[toastercat]

I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.

There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).

If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.

[ndriscoll]

> There is an unwritten social contract here.

There isn't and never was. Adware and spyware have always been flavors of malware. Some people thought they could use that as a business model. It was pretty much immediately met with people blocking it and providing software to remove it. Some people have tried hiding botnet command and control functions in software they give out as a business model or putting crypto miners on web pages. That also doesn't form a social contract. That makes them malware authors.

[roscas]

I understand this. I do disable the uBlock Origin on few selected sites.

But this topic has grown more than I could imagine. Ads are a jungle. We do need to change this. Make this companies behave and not exploit people.