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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators

Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described. All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too.

I'm all for blocking intrusive or malicious ads. But quality content depends on ad revenue. The author dedicated an entire paragraph on donating to the pi-hole project, but no mention of supporting quality content with subscriptions or unblocking acceptable ads.

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Do you keep your car doors unlocked when you park in safe neighborhoods? Do you give nice strangers a spare key to your house? Do you sleep in an expensive hotel with the door propped open? Do you keep your password on a sticky note at your desk inside your secure office?

Of course not. So why would I disable my security software just because a site I visit hasn't been hacked yet? That's just basic security hygiene.

Agreed. Furthermore, nothing guarantees that them being good actors now won't be changed when they get acquired by a media giant. Policy and culture can and have changed overnight in organizations after acquisition.

It's the same as with Troy's argument about good browser extensions. Yes they are good today but them being bought for 5 figures and the personal data harvested does not make the news and the users are clueless about it. I rather just not take the risk.

> Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described.

I've still got ads blocked on reddit because they're so clickbaity as of late. They look like posts from subreddits I'm subscribed to and turn out to be an ad, no thank you.

All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too.

The ads are not malicious, granted, but in the case of NYT at least they're still "blinky". They get blocked at the Pi-hole now. I do subscribe, however. I'd like to turn the ads back on because I view the NYT to be a quality publication, but I'm not going to have something moving out of the corner of my eye while I try to read the paper.

What in the world does your subscription pay for, if you still get advertisements on the New York Times?

Same thing my subscription pays for if I get the dead tree edition: ads sprinkled in with the news. Right or wrong, it's not like there isn't 100 year old precedent for this.

Right, but if you've already paid I don't see why you'd want to turn ads back on? You've already fulfilled your moral duty to reward them.

I hope more companies offer a paid version of their site that completely removes Advertisements. I cannot stand ads and won't use a site if I can see them. I'm not trying to be a bad guy though, I want to use those sites legitimately. My only option is to not visit them until they offer a compromise.

Reddit is work friendly 4chan. That is, (mostly) not quality content.

I stick to a search engine rather than browsing Reddit directly. If what I'm looking for comes up in a relevant Reddit thread, huzzah.

I get the contemporary meme is "Agree with great-great-grandpas economics of 'survival of the fittest'." But I feel little obligation to pander to it everywhere it exists.

Maybe I'm an odd bird, having grown up in the remote wilderness in the 80s, no TV, growing food and hunting/fishing, and only using money for things like clothing and basic services (water/electricity/phone).

Ads on Reddit used to be alright, but since the advent of their dumpster fire of a redesign, their ads have turned into block worthy material.

I used to have Reddit whitelisted until they started showing subreddit-targeted ads in other subs. I follow a bunch of cryptocurrency subs and the ads there are… well… as you expect.

Why is this bad? You follow cryptocurrency subreddit, they show you relevant ad. You follow "warm mittens" subreddit, they show you relevant ad, etc. So why is it a bad thing?

I can't speak for the GP, but in this case of the cryptocurrency sites/fora I frequent (including topical subreddits), the ads are for idiotic scams. This indicates that whatever vetting they're doing is insufficient, and so they can be safely blocked (specifically -- if they can't be trusted to not display ads for obvious fraud, they can't be trusted to vet ads for other malicious attributes).

Yep.

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