That's an ethical question that I've weighed a decent bit. I don't use ad blockers personally, as ads are truly the reason most of the internet is free. If ads are too intrusive, I will 'vote with my clicks' and avoid that particular website in the future.

There are privacy concerns with this, of course, but DuckDuckGo and modern Safari (with cross-site tracking prevention) helps mitigate a bit of it.

I felt the same way once, especially when Google first came onto the scene with their plain text unintrusive ads. After the 90's, they truly were a breath of fresh air. They weren't intrusive at all and for the first time were often even relevant. If memory serves I even bought at least one item from a text ad on Google sometime around 2005 or 6.

What's happening today couldn't be more dramatically different. Tracking your activities around the entire Internet, then using your own computing resources to auction them off to the highest bidder for every new page you view.

I don't have a solution to the ethical conundrum. But accepting this kind of thing cannot be it.

"If ads are too intrusive, I will 'vote with my clicks' and avoid that particular website in the future."

They'll never even notice, and in the meantime you're at risk of all sorts of trackers, malware etc. Plus...you're seeing adverts all the time. I used chrome on android the other day and I couldn't believe how many there were, or how annoying. If you're not clicking on them it means nothing anyway, as far as I can tell. I remember back in the day sites saying "click on the ads - it helps us" but I don't think that's a thing any more. Perhaps I should knock up a script to visit random sites with ads and maybe click on a few, in a container/vm. Would that help?

> Perhaps I should knock up a script to visit random sites with ads and maybe click on a few, in a container/vm. Would that help?

Don't worry, there's enough publisher-side fraud already doing that for you!

I used to use one, but ceased.

Once I started using "request policy", then eventually uMatrix, I found I no longer needed to use an ad blocker.

Especially if one browses with javascript disabled.

I occasionally do occasionally see ads, but now they tend to be non intrusive, and for sites I frequently read, can be avoided w/o the use of a blocker (and the regex engines they tend to depend upon).