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Comment by throw872291 | Hacker News Reader

Whoa whoa talk about AdBlock Plus and integrity!

AdBlock Plus seems to whitelist your ads if you pay them millions [1][2]. The euphemism ABP (and their parent company Eyeo) uses is 'acceptable ads'. Acceptable to Eyeo I guess. It's opt-out at the users end.

OP knows all about this [3][4].

I'm not a fan of some of Mozilla's policies but I'm thankful if it's true that Ublock Origin is shown preference over the shady, user-disrespecting ABP.

[1] Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995140

[2] gorhill, UbO developer on Eyeo https://nitter.net/gorhill/search?f=tweets&q=%22eyeo%22

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818307

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5946892

[5] Eyeo on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28746231

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I can't say much about recent years, given how I've left quite a while ago. But I do want to point out that ABP was always surprisingly upfront about Acceptable Ads (only users who cannot read could possibly miss it, it's prominent on every step of the funnel). And even though that may be hard to believe, they do take the criteria very seriously last time I checked, even doing a ton of user research, which surprisingly (to me) yielded back then that a lot of users feel bad about blocking all ads unconditionally and mostly care about not having stuff jump at them.

The only possibly shady thing you point out is that it's opt out, I get that. Especially people who want to block everything unconditionally might feel cheated because it's not called Adblock Minus.

What Mozilla did here, OTOH, I find shady because they're pretending to run an impartial addon store, when in practice some guy who wants to promote a specific extension (maybe that person feels like you, maybe he's a friend of gorhill - I have no way of knowing) can pull these kind of tricks.

But I suppose it's a case for Hanlon's Razor: They probably just don't have their stuff together about running any type of store the way the big guys do.

I'm still a proud Mozillian, I can find one thing they do shady without finding all of Mozilla shady, I realise it didn't sound like that above.

If there was a whitelist toggle in the funnel clearly labeled "No, I installed an adblocker to block ads, not to be shown the ads your protection racket is paid to deliver" then it would be all cool.

The thinking is that when something says it's an adblocker, it has one job - blocking ads. ABP doesn't do that, hiding behind the euphemism 'acceptable ads'. It would be ok if they promote it as a 'selective blocker' instead of 'adblocker'. It would also be ok if they say adblocker and the acc. ads thingy is opt-in. If Mozilla did something to highlight something that had one job to do and did it, I'm thankful.

P.S: Ublock Origin is not just an adblocker. It can block various types of content.

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