Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The real reason it's good is because adblock enables people to steal from websites without "paying", it is effectively theft. No browsers should have adblock and marketplaces should ban adblock.

See: people who use uBlock on YouTube and refuse to buy YouTube premium.



"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


My computer will do whatever I wish with the content that is sent to it, including removing ads, it is not stealing.


Oh please. There is no "stealing" or "theft" of any kind going on here. What's happening is your server sent us a free web page and we deleted parts of it. We can rip out and trash the ads from magazines and newspapers too.

If you don't like that, then don't send people free web pages when they make HTTP requests. Make your web server return 402 Payment Required instead. If you send us free stuff with garbage included, don't blame us for deleting the garbage.

Every browser should have uBlock Origin. It should be literally built into the browser in fact, only conflicts of interest prevent that.


Not really, stop lying to yourself.

Somebody has to pay the compute bill and ads are mechanism to get some €€ back.

I do use ad blockers cuz a lot of sites are too ads heavy, but at least im not making up some ideology that im not ripping somebody off.

Be genuine and honest with yourself


>Somebody has to pay the compute bill and ads are mechanism to get some €€ back.

From the parent comment: "If you don't like that, then don't send people free web pages when they make HTTP requests. Make your web server return 402 Payment Required instead"


Because what? It isnt the only solution and has *significant cons*.

If you prefer radical / extreme approaches, then do it with your content


I refuse to pay for YouTube Premium primarily due to their forced bundling of YouTube Music.


That kind of just makes sense though. YouTube has music on it, giving you access to the UI that plays it a bit nicer than the regular YouTube frontend doesn’t cost them extra.


I would expect the licensing situation to be very different for music than for normal YouTube uploads. YouTube sometimes[0][1] offers "YouTube Premium Lite" in some countries, which doesn't include YouTube Music. This heavily suggests the music licensing adds cost. Unfortunately, it's not available where I live (New Zealand), looks to still have banner ads (easily deal with by an ad blocker, but still kind of insulting to have banner ads on a paid product), and doesn't even include background play on non-music videos (not that it actually matters in my case, since I only watch on my Mac).

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1d0d1sg/premium_li...


>I refuse to pay for YouTube Premium primarily due to their forced bundling of YouTube Music.

I'm the opposite, I get youtube premium as a side effect of paying for youtube music.


Why? So you can keep your job? Screw big tech


Please don't take HN thread further into flamewar hell. We're trying to avoid that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.

When I access a site I’m downloading some markup. I’m free to render that markup in any way I desire. It’s my machine. My software. My experience. Nothing else should be able to dictate that to me.

Ads are harmful. They are used to spy on and build profiles of people across the internet, gaining knowledge along the way that is intrusive, without consent from who it’s spying on.

Sites are free to make money off their content. There are ways besides ads. Paywalls, subscriptions, donations, etc.

Point is, they can make money in ways that doesn’t require telling their users how to do things on their own computers and doesn’t involve forcing malware and spyware onto their users. Nothing is being stolen. The html document was delivered on the public web internet with no restrictions. It was even delivered with the code to run ads. It was given to the world. How the world renders that document cannot somehow change that into a theft.


> Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.

ublock has always worked for YouTube ads, until the very recent crusade against adblocking.


> Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.

Either you are misinformed, or you are flatout lying. I literally just tried it on Firefox with uBlock and after 10 videos, received 0 ads. See here for more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1etvawp/youtu... A simple Google Search of "does ublock origin block YouTube ads" disproves you.


Maybe something on my end is broken but I’ve ran ublock origin for years and never once has it stopped any preroll or mid roll ad on Yt. Weird.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: