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"Now, this was fun little project to mess around with, but it does give me a moral dilemma. Do I care more about my privacy, time, device battery life & data us

"Now, this was fun little project to mess around with, but it does give me a moral dilemma. Do I care more about my privacy, time, device battery life & data usage or do I care more about the content creators of sites I visit to be able to monetise effectively and ultimately keep creating content?" Once we show content creators that we're willing to block their unsupervised invasions en masse, they'll come back to us with a better deal. The illusion that blocking is binary - either you allow egregious privacy invasion or you fail to support the content creators is one that the content creators have created!

castell 11y ago
The content creators has a dilemma too. Without ads, no money. The party who can solve that are the ad networks. We need a disruptive ad provider that offers non-shitty ads (like ads before the Flash era) and pays reasonable ad-money. Blocking all ads is bad for everyone in the long run. Adblockers should block only the bad players like Antivirus blocks bad players.
- amyjess 11y ago
  Like the original Google ads? Before they bought DoubleClick, they were just plain text and people actually liked them. Or, better yet, reddit ads. Honestly, I feel like I'm missing out when I turn reddit ads off, so I don't do that anymore: they make an excellent subreddit discovery engine, so they're actually useful to me.
- hnsayzwhat 11y ago
  When it uses my bandwidth and my battery, they already are bad players. I'll raise a glass or two to the end of the ad muppets!
jscheel 11y ago
I think the author hits on something here. It's not the ads that bother me, it's that they are destructive to my time, bandwidth, and battery. It's the equivalent of walking into a furniture store and being followed around by a salesperson who won't respect your personal space and berates you verbally if you don't buy immediately. Even better, if you've ever visited a city/country with a bad tout culture (like Luxor, Egypt), it's a lot like that. It's fine for you to advertise to me, but once you've had you say, get out of my way and don't make my life miserable.
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  The analogy breaks down a little bit because you aren't just shopping, you are getting the product, and the price of that product is listening to the salesperson. So the situation is probably closer to sitting through a timeshare presentation to get something free, although online you are not forced to pay attention to the ad for any amount of time.
  - jscheel 11y ago
    Fair enough. It seems that most timeshare deals have figured out the balance of pitch to product though. The internet, however, is filled with hack jobs that make your page take 11 seconds to load. It's like the timeshare guy that keeps grabbing your shirt when he wants your attention.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - walterbell 11y ago
    An alternative to blocking all ads would be blocking based on risk. We could have open blacklists or JSON content-blocking rules for different ad/content categories, including business models. Blocking extensions could optionally notify sites of tagged categories which are whitelisted.
pmontra 11y ago
The answer to that question is "it depends". If the author is the kind of person that sometimes clicks on ads, then blocking content will make a difference to those sites. I never clicked ads before discovering AdBlock, so the fact that I've been using it for years now didn't deprive them from any money. Before anybody asks if I gave a chance to ads-filled web sites recently: my tablet doesn't have AdBlock (I run Opera on it because it so much faster than Firefox) so I see all ads and I still don't click them. Luckily I have AdAway on my rooted phone and it blocks all ads, in browser and in app (it uses the hosts file.)
- joshuapants 11y ago
  > I never clicked ads before discovering AdBlock, so the fact that I've been using it for years now didn't deprive them from any money. Do all ads rely on clicks? I'm fairly certain that a good number just want to user to see the ad (they probably pay less, though). I don't disagree with your main idea, and I do use adblockers, but I think it's worth clearing up that point.

castell 11y ago

The content creators has a dilemma too. Without ads, no money. The party who can solve that are the ad networks. We need a disruptive ad provider that offers non-shitty ads (like ads before the Flash era) and pays reasonable ad-money. Blocking all ads is bad for everyone in the long run. Adblockers should block only the bad players like Antivirus blocks bad players.

amyjess 11y ago
Like the original Google ads? Before they bought DoubleClick, they were just plain text and people actually liked them. Or, better yet, reddit ads. Honestly, I feel like I'm missing out when I turn reddit ads off, so I don't do that anymore: they make an excellent subreddit discovery engine, so they're actually useful to me.
hnsayzwhat 11y ago
When it uses my bandwidth and my battery, they already are bad players. I'll raise a glass or two to the end of the ad muppets!

jscheel 11y ago

I think the author hits on something here. It's not the ads that bother me, it's that they are destructive to my time, bandwidth, and battery. It's the equivalent of walking into a furniture store and being followed around by a salesperson who won't respect your personal space and berates you verbally if you don't buy immediately. Even better, if you've ever visited a city/country with a bad tout culture (like Luxor, Egypt), it's a lot like that. It's fine for you to advertise to me, but once you've had you say, get out of my way and don't make my life miserable.

ohitsdom 11y ago
The analogy breaks down a little bit because you aren't just shopping, you are getting the product, and the price of that product is listening to the salesperson. So the situation is probably closer to sitting through a timeshare presentation to get something free, although online you are not forced to pay attention to the ad for any amount of time.
- jscheel 11y ago
  Fair enough. It seems that most timeshare deals have figured out the balance of pitch to product though. The internet, however, is filled with hack jobs that make your page take 11 seconds to load. It's like the timeshare guy that keeps grabbing your shirt when he wants your attention.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- walterbell 11y ago
  An alternative to blocking all ads would be blocking based on risk. We could have open blacklists or JSON content-blocking rules for different ad/content categories, including business models. Blocking extensions could optionally notify sites of tagged categories which are whitelisted.

pmontra 11y ago

The answer to that question is "it depends". If the author is the kind of person that sometimes clicks on ads, then blocking content will make a difference to those sites. I never clicked ads before discovering AdBlock, so the fact that I've been using it for years now didn't deprive them from any money. Before anybody asks if I gave a chance to ads-filled web sites recently: my tablet doesn't have AdBlock (I run Opera on it because it so much faster than Firefox) so I see all ads and I still don't click them. Luckily I have AdAway on my rooted phone and it blocks all ads, in browser and in app (it uses the hosts file.)

joshuapants 11y ago
> I never clicked ads before discovering AdBlock, so the fact that I've been using it for years now didn't deprive them from any money. Do all ads rely on clicks? I'm fairly certain that a good number just want to user to see the ad (they probably pay less, though). I don't disagree with your main idea, and I do use adblockers, but I think it's worth clearing up that point.