I suspect something else is going on there. I made that switch years ago and haven’t found a site that doesn’t play nice with Firefox in that time.

I think you’re wrong on the overwhelming majority and that they’ll still be fine with it should it happen.

Good luck I guess

Except it’s less likely to be donation based and more likely to be fee based.

The fact that you’re aware of any kind of ad blocking for Netscape reinforces my position that blocking was a leader in the arms race

And nothing of value was lost I guess

There were no adblocking extensions for early internet explorer so consider its share 0.

What you consider it to be is irrelevant. An extension wasn’t any more the only way to block ads then than it is now. Ad blocking has absolutely been happening longer than there have been extensions to do it.

Adblocking increased at twice the rate of new internet users

Which means it’s going to reach a critical mass at some point, no? What would you expect to happen then?

very obviously trolling or roleplaying

Damn am I sick of people falling on this regardless of what the disagreement is over or who it is with. Even if it were true, which it’s not, you have a better picture of the situation, at least if you’re willing to accept that someone legitimately disagrees with you.

I’m sorry to hear about your food

There’s something perversely amusing, given the conversation, how you seem to expect me to answer your question without seemingly being willing to answer mine.

I’ll answer, but not until you’ve extended the courtesy of doing so yourself with the questions you’ve already been asked.

And I get the impression you weren’t around for the first ad blockers. I recall it very differently and unless you have something to back up your end of it we’re at a bit of an impasse.

I’ve been around far longer than you think.

It absolutely has bearing. It’s directly related to how we consider our fellow humans.

It’s also not simply a question of more money. It can absolutely be a question of any money.

Is it ethical to consume a product or service put out for sale, in one method or another, to the public without paying for it?

If a local farmer sells eggs at a farmer’s market would you take one and eat it? Why or why not? Does the number of eggs he has for sale change your answer? What if others are also doing so? You did say there’s nothing wrong with trying to get everything for free before, didn’t you?

auto ad skipping has been a feature since at least 2002

And do you recall when the obnoxious banners and pop ups during shows started to happen with regularity?

any clearly separate banner, pop up, intermediate page etc placed around the main content

Given the above, what factors would you figure contributed to the decline of that type of ad?

I can block a banner ad

Precisely

As far as I am concerned content online is easily replaceable

I bet the people who hunted animals to extinction thought the same. At some point it stops being worth the effort to make another.

No matter what you or I do, web content will survive

See my previous statement about animal extinction

the market will evolve new ways to separate us from our money

And another like you will complain about it, block it, and the cycle continues while the masses complain about how it wasn’t this bad before without an ounce of consideration to their own part in the whole thing. Wanna guess how I know?

As a question, how do you feel about data mining and tracking?

This whole paragraph looks like it’s supposed to be some kind of gotcha. It’s not. I’ve made it very clear from the start what I’m against is blocking all ads. By all means block the ones that are legitimately malicious. But I remember when the blocker in the post announced they’d be allowing non-malicious ads, which met certain published criteria, to go through the blocking. Ublock was the new darling pretty much overnight.

I do block various ads and trackers. I do not blanket block everything that could be considered an ad.

You think no one has ever had to spend time and money dealing with a picked pocket or a pothole on a road they drive every day? It’s not always as easy as you make it sound. Just like a lot of times you run an antivirus and it takes care of everything. Not always but sometimes your whole identity is stolen and it can be years later and you’re still dealing with problems. Guess you shouldn’t have gone to the gas station you always go to.

Why would sites go back to stock banner ads when they’re so easily blocked. Why do you think they stopped? The same culture you’re now defending pushed them out. Now it’s an arms race with stronger measures on both sides all the time.

You lose nothing by blocking ads today. At some point the bill comes due and either you can’t block them so easily or you lose access to the content you want to see. You’re pulling pebbles away from a levee and telling everyone it’s safe because nothing has happened.

It’s not a matter of locked vs unlocked. It’s a matter of payment.

A website also isn’t really a product. When you go to a store you see the things they want you to see. If you go to a restaurant you’re greeted in the way they choose to greet you and are exposed to how they choose to decorate.

But at the core someone has to pay the bills. If you buy a product you pay for it. If you visit a website that serves ads instead of charging that’s what pays those bills. If you’re refusing to even see them you’re handing that cost to someone else

So it’s only a possibility for millionaires to serve ads and get paid from them? Someone should alert the podcasters and independent app developers.

It’s your moral responsibility to “subsidize income” when you’re consuming the content someone created in order to afford to live, no?

I’m with you, that’s the world I want to create and live in along side with everyone else. That’s not the world we live in today and a whole lot of people need to be able to survive before we can get to that point.

A whole lot of people seem to think I’m out here trying to encourage everyone to give up their time and bandwidth to donate to the rich. Not at all. But the idea that they’re the only ones who might be getting any money from ads is absurd.

Interestingly enough the library is possibly the analogy I needed. It’s funded by your taxes. Tiny little amounts that won’t make a difference to you at all but it’s still there. I would absolutely object to someone looking through everything I checked out on my way out the door (trackers) as well as salesmen lurking around the whole place (obtrusive ads). I don’t mind them setting up displays or flyers on community boards (unobtrusive ads) or late fees (payments). It’s also great that the writers and publishers (creators and hosts) are still getting paid since the library still bought the books. It may be tiny amounts per reader, but so are ads.

On the other hand I’m pretty sure most people agree that if you spend the day in a local coffee house using their free Wi-Fi and not buying anything that you’d be an asshole and it would be reasonable for them to kick you out.

In the same way your TV does, sure.

It becomes your problem when the thing you want to see is not available because it shut down.

Whether or not they can make money on traditional advertising is a complex thing when I’m not sure what you mean by traditional advertising. Can a website offer traditional advertising? If so how do you think the existence of ad blockers has contributed to its decline? I remember when TiVo was a big thing we started seeing banners at the bottom of shows advertising other shows. Seems like a pretty clear correlation to me.

And they didn’t sign a contract and are under no obligation to serve you content. That road goes both ways. Is a contractual obligation the only way you deal with something you don’t like to get to something you do?

Then it’s not every ad. That’s the whole thing I’ve been trying to establish to plenty of people this whole time.

Go take a look at nearly any conversation about streaming services, for example. It won’t take long to find someone upset about how “it’s as expensive as cable now”. Then extend that same logic to the entirety of the Internet and how do you think it would go over.

My issue is that blocking all ads indescriminantly is costing someone and the rich won’t allow it to be them.

The analogy would still break down because the robot would need parts or maintenance. There would still be a cost and someone would still be getting their money. Instead you’ve just got a lot of people proud of themselves for sneaking their hand into someone else’s pocket.

Another argument against not my position.

If someone who does something for a living does that thing for you, do you pay them or scamper off beforehand? Why?

Great. I’m glad you think it’s inconsequential. I think people being able to pay their bills is very consequential, so I raise my concerns where I see a problem.

Though you’d think inconsequential would go along with how you don’t enjoy ads. Curious, no?

If donating weren’t an option and there was, occasionally, an easily missed ad somewhere off to the side, what then?

We’re all playing at a handicap against them all the time.

I grew up beyond poor. I don’t need a reminder of how big that gap is.

No, I’m not willing to employ their tactics. I’d rather help those worse off than me succeed than elevate myself on their backs.

Nice enough to be considerate of the low level employees who only have jobs because the company they work for has ads on their site.

How so?

Am I obligated to look at every billboard by the road or can I not get up and leave or at least mute commercials on TV?

Just as easily as you can scroll past an ad on a page

Why should I have my computer use my bandwidth against my data cap so that a company paying someone other than me can show me an ad?

Why should someone have to pay for your ability to access that data? Your isp isn’t sending that site money for you to be able to access it. Someone has to cover costs.

Frankly data caps are bullshit but that doesn’t help the current situation.

The way I see it is that the host is getting paid for giving the opportunity to show an ad.

Except you are denying them that opportunity.

The exchange is between the company hosting the content and the company advertising the product, not the end user.

So an advertiser should pay for functionally nothing?

Let’s go on a hypothetical journey. Tomorrow a switch is flipped and everyone in the world is blocking ads the same as you. How are the web designers and content creators getting paid now? Ad revenue dries up because it’s pointless to pay for a thing you’ll never get. Those employees are not going to continue to get paychecks because the site is just an expense now. This should not be difficult to understand.

Right. How do you cut the ads out? Do you just snip around blindly and hope for the best?

that’s what paywalls or logins are for

And how do you react to those when you encounter them? More often than not the people I see blocking everything flip out.

There’s absolutely something wrong with taking steps to get everything for free as it’s going to come at the expense of someone. Companies and the rich are unwilling to absorb any costs when they can get away without, and they usually can.

Who are you willing to pass the cost of your consumption on to?

That’s not at all the same situation. To even get close to similar we’d need to assume that we’re getting either the console or the games for free. Even then it’s still quite a road to even imperfect analogy.

In the current situation we buy every piece of that puzzle and are still locked out of modifications through obfuscation, proprietary knowledge, and security measures. So that makes the analogy even harder to sell.

It’s more like ordering a package and being upset about the company’s name appearing on the box/label/receipt.

Sounds like a pretty weak constitution if you can’t stomach looking at something so mundane. I hope you don’t drive.

And great job ignoring the other part.

My issue is more with trackers than ads anyways

Agreed. I have no issues with this.

Also, there are quite some sites that just copy content or or have an AI write content, made to rank high in searches, then is putbfull of adds to make money. Those are automated money-farms, and deserve blockers.

I agree here as well. Though the simplest solution is to avoid them altogether I don’t have an objection to working against deliberately malicious sites like this.

But I also pay for multiple websites and services I use regularily despite them working fine without paying or having “free” alternatives. After all, nothing is free and I rather pay with money than with data.

And with this I have no objections to anything else. My issue is specifically with the mindset of neither viewing any ad regardless of anything besides it being an ad combined with refusal to offer any sort of recompense. You’re supporting at least a few sites that you feel are worth supporting and that’s plenty for me.

We’re obviously not on the same page here.

I object to blocking “all ads”.

You responded to that by stating you lost trust for, presumably, everyone after a specific incident.

To extend that it seems implausible that you could trust anyone, about anything, ever. If one instance of a thing can break your trust for everything like it, what other possibility could exist.

On the other hand, if you’re blocking malicious ads, which is to say not every ad across the whole of the Internet, that’s a very different thing which I do not object to.

Are we more clear now?

I’m totally with you there. JavaScript ads are not ok. But that’s not what the quoted statement said. It said “all ads”.

I see this a lot with the ad blocking crowd. Especially the ones that will run over to tell you how you’re doing things wrong if you’re not using their preferred method (usually ubo). It’s not enough to block problematic ads because all ads, simply be existing, are problematic.

But then they won’t offer anything else either. They want all the content of the internet served up to them for free.

I’d love to live in a utopia where we can all freely share everything. Until that happens I’ve got a family to feed and bills to pay. So does everyone else.

Did you cut all the advertisements out of magazines and newspapers before reading them?

What about the billboards on the side of the road?

You are not entitled to their hosting or their content. They provide them to you in exchange for ad revenue they receive from showing them to you. You’re refusing to engage in the exchange.

So you got screwed once and that’s it for everyone ever? How do you not live in a hut in the mountains?

If you’re blocking them all how do you know how obtrusive or obnoxious they are?

Secondarily, why do you think that is? Have they gotten more or less instant since ad blockers have been an option?

I’m not at all against ad blockers. I’ve got a Pi-hole myself. I just think blocking every ad ever is doing a lot more for the problem than it is to help

If you have so little attention to spare that an ad along side or even within content is too far for you how did you find the time to comment?

Good on you for looking for free options. On the other hand that furthers the question about how much attention would really cost you…

it blocks all ads

Am I the only one that has a problem with this? Unless you’re paying for use of a site then aren’t you basically being entitled to someone else’s labor?

Someone made the site, created the content, and hosted it for consumption. Until money isn’t necessary for survival it seems reasonable to make sure they’re compensated for it.

So it does, in at least some cases, work like that?

It’s ok to admit being wrong

Except all the times it has.

When there’s only one camera that’s often been the way it has worked