Pi Hole Morality

After several days of playing with a Pi-Hole I both enjoy using it and feel guilty. I feel guilty about blocking adverts from certain websites and sources because I don’t want to impact their revenue streams. At the same time I really want to block ads from two specific sources. Pre-roll videos for Plex, YoUTube and other sites, and video adverts from iOS games.

Blocking Pre-Roll

I want to block pre-roll adverts, especially from Plex now, because it’s Christmas themed. As a single person I don’t want to be reminded of the family life that is not mine directly. I don’t want to suffer from ROMO (Reminder of Mission Out) as I’m about to watch a program about people flying DC-3 and DC-4 aircrafts in the North West Territories.

With YouTube I want to block pre-roll ads, more than other ads, because sometimes you decide that content is not worth watching after ten seconds. When you’re browsing like this you give up when you have to watch 30 seconds to two minutes of pre-roll. It’s too much, especially when you always see the same advert, or the same three adverts.

Stop Seeing the Same Ads All The Time

A decade or two ago I said that the problem with satellite broadcasting is that we see the same four or five adverts at every break. If you watch three programs you might see the same adverts five times. That’s several minutes wasted, for the consumer, and a waste of money for the advertiser. I remember seeing an ad after seeing it once. Forcing me to see it five times just gets me to tune out and stop watching tv, and youtube, and podcasts.

Awful Ads for Crap Games

With iOS games I want to block adverts because it’s always the same crappy games. It’s adverts for pay to win games. If the game maker stopped making crappy games he wouldn’t need to make crappy adverts, and then make people pay for crappy games. He would just make crappy games, and people would play them. How much of the cost we pay for some app games is to pay to be overloaded with bad adverts?

Arcade and Premium

I hear you say “but just use Apple arcade. It’s 6 CHF per month and you have a choice of games and no adverts. This goes back to the topic I mentioned in other posts. If you pay 25 CHF per month for Switch online, 6 CHF per month for Switch, and x amount for another service then it quickly becomes hundreds of francs per year. In this context it’s cheaper to get a console and buy games when they’re reduced in price due to Christmas or other promotions.

With YouTube you can pay for premium and stop seeing ads too, but do you want to pay to see user generated content via a company that demonetised your content because their celebrities poisoned homeless people, for views?

An Ad Guard Interlude

I experimented with Ad guard locally, and I also looked at the app on iOS. 5 CHF per year for the iOS version. The price of installing it on a Pi locally. I stopped using Ad Guard locally because it seemed to be blocking 192.168.1.1 and I want access to that IP. I also found that the UI was less fun. No interesting graphs and less active oversight of what the app is doing.

Political Blocking

Right Wing Media like to spread hate and disinformation. These sites are usually inundated in ads. By using ad blockers we make sure that if, by accident, we visit their sites we do not help them generate revenue from adverts.

It would be nice to whitelist websites, from which adverts are accepted, and blacklist websites from which I refuse to see ads. At the moment the closest you get to incremental blocking is to disable blocking for five, ten, 15 or more time. This is a workaround but not a solid solution.

White List Specific Sites

I would like to white list quite a few magazines, news sites and personal websites, without getting ads from sites that I have blacklisted. I want ads from my blog, and the Guardian to show up, for example, but not from The Times of England, or The Sun, or the Daily Mail and other such sites.

Ad sources

When you block Google Ads you block ads on large websites and small websites. Small legitimate websites suffer when we don’t see ads, so that’s why we need the option to whitelist Google ads on this site and that site, but not those other sites.

Web Browsing on Low Ram Machines

Anyone who has tried web browsing on a feature phone or low ram Raspberry Pi has experienced how slow websites can be. Part of the reason for the sites being so slow is the volume of ads that need to be downloaded, but also displayed. A website that is a few lines of text and one or two images loads fine. Commercial websites inundated with ads do not.

In low bandwidth areas, or places with machines that have limited RAM it makes a lot of sense to use a Pi Hole, to make the web more accessible.

And Finally

Ad blocking can be about quality of experience, for example in trying to block pre-roll on video streaming services or video ads on iOS games. In other cases it can be about seeing what certain news sources are writing, without contributing to their business model. News organisations that spread disinformation can be visited without helping fund yet more disinformation.

We need Pi-Hole to be like web browser plugins. “White List this site, and that site”. We could support the newspapers, blogs and magazines we like, without supporting those we do not. When ads are not obnoxious I don’t mind seeing them.

Ads make the web functional. By blocking them we are affecting content creators. We should use ad blockers sparingly. My site has too little traffic for ad blockers to make a difference but other sites do, and it’s a shame to see sites that we appreciate fail, because we used ad blockers when visiting them.