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Comment by dlisboa | Hacker News Reader

It’s not even those professionals, I’m talking people who are highly skilled and trained (CS/Engineering degrees). Like they could tell you off the top of their head HOW to build an adblocker, but they don’t use one themselves. That type of disconnect that is weird to me. People who don’t know any better I can understand.

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Ad blockers can be an ethical issue if one considers that's what funds a site's content and its widespread availability.

Indeed, spying on users and sharing data about them so you can make a buck is unethical.

Not to mention ads incite to consume more, attempt to creep inside your daily thoughts and lie about the qualities of the product using all the tricks in the books.

Add on top of this it gives more power to the big players with more money and create terrible incentive for the medias and you have one of the easiest moral decision in the world.

Not all ads are exploitive or deceptive. Ads empower small players as well. Without them large and entrenched players have a greater advantage.

The whole industry lost me way back in the 90's when I saw the first popover/under ads for X10 cameras. No, the industry is entirely exploitative of technology with little to no real redeeming qualities and are so invasive, pervasive and dishonest that you generally can't even trust the top search results for product class reviews either.

This reads like a submarine article.

This presumes ads must spy on users. Yet ads have existed long before such spying was possible and can and do exist without spying on the web.

I was definitely late to the game when it came to ad-blockers at least compared to a lot of HN. In general my position is that sites have to make money somehow, and too many users are never going to purchase their way past your paywall, not matter how cheap it is. Even having the friction of making someone sign up for an account is often too much.

There just finally came a breaking point where too much of the web was essentially unusable without it. It's a shame this ends up punishing sites who do the reasonable thing and just have for example a static add off to the side of the content, but I don't know what else to do at this point. This is why we can't have nice things.

Depending on the type of ad/adblocker combo, the website might still get the money for them, so the only “harm” you do is to the advertisers.

In fact, the ethical ones that are clearly written are the users with blockers, NOT the websites with ads

https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render

> 2.12 People should be able to render web content as they want

> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts or auto-played videos. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples' agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.

It's just a trust issue maybe? Browser extensions with this kind of access are surely not to be installed on a whim.

That being said, I do use uBlock origin.

But that's the only extension not from a huge company with this kind of access rights that I'd ever install on my machine.

Maybe they just don't want to. I don't use an adblocker because I'm not bothered by ads. I just don't care enough. The only place where it's actually annoying is YouTube and that's solved by paying for Premium.

I grew up with ads and learned to not pay attention to them.

I still use an ad-blocker on all of my own systems, and on my current company laptop.

But a few years back at a different company I didn’t have any ad blocker installed. This was an office job with a desk and coworkers walking past me all the time.

So at that job I’m having the browser open reading something and one of the older guys is walking past me. He stops dead in his tracks and says jokingly “are you looking at women on company time” and he laughs.

I look at him, confused. Then I look at my screen. Whoops! Next to the content I am reading is a huge ad that is pretty much a soft core porn ad.

Embarrassed I say I didn’t even notice the lady. My coworker chuckles and says “sure”.

But really, I had developed built in blinds in my mind that prevented me from consciously paying attention to ads.

That experience reminded me to always make sure to have adblockers installed.

And of course video ads are annoying no matter what, so having an ad blocker is nice for that as well.

Plus who knows, even if I don’t consiously notice ads my subconscious is probably registering it. So having an ad blocker is nice for this reason as well!

Marketing is a branch that employs hundred of thousands of people to devise the best images to manipulate you. Billions are spent on research in this domain.

thinking oneself impervious to ads, let alone blind, is in my view a bit presomptuous. I am convinced you are influenced by ads, you just don't notice it (and that's the point of ads, you shouldn't notice)

> I am convinced you are influenced by ads, you just don't notice it (and that's the point of ads, you shouldn't notice)

Yeah that’s why I explicitly mentioned the difference between what I consciously notice and my subconscious and why I mentioned this as another reason to have an adblocker :I

Sorry then I misread you. I focussed on the statement "truly blind to ads"...

No worries :)

I can't find it in a quick 2 minute search, but I seem to recall a study that concluded that people who thought they were unaffected by advertising were actually MORE susceptible. Which makes a sort of intuitive sense. If someone is aware they can be manipulated they can make a conscious effort to counteract it. Someone who assumes they are immune won't.

Thinking that the purpose of online ads is advertising, is in my view a bit presumptuous :-)

Depends a bit what your definition of "advertising" includes I guess...

I can't help but wonder what effect advertising has peoples mental health. I doubt it's positive.

Video ads are an exception — especially when your country pushes their disgusting propaganda through it. I could honestly throw my phone at a wall when I hear that ad, and it is constantly everywhere — I don’t even understand how come I can’t report it or make it not appear to me in google?!

(Country is Hungary..)

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