> no one is owed the viability of a business model

I'd like to emphasize this. Somehow there is a sense of entitlement. Many businesses got where they are today by driving competition out of business, preventing new entrants in their market, and/or 'disrupting' entire industries.

Exactly.

They (the media companies that took ads too far and ruined the experience for us) did this to themselves. Ad blockers would have never proliferated, had the web not come to a state where 25% of web requests were ads and tracking requests.

I'm reminded of the ads that had audio. These were the worst!

Imagine an adblocker that blocks what we know are the worst. Then, implement an upvote/downvote overlay system to the ads and if downvoted, dynamically remove them from the page and future requests on a per user basis. The votes are tallied and if beyond a certain threshold, global block. Then, sell this information back to the advertisement agencies.

I wish they were a thing of the past. I don't always use an ad blocker, and I was surprised by having a video advertisement start playing automatically, broadcasting “Don’t take painful sex lying down!” to the entire room, and continuing with information about vaginal tearing.

This was on the New York Times website, of all places.

Autoplaying videos. They are the worst. Especially of you have metered internet, which a sizable population does.

They're annoying even if they're legitimate, like CNN having an auto-play video (even on mobile) at the top of every news article.

I use firefox, so I disabled them all using media.autoplay.enabled = false. That solved it, but it made Youtube embeds and a few other things work a little funny.

The very incentive of web advertising has incentivized creation of massive knowledge content and created platforms to do so, for example Stackoverflow. To totally disregard it will be a bad decision and it would eventually drive everyone to pay per view/create way.

> it would eventually drive everyone to ...

... a new business model. I have no problem with that.

But I have a problem with that. I don't want to live in a walled garden.

Then you are free to subject yourself to ads. If I don't feel I owe these companies a successful business model, then I certainly don't feel I owe you successful companies using that model.

And I am. I am rooting for the existing, the new and unknown who are adding value to the internet and who are helping give voices to many in the world.

And I don't want to shop at {Insert Store Here}.

If other people's patronage is required to keep your favorite store open, that is none of their concern.

I disagree. The will to push the programming industry forward is what created SO. Web advertising is what created all the sites that scrap and repackage content from SO.

This is an arms race, not a dilemma.

"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it." -- John Gilmore

The advertisers will just inline the ads, changing content sites from redirectors to proxies.

Rock, paper, scissors.

That in itself is a win, as it relieves the user from third party trackers. It also raises the barrier to integration, potentially causing ad-including web developers to pay a little more attention to the hell they are foisting on their users.

Well, the majority of users are pro status-quo. Most people want their content (their facebook, youtube, and links stemming from) to be free in cost, and are ignorant/unconcerned about tracking.

The ethical dilemma I see is whether users should have tracking disabled by default. These users do subsidize much of the content on the internet; is it wrong to leave them be.