by Voultapher | 2025-07-10 10:37:39+00:00
I feel like you are being willfully obtuse.

I'll counter a couple of points that hold up your arguments.

> and network filters just make it feel like you're outsmarting the system — trying to change how physics works while withholding website data like "how long did you keep your tabs open", for instance.

There is plenty of creepy tracking going on that goes much further than that and has demonstrably been used to for example advertise to gambling addicts, insecure teenage girls, easily scam-able elderly people and more. The blockers have proven to help in that regard. The websites in question work perfectly fine without that information, they need that information the same way I need you to wire me 10k.

> In contrast, what actually makes me "feel my food coming back up" is the fact that some privacy browsers advertise how they block (for instance) YouTube ads.

Tricky topic and I feel the way they seek to profit off of blocking ads is somewhat scammy. But the underlying issue that Google and co. have made the internet progressively unbearable without an adblocker remains. Sometimes when faced with greedy and immoral behavior, the answer isn't to simply accept it lying down.

> which BTW work fine even now with Manifest V3 etc

No they don't. Filter list update rate is now tied to how often Google approves extension updates, that gives them a significant leg up.

> We live in an open market.

LOL no we don't. Big-Tech uses IP law, specifically DMCA 1201 to block competitors from interoperating with their services and try their best to buy and destroy any kind of competition. They have all been convicted by the FCC of monopolistic actions. The same players like Microsoft and Apple that reverse engineered the for example document formats of their competitors and engaged in adversarial compatibility, while now strictly blocking it as best as they can. Let's look at how the famous Apple boys got started:

> A blue box is an electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voice circuits. During that period, charges associated with long-distance calling were commonplace and could be significant, depending on the time, duration and destination of the call. A blue box device allowed for circumventing these charges by enabling an illicit user, referred to as a "phreaker", to place long-distance calls, without using the network's user facilities, that would be billed to another number or dismissed entirely by the telecom company's billing system as an incomplete call. A number of similar "color boxes" were also created to control other aspects of the phone network. [...] Blue box designed and built by Steve Wozniak and sold by Steve Jobs before they founded Apple.

> If a fraction of people hates subscriptions, there'll always be alternatives.

Not if the monopolistic players have a say in it. Take Adobe for example. They don't want any competition to their service and recently tried to buy Figma.

> Software businesses chose subscription models for a reason [...] I will just conclude that if subscriptions are everywhere, there's a reason for it.

Yes, greed and a lack of regulation. Slavery was a very popular thing for thousands of years, your reasoning could be applied to say it was everywhere so there's a reason for it. Paying employees no money vs paying them money is often cheaper .. doesn't mean it's ok and right. We are talking about moral and regulatory questions here, behavior existing does not imply anything about it's morality.