Ask HN: Should ad blockers be limited?

There is no doubt that this has affected the revenue for website owners negatively regardless of the size of the website. This could be damaging the web, especially for the smaller sites that receive less traffic. It's likely that we would see an increase in quality and variety of content across the web if it was more rewarding.

It's understandable that users don't want to be bombarded with ads or tracked across the web, but there should be a global list with acceptable and simple ads (banner or animation and a link) that should be enforced by all ad blockers and controlled by each add-on platform.

One might argue that AdBlock Plus implemented a list of "acceptable ads", but this is a bizarre scheme made to generate ridiculous amounts for their organization with the explanation that the fee is set due to the "significant effort" of maintaining the whitelist [2].

Do you think that ad blockers are reducing the quality of the web and should they be limited?

1: https://www.globalwebindex.com/reports/global-ad-blocking-behavior

2: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements

It's affecting the quality of the web that you, as a user, are browsing.

> The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and you're not getting him back in.

The proposed solution is to maintain a global whitelist that each ad blocker is forced to respect.

Whether they reduce the quality of the web or not, they are here to stay.

You know what affects the quality of the web I, a user, am browsing? A bunch of damn videos I can't get to go away, a bunch of flickering GIFs, and a bunch of horrid banners. That's a very, very direct effect. The "reduced" quality is at best a second order effect.

There's also all the malvertising, the malware spread by ad networks. I grant that this, too, is a second order effect, but if we're going to worry that web quality is reduced by some ads not getting clicked, we should worry just as much about the malvertising.

Any numbers to back this up?

(also while I'm asking for numbers how about "There is no doubt that this has affected the revenue for website owners negatively regardless of the size of the website." ?)

>The proposed solution is to maintain a global whitelist that each ad blocker is forced to respect.

I personally can't think of an effective way this could be achieved. Getting even a small proportion of the world to agree on a single whitelist would be difficult if not impossible; who would maintain it, who would decide what was whitelisted and what was blocked? not to mention any actual legal issues across any sort of jurisdiction.

But assuming you could, what mechanism could be used to stop people loading extensions and apps into their browser? Then, for the more technically savvy users, how do you propose to block the use of something like a pihole (https://pi-hole.net/) or equivalents ?

This all assumes that blocking the ads is even a problem (for the quality and stability of the web) in the first place and without a solid range of evidence to back it up, it's anecdotal at best.

Pure conjecture, but i'd guess there is probably evidence to support declining advertising revenue that might possibly be partially attributed to adblockers, but I doubt its the only factor( or even the biggest ).