You mean destroy more jobs.

Cheap labor is what we need!

1) Money
2) Money
3) Because you don't own politicians
4) Money

5) The "Ellen fanclub" page in your favorites file gave it the impression.

First of all, there were web pages before the onset of ads. There are still big pages that can exist without ads. Some would perish, but I doubt that something we deem valuable would be unavailable for long. I could currently not think of a single page that I would honestly miss dearly should it perish due to a lack of ad revenue.

Blocking ads is a rather recent development, and mostly due to increasingly obnoxious ads. Of course you had the hardcore anti-ad people who would block ads on principle, who went out of their way to block them, rewriting DNS entries in their servers and even developing their own page-manipulating plugins. But they were few. They existed for a long time and they hardly mattered.

When it started to matter was when "normal" people started reaching for ad blockers, and they would not have done it if ads hadn't evolved into something that is SO obnoxious that people who accept ads in their TV shows. Can you remotely imagine how much you have to piss someone off to go out of his way to find a remedy who is used to having his TV series interrupted every 10 minutes for a 2 minute commercial break? How much you have to piss someone off who puts up with THIS?

But the genie is out of the bottle now. The ad industry slaughtered the goose that lays the golden eggs. People are not going to uninstall their adblockers, even if the ads went back to a saner form.

So... we let the 99% suffer so we can live in luxury?

But hey, I'm an immoral, antisocial anti-ad person, what would I know about fairness?

Well, I've been here the past 10 or so years. And allow me to tell you what made /. so relevant, interesting, insightful and informative. It was not that anything here was "breaking news". C'mon. /. was something like the Reader's Digest of the tech world. That it was devoid of obnoxious ads was certainly a bonus. As was the "old school look". I think we still remember the backlash when you tried to "modernize" it (aka "Beta").

What made this site great was two things: Interesting, thought provoking articles and, even more so, the awesome, insightful comments from various experts in various fields of IT. That was basically what drove /. and what made it an interesting place to stop by and catch up on IT topics. You'd get a quick overview of what's going on, and more important you'd get valuable information from different people who actually know what they're talking about. With a moderation system to boot that managed to keep the quality standard pretty high.

Now, let's take a look at the current "headlines", shall we?

Men's Rights Activists Call For Boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road
Harvard Hit With Racial Bias Complaint
Report: Google To Add 'Buy' Buttons To Mobile Search Results
The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks
How MMO Design Has Improved Bar Trivia
A Look At GTA V PC Performance and Image Quality At 4K
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty In Boston Marathon Bombing
Mechanical 'Clicky' Keyboards Still Have Followers (Video)

News for nerds? Stuff that matters? Really? What I see here is PC bullshit mixed with politics, an opinion piece or two, general news I could get anywhere and stuff of such insignificance that I can only wonder why the FUCK it is on the front page in the first place.

And it's amazing that there's neither astroturfing going on, nor some shamless plug for someone's blog or some new product on there. But I'm pretty sure we'll get plenty thereof again come Fall, it's time for some campaigning!

If you're looking for the reason why /.'s goodwill is in free fall, I think looking at ad blockers might be looking the wrong way. Just saying.

Why guarantee? Just create a law that makes them liable for any damage done by ads they served.

I do. I use adblock. And I do allow ads on a few select pages that earned my trust not only by serving no obnoxious ads but also working with ad servers that make sure their customers are no crooks that try to install crap on your machine.

If they disappoint me, they get back onto the blocked list. And if they perish due to it, I consider this a good thing.

Thank you for your concern, we all had a good laugh. But still I feel you are entitled to a response. And that's all you're entitled to. A response. You're not entitled to our bandwidth, you're not entitled to us reading your spam, you're not entitled to steal our time and most of all, you're not entitled to infecting our computers with malware 'cause you can't be assed to check whether your customers are crooks.

And this is why we use ad blockers.

Advertising is something we have come to accept as the price to pay for what we want to have. We have accepted ads as part of our TV viewing experience. And you may trust us when we tell you that we're not too fond of it. It's something we accepted as a price to pay. Not as an "additional experience" or as "valuable information". It's something we put up with to get what we want. nothing more. Essentially, we see you and your product as the necessary evil we have to accept to get what we want.

Just so you know where we are standing, and where you are.

We're not your partners. I think I don't tell you anything new, since we're essentially your product. You sell us, to your customers. You sell our views, our page impressions, our viewing habits, our "eyes" so to speak.

And products are rarely fully on the side of the entity selling them.

We have come to terms with you and your customers. And we have accepted it, as stated above. And we were also willing to do the same with this new medium here. We do understand that someone has to pay money, and if we want to pay with our time, someone else has to do the money part. We do understand that. And we do actually accept that.

What we do NOT accept is when you do not check whether your customers are crooks, we have to defend ourselves against their attacks. And that means that we have to disallow you to show us ads. Out of self defense.

What we do NOT accept is when you try to get obnoxious. When you slap ads over ads over ads before, while and after we have had any chance to see a tiny bit of what we actually want to see, we will defend ourselves. We allow you to use our eyes on our terms. Overstep your boundaries and be prepared to be shown the door.

We do NOT accept hundreds of megabytes of traffic for obnoxious video/sound ads for a few lines of content that we want. If the price (ads) outweighs the product (content), we will not pay that price.

Bottom line, and tl;dr version (we know, your time is valuable, you only deem ours expendable): You're entitled to nothing. You will get what we let you have. Be thankful and you shall thrive. Try to force more out of us than your due and you shall perish.

Hey, give it time, Rome ain't been built in one single day either. What you have there is three major players of world economy and two who already learned that the only way they can stay propped up is to fall in line. Just wait how things develop when more governments notice that they can either become Italy or Greece.

This is basically the great fear of all fascist systems. So let's be glad that the army we have ain't one where only people who really, really believe in the shit can join... oh wait.

Uh... because James Bond is fiction?

Let's wait 70 years and see.

Oh yeah, swell idea. I never heard that one before, why didn't anyone have this awesome idea before? Just run for office! People will vote for you and ... erh... no. Wait. They won't. Because they don't even know you run for office. So you run an ad campaign and ... erh... well, that works if you're kinda filthy rich. But if you are, why the hell should you run for an office, politics is pretty much working in your favor. But, ya know, you could do it as a hobby. The fate of a country as a rich boy's play toy, why not? And you would change the fate because ... yes, because why exactly? You'd only piss off your other rich friends.

And even if you're a filthy rich guy who could literally throw millions of dollars behind such a campaign without having to throw parties for corporate friends and suck some corporate dick to get a bit of corporate money, you'll still be ignored by TV and other media,

So please, if you ever have any great ideas again, here's what you do: Go to your bed, lie down on your back with your hands folded behind your head and pat yourself for having the greatest idea in the world. It makes you feel good, it doesn't annoy the rest of the world and most of all it doesn't make anyone write you a reply that might make your idea look less great.

Of course not anymore after the sale.