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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

I block ads because I don't want to be conditioned to buy things I don't need or legitimately want. I don't want the mega rich to gradually chip away at my mind day by day, hour by hour in order to make themselves another fat pile of cash. If a site shows me some sad puppy image about me stealing their money by blocking their brainwashing, I just add their whole site to my filter.

Content on the internet powered by ads is almost entirely content made to distract people. Cutting it of my life is only doing me good. Until everything decides to block me, I'll just be blocking ads because I hate them and the industry behind them.

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My clients are small business owners. They run ads. They are not "mega rich" and are not building a "fat pile of cash". You need to step outside your bubble, and consider the broader ad landscape.

The well has been poisoned. If most ads were politely advertising local businesses, nobody would object. But the essence of advertising is to seek attention, and the inevitable result of that is ads that are obnoxious and discourteous. Even if they are not outright dishonest or manipulative.

Businesses do not communicate between themselves using obnoxious language. Business letters are stereotypically formal. They reserve the brash language of advertising for their potential customers, and those subjected to it are within their rights to point out this hypocrisy.

> Content on the internet powered by ads is almost entirely content made to distract people.

If you honestly believe this about podcasts running ads, then why are you listening to them at all!?

That’s nice. Do you use gmail and other services? Because those were built and delivered for free based on the same ideas you dislike.

I find this argument very weak. Should communists not buy anything? Should anarchists not use roads?

When your political beliefs are at odds with the current legal framework, you have no choice but to compromise to some degree. That doesn't mean you don't actually believe what you claim.

My point was it comes from a entitled position. I'm not making the absolutist position, nor am I dismissing all advertising like OP, but these business models exist for a reason and that is why we have so many of our products online.

It's easy for us to use adblockers as the minority of technical users, but that's a privilege based on the other 90% still seeing them (which I personally see nothing wrong with and clearly most publishers dont want to poke the bear either).

Otherwise of course people would love to have everything free plus no ads. But ads built and paid for a lot of good things on the internet, which wouldn't have been possible had they all expected payment or other models.

I'm all for pushing Google et al to be less aggressive with ads and make the web more usable and not requiring adblockers in order to have basic performance. But I don't disparage advertising as a whole because I understand the tradeoffs.

Well if you hate ads so much, then just pay for the damn radio.

He can't, because free-with-ads is the only option on the table.

SiriusXM, Pandora, Spotify, Apple music...

Remind me to which frequencies should I tune my receiver to pick those?

Anyway, paying for ad-free and surveillance-free experience is increasingly not possible, as companies try to double-dip.

There's nowhere to buy ad free podcast episodes though.

Lots of podcasts have paid, ad-free streams

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