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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

I’d rather pay a few dozen bucks to buy more RAM than running the risk of been infected by malware served from compromised ad servers. Not to mention the significant decrease in aesthetics/usability when pages include a dozen different ad areas.

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I don't know about aesthetics. I've found that AdBlock actually destroys a lot of the symmetry since the page was designed with ad elements in place.

That could actually be a novel technique against ad blocking. Make the website dysfunctional if the ads can't be displayed.

Yeah, having an option to pay for the site instead would just be crazy.

Having to pay to visit all of the sites out there which are currently using ads would pretty much ruin the internet for most people. Having a big banner at the top asking for donations seems to work rather well, though. See gnu.org and wikipedia.org for examples (though Wikipedia's donation campaign this year is a bit excessive IMO).

FYI, you can hide the Wikipedia donation campaign banners by putting this in a userscript that @matches http://*.wikipedia.org/*:

    setTimeout(function() {
        fundraisingBanner.hide();
    }, 1000);

Or just sign into your wikipedia account.

This ublock custom rule worked for me:

  ||https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:bannerloader

I consider them ads and use adblock to block those as well.

Google's actually testing this out - http://consumerist.com/2014/11/20/googles-new-contributor-fe...

Doomed to fail since Google takes a chunk and it still leaves all the content available to anyone with adblock. It'll get some small use I'm sure but not enough to be notable.

Many sites do this. Baseball-reference is one of them.

I never notice this. I can almost always never tell where the ads actually were.

If your browser is vulnerable to drive-by malware, blocking ads is the least of your problems! Most malware is not spread by ads.

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