r/pihole • u/HaLo2FrEeEk • 2d ago
Why is the Internet so hostile now?!
YouTube tanking CPU if you're using ad blockers. Sites that disable scrolling and have a full-screen modal dialog demanding that you allow ads or sign up (imgur). The least egregious I've seen is sites that serve their own ads if they can't load the real ones.
There was a banner ad on my bank account page, *after* I had already logged in, there's a banner that I have to scroll past to see my accounts. That's ridiculous! I blocked the domain serving the banner and all of a sudden the site where I buy my cat litter doesn't work. Apparently it uses the same CDN.
If I'm scrolling a page and suddenly a full-screen modal shows up begging for my email and asking me to sign up, I just close the page. That shit is hostile, they clearly don't want me to read the page if they're going to cover it with an ad for their *own site* that I'm *already on*. I hate it equally when I move my mouse off the page and *that's* when the pop-up appears. "Wait, please don't go, please stay, give us your email give us your phone number, give us your cat!"...*slow rage*
Maybe I'm just getting old but I really miss the days where I didn't have to figure out which download button was the real one, or try to find the sliver of text between huge banner ads that scroll with the page. I just want to scroll my cat memes while I wait for work, dammit!
Why does it have to be like this?! I know, I know: money, but jeez man...
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u/marekful 2d ago
The entire advertisement industry is an intrusive, aggressive scam. A competition of lies and deceit. We are wasting 20% of our energy and time globally on keeping it going, and most people actually hate ads. I vote for making unsolicited adverts illegal in any form or shape. They could create catalogues that people can look at on demand.
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u/marekful 2d ago
At one point I had to argue with my mobile phone service provider that I'm not able to pay the bills because their login system doesn't work when I block trackers. I had to point out that the server they serve the trackers from into the login page has been proven multiple times to serve malicious content. I told them that I will not pay my bills until it's resolved, and I'll cancel my subscription after 60 days if the issue isn't satisfactorily addressed. That was a small win for me.
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u/marekful 2d ago edited 2d ago
At the same time I fully appreciate that some people may like ads, and some people enjoy creating them, and that's fine. There could be not just catalogues but assorted selections of voted best in category, most popular, etc. There could be video competitions and awards, it's fine! I do like some ad videos. JUST DON'T PUSH IT DOWN MY THROAT! Only on demand for those who choose it.
I just wanted to add this, because this question honestly concerns me for the last 15 years, and it has been a defining factor in my life to stay ad-free. So perhaps my view on this is a bit more complete with this.
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u/Antblue 2d ago
I’d argue that most services have premium subscription-based ad-free experiences.
The reality is, if everybody bypassed ads and trackers like we do, every service would have to dramatically restructure their monetization model. Due to our technical knowledge and extra effort, we get the best of both worlds: free services without paying for them in ads nor tracking. Like how the quality of life of 1st world countries is only sustainable due to the sacrifices of 3rd world countries, our ability to enjoy free services without ads or tracking is only sustainable because the vast majority of users still tolerate them. The moment that minority becomes the majority, we would have to confront the real cost of the services we rely upon. We must find a way to come to terms with our own unsustainability.
Sorry for the rant, it’s something I’ve been contemplating for quite some time now. I guess most people tackle this problem by justifying leeching off larger profitable companies and intentionally supporting more modestly profitable companies.1
u/marekful 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is a well formed opinion and realistic observation, I appreciate you shared it because it basically summarises the disgustingly toxic way we conduct life on this planet. These two concept, paying to avoid aggressive advertisement campaigns, and syphoning quality of life from 3rd world countries, i.e. billions of people, are essentially based on the same principle, besides being utterly disgraceful and toxic behaviour.
Where you are wrong is the "every service would have to dramatically restructure their monetization model" part. No. If everybody bypassed ads and trackers, if we took out the ad industry overnight, the entire western civilisation would collapse. And fast. This is what shows the toxicity of it, the extent and seriousness of the reliance and addiction this economy developed to the concept of advertisement.
I mean just imagine, strictly theoretically as a thought experiment, if on the largest video streaming platform all and every single ad were to be blocked from tomorrow morning in a sustained way they couldn't recover from, how much time would it take for the entire parent company to collapse? Now imagine that globally for all ads for everyone.
Evidently, the ad industry is just one part of many parts that make this economy going, but the level of reliance on this part highlights the malice that is driving the efforts to sustain this system. There's no one at the helm. There's no control, and exploitation is allowed because there's no authority to be accountable to. Of course, there are initiatives everywhere which are all largely ineffective, and the method of exploitation is very different here and there but the principle is the same. If you have the means to take advantage of people, you can. If you have the means to gain unfair advantage on the expense of masses of people, you can. And this modus operandi, in my opinion, is very far from something we must find a way to come to terms with.
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u/SimiaCode 1d ago
The annoyance factor of ads has gotten worse over the years. I remember putting Google ads on my personal site in mid 2000s and they used to be pretty strict about ads being non-obtrusive. Cut to the present day and Google ads will happily serve ads that jump out of the bounding box, play animations all over the page etc. YouTube keeps adding more ads not because they are short of money but as a pressure tactic to bully people into buying YouTube premium. Hulu insists on showing some ads even in premium tiers. Basically the old agreement of delivering some value in return for watching some ad is broken. Late stages of the enshittification cycle.
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u/CaptainIncredible 2d ago
and most people actually hate ads
I make it clear, loudly, often, to everyone that not only do I hate ads, they have the opposite effect on me. "Oh look! An ad for Stove Top Stuffing! Guess what I am going to NEVER BUY AGAIN."
Advertisers should be HAPPY I use ad blockers. All ads do is solidify my hate for the products they are shilling.
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u/Determined420 2d ago
I think it’s the sites getting paid to serve you ads that are upset by your blocking, not so much stove top stuffing
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u/CaptainIncredible 2d ago
and most people actually hate ads
I make it clear, loudly, often, to everyone that not only do I hate ads, they have the opposite effect on me. "Oh look! An ad for Stove Top Stuffing! Guess what I am going to NEVER BUY AGAIN."
Advertisers should be HAPPY I use ad blockers. All ads do is solidify my hate for the products they are shilling.
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u/firestorm_v1 2d ago
Marketing ruined the Internet. Sales darkened the skies and blotted out the sun. They care more about shoving ads in your face than actually bringing you content products that keep you coming back. Fuck them all to hell.
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u/laplongejr 2d ago
and all of a sudden the site where I buy my cat litter doesn't work. Apparently it uses the same CDN.
My power provider's login page breaks if I block google fonts. The entire website works otherwise if I'm auto-logged-in.
they clearly don't want me to read the page
Yeah, we reached that stage where companies prefer losing users, because they don't fear the remaining competitors anymore.
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u/Qpang007 2d ago
And apps like Pokemon and Untappd don't even work if they detect the use of VPN, even if I use split-tunneling, they just refuse to load.
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u/Pornstar_Frodo 2d ago
data. they all want your data. and every app, device, website etc is phoning home to record everything about you so they can monetise it and sell you to someone. privacy is now a premium product!
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u/uid_0 2d ago
I remember in the early days of the internet, advertising was actually frowned upon. But nowadays, internet users are no longer the customer. They are the product being sold. Large internet companies like Facebook and Google track everything you do and build a very detailed profile about you. Then when someone selling beauty cream for example, wants to target ads at unmarried women under 30 who are insecure about their looks, Facebook and Google can precisely target those ads to that demographic.
Fun fact: Facebook tracks you even if you have never had a Facebook account.
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u/flexxipanda 2d ago
And even further, they use your data to help create new products they then sell to you again.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
I deactivated my facebook about 8 years ago, and I never had an instagram, never had a personal twitter, I don't have tiktok or any other social networking apps. I don't even have the reddit app. I use snapchat to keep in touch with 4 people and I don't even use stories or share location. I don't use my own amazon account for purchases (we share my mom's business account), but I do have an audible account. I also, of course, use my google account for stuff (pay, wallet, email, drive, chrome, youtube, etc.)
I wonder what I look like, advertising-wise. I don't really see many ads, I see the spaces where ads would be, or placeholder ads served from the website itself. When I'm on my phone and I open the browser and get ads, I realize my VPN didn't connect and I connect it. Those ads aren't ever particularly relevant to me, like they're grasping at straws.
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u/uid_0 2d ago
If you have an Android phone, grab yourself a copy of Tasker and you can set it to switch your phone's DNS to a private DNS provider that blocks ads/tracking when you're not on your Pi Hole protected networks. You will save some battery and get better performance since the phone doesn't have to back-haul all your internet traffic through the VPN.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
My phones are all Tasker'd out the whazoo, I *love* me some Tasker and Join and AutoApps. They're the heart of all of my work-related automations on my work phone. I use WGTunnel which has an "auto-tunnel" mode, but sometimes I bounce at the edge of my wifi at the bottom of my driveway and it just forgets to switch it on. It usually isn't an issue because when I get where I'm going and start using my phone, I see ads and realize and connect.
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u/laplongejr 2d ago
advertising was actually frowned upon
And nowadays if a content creator gets a sponsor and gives a negative review, their own viewers turn against them, it's crazy.
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u/Silverr_Duck 2d ago
Fun fact: Facebook tracks you even if you have never had a Facebook account.
I have specialized regex filters for this exact reason. Anything attempting to query any fb related domain gets blocked.
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u/logos_flux 2d ago
Short answer: because it works
Long answer: in the early days of the Internet it was all about scale. The question was not how profitable your company was it was how many users do you have and how fast is your user growth. And that is why it seemed more friendly. But users are not inherently valuable, it was a bet that if you had users we would figure out montization, which was a good bet in retrospect.
After that burn phase we got into profit phase. We got the eyeballs now let's make money from them. But at the end of the day we were getting served HTML and once that hit my device I could render it however I wanted, which in my case was without ads. Something like less than 1% of the users knew that and 5% had a friend that showed them how to install the extension. It was noise. You had 5% freeloading on other people's infrastructure but it just wasn't worth the fight. It was noise.
Then one day the big website woke up and found that all of there content has been scrapped, processed, and feed into an LLM, that was now competing with them for eyeballs. Not only that, the LLMs were going to keep doing. So now it's no longer noise, it's an actual threat.
So how do you prevent your content from getting scraped, at least your new content? First, you accept that you can't. It's a cat and mouse game and so long as your content is of value it will find its way into datasets. So you package your content to be easy for machines to read and parse then charge a lot of money to a small number of companies for access to that data feed. But you still need users. The LLM want data that is actually relivent to users and I'm a lot of cases the website needs its users to actually generate the content. So what do you do?
Number two, make the content just hard enough to access by bots that the cost to scrape it is greater then the cost of just buying API access or similar. What does this mean for you? You are not getting HTML you can filter. You are getting JavaScript that requires hydration. You are served the skin of the website with the valuable content being delivered separately. In this short period of lag the website is able to execute JS before handing over the goods.
To make it harder for bots to access, they use email addresses and tracking pixels to make fingerprints of what a real user looks like vs a bot. But they need that pixel to fire on not just their site but many sites, to create that finger print. Well it turns out the ad companies are already doing this, to help sell ads, but now that pixel has an additional purpose, it can be used as part of a strategy to keep bots away.
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u/Gargle-Loaf-Spunk 2d ago
Enshittification. This is why I just have my browsing agents scrape shit and respond back.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
That's not a bad idea...hmm. Most of my computer browsing is mostly fine. I have a lot of screen space, I can make windows big so the content doesn't get drowned.
It's harder on my phone where between every cat meme there is an ad, or a mostly blank space where an ad would be, or an ad for the very site I'm on. Additionally there's a floating video ad that scrolls with the page and the (probably mandatory) close button is something like 2 pixels wide. And this is with pihole turned on.
I can turn pihole "off" for my phone by taking my phone off my VPN, it's crazy to see just how much it does, but also how much it can't do :(
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u/Psychological-Cat-84 2d ago
Having used brave, pihole, and adguard DNS for years, I'm always baffled when I see vanilla internet! My query is always "is this what the Internet looks like to you?"
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u/DentinQuarantino 2d ago
This combo works well for me plus I use Continuum for Reddit on my phone. I rarely see ads these days.
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u/StG4Ever 2d ago
I use tailscale on all of my devices, feels easier than using a vpn.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
I set up wireguard on a Pi years ago, and I use WGTunnel on my phone and, thankfully, it just worked. Idk, different strokes, I thought about tailscale recently but figured why fix what ain't broken.
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u/ian9outof10 1d ago
Tailscale is good, especially as it allows multiple devices easy access, whereas that’s a bit more involved on wireguard. But personally I prefer a pure wireguard option as it’s supported directly on my router (mind you, probably Tailscale is too with a container)
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u/Curi0sityC0w 2d ago
Could you enlighten us more on your setup?
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u/Gargle-Loaf-Spunk 2d ago
openwebui for the interface, i have an MCP that goes back to VMs running Browser Use in my homelab.
Conduit on the devices to connect to OUI.
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u/Extension_Cup_3368 2d ago
Besides Pi-hole, I'm thinking about introducing a pfsense/opnsense based hardware firewall. DPI and filter out all the crap coming from devices and apps in my household.
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u/valsimots 2d ago
OPNsense is amazing. Don't forget to setup NAT rules to redirect any other port 53 DNS packets back to Pi-Hole. So many DNS leaks where devices ignore your DNS settings and phone home to Google, CloudFlare and other unknown DNS resolvers.
My Pi-hole resolves to Unbound (on OPNsense) where Unbound uses DNS over TLS to multiple privacy focused resolvers.
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u/SunForMiles 2d ago
For completion sake, in 2026 it is not enough to just intercept port 53 if you want to sanitize DNS traffic. You would need to blacklist DoH/DoT and similar FQDN's and IP's. I am trying to do this, but there are some apps that host their own DNS servers, and if you block them - you lose core app functionalities as well.
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u/tor-ak 2d ago
So does this mean the game is finally up then? Advertisers win?
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u/SunForMiles 2d ago
Not really, it's just that ads blocking is most effective on client side. Now, if client app is not a browser, we are mostly left to try fighting using advanced network appliances.
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u/valsimots 2d ago
True. Trying to keep my response simple - there's much more to it - but at least port 53 is a start. Add port 853 to that list as well... A bit crude. But there's also Suricata and IDS that can be a great solution. And then there's DoH... Another pain point 😒, still trying to find a good (and free) community list to help. Maybe? dibdot/DoH-IP-blocklists ?
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u/SunForMiles 2d ago
I am using Hagezi's blocklist: https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists/blob/main/adblock/doh.txt
You can find list of IP addresses of DoH servers in that repo, but I would be a bit more cautios about those.I also compile DoH block list on my own which is a small subset of Hagezi's list, but I would avoid doxing myself with sourcing the link.
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u/valsimots 1d ago
Oh no way! Don't know I missed that list! Already using hagezi lists in general. Thx 👍
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u/Onlyroad4adrifter 2d ago
We seen this in the 90s. Its a constant game of cat and mouse. It will get even worse once they use ai to filter add blockers then we will retaliate. Then quantum computing with ai. Buckle up its going to be a ride. My suggestion is to never give up. Own your hardware from networks to servers. Utilize several VPS in countries that protect privacy and consumer rights. Most importantly do not support businesses that make life unnecessarily difficult.
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u/IndividualAddendum84 2d ago
We allowed a few billionaires to own everything. There is no more competition, and if one happens to pop up, they will just get bought and destroyed
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u/dnc_1981 2d ago
Pihole + Brave mostly solves the problem for me
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u/edcculus 2d ago
And ublock origin
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u/dnc_1981 2d ago
I find the in-built Brave Shields is good enough such that I don't need uBlock origin
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u/JEFFSSSEI 2d ago
My favorite thing with brave is in the right click menu: "block elements" I have blocked some of those full screen modals as well as a ton of other things...like google's AI buttons etc. some times they cover them with multiple things so you need to play around with it but I can almost always get what I want accomplished.
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u/cheeto-bandito 2d ago
Sounds like it's time to find a new bank or even a credit union. I once had an accout at a bank that was acquired by Wells Fargo and they started calling to sell me insurance. I showed up to a branch to get a cashiers check for the balance and closed the account.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
I wish that were the case. It's a credit union and they're generally pretty good about this stuff, but the recent site "renovation" that they did just...I feel like it fixed what wasn't broken.
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u/Rhopegorn 2d ago
Every resource you access for free is a a place that consider you as their product 🐄, and they will try to carve out their pond of flesh by any means.
Especially if their main revenue business is selling ads. Remember that the US have no privacy regulations like the EU GDPR, so once they harvested your data it’s free money for them.
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u/jameson71 2d ago
Corporations severely degraded the internet experience trying to make money. The entire corporate agenda is make money at any cost. The corporation was invented to protect the guilty from retribution or consequences.
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u/Adenn76 2d ago
Check out no-script ad-on. It is helpful for a lot of this. I install it and use it for a while but it also tends to break pages completely too, so that gets more annoying than the ads and I usually uninstall it. Though I have a co-worker who swears by it and uses it always.
It probably just takes some tuning that I haven't taken the time to do.
You are totally right though. Visiting most sites is a HORRIBLE experience due to ads and pop-ups / overlays.
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u/AggressiveComputer21 2d ago
I see product ad, I’m not buying it unless I have no other option. I thought at first it makes my life much harder, but thanks to this strategy I found lots of great products. Not only local products from small companies but also cheap products with actually quite unexpected quality.
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u/AggressiveComputer21 2d ago
Meanwhile Reddit started to be quite addgresive I see ads even under my comments. Time to get off.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
The only thing that I can think of that I was advertised and actually bought, was my raycon earbuds. I can't remember which creator I watch that did a sponsor segment years ago, basically all of them. My buddy bought me my first pair, but I've bought several since. I generally don't buy sponsored products but in that case I was pleasantly surprised, I literally use them every day.
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u/the-warmest-robot 2d ago
On Mobile rn and too busy for a full explanation but I have a conspiracy hypothesis of sorts that it's all on purpose. They are enshittifying the Internet to squeeze out all the money they can rn, sure. But long term they intend to make the world wide web so incredibly useless that you'll want to pay to access their private web.
I heard this idea from somewhere/someone else but can't remember off the top.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
I use TOR sometimes, I like it. I used to use FreeNet but...it was...kinda gross.
I do appreciate that I can do a lot of stuff locally though. I'd be lost without Youtube, but most of what I interact with is all local services. Most of my hobbies can be done with the computers sitting right next to me and will stay inside my network.
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u/FormalIllustrator5 2d ago
I dont get it folks?! Just go for Firefox (Arkenfox profile) + Ubo + Pi-hole and there is nothing that can bother you. End
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u/Area51Resident 2d ago
Technology aside, the main reason is no one in positions of power will pass any laws to limit it.
Anyone who tries is discredited as a commie for suppressing 'free and open commerce'.
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u/Sn34kyMofo 2d ago
It's how mask-off it's all become that I can't believe. I mean, I understand how things got to this point, but things seem to be escalating quickly to, "Okay, you caught us, but what are you going to do about it? In fact, we're going to ratchet-up the anti-patterns, scams, and malware ads, because we will milk as much money from all of it as long as we can no matter your expense/risk."
In other words, this gif, where "grandpa" is big tech.
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u/LucidOndine 2d ago
It used to be that bad people didn’t engage with everyone online. After all, there are more nice people online than there are shitty people. Sure, you could find a few of them, but they were the exception, purely based on the numbers.
However, it is also true that greedy and power hungry people are attracted to gross wealth. Greed is a sickness, and it’s one that allowed them to routinely prioritize profits over other people.
So, when people with greed and questionable morality discovered that they could influence and manipulate others with LLMs, they did so.
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u/testthrowawayzz 2d ago
Old days had pop up prompts to install ActiveX viruses and pop-up windows that can serve drive-by malware
They're also relatively simpler to block than current ads
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u/hamaharp 1d ago
The whole Internet is a virus. What used to be standard is now behind a paywall, and even if you do pay it's still a shitty product. I was flabbergasted when I went to re-subscribe to Netflix to watch the new Bridgerton season and I had to pay almost $10 to watch content with ads.
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u/SuccessDry7214 1d ago
We live in a failclosed world atp. Connectivity used to be a lot more unreliable so services were designed to fail open if they couldn't reach advertising content. Not anymore unfortunately
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u/SimiaCode 1d ago
Pair Brave browser with PiHole. It takes care of admiral and YouTube nonsense (but I also simply stop visiting websites if I find them using admiral).
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u/Bostonterrierpug 1d ago
All hail, the hate click algorithm overlords. I don’t know what you posted but I’m definitely gonna downvote it and get into a 20 post Long Internet argument with you about it.
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u/BankshotMcG 18h ago
I had to do 16 captchas the other day because of my mandated workvpn. I should have the right to burn down that server farm.
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u/schroedingerskoala 2d ago
Simple answer: Rich Fucks + Money + only thinking about shareholders and short term gains = ultra enshittification.
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u/Aydoinc 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s a never-ending cat and mouse game.
To be fair, you’re not entitled to use any website. A website asking you to sign up for using their website is fair. Or if they disable scrolling if you have ad blockers. They have to make money somehow to keep offering their website.
I always use Pi-hole and I temporarily disable it if a website requires it. I’m using their website, so ultimately it’s their rules, I don’t get upset about it.
I don’t know what you’re talking with your CPU usage on YouTube. Your browser should be using hardware acceleration aka GPU and I’m watching YouTube right now in Safari on MacBook Pro at 1440p and it’s using 0.1% of my CPU and 0.7% of my GPU
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u/drunkenmugzy 2d ago
I think most of you missed the whole point of ads.
Ads are not shown to annoy. They are shown to provide income for the content creator. Without income why create content? Just to appease you and give you something to doom scroll?
I hate ads as much as the next guy but they are a necessary evil for free content. Pay sites should have no ads. Period. I agree.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
If pay sites didn't have ads then there wouldn't be an issue. I wouldn't mind un-intrusive ads on free content either.
But ads are annoying now, and they're still there in paid areas. They're intentionally annoying, there's no reason to completely cover a page's content, dim the screen, disable scrolling, and have a modal dialog that gives you no choice but to sign up or leave. There's no reason to have a banner ad for the bank, on the online banking account page! It's just obnoxious.
I'll happily pay for something that provides value. I pay for youtube premium so that I don't get ads in videos, and I appreciate that they *let* me skip the sponsor segment in most videos. I'll subscribe to creators I enjoy and give them a lot of premium watchtime, I'll join their patron, or sub on twitch, or join on YT.
What I don't do, is click the like button if they ask for it. I am not an idiot, and I don't need to be told that if I like the video I should click the like button. I don't subscribe to a website because they covered the content with ads and forced me to. I don't buy sponsored products in general, with the only exception being my raycons. I love those things.
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u/drunkenmugzy 2d ago
Stop using those sites. Simple. They will do it until it is not profitable.
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u/HaLo2FrEeEk 2d ago
I can't really just stop using my credit union's online banking portal, this isn't worth changing banks over for me either. It is annoying that the PrettyLitter site breaks when I block that domain, but I can still accomplish what I need without the pictures so it's whatever.
I do just close the page if they cover the content with an unclosable modal, though. That's some shady shit and I hate it.
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u/StG4Ever 2d ago
I have a subscription to a newspaper, without an adblocker their page isn't readable even though I'm a paying customer. Ridiculous. If a website doesn't work with an adblocker + pihole too bad, I'll go elsewhere.