this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Ima be honest. I don’t run ad blockers. The way I see it, if I’m consuming content from a given source and that source invested time and/or money into said content then they deserve to be compensated for it. I am not willing to pay a subscription for every website out there, so ads are an acceptable compromise.
I legitimately don't understand how people tolerate using the internet without an adblocker just from a usability standpoint.
Some pages are fine but frequently wandering to new pages on the internet is an experience in frustration.
I use an adblocker. I wouldn't click on an ad even if I could see it.
I agree with you in principle but in practice way too many sites are doing ads in bullshit ways. If they were just along a sidebar or at the top/bottom of the page I'd have no issue but usually they affect the actual usability of the site and I'm not dealing with that. If they want to expose me to ads they need to make it not a problem for me.
Also ads have served a lot of malware
The big assumption here is that the website had time or money invested in it. I feel like the vast majority of websites these days are just ai garbage with enough ads to prevent you from even reading the thing and give your computer herpies as a bonus. The era of good faith advertising where the ads were reasonable and balanced with the quality of content is long gone. Most sites are now explicitly designed for exploitive data harvesting and endless ad delivery.
Of course, some websites are exceptions to this and adblock can easily be toggled off for those websites if you really want to support them. Taking off protections for a trusted partner though is quite different from raw dogging the whole internet
Not everything I view online deserves money. I decide what is worth it to give money to and I decide what news articles I'm allowed to read.
Your annoyance does not pay the bills though. You are annoying yourself for nothing.
If enough people block the ads then that’s a significant hit for publications.
It doesn’t really annoy me though. I guess I have high tolerance. Maybe it’s also because I rarely use YouTube, thats the only place ads have annoyed me and only because they are constant and impossible to ignore.
Bike cuck vibes
I run ad blockers. As a security measure. Ad companies collect insane amount of data and do a bunch of shady stuff whenever they can get away with it.
I want to support websites whenever I'm able, but the way ad companies operate just ain't it.
If they clean up their act, maybe then I could stop using ad blockers, but it's been decades and I don't have high hopes.
Also using ad blockers for performance and usability reasons. For example, I used to use a bunch of Fandom wikis and couldn't understand why people hated the UI. Then I saw how Fandom looks like without ad blockers and holy shit how can humans live like this
oh yea i been on those fandom wiki, and almost slows you down on mobile because the amount of ads.
You remind me of the old guy at work who called me a "FUCKING FREELOADER" because I told him about uBlock origin.
I'm never recommending it again to anyone and I have since kept it a secret that I use an ad-blocker. I guess it's a problem for people.
Don't let this one person stop you.
I'm still recommended it to everybody.
That guy sounds like he thinks his kids owe him money for raising them. Disregard the stupid bastard.
At this point ad blocking is more about security and optimization than stopping ads themselves. If a site wants to run some banner ads to pay for costs, I have nothing against it, but once Javascript is involved, that just becomes a vulnerability for attack.
Also, websites that bury their content in layers of overlay and popup ads with loud audio and several unrelated videos can go fuck themselves.
I do, but it's less about the ads and more about privacy. I don't use things like sponsor block because there's pretty much no privacy violation there. But I do use an ad blocker because advertisers track me across websites to build up a profile.
I also don't want to make a free account, again because of privacy concerns (both from the site and from any data breaches.
I'm happy to pay a little for content, but I haven't yet seen a system that respects my privacy and is reasonably priced. If that was a thing, I'd totally pay.
I just use Safari and private relay for that. But yeah I can understand that particular point. I mean I’m not against ad blockers, it’s just that I don’t use them for the reasons I stated.
That's totally fair.
I'd really like some extension where I can compensate websites in exchange for not having ads. Let me load up a balance and present the option to deduct $0.0X to see read/watch past the teaser. The website wouldn't need to track me to get paid, and the browser/extension could merely track balances and keep an anonymous accounting of transactions to send a single larger payment later (to save on fees).
I'd totally use that.
Axate (used to be called Agate) is trying something like this. Popbitch (sue me) use it to charge 0.25 per article or 0.50 for access for a week, but it doesn't seem to be very widespread
I tried https://popbitch.com/royal-blush/ on firefox with ublock turned off and the microtransaction box after the faded out text still didn't display so it might have some way to go yet
Huh, I hadn't heard about them, probably because they're UK based? Thanks! I'll check them out.
I respect your stance and I agree with the subscription vs ads decision, websites need to make money somehow and I dont want to pay a subscription for everything either. I do run an adblocker but whitelist websites I use often and that dont have intrusive ads. It unfortunately affects websites that I visit quickly and dont come back to, they get a visitor but no advertisements. Its not a perfect solution but ads tend to be very intrusive on random websites.
I still use Google news, I really need to get rid of it but I've been slacking. Anyways, every once in a while I'll click on a story and the website will literally be paragraphs separated by gigantic, scrollable ads, and ads between paragraphs done in a way that you're not sure if you've actually finished the story or not.
I can't use fathom being on those websites without an adblocker. It's horrendous.
Might I recommend an RSS reader? I use feeeds on iOS, it’s fantastic and 100% percent free.
But then how do you pay the content creator?
Great point. Hadn’t thought about that. Maybe that’s why ads don’t bother me? But then again if a website has an rss feeeed that means they consent to serving their content ads free, so I don’t think it contradicts my stance.
But I never said I was against ad blockers anyways, I just said I didn’t use them because I feel it’s a little unfair. I have no intention of passing judgement on those who do use it, it’s up them, and like someone else at the individual level it makes little difference.
Good, click on them for the rest of us
There have been very decent alternatives, but they never took off.
One such was Flattr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
I used it for a while, but not many websites and creators used it, so most of my money was going towards a select few.