im getting sick and tired of seing ads and commercials everywhere on the internets. i understand they are TRYING to sell their stuff to me and everyone else but the amount is just sickening. its a business. but the way it has become and it might get worse. specially on social media its every second post coming as suggestions and other weird fake news and crazy stories. are you aware of this?
ads are everywhere now. its scary. if i think about buying a synth i gets ads of that synth. and i did not even buy it. also.. the excess advertisement on youtube..
Switch off and go on vacation—or read only the absolute essentials! Set an alarm and tell yourself that, say, an hour or so is enough. When the alarm goes off, turn off the device and head to the park! Is your brain a garbage dump where every piece of written nonsense and every advertisement gets dumped?
Ads? social media? what are those? idk, I stay away from social media and use a private dns coupled with ublock origin on all my devices. Only time I see ads is when I'm taking the train, but closing my eyes or just looking the other way is enough to avoid them.
I use a combo of 3 browser add-ons: 1) Ghostery, 2) uBlock Origin, and 3) AdBlock. I hardly see any ads. When I use another computer, a friend's for instance, I'm shocked at how many ads there are. But the internet is quite tolerable with ad-blocking add-ons.
When you open a webpage, your browser (and sometimes embedded scripts running inside it) makes outbound requests to multiple servers to fetch the page content. That includes the site itself plus whatever third-party resources the page is designed to load like ads, trackers, analytics, etc. A system level firewall like Little Snitch on MacOS doesn’t “see ads arriving.” It sees outbound connection attempts from processes on your machine and can block those connections before they complete. If a request to an ad server is denied, the content is never downloaded at all. That’s different from browser adblockers, which typically allow the request to happen and then filter or not display the results. I think maybe PortMaster is close to it for Windows. Maybe someone will know a better one. There are a lot more blocklists available in Little Snitch than this screenshot shows but you will get the idea. They are also free to subscribe to so you get updates... Last edited: May 27, 2026 at 8:52 AM
Run AdGuard or similar in a Docker container. If you have a raspberry pi or low-power pc, you can use it as your DNS Server to filter out most of the junk. You can also get a Unifi Gateway Max to replace your router and apply telemtry and ad blocking easily. I also pay for youtube premium because it makes a HUGE difference...and they usually serve ads on the same port as the video stream, which bypasses most tools these days. Sometimes just hearing "garbage" is unhealthy, even if you think you can tune it out. I refuse to watch some ad about "We found this little known method...." while I'm trying to find helpful resources quickly.
Those of us old enough might get a kick of this uBlock Origin Lite fork: They Live Adblocker I'm gonna keep this around for those few times I actually the Chrome installation. Like most of us I'm already used to not seeing too many ads and it's always a slight shock to see the web unfiltered. This extension kind of hammers the point home. It's great.
This is the reason why you should be using good blockers like ub-origin and the like. Regular url blockers don't work anymore and will be easily defeated by javascript and every other circumventing method they have come up with since the original ad blockers hit the scene. When using good filters and blockers the experience is tolerable. Without it it's positively deal-breaker annoying.
