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Comment by jmcdiesel | Hacker News Reader

There is a 3rd option. You dont visit the sites that have ads on them. That way, you aren't imposing your will on them, and you aren't taking their work without passively supporting them, and everyone wins.

The idea that you're entitled to everyone's content without even passively supporting them, the author, as they ask, is just a bit too much for me.

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No, everyone does not win. I lose, because I've had to process a bunch of junk commercial messages that substantially distracted from the task I was trying to achieve while falsely claiming to be helping me. The value of the content ads are underwriting is frequently lower than the cost of the distractions created by the adverts themselves.

I like good advertising. If an ad is well-designed I'll look at it for its own sake. If I'm interested in a product or service I will scrutinize an informative ad in detail and read every commercial appeal therein.I am open to polite commercial pitches.

What I'm not open to is bullshit. If an advertiser leveraes distraction, misrepresentation, or other popular tactics to promote a commercial message, I become hostile to them because I do not care to be communicated with that way. Annoy me enough and not only will I block an ad, I'll undermine it by turning it into a meme or somesuch. Advertisers do not have a right to annoy people in order to get their message across.

That's interesting. I find their aggressive use of my bandwidth, disk caching, and CPU resources to be rude. Since I'm in control of those things, I don't feel bad about restricting them access to them. Not to mention their utter disrespect for me by enabling the tracking of me by the ad companies across the web.

I'm amazed whenever I watch someone else connect to the ad-infested web on their wide-open systems. I keep hoping that the ad companies will learn restraint, but they don't. As far as I can see, they just double down. I remember the internet before advertising got such a foothold, and I miss it (warts and all).

A few content-related, static linked images that match the look-and-feel of the rest of the page would actually encourage me to click on them. The over-complicated mess they have in place now is ridiculous.

I agree, to an extent. Those sites should not be allowed to be indexed by search engines if they want it that way. If an article is indexed by a search engine and they clearly benefit from that traffic, the page should be open to the public, even if they have ad blockers.

Like most people in these threads, I want to support websites but I'm not going to give up my 1) privacy 2) bandwidth 3) battery life and 4) security just so these sites can shove annoying ads in my face.

For example, The Atlantic, which I subscribe to, continues to give me nags about my adblocker usage. I specifically block them because they are the annoying ads that animate and flash and make it impossible for me to actually focus on the text/content that I'm paying them for. It's obnoxious.

Ad blockers would not be so prevalent today if companies had not completely given up control of their advertisements to third party ad companies, who don't have the best interests of the viewer or even the site owner in mind.

You think that putting stuff on the public internet entitles you to compensation? Why?

How do you implement your policy of not visiting sites with ads?

How do you block a site prior to visiting it? Are you using a custom hosts file to block all sites that are known offenders?

Many of us are blocking ads for security and privacy concerns. How do you confirm that a site is safe prior to visiting it so that you can allow ads if it is a safe site?

Unfortunately, the only tools I have found block the good with the bad.

It's actually not that hard to eliminate the worst of it. You just leave the ad-blocker on, full-time until you visit a site. If the site isn't an abhorrent "content farm" with link-baity headlines and vague, poorly worded nonsense, then "So far so good..." you whitelist them and hit the reload button. Thanks to the race to the bottom that advertising has become, >90% of the bad sites won't make it past this first stage.

If after disabling the ad blocker the content becomes buried in interstitials, auto-playing videos, and is so crowded with ads that the actual content turns into snaketext that looks like someone tried to outdo The Odyssey in haiku form, you turn the ad blocker back on.

Black the ads, fine... but when you see ads blocked, leave the site?

I like the 4th option. Technical staff and management of sites that serve malware through their ad services should be found guilty of gross negligence, the corporate veil broken, and should be personally financially liable for all the damage their malware caused, in addition to criminal penalties and prison time.

Yeah, those ads for skis on amazon just wrecking computers left and right...

I've never had any problems with amazon ads, have you? You should document it if you have. When I go to amazon I am there to buy things. Being shown products is very helpful then, and never a problem with malware. I am sorry that you have had those problems. If you would document them and blog your findings it would be helpful because this is the first I have heard anyone say amazon serves malware.

That was sarcasm. You act like all ads are malware, when the vast majority are just ads...

There's another option: https://brave.com/

It blocks ads, but lets you fill up a 'wallet' that pays publishers based on your visits.

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