[antisthenes]

I started blocking ads personally when I saw the double-click ads.

You guys will know what I'm talking about - random words in text, underlined twice, which if you hover over, will get an obnoxious ad.

Google bought them not long after:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick....

Ads have been obnoxious for at least 15 years already.

[hendersoon]

Much longer than that! The first really user-hostile move was pop-up ads, then pop-UNDER ads, which were just offensively intrusive, so bad that all the browsers stopped them. Then the advertising industry started to innovate, and it became necessary to block everything. I've been blocking ads since the late 90s.

Once they lose you, once you get so pissed off that you go to the trouble to install and configure an adblocker, they NEVER get you back.

They do not understand this, and so they'll simply push more people to adblockers. Maybe Chrome's manifest v3 won't suffice, so people will move to Firefox or Brave to do it. Either way, Google loses.