Hacker News Reader

Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

That's not really true. I don't use ad blockers, but I still care about my browser speed.

I am curious why you do not, have you tried? Life is bliss.

Not OP but I develop websites and consult for companies on web matters.

I need to experience the web day to day the same way most other people do otherwise I have a rather distorted picture of things.

I don't mind paid advertising, but I dislike the tracking and profiling and sale of my information so for a while I was using Privacy Badger and other 'smart' ad-blocking anti-tracking plugins that learned.

As a web dev, it was blocking a lot of my CDN-hosted files to the point that I would need to work in other browser to make sure it wasn't really broken. Removing the ad-blockers restored normal function to me.

You may also want a website you a reading to stay in business and proffit from their work.

I think ad blocking days are numbered, the more mainstream it becomes the more likley the ad networks are to respond.

There are responsible ways to advertise which I completely agree with (that the adblocker I use respects) - and personally I do make an effort to turn it off for sites with a polite message and clearly need the revenue to function... however it gives me a warm feeling when getting caught out by linkbait articles that I am not feeding a fire I dislike.

How would ad networks respond to that? I can't think of any technically possible way for them to do that (except somehow getting operating systems to build in some crazy DRM scheme).

Sure there is, you start making the distinction between ads and regular content impossible. If all of the images on the site and all of the ads all map to something like www.sitename.com/resource/somekindofhash, then how would you tell programmatically whats an ad? You could even assign each visitor a mapping seed, so that caching still works. Blocking would have to be done on a user-by-user basis, turning this into a MAD-scenario, where some users just start blocking EVERYTHING that isn't textual or generated.

Simply serving the adds from the same domain as the content. Ad blockers are really simple currently.

After that I imagine the blockers could step it up and start looking for script names, or reporting on common scripts shared accross domains, by which point we are in an arms race :)

By making ads indistinguishable from content. Or serving content from ad servers.

I'm kind of opposed to the concept. If a web site is serving a page that is annoying to use, my solution is to not use it. I don't feel like doing usability improvements that should be done by the site operator.

You don't always have that option -- there will always be some crappy website out there that requires re-arranging your life to avoid (whether it be for a job, a bank loan, an apartment, the DMV, etc.).

For sites that are important to my life, I prefer not to have plugins modifying their contents in potentially intent-changing ways. Ad-blockers make no guarantee to preserve functionality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com