I would agree if ads were the only sustainable way to fund content on the internet. They're not. Direct fractional funding should be the universally accepted scheme and until companies figure that out, adblock all the way!

Web ads are a security risk that even the FBI has acknowledged, so your friends should be aware that having uBlock Origin installed is nearly as important as having virus protection.

Never change a running System.

"Let others suffer with ads so I can have a cost-free browsing experience"

I'd much rather pay to support platforms that enrich my browsing experience, than continue allowing the ad-fuelled, spyware ridden, clickbait filled internet to continue even one more day.

Ad blockers for all, until we don't need them anymore!

they fuel the internet

no they don't

they fuel shitty companies

Ad blocker is a terrible misnomer. Go to ublock's github and read the README. Ublock's primary purpose is to protect your right to privacy. Blocking ads is a consequence.

That given, your question could be reframed as "I don't have spyware and my friends do. Should I tell them how to protect themselves at the risk of being spied on again?" An ethical dilemma where only a coward makes the wrong choice.

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn’t be what it is today.

Indeed, because of relying on ad revenue, journalism has given way to sensationalist click bait factories, and interesting or unique content is drowned out by invasive and manipulative commercial interests in search results .

If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web,

Sounds pretty good to me.

Donationware >>> Adware

Yeah no. Ad blockers for everyone. Death to the corpo web. Death to youtube and all other ad driven platforms.

I believe my digital person is a part of me. Anyone collecting and owning any part of my person with intent to manipulate me in any way, is stealing a part of my person. I call that digital slavery.

The third pillar of democracy, as we all learned in early primary school, is freedom of information through a free press. The Press, does not mean corporate media owned by a few shitty billionaires. It means freedom of information. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers, Google's and Microsoft's. It doesn't matter where you search the web, the query is going through one of these two crawlers directly or through the third party API. This is like if a hundred years ago, all newspapers were sold by one of two companies. The worst part is that, at the present, search results are not deterministic. If we both search for the exact same thing, the results will be different. This is a soft coup on the third pillar of democracy.

Ad block users are already the minority.

Adblockers are a must have for protecting against mailware and phishing attacks. Google and other ad services have proven to be incompetent in protecting their service against those kind of attacks targeting users.

You should be ashamed when your life is so worthless that you can waste it watching ads.

This must be reduced to one word, to spread fast, like other topics have simp, cuck and coomer.

I'm old enough to have seen the Internet without ads. It was better.

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn’t be what it is today.

The corporate web wouldn't be what it is today, the internet would be fine. This is an important distinction to make. The internet is run by a bunch of nerds going to "internet peering conventions" and paying for BGP cross-connects in data centers. They would be fine, because ad-blockers don't hurt them.

The corporate web, on the other hand, would die. I'm very okay with that. In fact, I see that as a feature, not a bug. I hate the corporate web, and I think the world would be better without facebook and google creating monopolies on communication. But either way, if the only way technology can survive is ads (and it's not the only way), then let it die.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It’s not like they know what they’re missing.

lolno. We should be doing everything we can to protect ourselves and those around us from malware, surveillance capitalism, and predatory advertising. Even if you don't care about other people, herd immunity to malware and surveillance capitalism are very real things. It's a lot harder to get infected by malware on an immunized network, and it's a lot harder for facebook to surveil you (remember shadow profiles?) when nobody around you is having their every step tracked.

Consider why those people don't even know about extensions or ad-blocking. The web was built to be extensible, but ad companies (google) have done everything they can to keep people from realizing they can just change websites however they want, including blocking ads. People aren't ignorant about privacy because they want to be, they're ignorant because a lot of money and manipulation has gone into keeping them unaware and unempowered.

Solidarity and support are the only real weapons we have in the war against surveillance and malvertising. If not for those around you, then at least do it for the sake of your own privacy.

Everything is already headed to a point of being paywalled, I wouldn't say there's any reason to not spread the word and let more people know.

The FBI also encourages the use of them.

Yeah the internet wouldn't be what it is today: complete shit.