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Yes. For the record, I am angry about it. Scratch that. It is absolutely infuriating.

It makes me feel beat down. I have always loved reading, but that has diminished as this garbage has infiltrated every nook and cranny of the web. I guess I'll have to go back a couple of decades and start reading paper books again. Of course, then I'll have to wade through the cesspool of ads to find and order books, since local bookstores have pretty much shut down. Enshittification of the real world is a thing, too.

@CatHat Yes, I do spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. I just wish I could keep up with brand new discoveries in technology/science/math. It's always been a major interest of mine, but now I stop early because I'm stressed out and frustrated, instead of stopping because I got inspiration for my own projects.

@VulcanTourist I know of some of those things, but the worst area for this is where I know of the fewest controls: adaptive news feeds. Stuff that learns my peculiar interests and finds articles on them for me. Regular, non-adaptive ones don't generally do it for me, sadly, or I could probably find some feed providers that don't shove ads down my throat as an alternative to Google.

@hosford42

I use Google News. I don't see advertising.

It's still frustrating as hell to me because of the unhelpful irrational organization. It's better than no news... maybe.

@VulcanTourist I don't get them on the feed. I get them when I go to the articles. And IDK how to shut that off.

@hosford42

I generally don't see them at other sites, either. It demands some intermittent moments of effort from me, and sometimes I exercise a wee bit too much agency and must unexercise, but it's worth it.

@VulcanTourist What sort of effort?

@hosford42

I have to make choices about what third-party sites and resources to block, and sometimes I have to backpedal some to make a site render useably. I use multiple tools. I didn't know about the config settings the other person mentioned, though I do use Firefox. I generally wouldn't have to bother with them because I don't see ads at all, much less animated ones that would make me scream.

@hosford42

I'm just now still seeing conversation from this, and wondering if you even found a solution that you could manage. I was expecting you to ask for specifics if you wanted to try some or all of my approach, and when you didn't I assumed that meant you were put off by it or tried something else.

- Firefox
- pop-ups controlled with Firefox
- NoScript
- uBlock Origin with blocklists
- Privacy Badger (not critical)
- Enhancer for YouTube

I have more extensions, but those are core.

@VulcanTourist Thanks!

@hosford42

There's more specifics, like which blocklists I use with uBlock and the NoScript allowances that I've carved out for Web sites over the years (are there publicly shared import lists for that?). It's not a static solution, it has to evolve over time.

A note about another's comment: AdGuard DNS appears to be commercial (ugh) and regardless is rendered irrelevant by uBlock Origin: they use the same public blocklists! I discovered that when I spent a couple minutes investigating it.

@VulcanTourist I did see somewhere else someone mentioned that yes, there are public lists for that.

@hosford42

Public lists for which, NoScript? I need to find those, then... though probably too late after the years of work I put into it.

Or did you mean blocklists? The two big ones are Peter Lowe's and Dan Pollock's, but I'm not sure the latter is still maintained. There have been many others over the years, but they don't stay maintained forever.

I've got personal blocks I've created with uBlock, too, but those are for elements other than ads, like those pesky cookie affirmations.

@VulcanTourist Honestly, I don't recall now. I wouldn't take my word for it.

@rood What do you mean?

(I'm a programmer, 30+ years, but not web stuff. So I can probably get the idea pretty quickly but still need some details.)

@hosford42 any webpage can be stripped of its css style sheet, and you can strip out the images too if you still have a problem. This can work because pages are sometimes developed to be looked at as plain HTML before the styling etc sets the UI.

If it's a simple matter for you, just Inspect (right click on image border) an element you don't like, and then delete the element/tag (<tags>markedupFoo</tags>). (An analogy, these are the scissors for a user/developer to cut off whatever pom poms and tassles they hate.)

You can equally automate with scripts to knock out regular problems. Some plugins, like ad blockers, can help to filter. There is 'usually' a console in the developer tool built into browsers - don't know a browser without it.

There's a whole lot of stackOverflow discussion on the best ways to strip CSS. Some of the script-in-the-console answers could very easily be rerouted to destroy images of a specific variety (via expression matching).

I get mad at websites enough sometimes to bother cutting them up before I read them. The Guardian springs to mind. You can also print results to pdf and have the browser read the pdf to you, so you can't be distracted by a clunky ad-maniac website that won't stop regenerating whatever nonsense.

There's a couple more solutions I can't remember at the moment.

Edit: I remembered one. If you want full automation on a must-use-website, maybe set up a console app that scrapes/gets (eg curl) the exact tags you need to read. Write is also possible with further enquiry on web stuff.

@rood This all sounds like desktop solutions. I do most of my browsing and reading on my phone, and mainly use my desktop/laptop for programming and gaming. But it's good to know about the option to delete elements from the debug window. I didn't know that was a possibility!

@hosford42 searching text browser in an app store almost filters on topic. One browser claims to break every website, but at least it only returns text. Another has dial in settings to stop various things loading. It's a common request with a few solutions here and there. Ad blockers are the most common solution.