Hacker News Reader

That looks great. I already use an adblocker, but playing a small part in interfering with their pay-per-click mechanisms sounds much more compelling.

Are there any downsides to using this?

View on HN

If you're goal is to get the pages, that you value enough to view, to move to some other way to get money from your use of their service (which I assume you think should be free), then there's no downside.

Well by clicking on the ads it's pretty likely the site gets more money.

As others have said, any service doing fraud prevention might ban you. It doesn't seem to be happening yet, but that could change any time it got popular and they would be pretty justified doing it.

Since when is clicking on something but not looking at it fraud?

I know you're being obtuse, but the fraud is that someone is paying for you to look at those ads. You're under no obligation to actually do it, of course, and the site is under no obligation to let you use it, hence the ban.

I just reacted to the term 'fraud' which is a legal term that has a clearly defined meaning.

If it was really fraud it would be implied to be illegal. It's not a nice thing to do but it's not illegal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com