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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone feels they are "owed" anything. I do, however, feel I have the right to download whatever someone puts online, and not download and view the adjacent ads.

Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.

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I think that the idea that "people would largely stop making content for the web if that weren't ads" is a myth. Sure, the money seeking people wouldn't do it anymore and a lot less people would be able to make a living off of it. But think of all the web content makers that currently don't make a lot of money, which I believe is a lot of people since not everyone who has blog earns a living from it. I'm not saying we wouldn't lose anything but this idea the "90% of the web would disappear or be paywalled" is kinda insane and quite unlikely

Based on how many trash sites show up in search (even after search engines' algorithms try hard to downrank garbage), I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of the web is there only to make a quick buck with ads. According to Wikipedia, 90% of all email traffic in 2014 was spam, despite hosting providers and ISPs blocking ports and taking a hard stance on spam. I have no reason to believe the web is much better, especially given that spinning up a trash site is not going to start alerts and get IP blocks banned the same way that sending email spam does.

I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web.

But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.

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