7 ms·

Adblock is pretty ubiquitous in developer circles?

• sumedh 12y ago
  I am think that almost all people in tech would be using adblock.
  • lordelph 12y ago
    This, then, is the price of adblock?
    • flurpitude 12y ago
      Well, it seems that vendors have decided web advertising is not valuable even among user demographics that don't block ads. AdBlock may not be making all that much difference if the basic problem is that people ignore ads even when they see them. That said, there must still be some value in brand recognition. I guess it's just not as much value as vendors had previously ascribed to these ads.
    • bsg75 12y ago
      Its the price of ad models that (generically) overwhelm content and users.
  • dalke 12y ago
    I'm one of the few then. I feel so special! (To be fair, I have to click to start Flash, because I haven't updated it and Firefox says it has security holes, which helps a lot.)
    • danielweber 12y ago
      It's amazing you got downvoted for non running ad-blocking software. I've never run AdBlock or any "stop viewing ads" software. I have run NoScript and those variations, which sometimes kills ads as a side-effect.
  • javert 12y ago
    Adblock is stealing. I'm pretty sure it's not the case that "amost all" people in tech have no integrity.
    • purerandomness 12y ago
      On your commute, you're passing a McDonald's store every day. You know it's there, but you never buy food there for whatever reason. Are you stealing? I'd rather pay the site directly if they'd stop displaying ads. Several companies experiment with those kinds of revenue stream: OkCupid shows you this [1] banner encouraging you to pay 5$ if you're using an ad blocker. Reddit has the "gilding" concept. While I don't know if that pays out at the end of the day, I'd rather pay the site directly than having them to rely on distracting and sometimes malicious ads which load 3 embedded flash player objects and destroy the site's performance. By relying on ads, sites naturally introduced a terrible usability. Notice how many times you encounter a complete page reload where a simple AJAX call would have done the job better? That's because you sell a certain number of page impressions to advertisers, and the sooner they're used up, the sooner you get paid. The complete system is a mess. [1] http://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/template/image.png http://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/template/image.png
      • pmelendez 12y ago
        > On your commute, you're passing a McDonald's store every day. You know it's there, but you never buy food there for whatever reason. Are you stealing? That analogy doesn't work very well in this context. A more realistic example would if they were giving away cookies in exchange of you getting inside and see their advertising and one friends of yours gets inside and take several cookies so you and your other friends don't have see the ads. It wouldn't be stealing because the cookies are "free" but still you might feel like taking advantage. I am agree with you and I would rather pay for the site but many people won't and that's exactly why several content providing are having troubles with ad-blockers.
        • VLM 12y ago
          If you want a physical cookie analogy, its more like going to a real estate open house knowing you have no interest whatsoever in buying that house, yet still eating a free cookie. You walk in, the house reeks of cat pee, no Fing way, but those are tasty looking cookies... I wouldn't break into your house and steal your cookies, but if you put up signs all over advertising your open house with free cookies, if you twist my arm enough I'll cave in and show up and eat a cookie. Just don't be annoyed at me when I don't buy the house. Practically no one purchases, anyway.
  • LeoPanthera 12y ago
    I don't run AdBlock, but I do run Disconnect. I have nothing against advertising, but I don't like being tracked around the internet. Running Disconnect without AdBlock is an interesting experience. It shows whose ads are trying to track you, and who just wants to show you ads.
  • curiously 12y ago
    I think the reach is well beyond tech now. People have figured out they can watch youtube without ads by installing adblock. For me that was a huge incentive and it effectively have made my online experience better. For those that claim this is stealing, that would imply that there was an explicit price with click to purchase button to view the webpage. There is no entitlement to the website operator, any ad click or donation is completely up to the discretion of the visitor. To claim people are stealing by using adblock is arrogance.
    • tzs 12y ago
      > People have figured out they can watch youtube without ads by installing adblock I've seen AdBlock Plus fail on YouTube in a particularly annoying way--the ads that consist of a long video (often 2 minutes or more) with a "you can skip this ad in 5 seconds" overlay that counts down and turns into a skip button are shown--but with that overlay and skip button removed! I recently installed AdBlock (at home) and AdBlock Plus (at work), and I'm not really impressed. At most sites, ads did not bother me. I installed these because of one particular site that was getting too obnoxious. That was gocomics.com. They started running frequent ads that expand on the left side of the page, which would often push the end of the comic I was reading off the right side of the page. I'd much prefer if I could have these off for most sites, and only block ads on specific sites that I find overly aggressive. They support this, but there doesn't seem to be a good interface to manage it, and it looks like it would get impractical to deal with a lot of sites that way.
      • curiously 12y ago
        I use adblock plus and haven't seen a youtube ad in a few years now.
• 300bps 12y ago
  Yeah I would never want to sell a software product to attorneys (for liability reasons) or to software engineers (for piracy reasons). When I was a computer consultant, I helped an attorney client install a software package that was specifically designed for attorneys to use. It didn't work as he had intended it to when he purchased it. So he asked for a ridiculous concession from them, was denied it so he filed a lawsuit against them. I imagine the company probably gets sued a few times per week with their litigious client base.
  • organsnyder 12y ago
    I agree that software engineers certainly have more ability to pirate software, but I doubt that the rates of piracy are any higher than with the general population. For one thing, developers tend to have fairly good salaries, so there's less financial incentive for piracy. Also, you're depriving people in your own industry of income—I certainly wouldn't appreciate it if people pirated my products. Regarding attorneys: I can't imagine that it's really that prevalent. Anyone who was that litigious would quickly gain a representation as such among the legal community.
    • danielweber 12y ago
      Some people in tech will lie directly to your face about pirating your software and not feel at all bad when they are caught in it.
      • organsnyder 12y ago
        No doubt. But I'd posit that it's probably no more prevalent among those in tech compared to the general population.
  • bbarn 12y ago
    Most developers I know buy software if they like it, or perceive it to add value to them. Stealing software, as a developer - especially if it's good, and you depend on it, makes you a massive hypocrite if you get paid to create software other people use, and I think most of us have at least one time thought "Someone's job depends on purchasing this". But you're spot on with attorneys. Worst customers I ever had was in the legal space. Not only do they get lawsuit happy, but there are a lot of attorneys out there being paid a lot of money because a very bad paper based system is still in place, and tech is not their friend.
• acveilleux 12y ago
  And it's so effective I forget it's running until I use a web browser without (like say my iPad) and realize how much ads some sites have.
  • danmaz74 12y ago
    Yes, and if everybody will do like you you'll soon find nothing interesting to read, because every free content website will end like DrDobbs.
    • findjashua 12y ago
      Disagree. I'd rather pay (a reasonable amount) for a subscription, than put up with cluttered UX.
      • testrun 12y ago
        Are you currently subscribing to a mag/journal/newspaper?
        • mooreds 12y ago
          Especially of a magazine in the area of software development.
    • Yizahi 12y ago
      No, there will be left free some small percentage of useful content, maybe 00,01% or less. And personally for me, these several tens of millions of pages left will be enough. Additionally some will survive on subscriptions.
    • TheSisb2 12y ago
      No, that's not strictly true. People will always do what they enjoy whether money is attached to it, whether they'll go to jail for it, or otherwise.
    • VLM 12y ago
      In the internet era you simply don't need a multinational corporation to publish your blog post for you. They're already being published for free. You still need a trusted editor to collect and curate... but that editor certainly doesn't need the multinational corporation, not anymore. Its not 1975 and ink on paper. The future probably looks a lot like "Clojure Gazette", which is a curated edited list of links to blog posts and projects focusing on a rather small field, and THE (emphasis, "the") only human involved is a trusted editor and he gets beer money plus considerable fame out of being the editor. Reading between the lines, at Dr Dobbs a small team can pull down less than a million bucks. To a multinational megacorporation, thats hopeless, sunset it. Divided among a very small team, however, that's one heck of a lifestyle business...
• georgemcbay 12y ago
  The sad thing about ad blocking is the advertisers and website owners essentially forced me into using it. I didn't use any adblocker software until earlier this year (much to the surprise of many other developers I talk with who adopted it much earlier). While I also didn't click many ads, I figured the least I could do for all the free content I was consuming was keep the ads showing. Then the line between what used to be "real" sites and clickbait sites began to blur rapidly (see, for example, the weather channel site which is now basically a clickbait digital tabloid) and advertisements on "real" sites got really pushy in ways that would previously only be done on sketchier sites, popping open tabs I never requested, etc. I eventually hit an annoyance level where I was forced to install an adblocker just to keep using the web.
  • ericd 12y ago
    Yeah, I couldn't stand seeing all of those content marketing advertorial blocks with the photoshopped-to-be-eyecatching/vaguely disturbing pictures anymore. I finally gave in earlier this year.
  • drawkbox 12y ago
    Same here, I always liked to support sites by having ads on or buying things I like on them. But I have recently switched to ad blocking as well due to tracking and worse due to broadband caps. I refuse to fill up my 400GB Cox cap with ads except on sites that deserve it. The content and marketing industries need to lobby hard against broadband caps to limit cuts into their industries, the broadband mafia wants their cut of every download and all ads run.
• acdha 12y ago
  Certain circles but I don't install AdBlock because of the huge performance hit and because I've seen plenty of false bug reports caused by malfunctioning ad-blocking extensions. It's much easier, not to mention safer, to uninstall Flash and stop visiting sites which don't respect their audience.
  • riffraff 12y ago
    for the first part, try µblock[0], it's incredibly better than AB and ABP. [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock