I've never used an ad blocker. I accept that today's web largely depends on advertising, so it feels like the right thing to do. I also think that using an ad blocker is like wanting to attend a concert, deciding the price is too high, and sneaking in anyway. It feels like stealing.
That said, I don't like ads any more than anyone else does. I rarely click on them, and I avoid sites that overdo them.
It makes me sad that the web is in a death spiral. The more people use ad blockers, the more intrusive ads need to be for the remainder of us who don't, which further encourages the self-interested to use ad blockers. The only ways I see to end the death spiral are to successfully reset the ad-vs-ad-blocker dynamic (which I suppose Google is trying to do with this move), or for another revenue model to take hold. I don't think either will happen. It's too bad, because I grew up with the web, and I don't want it to die.
The ad industry has no one to blame but themselves for entering an aggressive tragedy-of-the-commons scenario. I installed an ad blocker after seeing one too many websites with auto-playing audio ads. Of course, this blocker then went on to block everything. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bunch, but I'm not going to shed any tears for an industry that has so utterly failed to police its own.
This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.
It's an arms race, and the users are the losers. Either they disable the ad blockers, and their browsing experience is filled with so much junk you can't find the content within it, or they enable the ad blockers and lose content.
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