Brendan is back to save the Web

Well, good job everyone--you made life miserable for him, and now the web is going to get even worse. Since, you know, this is going to validate what are effectively subscriptions to websites not to be pestered to death.

I take issue with the assertion that ad-blocking will break the backbone of the web: it's just been such an easy thing to do that people have built so much garbage around it and bloated up so much while offering actual users little in exchange that to finally kill it off is seen as impossible.

It's like this bizarro world where Stockholm syndrome has kicked in and everybody thinks that ads are somehow needed to keep the economy turning (which they aren't, because we can find things via search and whatnot) and that they actually delight people (which they don't, because they ruin the design integrity of most sites).

Like, we've got a gigantic industry built on adtech and user tracking--and once, the Southern US had a large farming industry based on slave labor. Neither is the "natural" order of things, and neither is anything but the exploitation of people.

Generally the sites who have more ads than contents usually have poor content (buzzy-clickbaity websites). In my opinion and AFAIK we can't change the business model of the web but each user can decide which site to go in order to seek high-quality content (I usually see less intrusive ads in those sites). Things are not as bad as we would think.