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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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If you want to actively shit on them, there is AdNauseam, which is a fork of uBlock Origin but in addition to blocking the ads, it clicks on absolutely everything, sending fake signals. Polluting their database is costing them money and they have to deal with all the noise.
Not for everyone, but definitely an active hostility towards these fucks.
That seems like it opens the door to a lot of security issues. Part of the reason to use uBlock is that ads are a known threat vector.
All clicks are performed in an isolated sandbox separate from the user area (basically imagine the click register signal going out, but nothing more).
What if you have a multi layered ad blocking setup where you’re using ublock origin and pi.hole and a VPN with blocking?
The multiple layers of redundancy would likely clash with Adnauseum, yeah. Although that probably is just wasted compute - you may only need one or two of those solutions to have effective adblocking (uBlock for supported browsers, pi.hole for devices unable to have uBlock installed) rather than all 3 at once.
Well I’m not gonna bother turning off any of the layers when I’m out and about. Like, my laptop still needs ublock when I’m not at home. And the vpn is just for certain use cases.
If you set up tailscale, you can connect your laptop to your home network and have the pi-hole everywhere.
I have tailscale set up. I’m not gonna have my wife be using tailscale. And I’m also not going to be using tailscale all the time. I even have an exit node on my server.
I prefer using Pi-Hole (DNS based block) the ads don't even waste my bandwith.
Except it still rewards the site for hosting ads in the first place
As someone who works in marketing - they will tote these clicks as a great success and continue to do what they are doing, maybe even more so, but will be distraught by the lack of follow through when it comes to sales. I guess if it happened long enough, And on a big enough scale, they might eventually give up but it would take years
Or, more likely, they would not include the fake clicks in their metrics at all, and marketing would never see the inflated metrics.
Didn't Louis Rossmann say that the conversion rate when they briefly ran repair shop ads was less than 2% or something similar? I think he referred to it when talking about using adblock and donating/buying merch for your favorite creators instead.
Site gets paid and I get the content I want. Only one losing is the advertiser, which is a good thing in my book
It's a cute idea, but they would just incorporate some amount of false clicks into their metrics.
Exactly, its data poisioning.
If someone is trying to build an ad profile on you (even if you personally dont see the ads) then it feeds them junk data instead of real date.
If you think clicking all the ads makes a meaningful difference, then all the power to you.
Its purely out of spite, plus, im not clicking anything.
I run the full ad blocking suite anyway and see more ads watching a sportsball game with the family than I do on my home network over the course of months.
I call it a win-win
Blocking ads definitely doesn't help the site get paid, that's what I was talking about above.
For the same reason, it's probably not doing any meaningful "poisoning" either.
Then go read what the AdNaseum plugin does and we will talk then.
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/
Whatever table you imagine clicks to be stored in, add a column called "Using adblocker".
Filter out any rows where that column = true.
Yeah they can probably just ignore your entire profile because it's gives no useful insight, and that's the point.
Do you know if AdNauseum actively merges in new uBlock Origin changes, or is it fully forked?
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/ It's a direct fork that seems pretty up to date, only lagging 26 commits behind upstream
I've never had it actually collect an ad