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Everyone emphasizes the privacy/tracking reasons for ad blocking and mentions the annoyance/performance reasons in passing. I think it's important to point out
by freshhawk 11y ago
Everyone emphasizes the privacy/tracking reasons for ad blocking and mentions the annoyance/performance reasons in passing.
I think it's important to point out that, when you ask people they mention two other defenses of ad blocking:
1. They hate advertising in general. They would block it everywhere if they could. They know it's engineered to manipulate them, often with lifestyle advertising it's engineered to manipulate them into feeling worse and promising to sell them the cure, but it's always engineered to manipulate them in some way. The psychological techniques are very good, better to just block it than falsely assume you can be exposed and then will it into having no effect.
2. It's their computer so it will do whatever they want it to. Remove ads, remove other parts of your site, remix your site, redesign it, remove all your branding completely, etc. These are the more technical uses with a lot of plugins/userscripts but when you show it off to less technical users they want it too, although it's not available to them yet.
It has become a good litmus tests to see who mentions the problems with advertising in general and who sticks with the constructed narrative of "Is it OK to steal content to protect your private information?".
I agree, I would have expected Mozilla (even though I know they are ad supported) to not fail this particular test.