Adblock Plus, scourge of websites, seeks industry deal

I thought ABP was the yesterday's news of ad blocking. The memory footprint problem alone was enough to get me to switch to µBlock, let alone shenanigans like this.

Isn't this business model plain extortion? If you want to create an open-source adblocker, fine. That's your rights to publish that software, and it's within the rights of users to run that software.

But requesting money for making modifications against the interest of users to the default settings of that software is just sleazy; I can't think of anything that would make this sleaze illegal, but it's still no good.

What I find most distressing about all the debate re ad-blocking is the built-in assumption that advertising is the only way we could possibly fund content creation on the web: that it all just comes down to compromising on what the "acceptable" level of advertising is.

I don't accept that premise. The debate should be framed as "Adverting: is it good or bad?" but somehow we let it slide into "Advertising: should it be extremely obnoxious or slightly less obnoxious?"

Advertising changed the web, it made it worse in most ways -- it encourages a constant stream of low-value content that serves as a framing device for banner slots. If advertising magically disappeared one day, I think nearly all kinds of website would be able to find a revenue model that works (in most cases it would boil down to "make less content, of higher value, that people would actually be willing to pay for.")

The only types of sites that literally could not survive without an advertising-based revenue model are the clickbait listicle aggregators of other peoples' content. Which, yeah, I'm kind of okay with. People would still find their way to their memes and cat videos, they'd just do it on a hobbyist level. Ultimately we'd all, publishers and end users alike, be better off without ads.

The very minute Adblock plus is compromised I will switch adblockers. Thankfully everything is done client side and its relatively trivial to create blockers.

I thought they already had a whitelist?! Or was this AdBlock (without the plus)?

Well, I don't used it anymore, switched to µBlock Origin. Brave seems to be a nice alternative too. I read it is much snappier and has adblocking built in.

This is like if Mozilla forced Google to pay them if they wanted to keep adsense ads showing.

I just use FlashBlock and a Chrome extension that stops html5 vids from autoplaying (and disconnect to limit tracking). Can't say I've even really thought about the ads that do appear.