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Reddit Suggests Blocking Ad Blocker-blockers

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Sites like Forbes and Wired could soon be blocked from Reddit.


JUST LET ME VIEW THE CONTENT SO I CAN DECIDE IF I EVEN THINK YOUR ADS MIGHT BE OF INTEREST.

Go ahead!
On the 9th of May a Reddit moderator posted the following announcement in the site’s technology section:

It has come to our attention that many websites such as Forbes and Wired are now requiring users to disable ad blockers to view content. Because Forbes requires users to do this and has then served malware to them we see this as a security risk to you our community. There are also sites such as Wall Street Journal that have implemented pay-walls which we were are also considering banning.

From there the discussion is lively, yet mostly sober, and the consensus from 7500 commenters (as of May 10th) is that Reddit should go ahead and ban such sites, but maintain an open list that gives the reasons why the sites are banned.

What’s going on?
The battle between ad-blockers and advertisers (or rather: sites that display advertising) has long been one of the most fiercely fought on the internet.

It’s the utopians versus the capitalist realists (or so it might seem at first sight). It’s a battle over the nature of the web itself.

On the one hand browsers give users the option of turning off ads, on the other most of the content that people like to watch and read is made available precisely because of ads.

What seems to have tipped the scale this time, against sites like Forbes and Wired, is the way in which the ad-blocker blockers have been reported to disrespect the basic agreement of ads, by going behind the backs of users and adding malware and even accessing people’s contact lists.

For Reddit this is seen as a security risk to its community.

A serious warning
What Reddit has chosen to do is issue a serious warning to ad-blocker blockers: You need to change your ways.

And Reddit has clout. The kind of clout Wired once used to have. In other words: The Reddit technology community has become the place where internet mavericks come to tell the corporate world where the lines are currently drawn.

And this is a fundamental one: openness.

By not openly telling users what was entailed in installing the ad-blocker blockers, Wired and Forbes has broken what amounts to an axiom of the free and open web.

Your enemy is perhaps your best ally
Executives at Wired and Forbes should be combing the relevant comment thread at Reddit and will perhaps discover that their ”enemy” is most likely also their best ally. Just look at what user ‘entropy2421’ suggests will solve the whole problem:

I’d be happy to respond to a pop-up after I’d read the article [asking] me if I’d like to view the relevant ads that their algorithm had determined I’d be interested in. Hell, I’d consent to tracking if it improved the ads they served me and I was given a chance to read the content first. Doubly hella true, I’d probably even surf my way through as many ads as they thought relevant. Just let me view the content so I can decide if I even think your ads might be of interest.


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