Do you use adblock? Why? Why not?

Of course. And I'll continue to do so as long as advertisement is detrimental to my online experience. If it wastes my time by forcing me to watch an ad before a video, if it distracts me from reading a text because of animations, if it tries to scam or shock me, I'm better off blocking it. I'm not against advertisement as communication that a useful product or service exists, I'm against advertisement abuse and greed.

I'll happily pay for, donate to, or otherwise support services important to me that need and deserve it.

The internet is an usuable hellhole without uBlock Origin. I don't give two shits if creators are losing money. All you're 'creating' for me is annoyance with those invasive autoplaying video abombinations.

If you, as a creator, choose to use advertising to monetize your content you don't respect the limited lifetime of the people consuming your content or their security or about the way the marketing and advertising industry is destroying our society, such as (not exhaustive, just off the top of my head right now)

• building a surveillance economy, destroying privacy in the process
• manipulating people into voting in certain ways that are harmful to them and others
• protecting harmful products from scrutiny (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, products with too much sugar or fat or low quality ingredients, the car and oil industries, corporate climate change denial,...)
• encouraging overconsumption both in terms of quantity and in terms of items or services they don't really need
• destroying content platforms with their mantra "not advertiser friendly", leading to dystopian self-censorship on e.g. Youtube

And then there is the way internet advertising can spread malware and compromise the security of websites in general.

If you do want to monetize content in other ways there are models such as subscriptions or Patreon-style that are a lot more respectful of the user.

As the de facto IT guy for my family, I block ads on all their computers just as a basic safety measure.

I can usually spot a fake download button and avoid scammy sites, but my parents and grandparents seem magnetically attracted to them

Adblockers are absolutely necessary because ads are a malware threat, never mind the scams and invasive popups. The cReAtOrS didn't care enough to ensure advertisements were safe, legitimate, or not horribly obnoxious so they did it to themselves.

I used to allow ads for certain sites but after malware attempts and scam ads, I block them across the board. If that upsets anybody, go whine to the shady advertises who made this a necessity to browse the web safely.

If you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank

If you put ads on your website, you don't care about users point blank.

yes :) if i like something, i will pay for it. as opposed to giving google 97% of the creator’s ad revenue

Well if I want to support creators, I would rather give them my money directly either by buying their merch or any payment plarform.

Nowadays ads are so intrusive. Also the way ads are delivered by knowing what I prefer is capitalistic at its finest. Not everything that I search are something I want to buy.

I do, I hate fucking ads.

Yes. I'm happy to pay for the creators I care about, but advertising industry is rotten to the core.

If you use adblock, you don't care about creator's point blank

This sounds a lot like not tipping being a bad thing.

Ads and tipping denigrate my daily experience. So I'm not going to suffer either.

Blocking ads is also just more secure as it's a vector for so many exploits.

In conclusion, I don't agree with them at all.

"If you don't pledge fealty to your feudal Lord, you don't care about the artists for which he is patron."

I don't care about creators who demand that I surrender my privacy as the only valid show of support for them.

I use it because I feel like ad's are forced on me at every turn in my life. Its not just the internet, but everywhere I go IRL. Bilboards on every road and highway. I actually think billboards should be illegal everywhere as they are an eyesore. Ad's at the gas pump when I'm filling up. Restaurants I go to with signs for unrelated businesses. At the store when the radio is playing. The radio is it's own mess. I have no idea how people listen to 3 songs an hour with no option to skip a song you don't like.

Counter point: Any creator blindly putting random ad networks on their site doesn't care about their users. Every ad should be vetted and served by the creator, those kinda ads are impossible to mass-block. If an ad swindles a user, it should be the creators reputation thats at stake.

I stopped having a bad conscience for blocking when one blog who begged promised to not autoplay any audio. The very next day it of course showed a very loud ad, and the creator excused it with "he didn't have any control over what the advertisement network showed".

I use AdBlock (and SponsorBlock on YouTube, and a cookie whitelist and a JavaScript whitelist) because only I decide what to see on my screen.

I stopped caring about the ethics of ad—blocking, I got sick of seeing scams, gambling ads, and shitty mobile games, crappy services that no one actually benefits from, and malware. I have ZERO tolerance for these sorts of ads. If an app has ads, I immediately uninstall it; if a website blocks adblockers, I stop using it.

The type of ads I might be willing to accept would be contextual ads (rather than personalised ones), and they should be individually vetted by either the content creators, or their community. If I visit a Linux forum, stuff like Linode or Tuxedo Computers would be effective, if I visit a Kendo forum, ads for shinai and other kendo supplies make sense, since we are the target audience, and there is no need to violate people's privacy for this ad model. These ads would need to be non-intrusive, and not take too much space as well, and not over content, and certainly not staying on the screen as I am scrolling.

This is why when watching YouTube videos, I block ads, but I don't block sponsors.

I have been with this idea for a very long time. But over time all the platforms got more and more greedy and I had the feeling that my privacy got more and more invaded.

Since that time, I have an Adblock and use DDG.

Sorry content creators.

yes, because no ads basically means my antivirus software has nothing to do. Creators have no choice over what ads are served up with the content and 99% of ads are loaded with malware whether you click on them or not.

Creators need to come up with better ways to monetise their content instead of relying on them.

It’s a bummer that blocking ads prevents some creators from getting money, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.

I don’t mind sponsored segments in videos and podcasts. However, the ads on YouTube and on many websites are invasive and annoying. That’s why I block them, and I won’t be turning it off.

No creator is worth catching some dodgy-ass computer std from someone's drive-by ad.

If someone wants me to read their site, they won't have it overloaded with intrusive ads, hammer me with popups, and plant tracking cookies in my browser.

If they do have all that stuff? I'll still read their site, but they aren't gonna make any money off me doing it.

If I don't block ads, then I'm stealing from the advertiser who's paying per impression to someone who isn't interested in their crap.

If the ad makes noise, moves around the screen, crashes my browser, or otherwise actively interferes with my ability to obtain the information I was looking for, It'll leave me with such a negative impression that I won't buy anything from that brand, now or ever -- or from the creator who allowed them to break an otherwise good website.

So really, by blocking ads, I'm defending the good reputation of both creators and their sponsors.

• I don't like getting bombarded with ads.
• It hides scam ads.
• If the creator of something makes something I like I prefer to directly donate to them instead of giving up my privacy, and letting a company like google profit of it, and then they only give a small portion to the creator.

The story of internet ads is a classic greed to ruins fable. People put up with static picture and text ads for a very long time, and many, myself included, still don't mind them. In fact, self-hosting picture and text ads is almost guaranteed to get through adblockers.

But then the ads started moving. They started playing sound. They started executing code and phoning home to third party servers and collecting user data without consent. They started consuming more system resources than the webpage itself. Malware started being distributed through it, and there was even a recent breakthrough of ad cryptominers, because, again, they literally execute arbitrary code on your computer!

At this point our trust in ads are irreversibly broken. We will never tolerate ads again like we did when they hadn't done all this, even if they promises to clean up their act. Adblock was developed as not just something to remove unsightly ads, but also, and I do not exaggerate when I say this, as a line of defense for the security and usability of your computer. It's like an antivirus, but it kicks in before the virus even reaches your computer! For this reason, I think adblockers are not only okay to have, but essentially a mandatory item for browsing today's internet. If you want revenue in spite of that, maybe set up a tip jar and/or go back to self-hosted text and picture ads, I'm not disabling adblock and opening myself to harm because, no offense, I genuinely do not trust you.

I used to on my phone, but then i started using foss apps and disabling JavaScript, so i never see ads unless sponsors are in a yt vid i watch

I'm not a hardcore capitalist. Also i can't watch all the ads the corporations would like to feed me every day. So i'm fine with using an adblocker. Don't give stuff out for free on the internet if you don't like this. But since you ask: I really don't like that strategy to commercialize everything, to finance everything by selling ads and user data...

I own my computer, and I control what is displayed on it. I can do anything I want to control what is and isn't on my screen. It is not my problem if the majority of content is reliant on an ineffective monetization method.

I do wish someone would make an ad block that faked impressions. But it would probably lose the advantages of fast load times, security etc.

Yes. I don't give a shit if it's immoral.

I use adblock because it makes the internet usable. There's just so much crap shoved in your face these days. Not just ads that are blocked, but sponsored search results and SEO crap that you have to use your time and energy to filter out. I don't know how anybody actually buys stuff or responds to internet ads. I'm more and more on the Dead Internet Theory bandwagon.

I'd say that ads don't care about creators.

We should be paying creators for content and that's not what ads do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5ri-KktNs

I do everything under the sun pretty much. Ublock origin, NoScript, chameleon extensions on Librewolf (and others). I “subscribe” to YouTube channels via rss feeds. Open up the newsboat feed reader from my terminal and an extension called “Alter” redirects me to an invidious instance. NoScript blocks everything pretty much as I just need the url. Then I use yt-dlp with the sponsorblock flag.

I only visit YouTube when I have a bunch of new “subs” that I found through word of mouth (reading blogs, HN, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc). I could just use invidious rss feeds, but if the instance goes down I would have to start all over again. There are other ways of achieving this same effect, but this is how I choose to consume yt now.

Yes, because most sites are completely unreadable without it. I also don't want to be loading megabytes of garbage with all the ads, trackers, and whatever other shit people stick on commercial websites nowadays.