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Comment by sacado2 | Hacker News Reader

If browser ads had a real-life equivalent, they would be more like that creep who suddenly pops in front of attractive women in the street trying to grab their phone numbers, and no matter what you do you'll never get rid of him and he'll be following you on your way back home (probably to provide you with a "better user experience").

If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web page, I don't think adblock plus would be a thing at all.

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ad blocking would absolutely be a thing still. Fundamentally an ad blocker is just a filter on what portions of web page get loaded. It is my intention to increase the signal to noise ratio on the things I experience, so I would filter these things out myself at the brain level. I'm just automating the process and offloading it to the browser, and there will always be strong incentive to automate things.

If ads were just gifs or pngs that loaded from the same site, did not noticably impact page load times, and were displayed alongside the main content (analagous to ads in a magazine) I would likely not bother blocking them (and blocking would be more difficult: how would the blocking software know that they were ads and not part of the main content of the page?)

I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.

In fact, most ad blockers do just that: they filter out all ads but the ok-looking ones that fits a non-invasive standard.

I would also not bother blocking them… I intentionally tolerated ads for years, the flash era was pretty bad… but almost quaint compared to the onslaught of ads that know everything from who your friends are, how much money you make, and what dandruff shampoo you use… (plus that one time you googled “butt plugs”)

and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me?

yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please

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