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Comment by bigredtech | Hacker News Reader

You should find the support channels at any websites you visit that don't offer ad free viewing options via paid subscriptions or otherwise and encourage them to add support for that. Then you can pay each of these websites individually.

If you're not into that, give some funding to a startup which is working to make micropayments on websites viable to remove ad-enabled content.

If you're not into funding something like that, try creating your own company or means to do that or joining a company which is working to advance ad-free viewing.

Now, if you're not into that, then stop visiting any site which has ads on it.

Lastly, if you're not into that, then suck it up and just view the ads which enable revenue for these sites to run.

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1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.

2) I find that ad supported content tends to be not worth paying for. I do pay for subscriptions to magazines and sites that are worthwhile (a paywall is a very good indicator that you're not wasting your time).

> 1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.

What's your take on this thought experiment:

Imagine a giant barrel of apples on the side of the road with a coffee can next to it. There's a sign that says "Take an Apple, Leave a Penny"

Now imagine you don't carry pennies for moral and/or pragmatic reasons. They're too heavy, or you don't want to support Big Copper, whatever. But you want an apple.

Do you take one?

It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.

Let's do a realistic thought experiment that's actually fair:

Imagine you have a movie that you love. It's showing tonight on an over-the-air channel that inserts ads throughout it. You decide to record the show and watch it later.

Do you skip the ads?

> It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.

This is why I said a "giant barrel", because serving web pages does have marginal cost to the server owner, and from there you could imagine a situation where your page view does diminish the number of page views left for "paying" customers.

I might fast-forward through the ads, but I wouldn't feel good about it or try to defend it philosophically.

I wouldn't take an apple.

If a website put up an "ad-wall" (click to view!), I would not try to bypass it. Instead, they want the experience to be friction-less, subtle, (or, alternatively, overwhelming and surprising) so I don't quite notice the ad is there, or can't click away fast enough to avoid being influenced by it.

That is malicious by any reasonable definition. They are trying to impose something on me without making it explicit. Shielding myself from such a thing is ethical. With your pennies and apples example, they are not imposing anything on me, they're not performing a bait and switch. We can both engage within the rules established on the sign.

The web existed long before ads. And it had higher quality content, too.

In this ecosystem, ads are parasites. If there is a workable method to filter out the parasites while leaving the rest of a site intact, one should use it.

Though I would like to see a search engine that only returns sites without ads. I suspect the results would be better.

Will address all comments here -

You shouldn't be "forced" to see ads. Quality content can exist with and without ads. But, ads are the price to pay to visit one of these sites with ads. My suggestion was leading towards that if you don't like a site with ads, then don't visit it. As opposed to using an ad blocker as a filtering method.

With respect to "the web existed long before ads" - Water has also existed before water companies. If you don't like to pay them, you can't just hook in directly to their water lines and syphon it off to yourself and bypass payments. You could however go out and get your own. Just like you could create your own news stories, online games, sites etc without ads.

Your search engine idea is a novel one, and it'd be neat to see that exist.

End users having ultimate control over presentation of content is the price to pay for using the web. If a business does not like an end user having control, they can't expect to reject that aspect while still keeping its users. Instead, they can go create their own platform.

I can appreciate the idea that creating an economy makes for sustainability. But I just don't see the merit with regards to web ads. The most noble ad-driven business model is news media, which is already rife with paid placement (and other propaganda) despite the ads - the motivation to profit from both sides is too great. And the most prevalent ad-driven business model is to aggregate creations from users who are not paid. If we were talking about what's right, then such sites should not even exist - they should be users' individual federated websites or even a better non-centralized protocol. But amorally, those sites create needless centralization points in order to profit off being gatekeepers. So users should feel no compunction about also doing self-interested things, like running ad blockers and other privacy extensions.

Nah, it's not my job to make your business viable. Internet business models would be a lot more likely to succeed without ad blockers just like airplanes would be a lot cheaper if gravity didn't exist.

This. If a business stops working because of technological progress, it's not my problem to keep it afloat. We don't have many blacksmiths anymore, so should everyone stop using things made of metal or make their own? Ad tech has been digging their own grave since they started with crap ads, poorly-secured platforms, annoying / malicious experiences...and now they're asking everyone to feel bad for them. Google manages to make an absolute killing with ads, and those don't make my eyes bleed like the ones on most news sites. I guess ads for articles don't work; the value the viewer gets isn't worth the price. Free market blah blah ok so maybe your business isn't viable any longer. Pivot, get acquired, or die, just like everyone else.

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