Also, wow, the web has a ton of ads. I've been running uBlock origin so long I forgot how bad it had gotten :(
Try turning it off. I got rid of ublock after arstechnica complained about a lot of their users blocking ads years ago and it honestly isn't that bad. Every once in a while I do back out of a page for maxing out one of my cpu cores but otherwise, nothing ever bad happens. With ads: either it takes me half a second to tell I'm not interested in an ad, or I actually am interested and i follow the ad because I am interested and I want to support the website.
The alternative is websites charging insane amounts of money with paywalls (Wall street journal has their "best" price for 12 months at $360 a year). That is horrible because it means only rich people can pay for high quality news as ads are one of the most progressive forms of payment (rich people ads are way more valuable than poor peoples and yet everyone gets the same quality services/news with the ad model despite their income/net worth).
But they really want to track me. And I'm not having that. The moment they stop tracking their users through third party ad networks, most adblockers stop blocking (because there's no AI involved and they wouldn't know what to block except images in general).
It's in their hands, really. If they want to show me ads they can do it in a normal and decent manner.
News websites should in fact be the first to adapt this model, because it's exactly the same thing as ads in print media. But they chose to get those disgusting third party tracking networks involved. And not just one or two.
I don't have to put up with that, but I really don't see why there would be an action required on my site to stop blocking those tracking ads.
Adblock Plus has the ability to not block ads that conform to a certain standard, but in addition to conform to standards ad publishers need to pay for that. At least that's what they claim.
Not my standard. Ad blockers should be rebranded as "tracking blockers" so everyone calls them that. Then sites would have to ask you to "disable your tracking blocker", which sounds scary as hell to users, as it should.