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Comment by errantspark | Hacker News Reader

It's absolutely wild, I have Chrome Canary installed w/o any addons because of some bleeding edge WebBluetooth stuff I'm working on and occasionally I'll forget which browser I'm using and visit a site with it. The web without adblock is basically unusable, it's legitimately completely insane that people will put up with it.

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I've said it before, but the entire ad business is a cancer. Every minute of the modern human experience is exploited for maximizing profits. I've read an interview recently with an journalist / documentary film maker (forgot his name) where he was talking about "bullshit jobs" and for most people, their actual function is to consume. That's why ads are penetrating every last part of our private lives, greatly accelerated by modern consumer electronics. Want me to disable adblock to look at your side? Fuck you, I'll never visit again. Youtube video with forced ads at the beginning? Instantly closing it, never to visit again. All my devices have some kind of adblock mechanism, my "smartphone" is rooted, my "smart TV" will never have any internet connection, my browser will always be the one working best with adblock technologies.

Sorry for the rant.

Don't be sorry friend. You are correct and I hear your frustration, and while we're at it most SaaS is just as vile as advertising. I fear that this is the inevitable conclusion of unfettered capitalism and perhaps individual refusal to participate is one of the few ways we can begin to turn the helm on a world that worships unfettered greed.

I think that was Jaron Lanier in The Social Dilemma.

People don't put up with ads. They are forced upon them. Many of them with no knowledge of how to block them.

To them, ads are part and parcel of "using the internet". Some of them hate ads. But not for technical reasons though.

Outside of complaining why they hate that annoying ad from company X, most people probably won't be motivated enough to actually do anything about it. For some, this is just how they expect the "internet" to work. An ad-free one would feel broken to them.

Ads are not a bother for most casual people.

They garbage it up more under the pretenses that too many people are blocking, denying them ad revenue. If they made it less obnoxious then less people would feel the need to block ads. The worst ones for me are the fake virus ads that basically hijack my browser. If you can't keep those out of your ad ecosystem then I'm forced to block it all.

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