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I just sent a LinkedIn email (yeah, spammy horrendous-ness all of its own, but I digress) to Malcolm CasSelle, the CTO of Tronc, the owner of the Chicago Tribune. This is the contents. _________________ I'm [kefka], a systems engineer. I regularly read Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com . A user linked to a story on your property, ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206294 ) which goes to ( http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-ghost-shar... ). It's the response that your website gives me when I try to go to said link: " Advertising revenue helps support our journalism To read today's stories, please turn off your ad blocker or subscribe" I get that your company needs to make money, which I greatly understand and get. However, asking me to quit my adblocker or otherwise disable it is unconscionable. Advertisement servers have been one of root ways drive-by attacks are dome on users, combined with Javascript attack ads that end up with millions hacked. Forbes themselves, with a day of implementing the same Adblock-shaming techniques ended up being the site that infected 3 million with DDOS clients. I am not against subscriptions, or static advertisements. You have to make money as well. But there's ways to run effective advertisements without alienating users. But, if a program demanded you to disable your antivirus, would you? (That's the kind of situation I'm at). Sincerely,
[Kefka] |
I hope this isn't a copy-paste of what you actually wrote.