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Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

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71–80 of 159 posts

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#71
Me, advertising is fine on most of the sites I like, and I don’t like ripping off sites that are dependent on ad income.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#72

Ad blockers are rules for thee, but not for me. 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…

Is it unethical to use accessibility tools that cannot see visual ads?

Is it unethical to use a computer that isn’t associated with you? (And thus have no ad profile?) If I get a untargeted ad, am I stealing?

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#73

Why? Because I believe they're wrong. I think it's just wrong to engage with any business and disable, sidestep or circumvent their way to make money. It's like shoplifting. It reminds of people who open up a box at the supermarket, eat the food, and then claim that the barcode was on the box so that must be what's for sale. I want the Internet to have ad supported content. I want the people who create this content t…

Do you also deliberately trigger red light and speed cameras, purchase and maintain a horse and buggy, and rent office space that you don't use?

Saying that ad (aka surveillance) based businesses are "undermined" by adblocking carries a fallacious assertion that those businesses have some inherent right to exist as they want. In reality, nobody is entitled to a business model. From my perspective, "freeloaders and thieves" describes those who have built businesses around attempting to hijack attention spans and create surveillance profiles about users. The fundamental dynamic of the Internet has always been that servers represent the server owners' interests, and my user agent chooses how to interpret what is received in my own interests. The Schelling point of the protocol is what separates the authorities/concerns of two parties with diverging interests.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#75
Imagine a world where the advertising billboard you walk past reaches into your head and takes a photo of your shopping list. While it's there it takes note of any deep concerns you may not know you have. And your sleep habits, where you live, random visual memories it may find useful anytime in the future, has a guess at how much you'd like to spend using personal records, what pets you have or would like, family, a bunch more.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#76

My wife doesn't, simply because Android Chrome doesn't support one and she won't move to Firefox because it doesn't have an extension to translate pages with Google Translate like Chrome does :(

Get DNS service with ad blocking, like NextDNS. It's pretty easy to set up, I'm using it on my Android phone and iPad. It's free for up to 300,000 queries per month (I've never exceeded this limit, for reference I made 100,000 queries on my phone this month). It also has a lot of configurability (You can select specific blocklists, whitelist sites and etc.). It's not as good as a dedicated AdBlocker like UBlock Origin , it won't be able to block YouTube ads for example, but it's far better than nothing.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#77
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see how having your navigation riddled with ads is useful. Learn the lesson that ads suck, don’t add any to the « internet stuff » you’re building, install an adblocker and move on?

I’m just not finding that ads suck that much. Things like mandatory cookie dialog boxes annoy me a lot more.

You can install extension like "I don't care about cookies". AdBlock I'm using has this as a build in feature you can enable.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#79
I don't use them. I do pay for the version without ads of the services I use them most though (YouTube, Nebula, Reddit, using Kagi instead of Google, etc). I happen to not use sites that don't offer a version without ads enough for them to annoy me OR I've used FB and it's so annoying that I just stopped using it, which is an improvement on my life anyway.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

#80

My wife doesn't, simply because Android Chrome doesn't support one and she won't move to Firefox because it doesn't have an extension to translate pages with Google Translate like Chrome does :(

Vivaldi or Brave are good Chrome-based alternatives with ad blocking and anti-tracking features built-in. Vivaldi has even better translation integration than Chrome, IMO.
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