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Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

I already have an ad removal pass, it's called uBlock origin.

I use uBlock too - it's great. Sometimes a site will have an obnoxious popover or something that's usually relatively easy to create a rule for, but generally it works, and in combination with Ghostery I'm confident it's protecting me from most tracking, which is what I really want to avoid.

However it is an ethical dilemma, especially in a World where Contributor exists. Content is not free, hosting is not free, development and the application of security patches is not free. Currently sites are monetised using ads, and by using uBlock you're getting for free something that is not free. You are also inevitably causing people who do not have uBlock to 'pay' more, or contributing to putting the site out of business.

While Contributor obviously doesn't prevent Google from tracking your every step, and I'll still take steps to avoid data harvesting, I'll be buying it the moment it's available on any of the sites I read regularly.

I want a UBlock where in place of ads a single micro tipping facility is inserted. Maybe the website can remember this for the future, etc.

I've done a few PayPal tips but it's just too clunky / unfit for purpose.

https://www.brave.com/

Ah, thanks, I saw it here before but forgot about it. Will check out now.

Brave is the first real solution to this issue. Big fan of Brave. Once they get the extensions more compatible then the user base will grow rapidly.

The Android version is great in that all ads are blocked. I will see if I can get my single LTC transferred into it.

I strongly disagree that contributors aren't providing content 'for free'. I request a stream of bytes from them, they provide a stream of bytes free of charge. Its up to me how I want to display those bytes, and I'm not stealing anything or breaking any contract by choosing not to render every single one.

They are providing content for free on the assumption that you will not block adverts. To imagine otherwise is disingenuous at best.

Why is it disingenuous. All they're providing is a stream of bytes, why should they get to dictate how those bytes are consumed.

They can hope for anything they like; this does not obligate me to indulge their wishes.

Well, I don't have an ethical dilemma. I would absolutely remove the extension the moment I can read or watch something without getting covered by full-volume-autoplay-ads and flashy popups.

Start by respecting my ears, my eyes, my laptop, and my time, then we can have an "ethical" discussion.

It's not exactly like torrenting music, but a bit (requires some tech skills, ambiguous morality) And at least in my circle of friends, Spotify pretty much killed that.

even assuming 100% buy-in for content providers for google pass as an ad replacement, it doesn't replace all the use cases of a decent ad-blocker (like ublock origin). For me, I block newrelic, google analytics, segment, and a whole bunch of non-advertising related sites that slow down the web. Doing this more than halves the load time and download requirements of just about any major site.

I absolutely agree, but you have to acknowledge that these are mostly things that only highly technical people care about. In the Torrent analogy, this would be like saying you like your music in lossless FLAC format, or DRM-free.

Haha, precisely. On HN, a common idea is that if companies offered ad-free versions for a price, people would pay. But why would you? You can get the ad-free versions for free.

Why not? Lots of people already support creators via Patreon who give their content away for free.

We'll see, I suppose. But most people will just take the approach of the person I replied to. If ad-blocking takes off, we're going to come to a new content winter.

Prisoner's dilemma: If only one ad-supported site switches to pay-per-view or a subscription model, people will go to the other ad-supported sites instead. It would take all of them to switch.

And if that happens, the experience would be strictly worse for the consumer. Every individual is going to have access to less content because they're not going to subscribe to every site that might conceivably have an insightful article at some point.

What does work is patronage-supported content, but only for certain types of content. For example, if Youtube were to remove ads tomorrow, I would expect most channels with original content to survive on crowdsourced patronage (i.e. Patreon or similar), but I would definitely not expect Patreon to be able to support investigative journalism. (It would be great if it were! But I don't see it happening.)

I do for the services that offer it.

I even pay for three different e-mail services and cloud storage.

If a site doesn't offer an ad-free experience? I block their ads.

and other background-script-blocking addons too

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