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Comment by Killswitch | Hacker News Reader

Your example about Ars Technica is perfect. They do it great and in a very tasteful way. I applaud them.

The issue lies in that all the people who do it bad, The Verge, etc ruin it for Ars Technica. Why? Because the ads on The Verge are so atrocious they install adblockers. Now these adblockers are all in whitelist mode from the start. Nobody cares to turn it into blacklist mode and require users to manually enable it for the sites. They just blanket block all sites from the get go. Nobody wants to deal with configuring it and being fair. So Ars Technica is now losing out by following the books because The Verge is douche spaceships.

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Even further, I'm not sure many adblockers even have a blacklist mode. Neither Ghostery nor uBlock Origin appear to have one, at least at first glance...

That is my experience as well. I would love to run an adblocker in blacklist mode and only punish the sites that annoy me, but I haven't found one that works that way. If anyone knows of one let me know.

uBlock origin actually does and it's what I am running right now, ofcourse in blacklist mode.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-tu...

Thanks for the link. I think there are about a dozen sites that I really loathe the advertising on. I haven't been running ad-blocking software (as I mention elsewhere in the thread) and I "punish" these websites by simply closing the tab as soon as it gets a little jerky while scrolling.

A blacklist is an interesting idea. I'd like it even better if the blacklist was only active for a limited time so that I have to manually keep re-blocking it. Then if a site cleans up their ad-act and starts running ads good enough that they don't eff up the UX I'll simply forget to re-block them.

Something along those lines might be a product, especially if you sell access to a chart of how many people are blocking your site at any time. It might be a tool that publishers can use to evaluate advertisers and not accept the business of advertisers that cause their blocking numbers to spike.

You're in luck. By putting it in blacklist mode, when you blacklist the site with uBlock Origin it's only temporary. After time it resets itself, unless after you black list it you click the lock.

I was incredibly confused by that page until I randomly discovered that you can display that red/green matrix thing by clicking the "+ requests blocked" text on the uBlock overlay. The wiki does not tell you that anywhere.

Yup. Very well put.

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