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.

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.

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

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.