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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> But my question back is always: until they do find a new business model, if they can survive by blocking people who use adblock, why shouldn't they?

In this day and age, Adblock is a necessity for nontechnical users. I installed it on my parents' machines to protect them against drive-by-downloads, malware, etc.

Someone may say, "I know my ad networks would never do anything of the sort". But the fact is, ad networks get compromised, and even ad networks that have strict policies for acceptable ads sometimes have bad actors slip through. Even if it's not often, it's enough of a risk that it's simply not worth it.

FWIW, Reddit may be in a different situation, since I believe Reddit's ads are self-hosted. In that sense, I'd view it more as analogous to sponsored user-generated content, which I have other philosophical issues with, but don't suffer from this problem.

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This was it for me. I don't really care about the stupid "hit the monkey and win" blinking animated .gifs, and lived with them for years without really worrying, but in 2015 ad blockers aren't sunglasses, they're condoms.

Furthermore, I installed uBlock in Firefox for Android because ads were getting so bad that it was essentially impossible to view some sites. It was a last-ditch effort to offer the content one last chance to survive. If publishers would prefer I not see their content at all, that's fine... I was almost already there, anyway.

In response to jedberg's question: I personally don't mind but I don't believe I'm as petulant and entitled as the typical loud mouthed redditor, but reddit made that bed, and now they get to lay in it.

> Furthermore, I installed uBlock in Firefox for Android because ads were getting so bad that it was essentially impossible to view some sites.

This in itself is enough of a reason for me to use Firefox on Android and recommend it to everyone who uses Android.

There are a lot of other great things about it, but the fact that it allows installation of extensions (and therefore allows adblocking for non-rooted devices) is huge.

Agreed. Not sure why Firefox on Android has such a low user base but I wouldn't consider anything else at this point.

I certainly would not use Chrome, despite its extensions.

Because Google actively work to make it a bad experience.

Look at GMail in Firefox Android. Now look at GMail in Chrome Android.

You should easily be able to allow self hosted ads in most good ad blockers, right?

> since I believe Reddit's ads are self-hosted

I'm not sure where it is at now, but we had a mixed situation when I was there. We self hosted some, but one of the things we "self hosted" was an iframe to an ad network.

We had to be really careful because everything you said was (and probably still is) true. Bad actors slip through, networks get compromised, etc. This is spot on: "Even if it's not often, it's enough of a risk that it's simply not worth it.". That was exactly the conclusion we came to.

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