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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers.

ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.

People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.

I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.

But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.

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You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes of many.

Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me bail from them.

If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.

My computer belongs to me and will display the things I tell it to display. If ABP gets in the way of that, then so long ABP.

I'm fine with this approach as long as it goes both ways. The media organisation's server is theirs, and if they want to put up a paywall or block clients with ad blockers, that's their prerogative.

At no point does ublock force their server to perform work it wouldn't otherwise. “Blocking clients with ad blockers” isn't a thing, there is only “send information plus instructions for the client to block itself”, and “only send information to logged in users” (and if they're incapable of choosing trustworthy users, that is not my problem).

I didn't say anything about the server doing extra work? And server-side ad insertion definitely exists, but if you want to get pedantic about the delivery mechanism, that's fine, websites have the right to bundle their content with ads and code that makes their ads more difficult to block.

This is essentially a variant of tragedy of commons by this point.

Except its a bit like that PERL quote.

You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.

You think, I know, i'll use ads!

Now you have two problems.

"Greedy end users"? WTF.

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