izzy | Technically Good ✨
Daring Fireball★ ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product
adamrice@daringfireball Apps, of course, can capture even more user data than websites (if you let them) and are immune to ad blockers.
christianoliff :-)@adamrice @daringfireball I think it is technically possible to have an adblocker for ads in apps. 1Blocker has a VPN firewall option which blocks apps tracking. I think they don’t block ads in apps for legal/App Store rules reasons… if you used a pi hole on your network I think it’d block ads in apps too.
WTL@daringfireball 💯 The web is practically unusable without an adblocker (I use Ghostery).
sjsmac@daringfireball And don’t forget, Apple News itself does NOT offer a reader mode. Gee, I wonder why?
Lazy B0yprotecting users from other people’s ads to shoe more of their own 🤪👍🥹
ChancerubbageIt was the bargain struck for magazines and newspapers going digital at all, on any platform . The publishers were in the business of selling ads, not providing editorial content.
Kiki Buber@daringfireball At least lite.cnn.com exists, I wish more news sites had such a thing
Victor ForbergerAlso see https://text.npr.org/
Killa Koala@daringfireball I use pi-hole, Instapaper and reader mode to make the web useable. So many websites are an absolute nightmare without this sort of assistance nowadays.
beasom@daringfireball Yep, nothing has changed for the better in the last decade or so. http://www.shindoisshin.com/blog/dickbars-and-other-readability-excrement
@beasom
quite the contrary actually…
as more and more people realize that plain consumerism doesn’t make them happy, advertisers need to push harder to brainwash and manipulate people…
and millions of people decided that making people buy shit they don’t need is their main occupation which they hence need to do to survive…
so the enshittyfication goes on.
Rachel Greenham@daringfireball uBlock Origin (non-Lite, the full-fat version) is literally the reason I run Firefox on Mac instead of Safari (though I do have uBOL on Safari too); a distant second reason is that it runs on Linux too and Safari doesn’t. Further down, any other considerations on which Safari would probably otherwise win. Even with uBO sometimes I have to resort to reader mode, and sometimes still I have to just give up: site obvs doesn't want me to read it.
edit: woke up, fixed abbrevs
Hastar i motvind 🇸🇪@daringfireball I laughed at this excellent take:
”It’s like going to a restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol while trying to sell you towels.”
Tors10 
@daringfireball The Guardian does not have a paywall - you can read it without subscription, but the experience indeed isn’t great. You can pay for a subscription though to have a better experience.
Their printed version is indeed a better experience but readers pay for that.
Their printed version is indeed a better experience but readers pay for that.
Delric@daringfireball i’m still using 1Blocker, think DF recommended it many years ago. not as good anymore?
John Gruber@delric There are many good options. Thankfully!
Windy city@daringfireball @gruber The point about the MacBook Neo (or any machine) being unusable without content blockers is the new reality. We often talk about Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"...well, the targets are all messed up these days. In an ideal world, we wouldn't be burning our battery cycles and cellular data to fund a system that actively prevents us from reading the very content we came for.
Thanks for featuring my article and your brilliant analysis, I appreciate you 🙏✨
Applewise
jburka@daringfireball honestly, what struck me most about that blog post was that it hurt my head to see the screenshots displayed at the wrong aspect ratios (e.g. a 1678x850 image rendered at 743x964). Guessing this is how you feel when you see arial instead of helvetica. I even tried it without content blockers and in a different browser.
The content of the article was great (I had no idea about the client-side ad auctions. omg.)
Thomas P. Moonis@daringfireball The ads are just absolute shit, too. Tell me what the fuck this is. Some AI-generated slop image -- why in Christ is he in a Marine dress uniform? -- and it's not even selling anything.
Stuart Breckenridge@daringfireball @gruber For the article title alone, I’ll direct you to a PC Gamer article recommending RSS readers while simultaneously downloading half a gig of ads in five minutes — https://stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss-readers-in-a-37mb-article/
not that coachmike@daringfireball I know @gruber isn't a car guy (or maybe his driving a 20+yrs Acura means he actually is hardcore car guy 😊), but every car parts website is exactly this morass of crap and upsell.
Except this one. https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/
Which I think is the largest direct-to-consumer. Low prices sure, but quick-easy “just present the info” navigation certainly helps.
See how long it takes to find, eg, a water pump, for your 2006 Acura. Then go to any other 3party seller and try. 🤢
@daringfireball RaspberryPi and PiHole. Blocks all the ads at the router level. So no ads in all browsers, my TV, dishwasher and light bulbs can’t phone home.
Quiche IndustriesOne of the many reasons I made Quiche Browser was to get a per-website JavaScript kill switch in my toolbar.
But these days I'm even tempted to disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it only where needed.
K. Langoso 🇧🇷🔴🐷🇳🇬🏡😷@quicheindustries @daringfireball That’s exactly what I use Purify for. 1Blocjer is my content blocker, Purify does my JS whitelisting.
https://apps.apple.com/br/app/purify-block-ads-and-tracking/id1030156203
Grant_H
Txema León@quicheindustries would love a toggle for that
@txemaleon then you can have it 😉
Robert Vitonsky@quicheindustries @daringfireball in case that approach become popular, the sites will inline all that garbage with no JS. What's your next turn then?
@vitonsky wouldn't that get rid of all the bidding processes and exclude large swaths of ads? The publishers would have to serve ads from their own domain, meaning they would have to host all the ads. This would definitely complicate using bidding and targeting algos, if not outright prevent them. @quicheindustries @daringfireball
@vitonsky @daringfireball Without JavaScript they won’t be able to do much in that area.
Beth Weigand 🦭@daringfireball @zwei What makes this even more frustrating is the majority of sites that aren’t super mainstream (blogs and such) are now mostly written by AI. Some of them even have ad structures like these. I grew up in an era where it was important to read multiple different articles from different sources, but I have no desire to read bulleted lists and “key takeaways” in every blog.
funnymonkeyYes - all of this.
I looked at this back in December with a scan of 15 mainstream news sites.