’t mind seeing ads (which personally I don’t mind unless they’re very intrusive), an adblocker is important for online safety.
Drive-by malware tends not to be zero-days though. I’ve stayed safe for decades just by keeping my software up to date.
Ads are probably actually not that bad. But to me the massive stalking is unacceptable. So, uBO FTW!
All hail Raymond Hill :0
He’s far too kind of a person. He doesn’t accept any donations for the many years of a better and safer internet experience I’ve gotten from his work
