Mastodawn

🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)

I love my ad-blockers 🥰

Proton¹ VPN blocks most of the ads I get served, and the ones that get through are caught by AdNauseam² (which silently clicks ads in the background, costing marketing $ and poisoning metrics).

I've wasted $800+ of marketing budget³ in the last few months—for ads I never saw.

Fuck you in particular, Amazon.

Edit:

Reply-guy credentials: I've been the CDO and head of business analytics at several tech companies, and I have at least some idea how my job works.

¹ Yes, Proton has some serious issues, but I still think it works better than most other solutions when you factor in the ease of setup & operation across multiple products.

² Ad Nauseam uses uBlock Origin.

³ It wastes the company's marketing budget (high- click-through, zero sales), which lowers how much advertising platforms can charge for their services, which hurts those platforms too in the long run.

★ If your reply boils down to "it's useless to do anything, because ____", then 🤷🏼‍♀️ I don't know what to fucking tell ya; roll over.

@alice hmm
does adnauseum work as well for you as ublock origin?

because ik it's based on ublock but idk never wokred as well

Matilda Love Mar 13

@alice i thought marketers liked clicks

MrGrumpyMonkey Mar 13

@alice I've been thinking about shifting to AdNauseam on my main host. How much better is it over the likes of Ublock & Adguard? As for the VPN, I shifted away from Proton in favor of Windscribe.

@alice huge shoutout to Proton VPN + DuckDuckGo browser on my phone. I don't think I've seen an ad on Android in over a year now

DDG's Android browser has a YouTube player built in that strips out ads too

@captainvellalives @alice does the vpn drain the battery?

@emily_rugburn @alice I haven't noticed any huge drops since using it full time 😊 I usually get about a day out of a phone charge (older phone)

@captainvellalives @alice i will keep this in mind. 😊

dexternemrod Mar 14

@captainvellalives @alice

My Xiaomi 10t Pro (LineageOS 23) also seems to be not impacted.

Fazal Majid Mar 13

@alice the ad networks like Google, Meta and Amazon don't care, in fact they applaud you, as they are the ones getting that $800 in spend.

@alice
I just use hardened Firefox, uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

The problem isn't just ads, you also have telemetry and a ton pf bloatware.

Green screen background Mar 13

@alice it’s useful to do anything 😀

Дими́трий Mar 13

i'm in the same boat with proton that you are. i use eff's privacy badger along with the proton vpn and have yet to see an ad.

but, you've convinced me to give adnauseum a try. i love the stick-it-to-the-man aesthetic!

MrGrumpyMonkey Mar 14

@saltywizard @alice You will need to disable Privacy Badger in order to get the full use of Adnauseum. Apparently it does something very similar to Privacy Badger. I've also seen fewer random java popups. Which is something I've been wanting to block, without breaking an entire website, for a while now.

@alice I appreciate your first subscript and shall endeavor to make something better.

@alice well done, i had problems at some point but yeah :)

Juniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲Mar 13

@alice I hadn't heard of AdNauseam. I will have to check it out. 😊

tootbrute Mar 14

@alice AdNauseum sounds great.

I'm downloading

Seth Galitzer Mar 14

@alice This is some Grade A field sabotage. I need to look into AdNauseum.

Alex Hyett Mar 14

@alice nice! I haven’t used AdNauseam but I do have a PiHole that works pretty well for blocking ads on mobile apps and games. The internet is unusable without an ad blocker these days.

@alice lol nice

Delta Sierra Mar 14

@alice I'm using Proton VPN as well (won a raffle for a lifetime Visionary plan so I'm not likely to change that up anytime soon).

I'm curious about AdNaseum though. Do you actually *see* the ads it clicks in any way, or does that all happen in the background? I'd love to help poison the well but between PiHole, Proton VPN, and Ublock Origin I don't see a single ad for weeks at a time. If I have to look at an ad for AdNaseum to work I think that'd be a net negative for me.

Niedliche Nacktschnecke ☑️Mar 14

@alice i love this and will try adNausean!

MrGrumpyMonkey Mar 14

@alice The fact this got as much attention as it did, while a majority were unsure of the purpose of this piece of software, shows that there are multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing. Prior to using AdNauseam, I was seeing more of those annoying java script pop up screens that I couldn't quite figure out how to ignore. Turns out AdNauseam seems to have remedied that. The only extension I had to disable was Privacy Badger. I run Adgurad and Ghostery in conjunction. I'll give this 👍 👍

Taffer 🇨🇦

@alice Oh damn, I love that, I’m going to check that out! I wonder how it handles malicious ads (they’re all malicious).

Jonathan Lamothe Mar 14

@alice Does ProtonVPN ise the wireguard protocol? I already have a wireguard VPN in place but it's for accessing my local netwotk whrn I'm out and about, not for anonymizing me.

I was using Mullvad for the latter because I could incorporate it into the existing system, but it's been tight financially lately and I didn't renew this month. I've heard Proton has a free tier, but haven't looked into it.

Orca 🌻 | 🎀 | 🪁 | 🏴🏳️‍⚧️Mar 14

@alice I do think AdNauseam's way is more interesting, but I have the following worries:
1. Won't AdNauseam's clicks make my browser's local database (cookies and stiff) a mess? Or does the data related to the clicks only presists for this browser session (as if I'm using incognito mode)?
2. Won't it be dangerous if some ads on page link to some webpages with browser exploits or other malware?

@alice
Gonna try it out
Replaced ublock adnauseam for an experiment

Do love some aggressive defense atm :3

neocat_flag_demiguy

@alice I just wanted to say I hate that you have to deal with so many reply-guys on posts like this. It sucks that people on Fedi can be such assholes. I appreciate that you’re willing to deal with that for the sake of getting information out there!

I have been using a combination of NextDNS filtering traffic on all of my devices and then uBlock on my browser. I’m intrigued by Ad Nauseam, I might want to give it a try sometime. Especially since it uses uBlock, it seems like it would be a drop in replacement.

狐ヴィクシー Mar 15

@alice The problem is I would very much like Google to not have any money at all.