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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely the people who are least inclined to install an ad blocker that could use it most.

On the other hand, it takes a long time, but they do learn to be more cynical about the Internet if they're exposed to its raw state.

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It takes less than sixty seconds and requires nothing more than installing a browser extension.

The people who most need to do this don't know what a "browser" is, much less an "extension".

And are still paying for AOL as it's the only way to get on the internet.

I think they meant that it takes the users a long time to learn to be cynical.

This is a good point. I often take for granted how quickly I can recognize advertisement from non advertisement. I attribute most of it to spending my early days on the Internet reading marketing forums and running ad campaigns myself. Nowadays marketing is very subtle. Often you find yourself reading content and don't even realize somebody paid for that content to build their brand, drive traffic, etc. Look at recipe sites for example. If you watch your ad blocker count the ads, recipe sites always have one of the highest numbers. Who would ever think that if they didn't know what to look for?

My rule of thumb is "if nobody would write this without getting paid for it, then somebody probably got paid for it."

There's a lot of crapware disguising as adblockers that unsophisticated users can fall for...

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