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Upvoted because its well thought-out, but here's what I'm thinkin...

> If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.

Sounds like a funny way to try to make the internet more "sophisticated." If you dont like the content of the regurgitation engine, then you wouldnt visit the site and so wouldnt be supporting it.

So something else is at play. I think that a huge portion of the public actually likes the regurgitated content. They come home from work and just want to chill out and be mildly entertained by buzzfeed. So addblockers dont reduce the velocity of the crap engine, they take away your patronage and therefore your vote for what content you want to see.

I think that there is so much low quality on the web because people value it very low. They only pay by viewing adds (and with privacy) so the media produced will reflect that.

Now think about what might happen with contributor. Those that hate viewing adds and some that block them will decide to pay for the add space of the pages they view. Then the value of addsense space goes up since advertisers are more confident that the people seeing the adds will not hate them and the website also gets money from those who are contributors. So the value of content goes up as well and that should bring the quality up as well.

> However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.

You're not really paying google. Google takes a commission, which they deserve, and the money goes to the content creators. Tivo and DVR are bad examples since they actually did end an era in television and were not free so not very widely used for a long time.

I think the problem is more that there is not that much good stuff out there. I mean look at Netflix. I like it, but it's either films I have seen, often on tv, from maybe ten years ago, or it's really bad. Really bad.

But there might not be enough really good stuff out there. User created content is never going to be like professional globally top notch produced content - or if it is it will take as much talent and time to make. Once I have seen the new Star Wars film, it's not like I am going to be able to see another three hours of similar quality entertainment the next night and the next and the next.

For a thousand years humans have mostly entertained themselves by talking and jossing and laughing with each other. That's likely to be the future of content - just aimed at our niches.

It's a chicken and egg problem, right? If we want good quality content on the web, we have to be willing to pay people on the web. If we also don't like ads, then one way to support the content is via micropayments. Many other models have been tried to varying degrees of success but didn't encompass all of the web like Google Contributor is trying to do.

Solution: Micro-organisms.

> I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.

I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.

Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and good content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.

Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.

And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.

Many of us liked the Internet in 1996 ;) And some saw its commercialization as an affront, as a violation of fundamental principles. So anyway, I'm not at all attached to the Internet existing in it's current form.

In general I agree with you. Technically though, youtube didn't have any revenue source initially, including ads. Basically they built a giant user base, then let someone else figure out how to make money with it (unsurprisingly, with ads).

"I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate to block ads."

And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.

It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.

Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).

There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.

And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.

Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.

It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.

Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.

> And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.

uMatrix is a much more effective way of using DNS to block ads than HOSTS file editing. You can select only certain items from certain domains. Sure, I block Google cookies on most sites, but those sites are dependent on scripts coming from the same domains. With uMatrix, I can permit just the scripts that the site needs.

And I can quickly and easily test different resource combinations to customize my website experience.

For blocking, I use zone files, not the HOSTS file.

I can select specific subdomains; I can also use wildcards.

I doubt there is anything an ad blocker can block that I cannot block using DNS. But if you have examples, post them and let's see.

Can your method block cookies and frames from a domain, but allow Javascript and XHR?

I accept session cookies only, I keep Javascript turned off except when I am forced to turn it on (banking, etc.), and I really do not like frames.

If there is some site with frames that I willingly use regularly, I just bust out of the frame and access the contents directly.

Hence what you are describing does not sound like something I desperately need to do.

The only way I can answer your question is if you give me an example: a website with ads to block. Then I'll test it.

I should note though that cookies are not ads; the original topic was blocking ads - you are shifting the goalposts.

The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing. I am pretty sure that google's datacentre bill is not a tiny amount, and it takes lots of developers to make a gmail. And you won't be indexing the whole of the internet on an old desktop running in a closet.

> The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing.

I agree. In the sense it's usually meant, "free" just means "monetarily free", but cost can come in more forms than just monetary units. :)

But I never suggested any of those statements you are making.

What I was referring to is that Google's "product" is offered free to the user.

What you refer to highlights the importance of the question: if their "product" is not free to produce, then why don't they charge users for it?

No matter how well Google delivers your search results and email, if they cannot serve ads, they are in trouble. They have hundreds of millions of loyal users of these websites, but Google does not ask users for money.

If they did, would you pay?

> Much of the web is noise and regurgitation.

Much of it is, yes. Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do.

Not that I have any answers here - I think your DVR comparison is fair.

"Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do."

Not any more. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist are all paywalled. Those are some of the few remaining newspapers with sizable reporting staffs.

Most other US "newspapers" have a few reporters, but mostly regurgitate wire services and press releases. The "fluff" sections (cars, real estate, food and wine, sports) are outsourced, sometimes to Demand Media, the content-farm company.

Buy a newspaper and mark all the articles that didn't originate as a press release, press conference, national news service, or ad. There will not be many.

Those organisations have paywalls, yes, but they still depend overwhelmingly on ads for funding. If they lost it all tomorrow their paywall earnings would come nowhere near filling that hole.

And you seem to be ignoring cause and effect here - the reasons many newspapers have much smaller staffs these days is because the bottom fell out of the ad market and left them with no money.

...and having online ads didn't improve the reporting, so it earns me no particular allegiance to maintaining the status quo.

If they didn't have online ads they would pretty much be out of business and there would be no reporting.

I don't really understand the point you're making here. Who suggested having ads improved the reporting? It made the reporting available to you at a lower (or free) price.

The argument made slightly above was that without ads, we lose the current media environment. I'm saying (agreeing with some) that since the current media environment contains very little reporting of value, I don't see a real reason to maintain it.

Ads providing revenue has not led to value, ergo I don't see much reason to protect the status quo for fear of losing it.

NYT has tons of ads, even for paying subscribers.

> Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is ... ad revenue .... If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.

That's one of the best good for all, social arguments against ads/for blockers that I've seen.

Except it's not because it's completely subjective.

The reason why people continue to visit all those sites and click all those links? - Because they like it.

Show me an objective argument regarding ad blockers.

And what's wrong with subjective, anyway?

This entire post has plenty of objective arguments. What aspect would you like to discuss?

There's nothing wrong with subjective - unless you're actively trying to say you know what's right for everyone else. That's not how we make progress in the best interests of everyone.

> The reason why people continue to visit all those sites and click all those links?---Because they like it.

This is disingenuous; there are people who dedicate their working life to causing other people to do things they (other people) don't want to do (e.g., following a psychologically-designed bespoke(!) anchor that belongs to a class of things colloquially known as ``link bait". )

So half the planet is incapable of learning what clickbait is and only you can resist it?

Let's say everyone falls for it once, twice or even a dozen times. Don't you think the traffic would just stop after a while. Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?

Why do celebrities have the most followers and gossip sites have some of the highest traffic? It's easy to argue that it's not "valuable" or "educational" content but it's still incredibly popular. Does that somehow make it "bad"? Are you the judge of that? Or is someone manipulating everyone to pay attention? Are a few people capable of controlling entire populations this easily? And why are they spending time with ads then?

OR - could it simply be that people just like what they like? At some point you just have to put aside the prejudices and look at the data and see that much of the popular stuff on the web is popular precisely because it's what users want.

Or it could be that we hadn't yet learned to avoid it, and we're slowly learning:

http://mumbrella.com.au/mamamia-has-said-goodbye-to-clickbai...

http://digiday.com/publishers/upworthy-goes-clickbait-free-n...

http://blog.newscred.com/how-reader-demand-for-content-marke...

> So half the planet is incapable of learning what clickbait is and only you can resist it?

Are you suggesting that this was my contention?!---I fall for click bait all the time.

> Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?

No, but I don't think ``we" are actively trying to figure it out. People design these traps _for a living_; ``we" get trapped by them _in ``our" spare time_.

> ...

...

Why do serial primetime comedies use laugh tracks? The writing is base and the jokes often not funny, but when we hear other people laugh we're psychologically driven to feel more joy/humor/whatever and join in.

Why do people keep clicking obvious linkbait articles? Because there's certain social-inclusion triggers we're wired to respond to, logic and conditioning be damned. The content isn't popular. The forcing function used to drive that traffic is playing on social addictions.

At some point you have to put aside the "data" and think about where the cause and effect really lies.

You never put aside the "data". That's how you make smart decisions.

You're talking about basing all this on some rough psychology - however plenty of people don't watch comedies with laugh tracks because they just don't like the show and it's the same with headlines.

There might be certain influences (since it is called clickbait) but in the end it's all up to the user. They choose to click.

That's a really interesting reason - now I can actually justify ad blocker and not just praise affiliate and content marketing.