Someone brought up piracy from the monetary perspective. Another perspective I like is piracy and streaming services. I, and most in my bubble, stopped pirati

Someone brought up piracy from the monetary perspective. Another perspective I like is piracy and streaming services. I, and most in my bubble, stopped pirating when streaming services provided, well, good service. We've bit by bit moved back to piracy when the service has degraded. My journey with ad blocking is similar. Even though my browser was loaded with extensions, I used to not run an ad blocker. No other reason really than laziness. The ads didn't bother me much. It was one of those "I've been meaning to do it but never got to it". What finally got me to install an ad blocker were news of malware being served even on popular websites through ads. Ads weren't simple anymore if they ever were. They were part of one of the most complex and lucrative domains of tech business. And that was leaking into websites. It felt too dirty, so I got an ad blocker. Nowadays the ad-tech industry boasts about moving to first-party ad tracking, a cat-and-mouse game where I don't hold high hopes for ad blockers. So I went a step further and turned off JavaScript by default in uBlock Origin. Or take YouTube ads. I was still watching them on my TV not long ago, but when it got to the point where a 20 minute video has 5 ad breaks I couldn't take it anymore. If ads sticked to being image only, no dark patterns, no targeting persons but instead content and not exceedingly disruptive, I would have probably never bothered with ad blocking.