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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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