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Comment by Retra | Hacker News Reader

>It looks like he just felt uncomfortable making money off of his friends' and colleagues' loss.

Anytime you sell a product in a competitive market, you do this. Those ad companies are happy to steal costumers' attention from other companies.

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I think people are fine losing money to competition but this isn't losing to competition. An ad blocker actually destroys potential value because sites that used to generate money no longer do. These sites aren't losing money to other sites making more money, the money just isn't made at all.

You could potentially argue that the intended viewer of those ads is now capturing that value, however real world examples of paywalls and various other business models suggest that general web users don't value not being shown ads as much as advertisers value showing them ads.

It doesn't destroy that value, it just funnels it into somewhere people don't know how follow it. It makes easy money harder to acquire. If you have the ability to work around it, all that value is there for you, and few people are competing for it.

Ad-blockers don't set their users' money on fire. Of course someone will make that money.

> An ad blocker actually destroys potential value because sites that used to generate money no longer do.

Or maybe it creates value by allowing me to spend my money on things I care about, rather than bandwidth for video ads?

Or maybe it creates value by speeding up the web for me, giving me the one precious and non-reneable resource: Time?

Or maybe it create value for me by giving me privacy? I value that.

Ad blockers are simply moving value around. If people didn’t think it created value, they wouldn’t have paid for it.

Right, we've heard that rationalization before. It's not about that. He (and we) are aware of it not being personal but being business. He's saying, even if he's completely justified by that rationalization, he doesn't feel right doing it, and since he's in a place to turn down huge money on principles, why not do it?

That's basically the position a lot of us hope to see ourselves in.

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