Pretty much any form of animation on a page causes me to stop reading it, until I can find some way of eliminating it. Too many ads are animated to risk going without an adblocker, flash blocking and disabling of autoplay etc.

And it's not just ads. It's currently fashionable to have all sorts of slide overs as you near the end of an article. Those cause me to stop reading too, until I've killed the elements that caused the slide over. Similarly with floating page headers (vertical space is at a premium), floating social button menus, etc.

And of course, then there's custom fonts. For years, I viewed the web with custom font downloading disabled, until the near ubiquity of FontAwesome forced me to concede. But I still run a plugin to disable font choices, and will run pages through a Readable bookmarklet if the designer has prioritized style over legibility.

I don't really see the relationship between me and site publishers as a social contract. It's much more hostile than that. They try to ram an incredible amount of crap into my sensory input, and I defend myself from their assault every way I can.

But, in my opinion of course, I don't think it's 'immoral' to block ads and stop their revenue if you don't care about it, we should have the ability to block domains right? The question is whether or not it's right to do so, if I'm thinking correctly. But believe it or not, I'm actually quite new to this 'debate'(?), just my first raw thoughts on this. I guess it's probably not as simple as what I just said..

"Are you a boy or a girl?" Popping up when I'm in my office at home is something that makes me want to use adblock. And I don't use adblock.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#%C2%B5block-for-chromium

Honestly? In my long time of adblock-free browsing I've noticed an interesting correlation - the more ads there are on a page and the crappier they get, the less trustworthy and useful the site itself is. Moreover, heavily advertised products tend to be crap designed to extract money from you by luring you into a suboptimal choice. Ads are a good proxy for both crappiness of the product and of the site that shows them. From what I see, if AdBlock kills anything, it kills sites that have no business being on the Internet in the first place, because they waste people's time.

But just thought experimenting.. Say everyone uses ad blockers. Websites receive no ad revenue, websites die as main source of support to stay alive is ads. Now who gets affected by this? People who like the website and essentially are 'subscribed' to it right (keep coming back for more)? As opposed to those who just visit probably most commonly once for some particular piece of info or news.

So eventually it should go back to the days before ads infested the internet right, where everyone hosted because they could / was useful / original content etc? What's so scary or immoral about that, if anything that's even better right?

But that's only good for small websites, today's internet literally runs the world, sophisticated, large and complicated systems. Would this mean that to run the world without such ads (assuming I actually want the world to continue to being run by the internet), as everyone would use ad blockers anyway, these big websites would start charging for their content/functionality? Is that bad? I think maybe yes, that might be worse than just being gratis, but with ads (paywall → privacy concerns just to surf the internet). And so now I've come full circle and contradicted my original position. What other efficient ways are there to easily support large websites financially as ads can, if any?

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Why do I avoid ads though in the first place?

1. Often (as in 99% of the time), they are very distracting. There are times when I'm on a computer without adblock, and I don't know how I ever survived without it. (Actually, I always inspect element > deleted, but to bother to do that everytime before I can read the content makes a point right?)

2. _Tracking → privacy concerns._

3. Because not what I came for. Captain obvious here.

So at the end of that, I think personally I wouldn't be opposed to non-tracking and non-distracting ads. But how do you confirm they do not track you? Can you? Is it possible to stop potential tracking attempts, without blocking the non-distractive (or unobtrusive) ads themselves?

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I don't care if a site cannot support itself without ads and dies, I don't think it's immoral to not care about them if I don't care about their content in the long term.

Also, I don't think it's immoral to continue to use a site with adblockers when knowing full well that it might be functioning just due to those who do. I can understand why people think it's bad and is freeloading, but I think it's still justified because ads fuck you over privacy wise anyway, and so I think it's more important to protect yourself and your privacy than to have the only way to pay for the content compromise that. Just a too extreme form of payment.

Ignoring whether or not it's actually practically enforceable (because I don't think it is, nor do I think it should be possible), should it be the case that accessing a site's content is all or nothing. I.e. you get both the content and the ads or nothing at all. But even if you accept the all or nothing concept, you still have to compromise your privacy. I don't want the internet to be a place that's only useful if I 'accept' to give away my privacy. And I just realised how much of a simpleton I am regarding this topic..

> > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

For what it's worth (and perhaps you intended it this way), this is a somewhat shallow application of the categorical imperative. There are other ways to justify using AdBlock (and in fact, condemn not using AdBlock) by means of the categorical imperative. For example: "If everyone uses AdBlock to prevent sleazy ads that can contain malware, then those ads will no longer have value, and they will cease to exist." If you think of AdBlock as a vaccine, then by the categorical imperative, it's necessary to vaccinate everyone[0].

Or, "If everyone uses AdBlock, then websites will have to invent monetization tactics that don't involve auctioning off its user's eyeballs and privacy". If you consider ads to be an intrusion and invasion of privacy, then killing the ad-supported model could actually be a good thing.

I don't really want to get into a debate on adblockers in general, because the topic has been beaten to death on HN before, but I just felt compelled[1] to make this note about the categorical imperative for the sake of others reading this.

[0] This is also a somewhat simplistic reduction, but you get the idea.

[1] (Yes, that's a Kant pun)

I'm okay with a world like that.