Why It’s OK to Block Ads

I think that the ability to filter out content is a basic right that should be built-in to any Internet application, not forced to be an "add-on" and vilified by being seen as synonymous with attacks on the advertising industry and content providers.

And since regexes on URLs would be complicated and error-prone for most people, I think the onus is on content providers to throttle themselves, baked right into a user-agent protocol.

For example, the USER should be able to cage the provider with certain limitations that must be met in order for content to be displayed:

- "I am granting you no more than 500K of my data plan. Please send me a version of your page that meets these requirements."

- "I am granting you no more than 1% of my battery per week. If your site exceeds these requirements, your site will feature prominently as the cause of battery problems in a report that is periodically presented to your users."

- "I do not consider this site to be an 'application' so I have restricted several dynamic behaviors. Please send me a version of your page that can operate in a quarantined scripting environment."

And of course, browsers would be expected to provide sane defaults for these settings.

This approach isn't particularly hostile to any one industry; it doesn't specifically block ads (if they fit in that 500K, be my guest).

In the end, it seems kind of irrelevant. Whether ad-blocking is "OK" or "not OK" certainly accounts for a lot of the arguing, but it probably won't play a huge part in determining whether people use ad-blockers or not.

I think the general public can be swayed by ethical arguments, but the threshold is pretty high, and an appeal to the financial well-being of companies almost certainly doesn't make the cut.

[Note that despite the enormous amount of money and effort that has been spent in an attempt to demonize copying of music/movies, the public still doesn't care a whit about those arguments, and copying is still generally considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do as long as you don't get caught.]

The insidious tentacles of ad tech touch every corner of today's economy. There are so many players (legal and criminal), varied interests and wealth involved, that it's difficult to imagine that enough users will ever embrace ad blocking on the scale that's required to achieve the change that this article suggests is needed.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is finally acknowledging a need for some change with LEAN (http://www.iab.com/news/lean/), but I doubt it's interests really favor users. It's vested in advertising and grabbing our attention.

We're not dealing with just one bad player, like Flash that's easier to kill and yet took way too long to do it. It's still not completely dead either.

Ad blocking is a moral obligation and just a basic tool for cybersecurity these days.

Good UX will win at the end of the day, but it's going to require a lot of effort.

I'm tolerant of ads. I recognise the argument that in order to provide me content people usually need some kind of payment, and ads are currently that payment.

But ads are so hostile, and are everywhere, and result in really unpleasant behaviour (spamming; slurping as much data and not keeping it safe; etc).

I recently got a machine with Windows 8.1 with Bing, and ads are baked into whatever the start menu is called now. It's WEIRD seeing click bait ("18 bizarre home remedies that really work") on that panel page.

So I love this article, and I'm probably going to move to ad-blocking (and different OS) soon.

One could argue that the text or simple image ads are not a moral sinkhole like the article suggests. A lot of the text ads, I've found, are just the people who would normally rely on word of keyboard, except they're trying to get their first hundred users or whatever. Sometimes I would be part of their initial user base because what they're selling would genuinely make my life easier/better. That's not wrong.

The big, flashy ads (you know, the ones that are animated, or play sound or video, or do something dumb if you mouse over them for 1/4 second) are generally purchased by makers of lesser products in order to manipulate users into choosing them, because they can't rely on the quality of their products to advertise for them. I don't feel bad about blocking them.

So, I don't think unobtrusive ads are so bad. The trick is figuring out how to let them through. I turn off AdBlock on certain smaller sites with less obnoxious advertising and find that sometimes the bar is set too high for what's considered unobtrusive; the ads would theoretically be acceptable under the AdBlock description of what's unobtrusive, but get blocked anyway somehow.

As the market improves, advertising may gradually go away. That first clause is kind of difficult though.

The other question is how we can support people making content like blog posts and so on... without limiting the people who actually can't pay for stuff like that (kids with no jobs, etc). It's the same question as the one faced by music and software producers. When you can find an answer to that, well...

An infected ad killed my computer several years back. I block all ads everywhere for everyone I know.