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Comment by dudus | Hacker News Reader

<rant>

Blocking ads is such a dick move. This should be made illegal. You are not entitled to change a website to your contempt and cut their main revenue source. If you want to use a website/app and it was made available with the Ad, then just suck it in or use a different one.

To my eyes this is not very different than piracy. Where you use a software without paying for it's price.

Advertising is the price you pay to use a service. Targeting is a technology to make that Ad as much relevant to you as possible. And yet there's a lot of negativity in here towards both. It's supposed to be a win-win-win solution for advertisers, publishers and users and yet are met with negativity and FUD.

If you are here in HN you should think the same, because advertisement is what funds the industry you are in.

</rant>

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> Blocking ads is such a dick move. This should be made illegal.

A law to enforce one very specific business model is a terrible idea.

If only I could tip $2 the author for that video I watched and liked (like say, 10,000 other viewers) with as little overhead as possible... No donations, no subscriptions, just a tip with no further obligations. You think ad brokers would welcome this business model?

You probably were implying this, but just in case you didn't, this might actually be quite possible right now through crypto currency.

> You are not entitled to change a website to your contempt and cut their main revenue source.

You are not entitled to require my HTTP agent to request assets I do not desire. I GET your HTML and I request the additional files I want. I override your CSS with user stylesheets if I'm colorblind or I just like seeing ponies in the background. I write my own custom JS to run with your page if I want. I'm a free user of the web, and you're operating under the wrong paradigm. Heck, even newspaper readers are entitled to use scissors.

If you don't want to serve content to the general public, use a paywall.

While I agree that ads are a good thing for the internet as a whole, I certainly have the right to change what my computer does and shows me. The idea of making it illegal to block ads and modify webpages locally is so absurd I can't wrap my head around it. I don't even see how that could be enforced.

> The idea of making it illegal to block ads and modify webpages locally <…> I don't even see how that could be enforced.

Say, modifying page source acquires questionable legal status (like port scanning or jailbreaking) and is removed from every major browser. Sadly, to me personally this doesn't seem too unlikely to happen in near future.

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