> If everyone did this though many online products and services would cease to exist. This is something I've been grappling with a lot. I use Adblock Plus and

> If everyone did this though many online products and services would cease to exist. This is something I've been grappling with a lot. I use Adblock Plus and Ghostery and set Firefox to delete almost all cookies on exit. For that small effort, I enjoy a beautifully snappy, ad-free, privacy-respecting web. With the sole exception of Hulu, no website I've used has denied me its functionality because I block ads. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Stack Exchange, the New York Times and many other ad-supported sites happily give me their content and functionality even though the ads aren't loading. I feel no ethical obligation to a publisher or service provider to view their ads. Some will disagree, but I insist. It's my strongly held belief that it is always okay to say no to a salesperson, and blocking ads is simply saying no to a large class of potential salespeople in advance. But there are other stakeholders than just, say, me and Google Inc. Suppose enough people blocked ads that Google was losing money, and had to become a paid service: $5/month to use the search engine, another $5/month for Gmail. Like most of HN, I could easily afford to pay that. Not everyone could. And for a lot of the working poor, they'd have a tough decision to make, and might have to give up access to a couple of great tools for knowledge and communication that, right now, we take it for granted everyone can use. Conversely, I wonder if there isn't also a sort of elitism going on in terms of who blocks ads. I can't find good stats for all ad blockers on all platforms, but out of over 450 million Firefox users[1], 15 million use the Adblock Plus extension[2]. I'm not sure whether that is a high or low number. It's certainly significant, but it makes you wonder why the other 96% of Firefox users aren't blocking ads. I know there are people who actually like ads and find them helpful, and there are more who would consider blocking ads unethical, maybe even tantamount to stealing (though I disagree). But I wonder if a larger cohort aren't simply unaware how extensively advertisers track them, and that they can stop it with a free addon. Weirdly, I feel as though there is probably inequality built into the use of ad blockers, where my use of Google services and the like is being subsidized by those with less technological savvy (and possibly, in many cases, lower economic class). But if someone ran a successful education campaign to spread knowledge of ad blockers, for equality's sake, then free services would shutter or turn to paid, and economic inequality would increase. It's a conundrum I don't know how to resolve. I don't really have a conclusion yet — I'm just dumping my internal conflict here for discussion's sake. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ under "Fast Facts" [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/