Some people in tech will lie directly to your face about pirating your software and not feel at all bad when they are caught in it.

No, there will be left free some small percentage of useful content, maybe 00,01% or less. And personally for me, these several tens of millions of pages left will be enough.

Additionally some will survive on subscriptions.

No, that's not strictly true. People will always do what they enjoy whether money is attached to it, whether they'll go to jail for it, or otherwise.

Disagree. I'd rather pay (a reasonable amount) for a subscription, than put up with cluttered UX.

In the internet era you simply don't need a multinational corporation to publish your blog post for you. They're already being published for free.

You still need a trusted editor to collect and curate... but that editor certainly doesn't need the multinational corporation, not anymore. Its not 1975 and ink on paper.

The future probably looks a lot like "Clojure Gazette", which is a curated edited list of links to blog posts and projects focusing on a rather small field, and THE (emphasis, "the") only human involved is a trusted editor and he gets beer money plus considerable fame out of being the editor.

Reading between the lines, at Dr Dobbs a small team can pull down less than a million bucks. To a multinational megacorporation, thats hopeless, sunset it. Divided among a very small team, however, that's one heck of a lifestyle business...

The unscrupulous advertising practices out there (e.g. straight-up malware deliver) make it too dangerous to not run ad-blockers. Until the security issues around advertising are addressed adequately, I consider blocking entirely ethical. Compare it to the idea of Target shaming users for not trusting them with their credit card info.

Besides, I expect direct patronage models to supplant advertising for smaller sites sooner rather than later. And yes, I already use Patreon.

> Yes, and if everybody will do like you you'll soon find nothing interesting to read, because every free content website will end like DrDobbs.

Ad-blocking is a necessary form of protection from corporate stalking.

It wouldn't be necessary if advertisers would restrict themselves to tracking what's necessary to create a functional ad (browser, capability, etc.). But they are bound and determined to mine for every possible bit of information they can and that's where I draw the line.

If you wouldn't want an individual doing that, why on <deity>'s green earth would would want some anonymous company doing it in an automated fashion such that they can almost guarantee a far more exact picture of you? Does this not completely subvert the idea of privacy? Especially when security is not absolute guarantee?

I think if people really, truly understood just how easy it is to collect the data, store the data and then still manage to get it wrong, they'd be horrified beyond belief. I'm sure a lot of people here have some inkling of how that's done, but if that could be communicated to the people who aren't as tech-savvy ...

Well, sad to say, there'd be a lot of pitchforks and torches and still nothing would be truly done about it.

But it's nice to think about burning down some corporations and lining up a few executives against the wall.

You could make exactly the same comment in regard to clicking ads and buying things from ads. If everybody stopped doing that then ads would become valueless and ad revenue would go away. The thing is, a lot of people who use ad block never click on ads to start with.

The idea that people should be forced to suffer, by viewing ads that are useless to them, in exchange for viewing free content is a very silly concept born of puritanical ideals. If a site can't sustain itself with users running ad block then it needs to figure out a better business model, period.

Well, it seems that vendors have decided web advertising is not valuable even among user demographics that don't block ads. AdBlock may not be making all that much difference if the basic problem is that people ignore ads even when they see them.

That said, there must still be some value in brand recognition. I guess it's just not as much value as vendors had previously ascribed to these ads.

Its the price of ad models that (generically) overwhelm content and users.

It's amazing you got downvoted for non running ad-blocking software.

I've never run AdBlock or any "stop viewing ads" software. I have run NoScript and those variations, which sometimes kills ads as a side-effect.

On your commute, you're passing a McDonald's store every day. You know it's there, but you never buy food there for whatever reason. Are you stealing?

I'd rather pay the site directly if they'd stop displaying ads. Several companies experiment with those kinds of revenue stream: OkCupid shows you this [1] banner encouraging you to pay 5$ if you're using an ad blocker. Reddit has the "gilding" concept. While I don't know if that pays out at the end of the day, I'd rather pay the site directly than having them to rely on distracting and sometimes malicious ads which load 3 embedded flash player objects and destroy the site's performance.

By relying on ads, sites naturally introduced a terrible usability. Notice how many times you encounter a complete page reload where a simple AJAX call would have done the job better? That's because you sell a certain number of page impressions to advertisers, and the sooner they're used up, the sooner you get paid. The complete system is a mess.

[1] http://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/template/image.png

Stealing from who?

I've never purchased through an online ad, I don't have any disposable income. If you don't want me to visit your site then you're welcome to paywall it - but I'm saving resources by blocking ad loading. If you put content on a website then you put it there free, that's the ethos of the web, I do it too - you're welcome to put up adverts of course but there's no contract between us that necessitates my consumption of those ads.

If you want to block those using adblockers then it's possible, any indication that those with adblockers are unwelcome will certainly be respected by me; I'll just find another source, maybe Google's cache. Oh, you don't want Google to cache your site, well you know what to do, it's easy to prevent.

Personally I started with adblockers when ads went dynamic, motion distracts my eye too much and means I can't read the content. In-your-face-ads make me determined not to buy from those companies - most of which don't sell in my country anyway, it seems.

If Adblocking is stealing then so is shutting your eyes during ads at a cinema, or going to the toilet in a broadcast-TV advert break, or looking at an amusing billboard without checking who the advertising company is, ....

Not even close to it. You could say the opposite, in that some of these more obtrusive ads are stealing from the business they are supposed to be advertising with. Many times a small banner ad can inline flash objects, all kinds of mess to take over real-estate on a site, and the owner may not even know it. Then, an ad collects usage data on you, and sells it, without your consent, or worse?

And you say people with ad blockers have no integrity?

> People have figured out they can watch youtube without ads by installing adblock

I've seen AdBlock Plus fail on YouTube in a particularly annoying way--the ads that consist of a long video (often 2 minutes or more) with a "you can skip this ad in 5 seconds" overlay that counts down and turns into a skip button are shown--but with that overlay and skip button removed!

I recently installed AdBlock (at home) and AdBlock Plus (at work), and I'm not really impressed. At most sites, ads did not bother me. I installed these because of one particular site that was getting too obnoxious. That was gocomics.com. They started running frequent ads that expand on the left side of the page, which would often push the end of the comic I was reading off the right side of the page.

I'd much prefer if I could have these off for most sites, and only block ads on specific sites that I find overly aggressive. They support this, but there doesn't seem to be a good interface to manage it, and it looks like it would get impractical to deal with a lot of sites that way.