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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

At risk of being very unpopular, am I the only person that doesn't mind ads? I mean some are pretty intrusive, but largely I'm happy to make the trade off. I'll look at (and maybe click on) your ad, if it means you have the cash to bring me what I want to look at. It's fantastic to think we live in a world where the web can support itself without ads, but it's not really practical, is it? Some stuff I'd support - but the best thing about the web is that I can dip in and out of sites completely based on one off content, knowing I don't have to pay before I read.

And the HN crowd is the sharp end of the web. A lot of us ARE likely to support the web in another way. The blunt end not so much. They're also the ones more likely to click on ads.

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I have 0 problem with websites that serve up ads that:

1. Are from their own domain 2. Are not flash/autoplaying video 3. Don't track me/aren't ad tech 4. Actually have something to do with the content

Run a homebrewing site? Great, run ads for stuff to do with that. I'll probably click on them, I am looking up homebrewing info! Run a homebrewing site that serves me ads for refrigerators, because I looked at one on Amazon three weeks ago? That's creepy, and that's getting blocked. Same with pop ups pop unders etc.

Advertisers seem to be moving in the same direction - Viacom has reported a lot of wins over the ad-tech insanity.

Apart from duckduckgo, can you share some examples of such websites ?

For a long time I didn't adblock, because I do believe in paying it forward. But--set aside the psychological battery enacted to make you Believe In The Brand and still, at this point, advertising is a threat vector. Text ads? Don't mind them. Image-based ads like Project Wonderful? Also fine. But I block a lot of ads now just because I can't evaluate effectively the safety of their payloads.

This is the only reason I use an ad-blocker. They are often an attack vector for 0day exploits. They remove that risk and the block comes off.

I don't mind ads in sidebars, banner ads, etc. I whitelist my adblocker and there's only three reasons I've ever blocked a site:

* The ad prevented me from getting to the content (popup modals, youtube preroll ads)

* The ad made noise (I've recently started using an autoplay-blocker which is on by default and helps with this, as well as annoying autoplay videos that aren't ads)

* The ad massively slowed down or crashed the page (for some reason, wikia seems to be particularly bad for this). This is much less common now that I have flash disabled by default.

I don't mind advertising in principle. The advertising from The Deck was fine by me. I do mind pervasive tracking, ugly webpages filled with attention gobbling trash, heavy webpages, malvertising, and the horrible morals of the advertising and ad tech industries.

I wouldn't mind ads so much if they weren't implemented so poorly. Much of the web ends up being unusable, because ads slow down the rendering and mess with the usage of so many web pages.

I don't mind ads typically. I still haven't bothered to figure out how to block ads on YouTube. I started out tailoring Ghostery to just block trackers but not ads. But the clickbait ads from taboola and friends were just so terrible (grossly misleading clickbait, half-naked women, tryptophobia) that now I don't feel bad about just blocking everything.

Is Ghostery overkill if you already use NoScript?

Ghostery is tracking and profiling people who block ads for the ad industry. Don't use it. Use ublock origin or umatrix or request policy[1]

you could also use random agent spoofer and better privacy or privacy settings.

[1]: https://requestpolicycontinued.github.io/

Oh cool, I didn't realize uBlock Origin blocked trackers - thought it was just blocking ads.

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