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Comment by r0m4n0 | Hacker News Reader

Some reasons I don't use them anymore (in no specific order)

1. I have had them subtly mess with websites I am working on and I probably wasted multiple hours troubleshooting an issue that wasn't an issue

2. I have had them break a web form when I was trying to purchase something

3. I have purchased some things I like from ads and wouldn't have discovered otherwise

4. I don't frequent websites that overuse them or I can't work around them

5. I'm on a work laptop sometimes and I'm not allowed to use them for corp security reasons

6. I'm not sure I trust the ad blockers themselves, their developers, or their own app security

7. It's another process that can slow down viewing a webpage

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> 7. It's another process that can slow down viewing a webpage

I guess.. just like how wearing a seatbelt could end up killing you. Doesn't mean the exact opposite isn't a million times more likely.

> 1. I have had them subtly mess with websites I am working on and I probably wasted multiple hours troubleshooting an issue that wasn't an issue

If your website is going to be used by people with an adblocker, discovering that an adblocker unintentionally breaks your website is a feature of using one, not a bug.

That is true, but does not help a person who is not building a given website.

I have had financial websites impacted by adblockers, which is why I stopped using them. (I do not work on all of the teams building the financial websites I use.)

3 clicks to disable an adblocker on a financial website seems like a trivial price to pay for mental wellbeing and tens of hours of your life not watching video ads, but you do you.

It's not the clicks, it's the cognitive load of discovering & remembering which sites break due to an adblocker. (This set of sites changes as the sites themselves evolve.)

The main point is you were writing advice to someone as if they were building the website, when most of us are not generally building the sites we use.

> you were writing advice to someone as if they were building the website

Yes, because I was responding to a quote of them talking about building websites.

Ad blockers often prevent ads from loading, so overall I'd be surprised if they really ended up slowing down browsing

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