[PhasmaFelis]

> The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors

No, I'm not, because I'm using ABP's vetted ad provider list. This risk of getting malware from one of those is greater than zero, but a whole lot less than the risk I accept by using the internet at all. I might get struck by lightning too, but I don't waste a lot of time worrying about it.

> and helping companies compete on ads rather than the quality of their products.

I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous.

> Maybe you don't care about your own attention or data security, but your actions don't just affect you.

Once again, you are trying to turn your personal software preference into a moral issue. My actions re:AdBlock affect you or anyone else exactly as much as my choice of desktop wallpaper.

[imagist]

> I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous.

If you choose to participate in harmful systems, you are in fact partially to blame for the harm done by those systems, and simply staying that I don't get to blame you for our doesn't change that.

Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in fact I think removing ads would make capitalism drastically more likely to yield the positive results capitalism purportedly yields.

[Fnoord]

> Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in fact I think removing ads would make capitalism drastically more likely to yield the positive results capitalism purportedly yields.

Indeed. Ask yourself the following question: say a user is not interested in advertisements. Is it therefore not a waste of the advertiser's time and/or money to force the ads upon this user?