i mean if not targeted, how is it any more brainwashing than arguments online?

or maybe i’m just biased against being affected by it because i’ve got a really frugal family culture

but to the website’s wallet

i agree; you’re making copies: not displacing any original inventory

could you elaborate on the verge?

the analogue there would be clicking on the ad. google ads, probably the most popular single platform, has two kinds of ad payment: per-click and per-impression. by just receiving it and throwing it away you get rid of the former, but by blocking ads you get rid of both. (there’s also the fact that most people do not block ads, while most people do throw away junk mail)

and if everyone throws away junk mail, there’s still money, because the post office got paid to deliver it. same goes for not blocking ads but not looking at them.

curiously, the only time i’ve ever gotten infected (besides wannacry) was through a torrent

these are as rare as non-tracking ads, and my approaches of<1. i don’t use my web browser much on mobile (that distance probably fries my eyes anyways) 2. i use µBO and whitelist sites on my normal computer>probably help me avoid that anyways

most people don’t block ads not because they think that it harms someone but because they don’t know that it’s possible.

I agree.

not paying attention to ads is very different from blocking the ads

to watch BBC, not mute ads, no?

i also like to smell armpits

post office gets paid either way, website doesn’t. you’re describing looking away from the website’s ads while your ad-blocker’s off.

I believe that advertising without trackers is ethical.

no, and neither is looking away from internet ads. blocking on the other hand stops the ad company from paying

i’d say the other comments disagree

to be fair, the most popular ad platforms like google ads use trackers, so it is something to consider. but i do agree that this kind of lumping is bad since this thinking hurts ethical ad platforms too.

so is DRM.

money isn’t what cult members want when they volunteer to evangelize. that’s different from webmasters and ads.

i don’t like the idea of excluding people who don’t have the means to pay from service (“monetize it as a business”), and when i was young i had to avoid paid services. many online creations that got popular like wavetro’s animations and modrinth simply couldn’t keep up with costs by just donations.

i value social contracts over law, and especially for small websites, when their advertising is unintrusive i think i should help them survive and keep running. a ton of major things i use like great independent news sources and some hosters of pirated content use ads while i don’t have a membership.

by analogy, maybe piracy doesn’t reduce indie devs’ revenues that much as it provides word-of-mouth. but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay for them.

i’m not asking you to accept harassment, i’m not saying piracy is bad. i’m just saying that ad-blocking is one form of piracy, just like how people pirate to reject DRM. and it surprises me that so many people insist it’s not.

i don’t understand why i would host a solicitor or how that is comparable to ads. when you see a solicitor you don’t pay them bread and jam, their company does. when you see an ad you don’t pay the website money, the ad company does.