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Comment by Grishnakh | Hacker News Reader

An ad-blocker doesn't care how "unobtrusive" or "un-annoying" your ad is.

The sure-fire way to defeat an ad-blocker is to serve the ad from the same domain as the parent site. If they did that, ad-blockers would suddenly not work, and would have to become a lot more complicated to figure out which code is an ad and which is normal content. It's fairly easy these days because they outsource the ads to other domains, so the ad-blocker just has to block anything pointing to doubleclick.com and friends.

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Adblockers have been blocking sections of HTML for years. Here's how to write such rules for Adblock Plus: https://adblockplus.org/filters#elemhide

There's even an extension you can install to create such rules by pointing and clicking on the offending section of the page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelpe...

I think uBlock does this out of the box.

It does. I used it to block twitter's new 'moments' icon, for example.

Ad blocking is a symptom of something else. Sure you can use same domain and make current ad blockers not work, but people will figure out better ways.

The reason why people install ad blockers in the first place is because they are becoming more and more aggressive. Toning them down is much smarter long term strategy, but it requires cooperation from everyone that is involved in advertisements.

People won't install ad block if they have no reason for it.

The whole thing reminds me of piracy, you can go add anti copying mechanisms, sitting down paying websites, start suing people or you start creating services like Netflix.

Whenever I reinstall my computer, I spend ~10 minutes online before I think "Oh, yeah, I need adblock". Websites are vastly different before and after, and they remind me why I need it.

If everyone's ads were unintrusive, I'd never remember to install adblock

Ehh, noticed some typos made by Swype, but can't edit this post anymore, the last line should be:

"The whole thing reminds me of piracy, you can go add anti copying mechanisms, shutting down pirate websites, start suing people or you start creating services like Netflix."

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