[billwilliams]

More importantly, no big publishers / ad networks really care about adblock. A vocal minority use it and think their convenience is socially progressive. The only people feeling the burn are niche sites that happen to have a core demographic which overlaps with adblocker users. Big companies don't care, and the second they do - they'll just block people from using their service who have adblock until its disabled.

[billwilliams]

And as long as we're all whining in one direction or the other, the average U.S. citizen still watches more than 25 hours of tv per week. So we're all just yelling into the ether of the tech-haves for the next 20 years while that number slowly drops.

[billwilliams]

To continue said yelling, a point that I haven't noticed mentioned on here yet - since when do consumers get to decide how much they pay for a service? Or how? If I want to sell you x for y - we don't live in a society where you get to decide what y is, or how to pay it. I think capitalism is dumb - therefore I won't pay in money but I will pay in labor I do for you. And you have no choice in the matter. I will take your hamburger and be in your house at 8am sharp. I will rake your leaves. Your yard will be the envy of the whole neighborhood. This is my anarchism. I will inflict it upon you, you cursed content publisher.

[billwilliams]

I like how much heat this topic on the hacker news. I wonder if its extra touchy given how much "hacker" culture overall developed with online advertising - the big tech successes often depending on sweet sweet ad money. Everybody likes react, hadoop, chrome, mozilla etc, but the truth is that a huge proportion of development on the web was due to ads. And this feels ugly to people. Hackers like to believe their beautiful meritocracy was independent of the advertising bureaucracy. The privileges of the tech elite were made by ads, but now that we're all here in this beautiful (and fully deserved) technological enlightenment, we think we're somehow above it.