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Comment by ankitoberoi | Hacker News Reader

You should punish publishers who serve malware, popups, JS & other bad stuff BUT you don't punish ALL the publishers - many of them don't do that and are just fine.

In fact, instead of an AdBlocker, it is better off if there is a plugin which blocks such sites completely. Why use their content if you don't like them anyway.

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And how would ANY user know which ad network is compromised or not before it serves them a delicious helping of malware? Face it, if you're using Adblock you're on a default allow model and any previously spotless network can be compromised at any time since it only takes one malformed payload to get through the cracks to infect a user. It's the same situation the AV vendors face. The only realistic option (whether the ad vendors like it or not) for a blocklist is to craft the regex to be as sweeping as possible.

On the other end of things the ad firms need to self-police themselves at a vastly increased level than what is happening now, preferrably under some sort of umbrella organization. But even if that happens I expect punishments to be mere wristslaps and non-legalistic in nature. At the end of the day, it's not MY business model that's at risk here, the stakeholders have the onus to make it work in the real world. They're not entitled to it because the base model worked on network TV and then assume it can be ported wholesale to vastly different environments without compromise and change.

but there are no easy way to discern the good sites from the bad so I just cant stop visiting bad sites when i get a link or search for something.

So the only way for it to get better is collective punishment. If web publishers made decent websites such things would not be needed.

No. That doesn't work. There's a reason collective punishment is a war crime, you know.

Why doesn't it work? If people decide to boycott a company or industry for unetical acts have worked in the past, not always but you cant say it dont have the possibility of a positive effect.

By the way, collective punishment is not a war crime. It can be in certain circumstances but so can a lot of other things.

We are not talking about boycotting a company or industry here. That's boycotting the Internet because Publishers who provide free information here make a large part of the Internet.

In the end, you won't find so much content freely available and would have to pay for it directly - most likely.

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