Enough of that new marker smell can make you forget all about $_PRODUCT for a while.
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Sometimes, yes.
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I don’t mind the ads so much, and if FB is serving the ads directly I CAN sue them when they screw up and send me malware. Sounds like a win for the user.
I call bullshit, @beschizza, and challenge you to name all of the “many” ad-blocking companies that do this. I can think of exactly one and certainly it isn’t many.
Sloppy reporting and I work in the browser industry doing security.
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I ran a test on my Core i7 (Skylake even) with 32GB of RAM and stock Chrome. I was trying to recreate a RAM issue Chrome has. I used a bunch of Youtube videos and wikia sites. Didn’t manage to recreate the RAM issue (and only got to about 20ish GB RAM used … no particular CPU load) but 3-4 wikia tabs slowed Chrome to a near halt. On about the nicest CPU you could get without going Xeon.
As long as the ad companies (including Facebook and Google) insist on letting advertisers run complex browser-side code, obfuscate the destination of the ad, and disguise ads to like real content (MGID, etc, I’m looking at you but you’re shameless so I guess I wasted a practice Mom Death Stare™), I’ll continue to have no sympathy for them when people block ads.
*Reminds me I need to block MGID etc. the next time I’m in my router. I don’t ad block but there are a few domains whose traffic is not allowed on my network. Why 90% of this is even legal. Speaking of Facebook, I suppose I should block them on the local level since their Like button tracks you across the web. Can’t block it on the router level because my roommate uses it.
I know they need ads for revenue since few can get away with subscription models. The line has to be drawn somewhere. I doubt many would go through the effort to block ads if the ad companies were behaving themselves.
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Hey, I’m good at it. 
Overblown rants aside (sorry; I was a bit OTT earlier), I don’t really struggle to avoid ads, online or otherwise.
Web’s covered by the techniques already mentioned, plus tweaks to my hosts file.
As was also mentioned, I don’t bother with broadcast media, so never encounter TV/radio ads.
Cinema: I have my Kindle app until the film itself starts.
Newspaper/magazines: nope.
Billboards: it’s surprisingly easy to break the habit of looking, when one’s background attitude is “I’m not interested in anything you’re selling, whatsoever; I’m not even casually curious”.
Email spam: obviously not, but also bacn: I don’t sign up for anything at all. Literally nothing.
Er…
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“Many” is a crucial word there. 
Before Chrome was really a thing, I used NoScript (out of necessity because I used a really out of date computer at the time) and I tried to get my relatives to use it too. With all the hard work done for them already (which was a lot at the time), they still asked me to take it back off almost immediately. I said “give it a chance, you’ll like the speed.” A day later, I was disabling the extension on each of their computers.
I’m with you in a lot of ways. I don’t watch live TV because the commercials drive me out of my skin. I stopped listening to the radio because the commercials are excruciatingly terrible (also, they all got bought by Clear Channel so it’s 90% ads and 10% oddly generic music from a really small playlist). Most people out there would rather put up with the ads though.
They just don’t want to have an excruciatingly terrible browsing experience (pop ups, ads that play audio, ads that freeze your browser, full page overlays demanding you sit here and watch x seconds of an ad for something you don’t care about).
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Same with me. They all have email and yet I can’t get them to use it so I’m stuck with FB
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Your family has no access to these, I guess.
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not even that these days… how about just plain safe computing. ad networks are primo places to get your malware delivered. even places you would normally trust get dinged cause the ad providers get hacked and start pushing bad things down to the unwary.
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Let the nuclear arms race of ads vs adblock begin!
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Yup. Allowing scripting by default is not much different to me than allowing every shop or venue I go to, to stick me up with a bunch of needles of unknown origin. I mean it’s basically an analogous situation.
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You seriously browse the web with all JavaScript turned off by default?
Sounds like a shitty user experience on most popular sites, like discourse.
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I’m under no obligation to run some stranger’s code on my computer. If I trust the site, then yes, I run JavaScript. But sight unseen? ABSOLUTELY NOT. I value my data, my computer, and my sanity. If it needs JavaScript (not many sites actually do) then I’ll allow scripting, with security measures. Just because Firefox is a generally well-secured browser, doesn’t mean I like punch the monkey ads, or driveby malware.
For a security guy, you’re awfully sanguine about some tracker from pornhub or whatnot potentially getting all your banking info.
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Heart for making not using facebook cool.
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I did use facebook all during high school. But then after that I asked myself “what’s it actually do for me?” and it turned out, at best, I got to see people I know complaining, or brand shilling and such, and at worst it’s a pit of depression and data insecurity where they change their privacy rules at the same rate most people change underwear. So I decided to ditch it.
They don’t respect users. Users are their product. We’re just carcasses for the adnetwork meatgrinder.
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I mostly liked the idea that it would get me laid, but none of my female friends’ friends (that I never met) were lining up to randomly knock on my door at 11PM, it turned out. Leaving the house was better for that.
And of course, Facebook is evil. It’s a void to scream into, at best. It’s an embarrassing way to make a permanent record of your worst, most attention seeking moments (or months), and it could make you a target of the government. Being “old” now, I’m not an authority on cool, but that’s lame as fuck.
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P.S. “We reserve the right to change these terms at any time” is where I stop reading too.
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Yeah, you know, the holiest of all principles of the modern age - large multinational monopolies have the inalienable right to screw their captive users over as hard and as often as they deem necessary.
It’s to do with the business structure; you have advertisers, who pay for clicks and views on the assumption that more = more sales, and the networks that provide that service. The networks fight ad blockers because more exposures means more clicks/view means more money; they aren’t the ones benefiting from sales, so they don’t really care if it reduces the rate at which clicks progress to sales so long as they get away with it. Plus there’s loads of subtle effects that exposure has even without you realising it, so while the ad blocker demographic won’t be won over to the same extent it will still probably improve sales.
I’ve been wondering if this might be solved by a collective subscription model, kind of like Brave’s paid model, except not Brave but an extension instead so you can use a proper browser with it.
I don’t know what kind of sites you visit regularly but a scary and increasing number I encounter seem to require JavaScript just to load text these days, let alone complete forms (despite the good old fashioned HTML forms still being an option), and any more interactivity than that requires a bizarre guessing game requiring refreshing the page 10 times to figure out which 10 of the 30 script domains (particularly since half of them are chainloaded by the others) the site tries to pull from operate that basic HTML5 video player, for instance.
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