There are two things wrong with this article.<p>First, it doesn't even mention that without an adblocker your being tracked all over the place by advertisers. (A practice that is btw clearly illegal in many countries, even if they haven't explicitly wrote it into the law yet.)<p>Second, but this is more subjective, I have a rather different experience with turning off adblockers. Almost every website becomes several times (!) slower, and is full moving distractions trying to get my attention. Sorry, I can't read that way offline, and I won't read that way online. Only when advertising stops disrupting my experience and is only passively present (like it is in old-fashioned dead tree publications) will I turn off the adblocker.<p>I the mean time, I only make exceptions for sites that a) understand I have no obligation to download their ads, and ask nicely, and b) are very careful about the ads they put on their site.
Am i the only one who never uses an adblock? I have two reasons for that, first is that it seems unfair to use a site and not pay back in a meaningful way. Almost like stealing. Second is that i don't visit a huge number of unique sites every day and the ones i visit are respectful enough to not make nuisance. I rarely come across any super annoying ad. I am kind of surprised how others simply take it for granted that everyone else uses an adblock. I have been living very well without an adblock for last 5 years.
I believe it was after reading a discussion here on HN that I began a similar experiment. It's been almost a week and I agree with bitboxer's assessment overall. Most of the ads seem to stay out of the way.<p>Some are overwhelming or at the very least a bit annoying. The first that pops to mind is space.com - which kept showing a footer ad even though I clicked the "X" - but that's only my immediate example because I'd been to that site more yesterday due to the Mars launch than I have in quite some time.<p>I noticed that a lot of newpapers seem to have ads that make me want to turn and run away. The full page ads with the "Click to continue" link at the top right. Forbes.com comes to mind immediately. Those ads are repulsive and make me never want to return. And while on the subject, any site that shows a 10 - 15 second video ad before a 15 second video clip will no longer get any of my attention, links, clicks, etc.<p>If I'm going to continue to try to use the web with ads enabled, I have to draw a line as to what is and isn't acceptable. I haven't tried bitboxer's fork yet, but it sounds like a step in the right direction. To take it further, it might be useful (to owners and visitors) to have a means for site owners to find out whether they are explicitly being blocked and hence losing potential income due of obnoxious advertising.
I spent a long time browsing without an ad blocker. I only started using one a couple years ago after getting hit by a 0-day exploit in an advertisement on a major website.<p>Now I whitelist the sites that I know don't host third-party script/media content (basically, text/image-only). There aren't many of them, unfortunately.<p>At present my two choices are: Send ad revenue to websites I like and get my machine owned by exploits, OR, browse without worrying about those exploits AND without the annoyance of advertisements. The latter is a vastly superior choice, even if there is some moral argument to be made about how I'm depriving those websites of revenue.<p>If someone has a sound technical solution for this problem, I'd love to be able to uninstall adblock plus. It tends to erroneously hide non-ad content sometimes.
As I began reading this, I thought "ugh, someone making hyperbole about how terrible they thought ads were on the web" (I seriously doubt anyone has been able to do NO adblock-free browsing in 10 years, while using VMs, other computers, family computers, etc.). And then I read the part about clicking an ad, and... wow. I've never thought to click an ad before. Even an ad for a product I want to buy right then, I assumed would take me to some shady site or the main site only via some shady pop-up or something. I kind of really want to see what clicking ads does now.
Even if ads are less obtrusive then they once where .. the thing that really annoys me when using a browser without an ad blocker is page loads getting hung up waiting on responses from ads.somedomain.com
So ads are less annoying now than they were a couple of years ago...<p>Is it perhaps because they've adapted to the increasingly common practice of adblocker(and browsers which prohibit unprompted javascript popups)? Let's not forget that adblocker is a great thing, if only because it incentivized a move towards less obtrusive ads.<p>Another thing: ads may be less visibily intrusive but things like tracking cookies are still widely (100%?) used. So if privacy is any sort of a concern, an adblocker is probably still a good thing to have.
I don't understand how such thing could be on the front page of Hacker News - this is ridiculous. It's sooo hardcore to browse the web without an adblocker... and survive. I'm sorry, but this is not what a site like HN should be about...
I like this article. I'll have at look at the forked ad-blocker sometime.<p>It depends on the type of site you visit, but most sites realise that ads are hated and obnoxious ads can cause visitors to leave.<p>Punishing bad ads, and letting site owners know that they lost a visitor because of the obnoxious ad, is important. Whether that'll counteract the hordes of idiots who'll happily click those ads (see "evony" my lord) is another matter.
> I actually clicked on an advert that interested me. It was the ad for a computer game I wanted to buy. And after seeing the trailer on the ad-site I bought it.<p>I would not be so sure about that. Without seeing the ad, you might have never watched the trailer. Or maybe a week later when you see the trailer for a different reason you suddenly realize that there is a better game you want to buy. Advertisements are sneaky that way.<p>I have Adblock enabled and don't ever want to disable it. Those few times I am on a different computer/working inside a virtual machine are enough to stumble upon many ads that are intrusive and annoying. I really wish advertisement would go away alltogether. Of course this won't happen anytime soon, but alternative ways to reward website creators like flattr, paypal donations, beerware license or a simple subscription model are getting more common.
I also use adblock to blacklist everything facebook. I don't have an account, and was often waiting for some fb.com stuff loading on pages.
I've whitelisted ads on a handful of sites that explicitly and politely asked their users to do so (reddit, osnews,but NOT arstechnica).
Adblock for Chrome - <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjoc...</a>
have an option where you can "Show ads everywhere except for these domains..." (screenshot - <a href="https://skitch.com/brajeshwar/gmw2e/adblock-options" rel="nofollow">https://skitch.com/brajeshwar/gmw2e/adblock-options</a>). Isn't that what you're looking for?
Glad you found out that just because a small minority is abusing the system, its not a good idea to destroy the income stream of all sites. I would love to block people that block the ads on my sites. I respect my users by placing only relevant and non-intrusive ads. If a user doesn't respect me by blocking all my ads, they can find their information or entertainment somewhere else, for all I care.
An easier solution than forking Adblock Plus to add per-site configurations would be to create a custom filter list. Instead of subscribing to popular Adblock lists like Fanboy's List or EasyList, create a minimal filter list that just blocks the most egregious ads. I'm sure quite a few people might opt for such a list because they hate annoying ads, but feel like that want to support sites they like (by viewing their ads).
I don't understand why you would single out ads. For me the whole experience of a site is what counts. If a site gives me a bad experience, whether due to ads or something else, I don't visit it anymore. Most news aggregators put the site you'll be visiting next to the link, so if you keep an eye on that you can use your brain as "negative experience blocker".
adblock is a waste of time.<p>i use 3 browsers, a mobile phone, a tablet... i would go insane with something unpractical as adblockers.<p>Just use this instead: <a href="http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/" rel="nofollow">http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/</a><p>work with any browser, any OS.
Please look up "where" and "were" in a dictionary. I couldn't focus on the content of the article because I had to reread every sentence containing one of those words.