Does anybody in HN (even/especially those in the media industry) not use an adblocker of some sort to browse the web anymore? If so, can you tell us about your experiences and why?
I occasionally switch off adblockers to see what the rest of the world sees. Within seconds I am shocked every single time. Some sites I use are unusable without adblockers. The youtube experience is attrocious without adblockers. Amazon products are impossible to find without being flooded with sponsored products. Google results are ads until pages later.
Its like a whole other internet. I cannot imagine how small of a portion of the internet I'd need to use if I could not use adblockers.
It then morphs into a dancing dashboard mannequin, a personal avatar, spouting nonsense, getting on your nerves, while its technoneurons spread, root-like, tapped into you. As you exit the car going into the supermarket, the supermarket is now a construct of the avatar not the bricks and mortar building it was when you were growing up. It exists for the avatar to make your life better, not for you, it robs you of choice and agency it does not agree with.
You go into a small cafe for some splice. It has a touchscreen display to order from, you must pay with a card or ApplePay.
I want the Internet to have ad supported content. I want the people who create this content to have a chance of making a fair, market-determined income instead of relying upon things like Patreon.
The saddest part for me is that I'm going to get voted down here because the support for this kind of behavior is strong here. Some day all of you will experience a business being undermined by freeloaders and thieves. This is the kind of low-trust world that you're building and it will come for your livelihood too.
Also adblocking does reduce some experiences. Some sites will tell you to disable it, and that's more irritating than the ad banners.
I had conversation with my daughter on how games used to have no ads but now they're chock full of ads, but TV has no ads now but up to a third of TV was ads when I was her age. I think there's a bit of nostalgia to ads, that some shows were designed for it. Even if it's those dodgy Evony ads. I can watch Futurama without ads today, but it feels like something's missing. Netflix shows drag out, maybe because it's missing the "grind" of ads?
But, quite frankly, most sites are effectively impossible to use without one :|
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[0] https://antipaucity.com/2016/03/03/on-ads/ (though I am down to just uBlock Origin & Detect Cloudflare)
All in all i spend about $30/month to not have ads while supporting the sites I use, which I think it's pretty reasonable.
These days I tend to use firefox with uMatrix for general browsing, with Javascript and CSS disabled globally. Then enabled on a site by site basis depending upon how I value the content, and if it is even worth following a link.
As software engineers many of us play a part in creating a world that we wouldn't want to live in and then exempt ourselves from it with ad blockers leaving the ignorant or less technically inclined to fend for themselves.
It unethical to use ad blockers.
I could not imagine using the internet without an ad blocker and despite trying to live an ethical life, that's one thing I can't go without. If for no other reason, raw dogging the internet without an ad blocker is a real and legitimate security risk.
I consider it part of professional ethics not to work for ad based companies, and I have started to pay services, like wikipedia in particular, so they don't have to be supported with ads.
Reason: I work building ‘internet stuff’ and I want to experience the internet in the same way that the majority of people experience it.
That’s more useful to me because I consequently experience the pain (or delight) of the typical user with greater accuracy.
Some sites are unusable. I don't visit them, or if I do, I'm gone almost immediately.
Some sites are hard. I will persist if I really want to read the article; otherwise, I'm gone.
Most of the sites I visit are still functional. But I mainly just go to HN, some technical sites when I need to, some news sites, actual company sites. I don't go to entertainment sites (they are mostly unusable without an ad blocker). I don't do social media (other than HN).
In general, if you make your site unusable with ads, then I won't be back. I don't need your site. But your site might want me, and if you do, knock it off with the garbage that makes it unusable.
The reason is that I now have a website and earn money through ad banners, so I understand how challenging it is to optimize ad banners. Meanwhile, we may have 60% of users using adblock in certain fields.
Now, if I do see ads for women's clothing in a deeply technical post, and notice that the clothes include some I bought as a present for my wife, then I'm amused.
If you don't want to configure and maintain your own box, nextdns is a pretty solid option.
I use it on the browser from where I browse YouTube, news portals, etc. On the browser that I use 99% for work I don't use it since I want to see (yes, strange I know) ads in my Twitter feed or work related portals that I visit. This way I support those portals (at least I hope that they get paid for showing me ads).
(Un)surprisingly a strict mode in Firefox blocks most of the clutter.
Can't say when I stopped bothering (I'm on FF since 2.x) but I have other things to do.
The only exceptjon is what I got some addons to block some obnoxious things, like 'login here with Google!!!' and Google webfonts (which sometimes breaks a carefully curated look of the site made by Internet connosiers, which just gaves me a chuckle).
I was using an add-on for Firefox where I could control to which sites a page could connect. Some years ago this was a pretty good way for browsing ad-free and without being tracked because both relied on resources from external domains.
Now, I’m using a DNS resolver that blocks these domains. It’s probably not as fine-grained but works across many devices.
Some sites have annoying ad popups, but most of the time they're just embedded in the sites and I don't even notice them.
You may not like this answer but you asked and that is my reason.
I think about advertising 50 times less than I think about cookie warnings.
I want to experience web as it is.
If it's unusable I don't use it.
So I can see how ads changed over time. Used practices seem more desperate nowadays, sometimes it's like year 2K again. Even google is using interstitials with misleading controls.
After all, I'm paid with advertising money like most people in the big tech...
I don't use an ad blocker and never have. It's fine, I'm used to it. Some sites are pretty horrible (mostly low end news sites). I subscribe to a handful of news sites which don't have any ads and that works out fine, most other sorts of sites have tolerable levels of advertising. If they don't I just go back and do without.
Why: the golden rule, pretty much. Not gonna be popular, but that's how I see it. Treat others how I'd want to be treated myself. If I browse someone's site whilst blocking ads, I'm consuming their financial resources but not allowing them to consume my attention in return, which is the "deal" implicitly entered into when I visited their site. Yes yes, it's not a written deal, you can make legalistic argument about it, but fundamentally the assumption website authors make is that people use browsers that follow the specs and will thus see ads, and ad blockers cause browsers to not follow the specs. If everyone did this those sites either wouldn't exist, or would have paywalls, and I appreciate the fact that they exist and don't have paywalls.
There are a couple of other related reasons.
I've been on the other side of this. I run a company and sell a product to developers (a tool for deploying desktop apps). We have tried ads, mostly text based. They don't work at all, presumably due to high rates of ad blocking. The number one feedback we get from missed sales is that they'd have loved to know about us earlier but it was just too hard to find us at the right time, and by the time they discovered us (often by accident) they were already buried under sunk costs. Targeted advertising is at heart about informing people about a product they might need at the time they need it. Because nobody is seeing ads, devs often end up wrestling with whatever MVP-level projects they found by following links from some project created by Big Tech whether it's any good or not, because they're simply unaware any alternatives exist. In turn this discourages people from just doing ordinary selling of commercial-quality tools, which leads to frustrating developer experiences.
I live in Switzerland where there are many rules that are very lightly enforced, for example, you can just walk on and off public transport with no ticket gates, and inspections are rare (my guess, 5-10 times a year even if you use it every day). My company's product is also done in this spirit: you can download it with no account creation or signups, the code isn't obfuscated, and it's free for open source projects. That policy is basically on the honor system with a bit of manual spot checking: if you declare your project is open source then the app just unlocks without payment unless we notice that you're lying. This sort of flexible trust-but-verify society is nice to live in but for it to work, it requires everyone to follow expectations even when you can get away with not doing so. I feel like ad blocking is similar to that. Likewise I could crack the commercial software I use and use it for free without being caught, but if everyone did that then the software wouldn't exist, so I don't, and I hope others will act the same way (whilst accepting that this isn't going to be true some of the time).
Finally, given the enormous extent to which the software industry is funded by advertising, it feels a bit hypocritical to block it. Consider how much of our collective developer platform is paid for using ad revenues either directly or indirectly (anything by Google or Facebook, even HN). If everyone blocked ads then at minimum Chrome and Android probably wouldn't exist, nor would HN which is justified partly by sponsored posts by YC startups. In fact it seems likely that there'd be no competitive open source browsers or consumer operating systems. I like that there are, and if that means advertising, so be it.