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by dopadelic 651 days ago
Adblock would break most websites nowadays. It's commonplace to detect adblock and disable the website if adblock is detected.
5 comments

I have uBO, a pihole, and noscript between me and the web nowadays. I'd say I run into a website that intentionally bricks itself once every 3-6 months.

It's an uncommon practice in my experience, and it's easy to understand why. 90+% of websites nowadays are click farms - their content is totally interchangeable with, if not plagiarized from, hundreds of other sites. The one site that implements an anti-adblocker measure simply gives up a portion of its traffic to another site that doesn't. The far more lucrative strategy is to try to subvert the ad blocker, which many sites actually do.

Even just pure uBO is good enough to stop the vast majority of anti-adblock efforts without any custom tweaking.
Hmm, it most definitely does not.
A lot of this anti-adblock nonsense is also blocked by Ublock Origin nowadays. I can't remember the last time a webpage succeeded in bricking itself intentionally, though I do occasionally get accidental cases where the website is just poorly designed and hangs because of shitty javascript failing to load some tracker links. Usually payment flows. Though it's pretty painless to just disable UBO for a few seconds in those cases. I'd rather have to click that button every now and again than have almost every website be unusable all of the time, but you do you.
The only time I ever get such messages is following links from HN, and even then I'd describe it as fairly uncommon.
Yeah, better not to install any kind of adblock even as a test. No one else does. You would be alone.

Also, people who use adblock are antisocial.

Also, I'd be mortified if I visited a web page, then the site told me that I cannot continue because I have adblock installed. I wouldn't want that to happen to me even once.

Uh, it's more that I had adblock installed and found myself needing to disable it for most websites just to access it. Adblock ended up being more of a hassle to use than the small handful of sites where it actually worked.
Oh, I see that I misunderstood the motivation behind your comment.

I've noticed an increase in sites that do what you describe, but so far I've responded by no longer hanging out on those sites, and that feels OK.

My adblocker is Ublock Origin Lite (the one that is expected to continue to work on Chrome indefinitely).
This hasn't been the case for me and I've been using ublock origin for maybe a decade now.

The only sites that break are streaming sites. Which is expected, I mean they need to make their ad money and they sell ad-free tiers.

All except paramount plus, funny enough. Yes, you can get ad-free paramount plus for half the cost if you just use ublock origin! I guess they forgot to put in that little bit of logic.