Wishing I Didn’t Need Ad and Tracker Blockers

Tracking software different websites use to track your movement around the web is insidious and should be stopped. Thankfully there are tools like uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger can help. Switching away from Chrome should also be a good first step. But with these tools, come some unfortunate side effects.

This past week I was looking to buy tickets to a music festival next year. Tickets went on sale at 10:00AM and I went to go buy them and it kept erroring out. I was a little surprised as I didn't think the demand was going to spike so much as to crash. I figured I must've been wrong and would try back later. Later came and it still wasn't working. I wasn't sure what to think.

Fortunately for me, my wife decided to give it a try got in. Finally, the pieces clicked. The blockers I was running prevented the site from working, whereas the blocking tools my wife was using didn't interfere.

This is what I hate about the modern web. Because of surveillance capitalism and enshittification, we have to browse the web with additional browser extensions, DNS filtering, and a bunch of other tools to make the web usable and/or not quite a complete privacy nightmare. This comes with the double-edged sword of some sites not built in such a way to work with the blockers in place. It'd be so much easier if I didn't need to run ad blockers and privacy extensions. I then wouldn't have to remember that if I run into issues, maybe the extensions are the problem.

It should be pretty obvious in hindsight that my extensions are the issue, but all too often, I forget I'm even running them. They're always on in the background quietly doing their thing. Most of the sites I go to on the regular either don't have a lot of trackers (yay personal sites), or work just fine with the blockers enabled so it's normally not an issue.

Maybe sometime in the future this won't be as much of an issue, but I doubt it. Either way, I'm still blocking ads, tracking tools, and as much of the anti-user, anti-privacy BS that sites use.