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Comment by b_tterc_p | Hacker News Reader

And yet, the majority of Americans (narrowly, even young americans) don't use adblockers.

Not the majority, no. But around 25% of people use adblockers, which might be higher than many expect. Also, very few people will stop using adblockers once they have started, so the number will only increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

Not necessarily.

If younger people grow up with environments where ad blocking is not allowed, they may never learn to do it, and so rates will decline.

That's kinda blaming the victim, isn't it?

I, as a technical person, can generally tell when a website's failing because of an adblocker false positive, and know how to fix it. I know what the reputable extensions are, and I keep track of which ones get captured by the industry (like Adblock Plus). My webdev experience lets me know how important they are from a security standpoint.

A random non-technical person likely doesn't know any of this.

> That's kinda blaming the victim, isn't it?

Maybe my intentions weren’t clear. The article appears to be suggesting that people are growing savvy to the ways of online businesses, citing some marketing tricks that laypeople recognize now.

I am merely claiming that if you don’t know about adblockers, you are most certainly not “wise.” That May feel like an attack but it’s kind of just the truth. Saying it’s not fair because they don’t have the technical competence to know better is just circular reasoning. It might not be fair, but we have significant low hanging fruit to pick before we start considering the general populace wise to the ways of e commerce.

As an aside, I don’t think I have ever encountered a website which both did not work due to ad blockers and didn’t give me explicit instructions on how to fix it, even if that solution is turning adblocker off for just that site.

> I, as a technical person, can generally tell when a website's failing because of an adblocker false positive, and know how to fix it.

How often does that happen? I believe that most people will be fine if the occasional website breaks because the benefit of ad-free/ad-reduced surfing is so large.

I find it's fairly common, especially with things like uBlock Origin that block privacy impacting stuff as well as advertisements.

Doubly so if you tend to use stuff like "Login with Facebook".

I've used unlock origin (with the default settings) for years, I literally can't think of a time when I turned it off to fix something.

Maybe it helps that I don't use "sign in with Facebook", but still, I use the internet a lot more heavily than most people.

I just had to turn it off about 5 minutes ago to pay my health insurance bill, as an example.

You must visit different sites than me then. It doesn't happen even on a yearly basis for me. The last time it happened was two years ago on my bank's website. And that was due to poor coding practices on their part

"And that was due to poor coding practices on their part"

Sure, you know that, but that's the point. The average user goes "that stupid extension broke my bank website and I had to hire someone for $150 to fix it".

I had a family member get soaked for thousands of dollars worth of Geek Squad "fixes" over stuff like this. We got her an iPad and she's been happy ever since.

IMO the obvious outcome is multiple devices for different functions. A stock device for banking etc. And then a weird thing you get from your nephew, who says it will track you less for general usage. If the latter doesn't work for something (or stops working altogether), you can always do it on the full-take device.

This will grow in popularity as ever more hardware becomes manufacturer EOL, but can be kept current with Ubuntu/Lineage/pmOS (etc).

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