The cognitive load is the worst part of ads for me. The amounts of ads that display an X to close the banner only for that X to be an actual link to another fkn ad or straight up opens a new tab. Not to mention the invisible divs spanning the entire page so wherever you click, it's gonna open a link which is most of time either porn, betting sites or aliexpress. This sh* should be illegal.
Yup. They're pollution. (There's gotta be a phrase for "cognitive load" + "pollution".)
I used to love tech ads. I'd inspect every ad in BYTE, Creative Computing, etc. I'd even buy Computer Shopper, a massive catalog interrupted by some articles, just for the ads.
Ads can be useful, informative, and engaging. I wouldn't mind that.
Oh and the list goes on. Click hijacking. Redirect soup. 1024 JavaScript tags that record the same events, only they all await each other. CNAME shenanigans. Unsubscribe really means subscribe to 1000 more. Request interception, email interception, email link rewrites in flight, await request to dead dns adserver with no timeout set making your page a hostage requiring closing the tab/browser and visiting page again.
I used something similar on Firefox to block unwanted divs from Facebook and Reddit but now Safari is my main browser and I haven't come across an extension that does that.
