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Comment by Bishonen88 | Hacker News Reader

Same here - I glanced over the article and was confused why there was a part for Gmail. I thought to myself : "but gmail doesn't have ads?". Which makes me wonder even more why 75%+ of the population doesn't have adblock themselves?

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This. People with adblock are living in a completely different online reality. I'm amazed how much time people spend on ad-ridden sites despite the terrible UX, with ads "slow loading" and replacing links you want to click on, full page overlays, flashy animated ads etc pp. People still tolerate it, the must really love the content.

I didn't use an ad blocker for a long time, because I just didn't care. But a few malicious ads made me install one, and the downside is that I have to manually enable everything to get a website (e.g. a business I have a relationship with) to run properly fairly frequently.

I wish there was a clean, sharp division between people trying to sell you stuff on the open internet and entities that you are logged in to and already doing business with, such that the latter were guaranteed to be accessible even with maximum blocking.

Exploiting customers is something that needs to be regulated more.

Are these sites from a specific industry that don't work with adblock enabled? I run into that occasionally, but it's rare for me. I'm always amazed when it happens at e.g. large online shops ... they never test with popular browser addons enabled?

Maybe they use uMatrix? The vast majority of sites don’t work with third-party-content blocked.

[citation needed]

I can only count a handful of sites that break with conventional blockers (uMatrix might be a different story) and those sites I can just avoid doing business with (only one I can remember recently is Patreon where the Facebook/Google ad scripts cause the entire page to be unusable).

That’s why I mentioned uMatrix specifically. It blocks everything but images and css loaded from other domains by default. Normal ad blockers don’t do that.

Funnily enough, Patreon works without a problem after allowing 2 CDNs and their usercontent domain.

uMatrix defaults to blocking nearly everything from third parties. Most sites do not work 100% properly; many 'simple' sites will not even render because of how common it is to outsource content delivery to cloudflare et al.

It's painful, but it's (for me) the only sane way to browse. I'm willing to trade a few seconds of determining what 3rd party sources I'm going to allow when visiting a new site in exchange for minimizing tracking and malicious ads.

My personal theory is that this is one of the reasons FB, Google, Reddit are so popular as portal sites, since they have far better UX and actual performance teams to make the experience good. Nobody wants to go directly to news sites anymore.

Good point. And it's not just better UX, it's also predictable and unified, you know what happens when you click on something, you know how to like and share, and you don't need to figure out the layout & design for each site.

This is an insightful point.

I believe a huge percentage of non-technical users have no idea what an adblocker is.

I've installed them for a couple of friends and family who complained about ads and slow websites, but hadn't known about blockers.

That's my experience as well. I had installed one on the PC I gave to my mother and one day she called me and told me that her friend's "internet is broken". Apparently they had tried to look something up together and my mother insisted that "that's not how the internet looks" because of all the ads, while her friend assured her that it's absolutely how it always looks. Needless to say, her friend's internet is no longer broken and everyone is happy.

Whenever I turn off my adblockers and visit common sites, it feels like I've been wearing hearing protection in a loud place and I'm now taking them off.

Yeah but Gmail doesn't have ads even for those without ad blockers.

I also think this also depends on when you signed up for gmail. my gmail account is pretty old, no ads, with no ad-blocker. but my gf's gmail account is littered with ads & I would assume my burner accounts too, if I didn't use a an ad-blocker.

I just checked a very old account and the theory that old accounts don't display ads is false. The account I looked at is older than the year 2007.

Indeed, my account is 2004 and has the usual ads sans adblocker. They're still not obstrusive though.

Weird, I don't recall seeing ads in Gmail either, but I don't use ad blockers. I just checked and there are definitely no ads anywhere that I can find when I log in to Gmail. Where do they normally show up? Perhaps I am in the holdout group of an A/B test...

There's a placement above the message list with sponsored links that look similar-ish to messages as far as I can remember. I turned them off many moons ago when you had the option to opt in/out, but can't see where it is now (and don't want to accidentally add them back in!).

I think it depends on the Inbox type you use as well (e.g. Priority, Default etc...)

Last time I was buying Gmail ads, they let us put an ad in the promotions tab of the inbox which looked like an email. It was something they were testing at the time, but it was reasonably effective and I imagine it is still around. The old gmail sidebar ads were absolutely worthless. Roughly 0.05 clicks per 1000 impressions, and those clicks were mostly accidental. They removed those ads because they were worthless to anyone.

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