My Brain Is My Ad Blocker

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These days ad blockers are used mostly for improving privacy, security, performance, and resource control.

But, when it comes to their primary purpose of blocking ads and advertising content, I don’t need these tools. I have been using the web since the early 1990s, when the first annoying and disruptive ads started spreading. And I’ve been doing such a deliberate effort to ignore them it eventually became second nature. When I visit a web page, my brain instinctively forces my eyes to tune out any areas with anything resembling advertising content, especially animations.

This avoidance is so effective I don’t notice ads even on the sites I want to support by checking anything to click I’m genuinely interested in. I invariably forget and move to the next site.

Although I don’t have true ad blockers, I do occasionally use a tool for reading pages with highly distracting or disruptive content, including ads.

It’s the Mercury Reader Chrome extension, a reader mode option that reformats a web page to keep only the text and discard most of the rest. It’s handy because I can switch to an uncluttered version of a page by just clicking a button. I look forward to trying the similar reader mode that’s coming to Chrome.

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