I’ve been having ad problems with BoingBoing for several months. It loads super slowly, whether in Firefox or Safari, and most of the page is obscured by ads and by a “top articles” pop-up. It got so bad that I reluctantly blocked ads several weeks ago, but now the whole page jitters and jumps when the adblocker is on so that it’s difficult to read and impossible to click. I don’t have this problem with any other website. BoingBoing is one of my most frequent visits, so I would really like to be able to see it. Here’s a screenshot of what the page looks like upon (very slow) opening.
The level of garbage ads is approaching clickbait fringe sites like Breitbart.
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What do you do about it? Just live with it?
I only read the forum to get the gist of an article. If it merits it, I click through to the article and live with the consequences.
A lot of folks have started doing the same. The periodic malvertising campaigns don’t help keep Ad revenue up, I am sure.
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I never read the front page since the last time I was automatically forwarded and click trapped
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Or Brave.
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I use the RSS feed with The Old Reader. No ads there, though you still get the shop posts
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But every page is like this. Here’s what I see when I click a random post link. It took ten seconds to load.
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You’re right. Brave works much better. Hadn’t used it in a while, because it won’t play some of my streaming videos.
Thanks!
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Lol I actually added uBlock Origin to Brave. Got my belt, and my suspenders, and my absorbent underpants with that browser.
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I gave up on blog view a while ago and went to purely browsing the bbs.
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If you’re up to it, putting a Pi-hole on your network works brilliantly. Then every device on your network (wifi or wired) gets DNS-based adblocking for free. It’s been super stable for me over the last year and caused almost no issues.
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(The answer is ad revenue, which cratered across the entire internet in February to just 25% of 2019’s average.
BoingBoing is, as far as I can understand, a jointly owned venture by the authors.
Jason acts as the publisher/frontman, who inks licensing deals. Branded product advertisements now make up a solid chunk of revenue in the media industry and with BoingBoing’s high SEO rank, probably account for the bulk of site income.)
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So my wife likes to shop online using Rokutan (formerly Ebates) and I guess the way they can give shoppers the rebates that they do, they route them through affiliate link sites that are all universally blocked by pi-hole, and no amount of pleading by me to try and convince my wife that pi-hole was a benefit to her worked. So that was the end of whole network ad-blocking at my house.
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I use wipr on iOS and see no ads here. On Mac I have UBlock and a half dozen other ones running.
What drives me CRAZY are the auto playing videos at AVClub, Jezabel, etc. Nothing I’ve tried stops that shit. I used to hang out and comment at AVClub (before the Kinjapocalypse), but now I mostly avoid it because of those GODDAMN VIDEOS.
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It’s probably my fault. I made fun of the memory foam pillows with the bio-ceramic foam they were hawking. Sorry everyone.
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Too many domains to add to the allowlist?
When I used to read printed newspapers, I simply avoided the ads I wasn’t interested in (which were most of them); I do that here also. The BB content I come for outweighs an ad-related nuisance. That’s just me.
