You don't know if a site contains ads until you visit it, and by then, they've already passed off your information to their Ad network partners and exposed you to the risk of Ad network malware.

The safe thing to do is to block Ads by default. And only disable them when they've shown that they're not just letting mass third party Ad networks embed arbitrary script in their page whilst harvesting your private information.

The safe/private thing to do is not visit any website at all. Ads don't have special access to your computer that a normal website does not. By visiting a new website, ads are by far the least of your worries.

Being online at all exposes you to risk and creates a footprint of your existence. Much like moving around in public does. And just as in moving around in public, the safest and most private thing to do is to not be in public at all.

You're ignoring opportunity costs, even in your meatworld analogy. There's real dangers to staying at home all the time, from social isolation to diseases of inactivity. Similarly, without using the web and visiting new sites, you're missing out on a lot of opportunity to communicate, learn, and yes, buy things. It may well be a lot less safe to avoid those things in the longer term.

Personally I block ads because I value my attention higher than advertisers value it. There is always an adversarial function built into ads; the advertising wants your attention, if nothing else, while I am interested in maintaining my focus. For similar reasons, I disable auto-suggest in Google search, animated gifs in the browser, and I use flashblock in all browsers that support it.

Anything continuously animated on the page whatsoever - no matter whether it's an ad, a subscription div popup, a "read next article" popup link, or a sharing toolbar - I block them all with element hiding helpers.

Because the greatest risk to me in browsing a random site is getting distracted and sucked down some rabbit hole. I use all the tools at my disposal to eliminate visual distraction.

You're right, there's risk in any action. The solution is to accept the risk, not to harm others while trying to protect yourself.

By blocking adverts, you're harming the people who make the things you like, in direct proportion to how much you like their content. The more you visit their site, the more load you make them pay for without giving anything in return.

If you're okay with harming others to keep yourself safe, and harming your ability to consume additional content from the people you want to consume content from, then fine. Continue to block ads. But know you're part of the problem, and are being selfish.

Ads don't have special access but because of their deployment across many different sites they get to track a much broader amount of your web activity than any individual site which in turn makes them a bigger privacy threat.

I don't block ads but I do use NoScript which means I rarely see them. It is increasingly common for pages to load scripts from dozens of different providers and those sites I generally turn away from.

Privacy threat? Because they want to serve you content you actually like? No, I don't think you know what a privacy threat actually is, then.

If you want to hobble around the web like it's 1995, that's your business. If you want access to content that's paid for by adverts, however, you need to be counted. That's the only way that content will be produced at all. You're not only harming the content producer, you're also harming yourself by lowering the number of interesting things in this world.

Well then. I suppose you are also opposed to

* pop-up blocking

* cookie blocking

* readability

..all of which are common browser features now. Because you can just not visit bad sites.

Yeah, didn't think so.

The only relevant thing you've mentioned in your list is pop-up blocking, which is a subset of advertising (cookie blocking doesn't prevent impression and click tracking, and Readability has nothing to do with ad blocking, as the most common use case for Readability is after you've visited a page already).

Blocking one form of advert is not even slightly the same as blocking all forms of adverts.

There is an implicit social contract created when a content distributor attempts to monetize the content - you can only obtain the content if you go through the monetization strategy. Sometimes that's a price on the content, other times that's an advert.

Circumventing the monetization strategy is a statement that you believe you're entitled to the content without paying for it. Almost universally, you're not, and this entitlement complex is pervasive through Internet users. TV shows, movies, music, software, anything that's been given artificial scarcity is a target for this entitlement attitude.

For some content, this attitude doesn't hurt the content producer enough to be meaningful, or the content producer has adapted. This is almost universally the most valuable and previously established content producers. Your large game studios, your record labels, etc. For other content producers, however, those who aren't as well established, the harm is more severe. The independent web comic, the unsigned band, the budding writer, the local newspaper. These people suffer because Internet users think they deserve the content these people create without providing compensation, and subsequently, less content gets made, talent can't be developed, gifted individuals can't specialize, and the world is a less beautiful place.

So sure, we can continue to use ad blockers, but at what cost? It's not hurting U2, and it's not hurting J.K. Rowling, but it's hurting other people, people who feel the kinds of pain a 1.5% vs. a 2.5% CTR might bring.

> Blocking one form of advert is not even slightly the same as blocking all forms of adverts.

Well good, then you just misunderstood me. I'm asking for an animated HTML5 ad blocker to parallel a Flash blocker (or pop-up blocker, etc.) Not something that blocks all ads.

Although you didn't state it specifically, presumably you're ok with pop-up blockers. And therefore accept that it is ok for consumers to override the choices of bad web site designers in some cases, not merely choose to never visit the site again. Flash blockers did the same thing. Cookie blockers and readability are relevant for the same reasons. Consumers have a vote on how the web should be designed, too.

> Consumers have a vote on how the web should be designed, too.

Exactly the wrong-headed sense of entitlement I'm talking about. No, you absolutely do not get a say, whatsoever. You either get the product through the monetization scheme set up by the content owner, or you get no content at all.

Your foot stamping and insistence that people shouldnt have any control over site content does not infact change the technical reality that they do, being as its their client on their machine displaying what they tell it to.

Its better to just accept this fact and work with it than attempt to boil the ocean.

one might also ask about what kind of entitlement an attitude like yours is bringing to the table.

I guess the mindset comes from TV/Radio land where content is just dished up, and there is only one way to consume it, or you can stop consuming it.

It's probably more an issue of, we are in a difficult situation where some businesses don't know how to monetize outside of advertising (like google). And if everyone could block them, you'd effectively destroy businesses like that.

But on the flip side, the advert business model have gotten everyone used to 'free'. If google started selling "Search packs" where you get 100 searchs for $20, I don't think people would go for it.

This has nothing to do with radio or TV, this is simply trying to keep the lights on. How is a web service like imgur going to keep doing what it does without adverts?

It's a practical problem as much as a moral one. Content producers need to pay the bills somehow, and ads can be an effective way of doing that, if people don't try to circumvent them.

This isn't about what you can do, this is about what you should do, and what damage you cause the content producer and yourself when you decide you're entitled to something without paying for it.

You're the one with a sense of entitlement. If you want to go down that road, you should only put your sites in pay per view locked-down kiosks, or something similar that enforces your perspective.

Um. I get the content however I want. It's my computer.

If you send me some data. I can choose to view or ignore any of it. You have absolutely no stance to make me acknowledge all of it, or any of it.

If I asked for some data from your server and you sent it, you sent it. But I don't have to read all of it. Even the bits that make you money.

Further, some people choose (or more likely didn't know they had a choice) to make you money, if you want their money, in aggregate their wishes are something you are interested in. At no point does entitlement enter into this.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I sent my data with the social contract that you'd also look at my monetization technique.

By breaking that contract, you're preventing me from producing more content, content you apparently want. You're actually hurting yourself, from a practical standpoint, as well as causing harm to me.

A social contract? I have never acknowledge such a system, or heard of such a system. Are you referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Contract

seems unrelated.

Advertisements have a measurable cost on me. I have limited focus, losing it is expensive to me. I've seen advertisements change the thinking and perception of my peers, and it scares the crap out of me. I am all for uplifting the community through my actions, but this cost is too great. I have an extreme distrust of advertisments anyway, I never click on them (except by accident, which was frequently btw, until I started blocking them), so even If I acknowledge them, I'm still not making you money.

and finally, this is just a side note which I think only applies to me, most content I consume only has advertisements introduced by the gatekeepers (or I pay for it). Youtube, blip, et al. I'd rather the producers just use distributed systems, but we can't always get what we want.

If the cost is too high, don't pay for it, but don't take the content as well. That's theft.

And I mean social contract as in a contract you agree to by simply being part of society that stands above law. Don't kill people, don't steal things, that kind of thing. Things you do and are therefore allowed to be part of society.

Society allows me to be a part of it because it has no objections to my behaviour. I actively tell the people around me I block ads. Therefore, if your social contract did exist, I would not be in breach of it.

Morals are subjective, the people that surround me believe there is nothing wrong with my actions, if your only standing point is that it's "morally wrong" then you have failed to convince me.

That, of course, is not your only point. You also believe that without the advertisements the content I enjoy wouldn't be produced. This argument has some grounds. The only problem is how actively degenerate ads are. I can outright improve almost all media just by removing them.

Let's say the "nightmare scenario" happens, and almost everyone blocks ads with ad block. Ad Block is running an initiative of acceptable ads. Ads that arn't decietful, distracting, or annoying (which, in my opinion, is a far more morally abhorrent act). So if everyone started using ad block. The world would actually get measurably better. Not worse.

The product server throws bits at you, and your software displays them however it's setup. It's not an entitlement issue, it's how you let any browser/server/thing consume bits sent by any server (instead of, say, requiring some sort of specific viewer).

I used to put blank paper on ads when reading printed magazines because ads distract me. What am I supposed to with web sites? Literally cover the screen with paper?

So...... you're for or against pop-up blockers?

You've turned a technical question into a moral one. Don't do that.

Why not?

One is answerable with fact. The other is unanswerable with anything but subjective opinion, and inevitably drags the ensuing thread into pointless back-and-forth over, in this case, particularly well-trodden ground.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should.

And here we go over the well-trodden ground yet again. "Should" according to who? You? See the problem there? It's perfectly possible for other people to have equally valid moral positions as you while taking a different stance on this specific question.

Trying to dictate morality never ends well. Especially in cases like this, where the specific tech is not only possible, but also has unarguably legitimate uses, and is therefore pretty much inevitable. You just end up tilting at windmills, and the ensuing hot air back and forth just creates pointless noise, generally adding little to the discussion.

Readability is in Safari, so many (many) millions of users. There are extensions for basically everything, bookmarklets for everything else, and many news-reading applications use the same scripts to render their 'text' views.

And popup / cookie blocking has been standard (not just common!) for a while, so I assume you didn't mean that.

I've been using Evernote Clearly for a while, which is easily the best extension for this in Chrome.

http://evernote.com/clearly/

I don't think that's completely fair. The people who are providing the content on a lot of web pages are not the same people who are responsible for the monetization scheme. Some sites have good/decent content, but really obtrusive advertisements that the authors aren't responsible for.

The people providing the content are still being supported by the monetization scheme - you're taking money from them when you use their content without viewing their ads.

No. Those people are exposing us to mass cross-site tracking before we even get to see their content, without our permission, and without most people even knowing it's happening.

Visiting a site is giving that site permission to run whatever it wants in your browser/on your computer.

The only winning move is to not visit a site.

"Visiting a site is giving that site permission to run whatever it wants in your browser/on your computer."

No, it really isn't.

Way to add to the discussion.

"Visiting a site is giving that site permission to run whatever it wants in your browser/on your computer."

Unless you configure your browser otherwise. Which is what I'm recommending people do.

IIRC running a program meant to delete the users computer on your website would likely get you in a bit of trouble.

So what? 99 times out of 100, the people monetizing the site are also the ones who pay the bills.

You aren't entitled to content just because it's good.

and you arnt entitled to my personal information and browsing history just because i clicked a link.

...yes, I am?