Whenever I'm on a new machine I get a momentary glimpse of what an ungodly mess the Web is without adblockers. I'd love to know what percentage of web users employ an adblocker, I suppose as that number increases the remaining users can expect to see an increase in both the volume and visibility (and arguably obnoxiousness) of the ads.

This doesn't stop SEO promotion. However I can't say DDG hasn't occasionally ranked some submarine results higher.

I don’t. I don’t pirate software either^. They are not the same thing, but in both instances sometimes you will negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line. So I don’t do either.

Edit: to clarify. I don’t think any less of any one for doing whatever or me being better than any one.

^there are exceptions. I’m sure if I needed to use Photoshop for a day I’d do something akin to pirating. In this case I don’t think it’s a big deal with Adobe being worth $300B.

> negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line

We are talking about Google here. How is blocking ads from Google "impacting the little guys's bottom line"?

The posts were about blocking ads en mass. Not about blocking Google specifically. It would be incredibly rare for some one to get ublock or something similar and only block multi billion dollar companies.

It's the smaller ad networks and obscure sites that are more likely to have malware sneak into the ads, though, so it's safer to block everything.

Sure. I could have similar or different but nonetheless reasons for software and apps. Maybe somehow getting around a SaaS app. Or for other circumstances like finding random people on the web to split a substack or Stratchery subscription with (the latter happened on Twitter and people were not pleased).

The reason doesn’t change my point. The smaller person is hurt by any of these actions when done to their thing - ad blocking, piracy, workarounds, etc.

I don't use adblockers because I need to see the web as the 'users' see it. When I do use a blocker I always forget to turn it off to do troubleshooting. Eventually I left it off... I'll proxy or incognito or whatever when it need to.