Develop in what sense? uBlock origin is at least 10% better than ABP just by not doing that.
The _only_ thing people want from such a program is to block all ads and trackers. That's it. That's the feature list. You decide to compromise the single goal to fund further "development"? How does that make any sense?
That's if 1. you stayed opted into the acceptable ads program when you used ABP and 2. you consider all ads equally bad and harmful.
I didn't and I don't, and I happen to agree with GP. I use ublock, but I found a constant stream of false positives and false negatives. The worst is with popups actually; a torrenting website I used to visit started doing "on page click" popups and ublock doesn't block those; ABP does.
I hate TV ads and never watch TV as i find the ads intrusive. But taking the minor rewards from content creators that my presence can bring - when I'm benefiting from their content and cost them server resources - seems pretty unfair to me.
Here's your reason for populism and the disappearance of good journalism: no one is willing to pay or be even in the slightest inconvenienced.
I don't give a single hoot about tracking and want quality ads. Do I not exist?
Sure, people have all sorts of weird fetishes.
Id prefer a tiny payment option - €5- 10 a year would give any news publisher more gain from having me as a user than bombarding me with ads (just the same way it works for Wikipedia) - but that option in most cases doesn't seem to exist. Or the flattr option to directly reward qualitative reporting and recreate good incentives (quality over clickbait).
Nope, I said zero things about ideology. All I said was this: an AdBlock program is a program that block ads. That's what is reasonable to expect: that it does what it says in the tin. If an AdBlock program starts charging money to allow certain ads to go through, then it is betraying its users.
Some people want a program that filters ads according to some criteria of quality? Sure, I don't care. But it's not an ad blocker anymore, it's an ad filter. Right?
The only ideology in this discussion is coming from people who argue that the public has some obligation to accept ads or tracking in exchange for free content. I made no moral judgements, I just have a strong personal preference against ads and tracking, a lot of other people in my "box" or whatever the fuck it is do too, and this is why ad blockers became popular.
And let's be honest: people who claim to like to be exposed to "high-quality ads" typically have some vested interest in the ad business.
And the leverage by its users who do not get paid them. IIRC ABP gets paid around a third of the advertising revenue from whitelisting the advertiser if it reaches 10m impressions, so the more users seeing ads ABP has, the more money they make.
Except, the acceptable ads list for larger companies can only be modified by Eyeo, and they only do it after being paid. It’s a racket.
[1]: https://gigaom.com/2015/09/30/adblock-plus-list-of-acceptabl...
ABP still is "evaluating" that, and currently has a beta where acceptable ads are handled by an ad network as intermediate, which validates the quality of your ad, and handles payment to get it whitelisted.