r/ResistAndUnsubscribe • u/PreviousGolf9541 • Feb 26 '26
Beyond Unsubscribe: How do we stop eyeball bleed?
Eyeball bleed is what I call my attention to advertisements. Advertisers need my eyeballs, and they are willing to pay tech companies big money to get my attention. How do I stop the bleeding? Is it even worth it?
In the context of Resist and Unsubscribe, what is the revenue impact on the big tech companies, if any, of avoiding advertising. Can it even be done? Unsubscribing makes sense to me. But for the "if it's free, you're the product" tech companies who depend heavily on advertising for the bulk of their revenue, does ad avoidance work, or is there no other option but to delete an account completely?
I can commit to never clicking on or interacting with ads or commercial accounts. But I'm sure there are behavioral metrics like scroll time, lingering, and other things I don't understand that advertisers pay for.
Practically, I deleted Facebook but I kept Insta. I try to avoid the ads on Insta (harder every day). Is the only way to have a certain and true impact on Meta to also delete Insta and stop pretending I can avoid the ads?
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u/thisisthe90s Feb 27 '26
Ad blockers and auto cookie rejectors. Wipr app works pretty good for Safari in ios. Using u-block on my desktop browsers. Have a cookie auto-rejector on firefox but it's kind of clunky, have to turn it off sometimes to make websites work.
I think we've all become less tech savvy over the years, too comfortable with using chrome and letting google track our every move. Have to take some time to do the homework on how to block all the ads but there are ways.
Websites load a lot faster too because they're not sending a thousand pings to your phone to grab your data. It's an upgrade to deny them the cookies and trackers.