Thank you Raymond Hill

Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?

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!
🙂 🐧
- Simple Mobile Tools was forked into "Fossify *" for anyone interested.
There's a reason uBlock Origin overtook Adblock Plus in popularity.
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.
- I wouldn't blame him if he took it, but I greatly respect that he didn't.
Raymond Hill: “Get behind me, Google.”
I hadn't even thought about that. Thank you.
What is the decentralised solution?

And all the volunteers keeping those lists up-to-date.

Yea it’s mainly those that do the work actually
- Still big kudos to Raymond for providing the foundations to make it all work too.

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
- 😀 👍
- I found out this trick when I eating dinner once at my local library. Oddly, it was a kid came up and saw I was watching YT videos. Showed me the tactic, and now I rely on it lol
- I just stay logged out of youtube. So far no ads and no nagware
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.
People just don't know, I've been showing my wife the way little by little and she's always blown away
- I've shown a colleague after seeing him browse an horrendous fantasy football website. He couldn't believe the difference between before and after.
Yeah, it's shocking to see how many ads they jam in now. I felt so dirty.
I also don't understand it. But now I am wondering if we would not have had those "careless" (indifferent ? ignorant ?) millions of people not blocking ads then Google and others may have started pushing anti-adblock measures years earlier, no ?
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.
- 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.
- Ads are probably actually not that bad. But to me the massive stalking is unacceptable. So, uBO FTW!
- You never visited the not-sheltered web...

What would we do without ublock origin

Use vblock ingress!
You would use noBlock origin instead
- I love posts like this. You get to discover new stuff 😂
In the 1999s-2000s we used WebWasher. It was basically a proxy server which you ran locally on your computer and it had all the filters. You just set up your browser's network connection to point to WebWasher and it acted as the gateway to the Internet.

If browsers somehow decided to kill all their plugin support, you could still use that to filter your content.
- Don’t forget good old hosts file. This file exists on both linux and windows.

Seriously. Says a lot about the modern internet, though. Both good and bad.

- Provide source please: xkcd

Thank Raymond and the list maintainers, you keep the internet usable

Yeah, Raymond Hill made a great plugin, but the people maintaining the lists are the real MVPs
- They're all gods among men.
Invisible and nameless internet warriors. They stay eternal.

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

When YouTube was blocking ublock people was surprised that they couldnt donate to the project.

All hail Raymond Hill :0

And the people maintaining the lists his work depends on.

Never knew the name of the guy behind it. Nice! This is why Everybody Loves Raymond!

https://github.com/gorhill

About

Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.

If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
- That is some commit history!!

Im genuinely so thankful for this project, the creator and maintainers. You are doing the lords work.

Gladly upvoted to ~~worship~~ honor one of the open source heroes.

Ad/content blockers of various types are the only reason the internet is still generally usable for me.

I'd otherwise have a meltdown and watch everything burn

There is something very wrong when deleting 50% of wep page is the least it takes to make the internet usable...

Messiah of the internet

I have been using uBlock Origin and uMatrix together for so long, that I don't remember when they became permanent must have.. uBlock origin sanitizes the site, while uMatrix prevents any surprises since I last visited a site. The more garbage the site is, the more broken it is on my setup.