Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

People who don't have adblockers are willing to put up with a heck of a lot. Agreed.

But if someone is not technically sophisticated enough to use an adblocker, they're also probably not technically sophisticated enough to find the actual content on a page and just give up.

I see this fairly frequently; someone with limited computer literacy goes to a website from Google, doesn't see anything relevant immediately (because of bad UI or really bad ads), and goes back to Google. Often the site even had relevant content when I look later, they just couldn't see it because they aren't as good at parsing website content.

There are so many websites with equivalent information, if you click on one and it's just garbage at first glance I think hitting "back" is more likely than "read and click on every ad and give them your SSN before downloading their virus scanning software".

Yet the Washington Post blocks me as using an ad-blocker, possibly because I'm using Linux, possibly because of no autoplay. But altogether, it seems like anit-adblock efforts are going to start having more and more collateral damage.

They propose a perceptual ad-blocking scheme where ads are always rendered in a DOM, but elements only displayed to the if they are not "ad like". This is makes it much easier to evade ad-block detectors, since your browser appears as if it does not have an ad-blocker! https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocki...

Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time!

I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.

I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.

If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.

All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout. Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely simple stuff.

parent: I've not seen this problem. I only use chrome on mac. maybe on windows/linux it's doing something differently. as each new tab is a new process, it smells like a goofball file system permissions issue to me. does it still happen if you create a new profile?

it works as you'd expect both with google sync on, off, paused, and never-been-setup for me.

hard to imagine that this isn't some bug of installation for you. there's no way this would be tolerable behavior and if it were because of chrome per se, there'd be lots of uproar so you'd find your answer right away.