How I block all online ads

Posted by StrLght 12/7/2025

How I block all online ads(troubled.engineer)

355 points | 287 commentspage 3

Jolliness7501 7 days ago|

Did same thing, not everything works, but there are (almost) no ads for me. I would add Smarttube with Sponsorblock extension for android TV to the list. They had hickup recently with melitious hack and malware in their code but now seems to recovered. And for all ads-trolls: "Oh, you are stealing income from creators." If I consider their work worth it I pay them (semi)directly.

ensocode 7 days ago||

My free and 5 minute setup: I am using Brave + uBlockOrigin Lite + AdGuard + AdGuard DNS on my home network. On android Brave + AdGuard DNS. No configuration just works, no annoyances. On youtube as well. Is there anything I should further do? I think I sometimes see ads in android apps maybe this can be optimized without root somehow?

inesranzo 12/8/2025||

Anyone have a method for blocking ads in RSS?

I regularly read https://daringfireball.com and sick of their ads showing up in my RSS feed.

It is bad enough and distracting that ads show up on the site (thankfully Firefox and ublock origin does the job already) but on RSS blocking ads is impossible.

Marsymars 7 days ago||

If you use a web RSS reader, then ublock origin will generally work on the ads in the feed.

I mostly just avoid subscribing to any feeds with ads. (Or pay for the ad-free feeds.)

browningstreet 12/8/2025||

I use Inoreader and filter out the ads via keywords. Works for repetitive content too…

twodave 12/8/2025||

I actually wonder if the whole anti-ad movement is moving in the wrong direction. And I’m right there with the author running a pi-hole, but I wonder if it would be better to have an extension that will click all of the ads in a way that is invisible to the user. Make all those companies burn thru their budgets for no gain.

notpushkin 12/8/2025||

You’re in luck: https://adnauseam.io/

gruez 7 days ago|||

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46188039

notpushkin 7 days ago||

It probably is filtered by now, yes. No harm in trying, though, and it puts some pressure on ad networks at least.

twodave 12/8/2025|||

Oh awesome, thanks for linking.

array_key_first 12/8/2025|||

You'd have to, like, spawn a background browser or profile or something to capture the click to prevent tracking or even zero-click exploits.

gruez 7 days ago|||

>or even zero-click exploits.

You'd need a VM to safely contain any exploits, although you're probably safe from 0days if you're just doing some run of the mill ad clicking. Nobody is burning a 6-7 figure 0day on a public ad network, when they need to save that for targeted attacks like politicians/journalists, so keeping your browser reasonably up to date will be sufficient.

twodave 12/8/2025|||

For sure, it would be technically challenging. Especially if the click requires use of a secure cookie. But it doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective, either, at least at first.

odie5533 12/8/2025||

Big players like YouTube can create detection for that behavior. So it would only harm small sites that are trying to run ads to get by.

twodave 12/8/2025|||

That assumes two things: 1. That such a tool couldn’t be limited to the big players (it could) and 2. That “small sites trying to run ads to get by,” aren’t part of the problem. I can understand why someone would believe this, but I believe the web would be a better place without them. These sites are all pretty much designed (poorly) around their ads, which limits their usefulness. Have you tried looking up recipes online? A bread recipe with 5 ingredients is 30 pages long!!!

oneeyedpigeon 7 days ago||

> A bread recipe with 5 ingredients is 30 pages long!!!

Is that anything to do with ads? I've always read that the padding is to make it copyrightable.

twodave 7 days ago||

It’s only 15 pages without the ads ;)

notpushkin 12/8/2025|||

I don’t think it harms the publishers. If the ad network (well, Google) does detect it, I think they just won’t pay for the “fraudulent”¹ clicks? (And in best case scenario, you’re actually helping small sites!)

Advertisers on the other hand will pay for nothing, yes. Some of them are small businesses. I wonder if there’s a way to click on big corp ads only...

Edit: ¹ – added scare quotes, see https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnause...

DaveZale 12/8/2025||

Brave browser helps a lot. I can't use some browsers due to the ad clutter. Some can handle the ads, some can't.

redrix 12/8/2025|

Brave is great, but I just wish it wasn’t Chromium based.

It’s always been ironic to me that a Privacy browser is dependent on source code primarily controlled by a company that derives the majority of its revenue from ads… exactly what the browser itself was spun off to shield its users against.

charcircuit 7 days ago|||

The majority of Mozilla and Apple's revenue for their browsers comes from ad revenue sharing agreements.

bluecalm 7 days ago||||

I tried using Firefox. I had it as default browser for 2 years but I just keep going back to Chromium. Firefox is slow and crashes/hangs too much in my experience. It was even very slow to open my automatically generated tables for accounting (for simple html but very big files because accounting regulation in my previous country of residence were brain dead). I don't think often published benchmarks tell the whole story there.

Now I am back to Brave and very happy. Almost no ads, super fast, doesn't crash or hang.

schubidubiduba 7 days ago||

I tried using Brave. It weirded me out with the crypto stuff and random popups. Now back to Firefox, on all my devices, without any crashes ever. And it's just as fast as chromium, which I very very rarely use for bad websites that do not work with Firefox.

maineagetter 7 days ago|||

[dead]

tensor 12/8/2025||

Whoa, if you use a VPN eventually instagram will stop showing you ads?!?! Is that really true? Has anyone else found this?

rovr138 12/8/2025||

Not a vpn, but use a known public cloud IP address through a vpn (but you could set a socks proxy, etc).

gitaarik 7 days ago||

And?

derelicta 7 days ago||

The VPN trick doesnt work for YouTube on mobile anymore. I get popups saying I need to log-in or disable my VPN to watch videos. I could probably buy a silly gmail account online and link it to my YouTube app, but am afraid it will log-in my whole phone to this shady Google account.

buttocks 12/8/2025||

NextDNS is sufficient on its own. $20 for a year of no ads (or smut if you want to block that too).

rmunn 12/8/2025|

Funny story on porn blockers. Back when I attended college, the college I attended blocked porn sites at the DNS level. It was pretty good at its job, but I did notice one false positive: I was trying to access the website for the Extremely Reliable Operating System (whose URL at the time was eros-os.org, though that URL no longer works). The porn blocker blocked my access attempt; I had to click on the "email the sysadmins" link and send them an email saying "Hey, can you add this site to the DNS whitelist? Despite having "eros" in the URL it's got nothing at all to do with porn." They whitelisted it and I had no more false-positives the rest of my college career. But I still laugh about that one, more than two decades later.

drnick1 7 days ago||

What is the point of such restrictions? DNS blacklists can be trivially bypassed by changing the browser's or the operating system's DNS resolver. For example, and somewhat insidiously, Firefox defaults to using Cloudflare AFAIK.

jamesbelchamber 7 days ago||

Adding friction, reducing "accidents" and ticking the "we tried" box.

EbNar 7 days ago||

Brave+ControlD, for me. I'm not interested in YouTube, so don't care about that part.

jenadine 12/8/2025|

To block adds in android apps, there is DNS66 available on f-droid. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

thunderbong 12/8/2025|

Thanks. From that page -

> NOTE: Dvelopment has stopped. The newer dev.clombardo.dnsnet continues development.

DNSNet

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dev.clombardo.dnsnet/

jenadine 7 days ago||

Looks like I've been using an outdated version for a few years. Thanks for the notification.

More comments...