
Is anyone working on fighting adblockers? - taewookim
I&#x27;m pretty sure most people will think this is a waste of time, but the concept of ad blocker is equivalent of using a nuclear weapon to catch a few bad thieves. Sure there are few idiots who misuse and annoy people.. and even abuse ad tech to do evil things (spreading malware via flash, for ex.), but lots of innocent people who mean well also get hurt in the process. Website owners who produce all that great, free information, for example. There is no such thing as free lunch, after all.<p>(Not to mention, adblockers are taking bribes from ad networks who are willing to pay to get their ads through. Complete racketeering.)<p>Is anyone working on this? What do you think, is this a complete waste of time?
======
genedickson
There are lots of people working to stop surveillance blockers. I expect that
at least some of the HN crowd are employed by sites which are refusing
admittance to people with such filters. I stumble on it regularly while
surfing around. But I have no sympathy. I regularly harass websites to the
effect that if they eliminate the interactive part of advertising the only
thing to filter out will be the graphics. Further, the amount of publicity
that an established outfit like Wired could have by eliminating interactivity
of ads would put them in the news for a while. Any publicist who couldn't put
an established site in the top of the news is incompetent. Imagine for
instance the New York Times getting rid of their paywall and having just one
non interactive ad on each article for unsubscribed folk. Of course they would
suffer from being the competition to many of the outfits who might otherwise
want to interview various people who were involved, But they would still get
major publicity if they had a decent team getting it. It is a talked about
thing even by non technical types. The real issue is that the publicity would
only last some months, after which they would only be able to trumpet to the
effect of we were the first. It could still be a gold mine of publicity, which
would bring customers to the site. Of course when people followed links
advertisers would still know where they came from, and whether they actually
bought anything. I use ghostery and no script. I never turn them off for
anybody. All surveillance is bad as far as I am concerned. What would you
think if your neighbors gave you shit because you had curtains on your
windows? That's how I see it.

------
bediger4000
Yes, this is a complete waste of time. Everyone has a moral right to control
what their computer does, and many don't want to download ads. To work on
fighting ad blockers (in the general sense) is arguably an immoral act, and
probably puts you on the slippery slope to spamming, and once you're a
spammer, well, bad breath and bad manners can't be far behind.

I dumped Ad Block Plus when I became aware of the whitelisting of certain
advertisers. I use uBlock and NoScript on some machines, Privacy Badger and
NoScript on others. I also use my home DNS aggregator to block major
advertisers like doubleclick. This is my right and privilege.

~~~
taewookim
So would you pay for information instead? Would you be ok paying $10-20/year
for every site that you block ads on?

~~~
bediger4000
Maybe for a few, krebsonsecurity, probably, Comics Curmudgeon and Washington
Post, possibly. Very few others. I'd have to see. I don't think very many web
sites have anything like content worth even $20/year. And no, I didn't
subscribe to many magazines in the past, but I did subscribe to a newspaper,
until it folded, leaving the other newspaper in town to take a very
conservative editorial swerve.

As it stands, I just don't click on wired.com, forbes.com, wsj.com and
nytimes.com URLs.

