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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

This opinion might be unpopular here, but I don't really empathize with adblock plus's arguments with why they have to be able to block ads (journalistic integrity?). This is how facebook and others need to fund their product costs. If you can't be bothered to sell your attention to them for the ads, then put up money instead; but we all know how unlikely people are to pay for content online once it was "free".

Nothing is free online. If you aren't paying for a product, you are the product. (said someone way smarter than me years ago)

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And I think the standard rebuttal is that, if ads were unobtrusive that would be one thing, but many times leaving ads unblocked leads to malware and extreme system slowdowns. I personally would not mind keeping adblocker off if ads were just minor ads in the text of documents, but from what I've seen on the rare occasions where I've been on a computer without adblock, the non-adblocked internet is pretty disgusting.

That argument doesn't apply to Facebook who don't serve ads from third-party servers or with third-party code. You're just as likely to find a security flaw in Facebook's ads as in Facebook's organic posts.

except that facebook can make ad for malware independently of flaw in facebook code

Except that facebook itself is a malware/spyware that tracks you in N ways that most of us don't know, and share with a lot of people and corporates that we would not want to have access to.

The trouble is 'unobtrusive ads' don't get the same clicks as the more intrusive ones. And if you're not getting return for your ad spend, you don't keep spending (unless you're mental). If a business is (primarily) funded by ads - and the users aren't paying for anything, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to show whatever they like (and to be fair, Facebook are fairly strict with what you can show and relatively good at policing it). If you really hate the ads, you don't have to use the service.

Because it appears that the type of ads that fall under "whatever they like" include malware and processor-intensive ads. Once I could tell that something was wrong because my fan turned on while just browsing the internet. Turned out I had a tab in incognito open and adblock was not enabled for incognito, so the ads on the page were so processor intensive they caused load on my system. That's not an okay thing to do.

So, I'll continue to use adblock AND use the services until they dial back their obtrusive ads.

This isn't the case for Facebook, though. For which this particular argument / post is about.

It is simple. Put a price on your product. If facebook is "free", so it has no right to complain about how I use it. Am I obligated to allow their systems and technologies to mess with mine?

How on earth does this make sense? It's not Facebook that messes with your system, it's your system that messes with their product. If you would actually pay for their product you might be able to make the argument that you should be allowed to use it as you'd like, but you don't. You're using something free of charge and then interfere with how they create their revenue.

Ok, me and all others that prefer to block ads on Facebook are leaving... Do Fecebook prefer this way? I already left, now I'm convincing others to leave too, and introduce them to ad block has been a good start.

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