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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

> Personally I would like to see ads improved

Sure, sounds good. When you win that fight, let me know and I'll reconsider the ad blocker.

Commercial sites brought ad blocks upon themselves with malvertising an insanely obtrusive ads.

It blows my mind how people are so accepting of the status quo, especially on mobile, where many news sites will put a sticky ad banner on the top, throw a video ad on the corner (with a close button that's only 1/8" across, of course), and then every paragraph (which is only like 2-3 sentences) is separated by an ad. At any given moment, well over half my screen is ads, even after managing to close the video ad in the corner.

Browsing the web on a phone, I wonder how many bandwidth and battery is being used just to show ads.

Get yourself firefox mobile and have ublock origin on your phone :)

I already do, but that only blocks ads in Firefox. If I open a link in an app, it often uses some browser widget that's effectively Chrome.

You can also block ads through dns like with blokada. That even stops ads within apps! In many cases.

though I do 90% of my mobile browsing in firefox, sometimes I end up using the pop-up browswer widget. Looking at my data use... the uBO-less widget has used more data than firefox, despite being used much less often. non-firefox mobile users must blow through their data plans...

I doubt it. In my experience those that block ads feel entitled to the content without payment of any kind. They see ads as an intrusion rather than a fair exchange. No, I don't see you turning it back on regardless of how things go.

The average user doesn't even recognize that running a website literally cost electricity that must be paid for. Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?

I pay literally hundreds of dollars a month to various content creators (eg Ars Technica, several local news outlets, many creators on Patreon, YouTube Premium) so kindly bugger off with your moralizing, thanks. I want browsing the web to not suck, so I use the tools I need to do that. If they want me to stop using these tools, they can make browsing the web not suck without them.

I'm glad you are willing to pay hundreds for that, at least you're consistent. But I think you are out of touch with how most people who use ad blockers think. People want free stuff. They are entitled. And when they have successfully suppressed the much less painful ad experience (no sign up, no credit card, works across all sites) they will be upset when they encounter sign up blocks and ask "why does every website want a subscription?!" not realizing that they themselves did it.

Now there may be some upsides to this. Shock content, designed to garner page views, may become less common. Perhaps content will get longer.

But I do not relish the annoyance of having to pay for every site. I despise that tech help on medium, for example, is often behind a paywall. I'd rather watch an ad.

I think fewer people would block ads if they were less miserable. So if you achieve your goal of making ads suck less, fewer people would block ads. I support you in your endeavor! But in the meantime, I'm not going to put up with a garbage web experience just because you asked me to.

I have used adblock since forever and I am absolutely willing to pay for quality content. I do actively support content creators by buying merch or funding their Patreon/Github.

Subscriptions suck because it is another thing to keep track off and many business models rely on you forgetting about them.

I think micropayments would be great but the problem is that you need to consume the content before knowing if it was really worth paying for.

My dream would be some kind of general internet subscription network set up as a non-profit public service where I pay a fixed sum every month and where all kinds of content creators, news sites, basically anyone could be in. The network would pay their members a split of my monthly fee based on the sites I visited by default but offer me up and downvote buttons on every page. Downvotes means the site is excluded from getting payments from me, upvote means double payment. (Of course I can't downvote all of them, the sum I pay is always fixed.)

So I have only one single monthly payment, I don't have to think about it much while still having a way to encourage high-quality content.

iOS is great for subscriptions - there’s a list in the App Store and I trust apple to allow me to cancel them if I’m no longer using them. It’s clear whether I’m signing up to monthly or weekly.

If your business can't survive without ads you don't have a viable business worth gifting to humanity.

Then put it behind a paywall or stop crying that people are viewing the content you put out to be viewed in public.

If nobody wants to pay it is totally fine if they go out of business. A lot of the be things of today's internet are caused by sites being able to live off ads revenue.

Hi adblock user here, who uses adblockers for 2 reasons: 1) Security, because ad networks can't be bothered to properly vet the stuff they shove down everyone's throats and 2) On mobile at least, its impossible to read most websites due to the sheer number of overlaid videos and other such BS.

That's it. That's not entitlement. I just want to actually read the stuff on a website. If websites could do ads that weren't trying to monopolize attention and/or trick me in to downloading malware, I'd definitely think twice about my use of a blocker on that website.

Sure there are some that feel like because its on the internet that's its free and they are entitled to it. But I'd wager most ad block users fall in to a similar camp as me.

Plus most adblocking extensions these days are also tracker blockers as well, so there's some element of privacy protection in play there as well.

I pay for a couple that I usually do visit, but I wouldn't be able to do the same for others.

Also, ads got ridiculous real fast, and started doing a lot more than just show a picture. This was really the breaking point for me. I happily pay for the couple mentuomed earlier, and donate to OSS projects even but more than that is unfeasible.

There are lists one can use for filtering out only the "bad" ads, mostly community driven. What we really need is a standard way of doing this, one that is enforced. But no ad company wants this, at least from what I gather.

Blaming ad blockers is the same as blaming video game piracy, you aren't tackling the real issue. The issue is that ad blockers provide a better service than not having one (i.e. not filling your screen and preventing you from seeing the content, not being a security nightmare, etc...), even if you need to go through the trouble of getting one. Alas, in this case it generates a perpetual cycle, which further puts people over their breaking point.

I guess what I'm really saying is that ad companies, and websites filling their pages with them, did this to themselves. The public tolerates it to a certain point, but I wouldn't see it it's their fault if normal web usage continues to deteriorate.

dont put your product on public display if you don't want it to be seen for free.

> The average user doesn't even recognize that running a website literally cost electricity that must be paid for. Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?

Running a retail store also has costs associated with it, including, yes, electricity.

Yet if I walk into a store and leave without buying anything, do I feel like I owe the store owner anything?

No. That's not how that works, nor is that how it should work.

There’s a difference between browsing in a shop and reading content online. It’s much more like going in and sitting in a book shop, reading a book and leaving.

No, it's not. It's more like an online bookstore mailing you a copy of a book for free. The only catch is that they also sent a book full of ads and directions that say: after every page of the book, look at an ad. Then, when I receive these, I don't even take the ad book out of the package, read the actual book, and send them both back.

You can imagine why Amazon never decided to go with this business model.

> Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?

Not my problem. The web existed as a medium before advertising and it will continue just fine without it.

Get a better business model and stop crying like a spoiled child.

The web has been plagued with ads for decades. Pop up blockers were the old thing, and everyone knows the screenshot of the internet explorer loaded with toolbars.

Some people will contribute money. Wikipedia doesn't have ads (except occasional banners to donate).

I run an adblocker. It’s not because I don’t want to pay, it’s because there are more ads than content.

I don’t want to dedicate 4.5 inches of screen space to ads including videos, banners, and often time inappropriate ads. If you want to do 3rd party banner ads, be my guest, but the minute there’s more of them then content I’m going to turn them off.

Well at least you agree with the position that Ads is not inherently evil.

That is almost certainly the opinion of only a tiny loud minority. Most people who run adblockers do so to protect themselves from abusive ad practices, not all ads out of some moral reason.

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