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I cannot verify the claims, but I'll state the reasons once again about why I'm not using ad blockers: 1) free websites and web services need revenue and as lo

I cannot verify the claims, but I'll state the reasons once again about why I'm not using ad blockers: 1) free websites and web services need revenue and as long as the ads are tasteful, I don't mind them 2) I actually want websites to annoy me with lots of stupid ads, as I want to stop using such websites, because I want to reward publishers that don't do that Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease and in doing so they only help spreading and growing that disease.

zeckalpha 13y ago
How do ad blockers affect revenue? Don't they still fetch the ads but just limit the presentation of the ads? So it would be indistinguishable from someone who just does not click on the ads?
- caust1c 13y ago
  Most block the loading of the url that contains the ad content. The website owners rarely host the ads they're displaying. In that regard, it's very easy to detect if someone is using AdBlock or not.
  - orclev 13y ago
    Only if you own both the site and the ad network otherwise you'll be unable to tell if they made a request for the ad or not. There are also ways of getting false positives with that sort of test, for instance if for whatever reason the server that has the ad on it isn't reachable from the client (say a problem in one of the major backbones, or a bad DNS entry). The usual approach I've seen sites take is they have some sort of "Please disable your ad-blocker" image that they load everywhere ads go, and then just overlay the ad image on top of that one when it loads.
- namdnay 13y ago
  No, one of the advantages of ad blockers is that they cut down on the amount of traffic, you don't download the ads. In fact, several websites show you a warning message, or refuse to load, if you're running an adblocker.
- citricsquid 13y ago
  1. No they don't 2. Even if they did this would be very unreasonable, either you view adverts and the publisher gets paid or you don't view adverts and the publisher doesn't get paid. If you're triggering the pay-out criteria without actually doing whatever is required (view, click, interact) it's just moving the financial hit to the advertiser, which is still unreasonable.
  - acheron 13y ago
    Not my problem. The entire point of HTML is that the server sends files and I have a client that decides how to interpret them. I may be using a browser that is set to display larger fonts for my poor eyesight, or I may be using a mobile browser that decides to use different CSS, or I may be using Lynx that doesn't show images, or I may be using a browser that displays some images and not others based on a blacklist. It's not up to the server to determine.
kybernetyk 13y ago
Hmm, I haven't seen it that way. I guess I start stop using adblockers, too. Now some of my daily news sources will become pretty unbearable ... but I guess I better look out for other websites that don't need to put up full site flash wrap-banners.
foobarqux 13y ago
The reason everyone should have ad blockers is to be free from exploitative coercion. If someone could attach electrodes on your cranium and "reprogram" it so that it would permanently increase your propensity to buy product X by 10% in exchange for viewing an article on a website would you do it? Would you justify doing it by statements like "free websites and web services need revenue and I don't really mind the electrodes"?
pi18n 13y ago
I block all advertisements because the majority I've seen are manipulative and push us to constantly be purchasing shit we don't need by making us afraid we aren't good enough. Or they're just nakedly bold; "come spend your real dollars on this online game featuring this witch's breasts". If websites have a problem with this they can just respond 402 to all my requests and I won't cry to anyone. Some advertisers are just honest people trying to make money and I hope word-of-mouth will cover those. But for the rest of it, let's just say my life is much better without TV, radio, or magazines.
citricsquid 13y ago
Plus a huge number of people that adblock have been doing it for years and are basing the continued usage on the assumption that adverts now are similar to the adverts in 2006 - 2009. I use a lot of different websites with advertisements and I can't think of the last time I've seen an advertisement that auto-played sound or caused lag, whereas in 2008 it was a daily occurrence. The value that advertisements provide (support websites) greatly outweighs the inconvenience that current advertisements cause, even Youtube pre-roll adverts are not that bad after getting used to them.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  I started blocking ads less than a year ago because of YouTube's pre-roll advertisements, since I'm perfectly capable of filtering out text based ads but a format that requires me to watch the ad to be able to view the content without letting me pay them is a deal-breaker for me. Is it really that hard to let me pay a monthly fee to turn ads off? Google is serving the vast majority of ads online and they already have the infrastructure in place to channel part of that fee to the content creators including knowing whom I visit and when.
  - ianlevesque 13y ago
    Exactly this. Everyone needs to offer the option to pay in some way. If we could pay for a bundle of all sites even better.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      I happen to be working on the technology to make this possible.
    - jimm 13y ago
      If you're old enough to remember the start of cable TV, one of the promises was that it would have few/no commercials, because you're paying for it. I'd trust very few web sites to stay ad-free if they switched to a pay model. The money is just too good for them.
criley2 13y ago
As if I need every single website hooked into Google Ads, all of them reminding me that I'm single, trying to sell me clothes, trying to sell me dating websites, trying to predict what I want in life. It's invasive, and quite frankly, it's disturbing and creepy that the same advertisements follow me regardless of website. I feel like the guy in Pachebel's Rant, finding Canon in D across modern music, except what I'm finding is invasive Google ads, and I find them on most websites... So no, I actively refuse the narrow demographic Google placed me into, and chases me around the internet with.
- maxmcd 13y ago
  You can opt-out of retargeting. Seems that would solve your problem.
  - vonuebelgarten 13y ago
    I opt-out by preventing the browser from emitting that HTTP requests. Why will I trust the ad-server from doing evil things?
  - betterunix 13y ago
    We should live in a world where people who want this need to opt-in.
- orourkek 13y ago
  FYI, you can change some settings for google ads[1] so that you're not shown targeted ads at all (for example). You can also block ads to have them and related ads never be shown again. [1] https://www.google.com/ads/preferences https://www.google.com/ads/preferences
  - HarshaThota 13y ago
    Google also has an add-on if you want to opt out from Google Analytics. [1] https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
theorique 13y ago
Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease and in doing so they only help spreading and growing that disease. They are like antibiotics creating stronger bacteria?
ianlevesque 13y ago
There's a growing segment of users that just don't want advertising in their faces, period. Thankfully a not-insignificant portion of these are willing to pay for it through subscriptions on sites that offer this. Not enough sites offer this. I envision an "ad network" appearing eventually that doesn't display any ads, just distributes revenues from an aggregate subscription. Then sites can still be supported by spontaneous visitors and users can control their exposure to advertisements online.
- tomflack 13y ago
  I pay for Arstechnica premium for this reason. I have adblockers turned off on The Verge, and emailed them asking for a subscription option but received no reply. I don't want advertising in my face, full stop.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  This idea has been around for a while; I call it "microsubscription". Several companies have tried and failed to make a go of it. Kachingle is still limping along, though fatally hamstrung itself by picking a dumb, public fight with the New York Times. As I said in reply to another of your comments, I've been working on the technology to make it possible to do this reliably for some time now. It's harder than it looks.
  - ianlevesque 13y ago
    Very interesting. I figured someone must have tried it but hadn't found examples. Kachingle looks like a deeply flawed implementation of it. What were the others?
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      From memory there was a few, but I've lost the links file I had. Contenture was one of them. There was a project at one of the journalism schools trying to push the same model too. It's a good idea on paper, but actually making the market-building side work is really hard. I've been focused on the technology side because hey, that's how I'm wired. Essentially, you can't rely on standard web bugs or javascript approaches; they're much too easy to subvert. In my honours dissertation I identified 9 distinct attacks on the "naive" protocol and developed countermeasures for each. But that design is fatally flawed too. I have another design which ... well, watch this space: http://robojar.com/ http://robojar.com/
betterunix 13y ago
"as long as the ads are tasteful" This is the problem: the ads stopped being tasteful. Remember pop-ups? Remember how, when browsers started having pop-up blockers as a default, the response by the advertising industry was to try to circumvent the blockers, resulting in even more annoying ads? Remember how ad companies did not get the message when people stopped accepting their cookies, and now use dozens of techniques to track people? Remember how they said they thought Do Not Track meant "track but do not show targeted ads?" Unfortunately, the annoying, intrusive, privacy-invading advertising is not limited to a handful of sites. It is all over the place. That's why ad blocking is important and necessary: we users should not have to suffer because of the advertising industry's greed.
mdip 13y ago
I agree with both of those principals, but I continue to run an ad filtering proxy on my home network. I don't do this because ads annoy me (of course they do, but for the above reasons, it feels wrong). I do this because a few years ago, certain less technical members of my family received a nasty bit of malware/rootkit combo delivered -- as best I could discern -- via a song lyric look up site. Another laptop picked up malware around the same time, though its source was more difficult to discern. In addition, about this same time, Microsoft and Google's ad networks were found to have some Flash ads that were malicious. After spending a few hours reloading laptops (with the offending individual being my first experiment with Ubuntu on a non-technical user's PC), I got fed up and installed a proxy. My computers all have local firewalls and anti-virus, but I'm sure nobody's surprised that they were still infected. I wonder, is the state of these ad networks improved at all? Are there advertisement blocking tools that just target ads that have the greatest probability of being exploits (flash, java, smaller ad networks)?
- ljoshua 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, how did the experience go for the non-technical Ubuntu user? Did it work out well?
  - mdip 13y ago
    I ended up switching to openSuSE because she was having a difficult time remembering how to connect to our network shares and I didn't have the spare time to sort out what it took to get Active Directory membership working. After the switch, though, we never went back. This was 4 or 5 years ago, and she's now my ex- (unrelated to software choices), but for what she used it for -- e-mail, basic document creation, YouTube (Flash at the time), music organization (I believe we used SongBird? ... whatever it was, she was happy with it), and (at the time) a SageTV client. Aside from having to learn what did what, where (which was pretty minimal, she was already using OpenOffice on Windows, and Firefox was Firefox, SageTV was SageTV, most things were familiar), it was great. She figured out, on her own, how to customize the background and some of the other user settings. And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.
skue 13y ago
Not all of us block ads because they are annoying to look at. They are also a very real threat to privacy because ad companies track us across multiple websites (yes, I block Google Analytics and other trackers as well). OTOH, I also feel tremendous sympathy towards websites trying to survive on ad revenue. I'm actually the type of person who still buys music to support artists. I don't know what the solution is. We are forced to choose between being watched as we browse the web, staying completely offline, or blocking ads but not supporting the websites we visit.
- ianlevesque 13y ago
  Would you pay to subscribe to a service that paid the sites you use instead of them showing you ads?
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    No. Not because I won't pay certain sites for their content (I subscribe to LWN, for instance), but because I don't want to pay some aggregating middleman service that by necessity can then track across all the sites I visit. In principle I like the concept of paying a fixed amount per unit time and splitting that across the sites I care about. In practice I don't see any obvious privacy-respecting way to do that.
    - skue 13y ago
      That is an excellent point about micropayments. Creating a system that pays sites without a middleman that tracks visits would be challenging (though I imagine it's technically feasible).
  - skue 13y ago
    Sure, I was always intrigued by the micro payments idea. Heck, if that we're the norm I wonder if it wouldn't promote better web content. I'd be more likely to spend more time on sites I wanted to support than the sensational sites I may feel guilty about having clicked through to. But I don't think most folks think this way, so practically speaking I don't see micropayments ever working. Would love to be proven wrong.
throwaway10001 13y ago
I use mainly so I can search with Google. Without adblock, it's a nightmare on many searches, the first screen of my laptop is all ads (not including youtube, maps, Google local etc.
Osmium 13y ago
Conversely, three very practical reasons to use ad blockers: 1) You save battery life 2) You save data 3) Pages load quicker And you lose no content in the process. So why wouldn't you? If you're using a fast machine hooked up to fibre broadband, perhaps it's a different matter, but as a mobile user it's a no brainer. And that isn't even mentioning the content of ads or privacy concerns... If you think ads are necessary for the health of the internet, then they need to be presented a way that doesn't actively harm the experience of using the internet.
Shivetya 13y ago
I too do not mind "tasteful" ads but unfortunately being a gamer leads me to man game related sites I do not trust and for good reason. More than once I have read postings where ad servers were hacked to server malicious items and more than once it was suggested the site operators didn't care. Fortunately being on a Mac as well as defaulting to strict blocking has protected me in every case. I would not mind a solution that provides trusted ads. A system by which I can inspect what the site is trying to feed me and whitelist what I am willing to deal with.
rustynails 13y ago
Malware is also delivered by ads, a very important reason to block ads.
abraxasz 13y ago
I do acknowledge a moral conflict when using add blockers, for the first reason you give. But ads and trackers have gotten out of hands, to the point where most of the chrome extensions I have installed deal with that type of things: - Adblock - DoNotTrackMe - Disconnect in addition to - Quick Javascript Switcher (if I really get pissed)
mike-cardwell 13y ago
I don't block ads, I block surveillance. The lack of ads that I see is just a side effect of this.

zeckalpha 13y ago

How do ad blockers affect revenue? Don't they still fetch the ads but just limit the presentation of the ads? So it would be indistinguishable from someone who just does not click on the ads?

caust1c 13y ago
Most block the loading of the url that contains the ad content. The website owners rarely host the ads they're displaying. In that regard, it's very easy to detect if someone is using AdBlock or not.
- orclev 13y ago
  Only if you own both the site and the ad network otherwise you'll be unable to tell if they made a request for the ad or not. There are also ways of getting false positives with that sort of test, for instance if for whatever reason the server that has the ad on it isn't reachable from the client (say a problem in one of the major backbones, or a bad DNS entry). The usual approach I've seen sites take is they have some sort of "Please disable your ad-blocker" image that they load everywhere ads go, and then just overlay the ad image on top of that one when it loads.
namdnay 13y ago
No, one of the advantages of ad blockers is that they cut down on the amount of traffic, you don't download the ads. In fact, several websites show you a warning message, or refuse to load, if you're running an adblocker.
citricsquid 13y ago
1. No they don't 2. Even if they did this would be very unreasonable, either you view adverts and the publisher gets paid or you don't view adverts and the publisher doesn't get paid. If you're triggering the pay-out criteria without actually doing whatever is required (view, click, interact) it's just moving the financial hit to the advertiser, which is still unreasonable.
- acheron 13y ago
  Not my problem. The entire point of HTML is that the server sends files and I have a client that decides how to interpret them. I may be using a browser that is set to display larger fonts for my poor eyesight, or I may be using a mobile browser that decides to use different CSS, or I may be using Lynx that doesn't show images, or I may be using a browser that displays some images and not others based on a blacklist. It's not up to the server to determine.

kybernetyk 13y ago

Hmm, I haven't seen it that way. I guess I start stop using adblockers, too. Now some of my daily news sources will become pretty unbearable ... but I guess I better look out for other websites that don't need to put up full site flash wrap-banners.

foobarqux 13y ago

The reason everyone should have ad blockers is to be free from exploitative coercion. If someone could attach electrodes on your cranium and "reprogram" it so that it would permanently increase your propensity to buy product X by 10% in exchange for viewing an article on a website would you do it? Would you justify doing it by statements like "free websites and web services need revenue and I don't really mind the electrodes"?

pi18n 13y ago

I block all advertisements because the majority I've seen are manipulative and push us to constantly be purchasing shit we don't need by making us afraid we aren't good enough. Or they're just nakedly bold; "come spend your real dollars on this online game featuring this witch's breasts". If websites have a problem with this they can just respond 402 to all my requests and I won't cry to anyone. Some advertisers are just honest people trying to make money and I hope word-of-mouth will cover those. But for the rest of it, let's just say my life is much better without TV, radio, or magazines.

citricsquid 13y ago

Plus a huge number of people that adblock have been doing it for years and are basing the continued usage on the assumption that adverts now are similar to the adverts in 2006 - 2009. I use a lot of different websites with advertisements and I can't think of the last time I've seen an advertisement that auto-played sound or caused lag, whereas in 2008 it was a daily occurrence. The value that advertisements provide (support websites) greatly outweighs the inconvenience that current advertisements cause, even Youtube pre-roll adverts are not that bad after getting used to them.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mtrimpe 13y ago
I started blocking ads less than a year ago because of YouTube's pre-roll advertisements, since I'm perfectly capable of filtering out text based ads but a format that requires me to watch the ad to be able to view the content without letting me pay them is a deal-breaker for me. Is it really that hard to let me pay a monthly fee to turn ads off? Google is serving the vast majority of ads online and they already have the infrastructure in place to channel part of that fee to the content creators including knowing whom I visit and when.
- ianlevesque 13y ago
  Exactly this. Everyone needs to offer the option to pay in some way. If we could pay for a bundle of all sites even better.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I happen to be working on the technology to make this possible.
  - jimm 13y ago
    If you're old enough to remember the start of cable TV, one of the promises was that it would have few/no commercials, because you're paying for it. I'd trust very few web sites to stay ad-free if they switched to a pay model. The money is just too good for them.

criley2 13y ago

As if I need every single website hooked into Google Ads, all of them reminding me that I'm single, trying to sell me clothes, trying to sell me dating websites, trying to predict what I want in life. It's invasive, and quite frankly, it's disturbing and creepy that the same advertisements follow me regardless of website. I feel like the guy in Pachebel's Rant, finding Canon in D across modern music, except what I'm finding is invasive Google ads, and I find them on most websites... So no, I actively refuse the narrow demographic Google placed me into, and chases me around the internet with.

maxmcd 13y ago
You can opt-out of retargeting. Seems that would solve your problem.
- vonuebelgarten 13y ago
  I opt-out by preventing the browser from emitting that HTTP requests. Why will I trust the ad-server from doing evil things?
- betterunix 13y ago
  We should live in a world where people who want this need to opt-in.
orourkek 13y ago
FYI, you can change some settings for google ads[1] so that you're not shown targeted ads at all (for example). You can also block ads to have them and related ads never be shown again. [1] https://www.google.com/ads/preferences https://www.google.com/ads/preferences
- HarshaThota 13y ago
  Google also has an add-on if you want to opt out from Google Analytics. [1] https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

theorique 13y ago

Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease and in doing so they only help spreading and growing that disease. They are like antibiotics creating stronger bacteria?

ianlevesque 13y ago

There's a growing segment of users that just don't want advertising in their faces, period. Thankfully a not-insignificant portion of these are willing to pay for it through subscriptions on sites that offer this. Not enough sites offer this. I envision an "ad network" appearing eventually that doesn't display any ads, just distributes revenues from an aggregate subscription. Then sites can still be supported by spontaneous visitors and users can control their exposure to advertisements online.

tomflack 13y ago
I pay for Arstechnica premium for this reason. I have adblockers turned off on The Verge, and emailed them asking for a subscription option but received no reply. I don't want advertising in my face, full stop.
jacques_chester 13y ago
This idea has been around for a while; I call it "microsubscription". Several companies have tried and failed to make a go of it. Kachingle is still limping along, though fatally hamstrung itself by picking a dumb, public fight with the New York Times. As I said in reply to another of your comments, I've been working on the technology to make it possible to do this reliably for some time now. It's harder than it looks.
- ianlevesque 13y ago
  Very interesting. I figured someone must have tried it but hadn't found examples. Kachingle looks like a deeply flawed implementation of it. What were the others?
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    From memory there was a few, but I've lost the links file I had. Contenture was one of them. There was a project at one of the journalism schools trying to push the same model too. It's a good idea on paper, but actually making the market-building side work is really hard. I've been focused on the technology side because hey, that's how I'm wired. Essentially, you can't rely on standard web bugs or javascript approaches; they're much too easy to subvert. In my honours dissertation I identified 9 distinct attacks on the "naive" protocol and developed countermeasures for each. But that design is fatally flawed too. I have another design which ... well, watch this space: http://robojar.com/ http://robojar.com/

betterunix 13y ago

"as long as the ads are tasteful" This is the problem: the ads stopped being tasteful. Remember pop-ups? Remember how, when browsers started having pop-up blockers as a default, the response by the advertising industry was to try to circumvent the blockers, resulting in even more annoying ads? Remember how ad companies did not get the message when people stopped accepting their cookies, and now use dozens of techniques to track people? Remember how they said they thought Do Not Track meant "track but do not show targeted ads?" Unfortunately, the annoying, intrusive, privacy-invading advertising is not limited to a handful of sites. It is all over the place. That's why ad blocking is important and necessary: we users should not have to suffer because of the advertising industry's greed.

mdip 13y ago

I agree with both of those principals, but I continue to run an ad filtering proxy on my home network. I don't do this because ads annoy me (of course they do, but for the above reasons, it feels wrong). I do this because a few years ago, certain less technical members of my family received a nasty bit of malware/rootkit combo delivered -- as best I could discern -- via a song lyric look up site. Another laptop picked up malware around the same time, though its source was more difficult to discern. In addition, about this same time, Microsoft and Google's ad networks were found to have some Flash ads that were malicious. After spending a few hours reloading laptops (with the offending individual being my first experiment with Ubuntu on a non-technical user's PC), I got fed up and installed a proxy. My computers all have local firewalls and anti-virus, but I'm sure nobody's surprised that they were still infected. I wonder, is the state of these ad networks improved at all? Are there advertisement blocking tools that just target ads that have the greatest probability of being exploits (flash, java, smaller ad networks)?

ljoshua 13y ago
Out of curiosity, how did the experience go for the non-technical Ubuntu user? Did it work out well?
- mdip 13y ago
  I ended up switching to openSuSE because she was having a difficult time remembering how to connect to our network shares and I didn't have the spare time to sort out what it took to get Active Directory membership working. After the switch, though, we never went back. This was 4 or 5 years ago, and she's now my ex- (unrelated to software choices), but for what she used it for -- e-mail, basic document creation, YouTube (Flash at the time), music organization (I believe we used SongBird? ... whatever it was, she was happy with it), and (at the time) a SageTV client. Aside from having to learn what did what, where (which was pretty minimal, she was already using OpenOffice on Windows, and Firefox was Firefox, SageTV was SageTV, most things were familiar), it was great. She figured out, on her own, how to customize the background and some of the other user settings. And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.

skue 13y ago

Not all of us block ads because they are annoying to look at. They are also a very real threat to privacy because ad companies track us across multiple websites (yes, I block Google Analytics and other trackers as well). OTOH, I also feel tremendous sympathy towards websites trying to survive on ad revenue. I'm actually the type of person who still buys music to support artists. I don't know what the solution is. We are forced to choose between being watched as we browse the web, staying completely offline, or blocking ads but not supporting the websites we visit.

ianlevesque 13y ago
Would you pay to subscribe to a service that paid the sites you use instead of them showing you ads?
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  No. Not because I won't pay certain sites for their content (I subscribe to LWN, for instance), but because I don't want to pay some aggregating middleman service that by necessity can then track across all the sites I visit. In principle I like the concept of paying a fixed amount per unit time and splitting that across the sites I care about. In practice I don't see any obvious privacy-respecting way to do that.
  - skue 13y ago
    That is an excellent point about micropayments. Creating a system that pays sites without a middleman that tracks visits would be challenging (though I imagine it's technically feasible).
- skue 13y ago
  Sure, I was always intrigued by the micro payments idea. Heck, if that we're the norm I wonder if it wouldn't promote better web content. I'd be more likely to spend more time on sites I wanted to support than the sensational sites I may feel guilty about having clicked through to. But I don't think most folks think this way, so practically speaking I don't see micropayments ever working. Would love to be proven wrong.

throwaway10001 13y ago

I use mainly so I can search with Google. Without adblock, it's a nightmare on many searches, the first screen of my laptop is all ads (not including youtube, maps, Google local etc.

Osmium 13y ago

Conversely, three very practical reasons to use ad blockers: 1) You save battery life 2) You save data 3) Pages load quicker And you lose no content in the process. So why wouldn't you? If you're using a fast machine hooked up to fibre broadband, perhaps it's a different matter, but as a mobile user it's a no brainer. And that isn't even mentioning the content of ads or privacy concerns... If you think ads are necessary for the health of the internet, then they need to be presented a way that doesn't actively harm the experience of using the internet.

Shivetya 13y ago

I too do not mind "tasteful" ads but unfortunately being a gamer leads me to man game related sites I do not trust and for good reason. More than once I have read postings where ad servers were hacked to server malicious items and more than once it was suggested the site operators didn't care. Fortunately being on a Mac as well as defaulting to strict blocking has protected me in every case. I would not mind a solution that provides trusted ads. A system by which I can inspect what the site is trying to feed me and whitelist what I am willing to deal with.

rustynails 13y ago

Malware is also delivered by ads, a very important reason to block ads.

abraxasz 13y ago

I do acknowledge a moral conflict when using add blockers, for the first reason you give. But ads and trackers have gotten out of hands, to the point where most of the chrome extensions I have installed deal with that type of things: - Adblock - DoNotTrackMe - Disconnect in addition to - Quick Javascript Switcher (if I really get pissed)

mike-cardwell 13y ago

I don't block ads, I block surveillance. The lack of ads that I see is just a side effect of this.