Ask HN: How do you feel about ad blockers?

I only realized very recently what makes me uneasy with web advertising. (This week from a HN comment)

If you see a billboard in the street or an ad in paper journal, you are exposed to the brand name for a few seconds and that's it.

If you are exposed to a web ad, you are exposed to the brand name for a few seconds AND your actions, the fact you have visited the page, from which IP at which time of the day, with which browser is recorded in a database for later use (and is certainly going to be sold or replicated by multiple entities).

So it is not so much the advertising part that his annoying but rather the "tracking". The fact that advertising network (or social buttons) are pervasive through many sites makes the matter worse.

The biggest lie is to still call that "advertising", this has nothing to do with old school advertising.

My device, my rendering rules. Without adblock things are hard to read and sites load even more slowly. Plus I despise the constant attention grabs and view that as bad for my health. (Same reason I won't sit in a restaurant with a TV visible.)

Even Google is out there making it worse. On mobile I get flashing yellow ads telling me I have a virus or need to clean or speed my phone.

A future web with unavoidable, ubiquitous advertising is a grotesque thing that I want no part of. Advertising and marketing represents the worst of what capitalism has to offer.

The point is that we must stop the momentum associated with the advertising-fueled web now, because it's too late.

We -- the technologists behind it -- need to stop taking it for granted what the future of the web is going to look like, and to think of other ways to obtain that revenue.

I do and will forever use adblockers (until they are circumvented) for these reasons.

We're definitely experiencing a textbook tragedy of the commons - parasitic advertisers make pennies by causing significant damage to everybody's reasoning and psyche.

Installing an ad blocker is similar to any other vaccination - reduce the spread of intellectual disease and hopefully create a herd immunity.

I think they symptomatic of an immature system. That's to say one which isn't well regulated.

They are the result of site owners trying to make their sites sustaining or profitable and we have some trying very annoying ways of monetizing, and on the other hand we have users wanting free access to everything.

The result is site operators getting more desperate using more invasive techniques driving more users to use ad blockers and siding by default with people who want everything free.

In the end, the piper needs to get paid. Will micropayments be the answer or will only businesses for whom the www is essentially branding and marketing survive? I don't know. Certainly hope it's not public radio donation style funding.

That said, paid content masquerading as journalism is the worst.

I love ad blockers. In the rare cases where the site is useful AND the ads aren't distraction or evil, I exempt them (duckduckgo.com being one example).

I recently moved most of my sites to a tip jar only and removed the ads. I have always done better via tips or donations than via ad money.

This is only a tragedy of the commons if we find no other means to fund things we value and expect to have access to online. The Internet is here to stay. You are only an asshole if you hate ads, use adblocker and are also unwilling to fund the sites you use via some other means. There is nothing inherently evil about hating ads and choosing to block them. But if you expect to get all online content and services for free, then you de facto desire to treat someone, somewhere as your slave in some sense.

So if you use ad blockers and want services you value to stick around, please, out of enlightened self interest, support and promote alternate funding models that you find more palatable. And if your answer really boils down to "I expect everything for free!" then, yeah, go die in a fire.

I don't run one because I choose to support the free content I receive (be it articles, videos, or similar). Without ads either they would have to charge, the quality would go down, or the content simply would stop existing.

That being said, I understand why others do. Adverts remain a source of privacy violations, legitimate security issues, and slow down a lot of websites.

I do run Flash click-to-play, and have EFF's HTTPS Everywhere installed. Those both negatively impact ads, but it is inadvertent and unavoidable. Both are set to improve security, if ads require an insecure connection or flash then more fool them.

I wish I could ad-block YouTube ads that don't let me "skip" in 5 seconds (that seems to be a good measure of my tolerance). The ads I do remember, and maybe the most effective, are the ones that only run for 5 seconds. "Tropicana" ran a 5 seconds ad for it's juice: very effective; I still remember it, I like their juice. There is a lot of content I'll not even bother to watch because I can't stand the pre-advertisement.

I love YouTube for catching up on the late night talk shows, checking out the latest Cyanide and Happiness shorts, or watching cool documentary; I used to spend hours watching content. Lately, however, I can't stand to stay for one or two videos, because the ads are so offensive. I'll close the app/website and find something else to do.

A few years ago I cut my satellite service, and now I refuse to subscribe to cable/satellite again. I have local, over-the-air channels, but I don't watch them anymore either. After being a few years without that kind of TV advertising, I realise how obnoxious advertising really is. It's a total assault on the senses! Advertising on the Internet is heading this way, and I'm equally disgusted.

Anyway... You asked how I feel. Yay ad-blockers!

In reality it does not matter if it is right or wrong; people will do it anyway.

In my opinion, a billboard does not make my car move slower, and I don't have to pay to pay to see it.

Once, years ago, I did not see a bug on the site of the company I worked for, because the ad blocker I was using with my browser masked the bug. Further, I reasoned that since we made part of our money from ads, I should not use an ad blocker and I stopped. Plus I thought I should see the web "as it really is".

Now I think those are really dumb ideas, plus I don't work for a company that makes money from ads. It's basically an arms race now, websites do insane things because their stupid fucking A/B tests ticked up .001 percent. Then the rest of them throw up modals (and whatever other garbage) because everyone else is doing it.

The real, actual web, as it really is, it's a disaster now. Sometimes I open a web page and forget about it, then minutes later it just begins blaring audio for some video ad that I can't even see because it's been scrolled offscreen. Toilet world.

I have not seen web advertisement in years, and I am happy to have it that way. Why? Because I don't want any of your flashing javascript animations in my face, neither your code running on my computer.

If I would run for a mayor's position, I would do similar as they did in Sao Paulo and clean up the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

I find it troubling that companies get to tell me how incomplete I am on the streets every day and try to sell me workout pants and whatnot. It is utterly unethical, and we should rally to remove demeaning advertisement such as half-naked women on trucks selling refrigerators.

Have forums for these kind of things, much alike porn magazines and porn sites.

I am upset my free riding will come to an end. I hate ads on the internet and run an ad blocker, but I also really want free content.

It'll be interesting to see how the internet evolves. If ad blockers are used by a lot of people, but not all, I expect to see the quality of content continue to fall lower and lower. The Buzzfeed crowd will be the last to adopt ad blockers.

I think it would be better if browsers just turned on ad blocking as a default. Force the web to find a new model sooner rather than later.

I wonder if Google and facebook have contingency plans for such an event.

If Microsoft wasn't so afraid of antitrust laws, I'd suggest they just introduce an adblocker built into windows and turned on as default. They could KO google in a quarter or two.

I've been using ad blockers for years.

I currently do webcomics, an area whose most effective business model has historically been founded on ads.

I don't run ads on my comic. I used to but I decided to make 'no ads' as a goal on Patreon; I reached it and now my stuff is ad-free. A prominent cartoonist offered to sponsor my entry into a profitable collective and its ad network, and I'm not entirely sure I want to take this offer. Because then I'd be going back to ads.

On the other hand, part of how I grew the audience that lets me make enough money off of my comic to turn off ads is by running ads elsewhere. Not having them on my comic feels kind of hypocritical. I dunno.

> Or are we experiencing a textbook example of the tragedy of the commons?

We sure are. But advertising, not ad-blocking, is precipitating this tragedy:

1. The commons in this case is a healthy marketplace where the users are the customers and thus vote with their dollars. The invisible hand depends on this.

2. But then a competitor comes in and offers something for "free". This is a trick, a lie. The other important principle of the free market is that there is no free lunch.[1] The advertisers pay the website with money that is added to the cost of the products they are selling. Guess who buys those?

3. Here's where the tragedy comes in: Consumers are fooled by this. You've undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? The straight-up businesses that want to compete the honest way can't. They either have to cave and switch to ads, or die.

4. The tragedy continues: Since we are now the products not the customers, businesses don't compete for a dollars by producing a product we are willing to pay for. Instead, they compete for our clicks (what they're selling to the advertisers). Competing for clicks, as most of us see every day, yields horrible products for us.[2] But of course, we are not the customer.

5. And like every tragedy of the commons, what we are left with is a misused and polluted[3] precious resource, the web.

I haven't even got into the harm advertising itself cause to society, nor how it distorts the free market, suppressing innovation and true competition.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10049494

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706

Necessity for users because of over-reaching sites and security issues, reasonable site owners get punished as a bad side-effect. Difficult to predict what the way out is going to be.

Ditto with not wanting to be tracked by "targeted advertising." It's like, the one thing the Snapchat CEO believes that I agree with - it's just plain creepy.

Depends on what context. ISPs should not block ads, unless they are offering it as an extra service (i.e. optional that a customer must opt into). ISPs need to treat any and all traffic exactly the same by default. Home users and business have the right to block any content they don't want to receive(either by plugin or proxy server).

Advertisers are assholes [0] and by extension anyone willing to do business with assholes is, themselves, an asshole. Find a better business model - because I don't do business with assholes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re5DgTJE0S4

I feel that they're useful. Neither modern advertising methods nor the circumvention thereof fall cleanly into "moral" v. "immoral", so I prefer to judge such things based on their utility and effectiveness - things which adblockers achieve better than modern advertisements, at least in the web space.

I use adblockers. The next annoying thing to tackle is doing away with the emotional manipulations: "We detected that you're using an ad blocker; we understand that, we don't like ads either! but we need money etc etc".

We now need a guilt-trip blocker. If you need money from your visitors, charge them.

Only time I get frustrated enough to care is the youtube advertisements that keep playing no matter how often I press skip. If I have pressed skip on this ad the last 10 videos, show me something else for gods sake.

Other than that, I've turned my ad blockers off since quite a while.

I like ad blockers simply because the format of most ads are horrible. Popups and modals make the site horrible for the mobile platform.

I would prefer some inline ad served by the site that is part of the page and has some sponsored by type feel to it.

I think blocking JavaScript trackers is pretty uncontroversial (almost necessary).

Even when I'm not using ad block, I pay attention to pretty much no advertisement. They probably need a better way to appeal to this sort of crowd regardless.

They're not ad blockers, they are HTML firewalls.

A god send. A glorious boon to privacy and a security necessity.

The deluge of invasive advertising in web content (along with tracking and various shades of borderline-malware) is symptomatic of late capitalism optimizing for profit: the web is almost unusable without ad-blockers, and yet alternative monetization models are not being seriously persued, because Google has no reason to optimize for anything other than ads even though they are never being seen. People pay for advertising despite it being almost completely ineffective (advertising, as far as we can tell, is slightly more effective than priming -- in other words, it is effective only in the highly suggestible, and then only slightly and only when it's well-targeted), and middle-men build infrastructure for distributing advertising content that at best will clog up the tubes and be ignored but that in the average case will be explicitly blocked (before or after loading). No party involved has a really good reason to move to something effective -- those doing the advertising are not doing it because they believe it to be effective but because they are expected to, and sites that display the ads do so because they have nothing to lose and a few cents to gain per page-load on whichever users happen to not be running adblock.

There are real alternatives. Micropayments based on reuse (much like publishing royalties), for instance, could simultaneously produce a good income source for creatives and an incentive to invert the chilling effects on transformative reuse created by the automatic conservative enforcement of DMCA safe-harbor policies; a nuanced model for this kind of system is described in several places as 'transcopyright'. Schneier's street-artist model has been adapted into the model used by Patreon, but is remarkably rare in practice for an idea by a major thinker that was published 20 years ago. And, of course, there's stuff like crowdfunding and selling t-shirts -- both of which have issues of their own (kickstarter-style crowdfunding is more sensitive to bad actors than either the street-artist model or Patreon's hybrid version that turns crowdfunding into a subscription model; hawking merch can turn off certain communities and may not be useful outside of communities with a strong and coherent identity with symbol-sets that uniquely identify it).

Advertising was jumped on as a monetization model because it's, at small-scale, low-effort. Google makes their money by keeping the effort the same for the other two parties (the ad-seller and the ad-buyer) while improving targeting. However, the targeting hasn't really scaled well, despite the amount of tracking going up. And, we've hit the point where the tracking intended to improve the targeting has gotten so resource-heavy that end-users would rather cut it off entirely than benefit from well-targeted ads -- we've hit a scaling limit. The effort of targeting the advertising has been pushed off to Google and to the end user in terms of bandwidth. So, unless everybody gets fiber and significantly faster computers suddenly, we have time to back-track and find something that doesn't clog the pipes with surreptitiously-collected data worth on the order of one cent per megabyte.