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Comment by parsd | Hacker News Reader

I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers. I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process.

Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.

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Ads may be painful, but they are also insidious. That’s why they work. I avoid ads not because they’re painful (although most are), but because I simply don’t want to be influenced by whoever paid the most money to influence me.

No thanks for me. Advertisements if nothing else consume too much of my local compute resources for zero benefit to me. Why should I give them this free compute?

Why should I give them this free compute?

Why should they give you free content?

They choose to. My user agent just doesn't connect to all of the domains that they ask it to.

Don’t know. Some people charge for their content so they could try that if they didn’t want to offer content for free. Its their choice. Maybe I should allow ads and then send them a bill for their use of my local compute resources at my going rate.

They transmitted it into my house. I didn't ask for it.

I think opening their video amounts to asking for their content.

They're free not to do it just as I am free to close their page if they don't.

Interesting that I had to scroll this far to find a defense for the payment of the modern web. How’s this different than piracy? The unspoken agreement is that you get the content in exchange for eyeballs on ads or cash up front.

> How’s this different than piracy? The unspoken agreement...

Because movie and game studios don't rely on "unspoken agreements".

In most cases publishers don't even ask me to serve ads. They try to go behind my back by asking my browser. When my browser tells them "no", they still have the option to ask me. Some sites do, and I will either turn ads on or walk away without reading anything.

When the agreement becomes spoken it becomes an agreement. There's no agreement when there's no communication.

This has to be the most unpopular opinion so far

I have a few questions for you

1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?

1. Been doing this for a few months, using only Safari for all my browsing. 2. My big annoyance is the weight on the CPU and battery. I have this sick pleasure from opening the network tab and seeing hundreds of requests filling my machine with garbage. :) 3. I often disable JavaScript temporarily with a hotkey - in macOS, you can map this action to any combination. This works incredibly well. Once I am done with the page, I re-enable it with a single keystroke. I only wish Safari did this just for the current page and not the entire browser.

There's also 4: It's not possible to consume content and not be affected by it. How okay are you with the fact that corporate messaging is a dominant mode of influence in your life?

Not the parent, but I've been doing the same thing. For maybe a slightly different reason.

1. Since the 90s. 2. Needs to be solved by user agents. Ad blockers generally work by host name or css selector. This doesn't filter out any of the bad guys that are really trying. 3. Continue with ads I guess. This doesn't actually happen in real life as far as I can tell.

The reason I don't use an ad blocker is that I like being able to see what's going on inside of a web browser. Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone.

"Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone."

Next gen ad blocker will be a headless web browser in a data center to capture the canvas, plus automated video editing to remove the ads.

That's a terrible future. Maybe it's inevitable. But I won't contribute to the arms race.

Not OP, but I find your questions interesting.

I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.

>3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads

At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we even consider "I don't like your terms so I'm taking the content anyway" an option.

> I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.

Except that's not true. Mark Twain and Shakespeare cannot tell you you're interpreting their works incorrectly. JK Rowlings cannot stop you from making paper mache out of her books. I can timeshift and spaceshift content with tape recorders, VCRs, TiVo and more.

That may have been a poor choice of words on my part. I am struggling to come up with a better choice.

I guess the analog would be “Ms Rowlings, I think the price of your book is too high, so I am going to pay you whatever price I want to. You don’t get a choice”

Someone spent time and energy to create something, and decided that annoying ads are the price of their labor. People seem to think they now deserve the labor without the price that the creator has chosen.

In almost all your scenarios they are predicated on having compensated the author in some way. Blocking ads is consuming the content without compensating the author in any way.

Then tying it to the digital age was a strange choice. People have infringed in copyrights since before electricity, operating manual printing presses to do so.

Your printed newspaper can neither build a profile of you. Nor mine shitcoins.

We have to consider this in the digital age, because in the analog world, ads have very limited impact.

> I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.

Nonsense. Broadcast TV and radio are the same. I use a TiVo for broadcast TV and use the skip ads function.

TiVo is very much a part of the digital age, it's literally called a "Digital Video Recorder".

And before that I used a VCR and would fast-forward through the ads. And before that, I would hit the mute button and get up to use the restroom or grab a snack. Or I'd change the channel and hope I remembered to change it back in a few minutes.

Fortunately goverment and b2c things like banks and insurance dont show ads, tho they are probably selling your data

Actually, I have seen government web sites with ads in the last couple of years.

The Cook County (Illinois) Assessor used to have them. There's a new assessor now, and a new web site design, but you can still see the space for the banner ad on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20130708043842/http://www.cookco...

As for banks, yes, some banks to have ads for other companies on their web sites. I see them when I pay my bills online. Not all, but some.

It's not just ads, it's also about blocking potential security threats with third party scripts and rogue domains, especially on "adult" websites such as xxx, crypto, piracy related stuffs and what not.

For some, it is literally impossible.

In my current home it's not sanely possible to get wired Internet, so I started by just using the 40GB data allowance on my phone. This was a huge mistake. With the modern Web and being ultra-careful about my browsing, I would still chew through the whole lot in a week. It was costing me insane amounts to keep my phone online.

See the OP's article - one page can be 250MB! And my data allowance was large. Many people only have 2GB on their phones. 8 web sites and they are done for the month.

I feel similarly. My default browsing mode is Firefox with enhanced protection on, but other than that, I don't use any kind of ad-blocking. But I also pay for Spotify and YouTube Premium. Other than that, sites like HN, SO, shopping sites, etc. don't have a lot of ads anyway. On the rare occasion I find myself on a site plastered with tons of ads, I just deal with it for a short while (local news I need to read) or leave. I'm actually kind of struggling here to find a site with a lot of ads. It seems to me like despite the concerning growth of ad-tech, for the internet that I care about, ads are either optional (removable for a fee), unobtrusive (like DDG), or a signal of poor quality and I won't want to go the site anyway.

I no longer use any ad blockers.

I'm OK with most ads. I understand why they exist.

What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.

Privacy Badger only blocks tracking and surveillance.

https://privacybadger.org/

> What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.

Aren't there lots like this? At some point Ghostery did that: It would show you static banner ads no problem; it would only be the crazy javascript advert-bidding-based-on-surveillance things that wouldn't show up.

doesnt works for me, the only places I disable my adblocker is basically financial websites & healthcare related stuff. other than that it is all off.

Another thing is, since these adblock extensions get cleartext view of all the site you visit, you really want them to be completely open sourced. So only ublock origin for me.

I have a similar perspective when dealing with cookie popups, since such a perspective is necessary for something you cannot block even if you wanted to. Those with enough annoying popup hoops just get the Back button from me.

Thank you for your service.

That's actually a pretty good strategy and I am inclined to try it.

Someone just convinced you to voluntarily watch more ads.

I sympathize with small creators and sites that rely on these kinds of money and are not obtrusive. It's just a test though. I will probably be back on adblocker by default.

You can selectively turn it off for sites that you like. I have mine turned off for the local news blog which is pretty good and I like to support it.

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