Reddit community is going to ban sites where ad blockers are blocked

After all, to prohibit prohibitions is not prohibited?

Activists of / r / technology / took the initiative to automatically ban in this subdidit of all sites that require visitors to disable the ad blocker. The initiative received strong support from the Reddit audience.

This ban is necessary not only for convenient work on the Internet, but also for security. For example, a recent Forbes magazine site forced visitors to disable ad blocking, and then shipped malware onto their PCs.

Together with blockers of ad blockers, it is proposed to ban sites like the Wall Street Journal, which close the content of the article after the “limit of articles read per month” has been exhausted. The restriction is easily managed by removing cookies or faking a referrer (Google’s access to the Wall Street Journal is always allowed for text indexing), but Reddit regards the fact of such restrictions as disrespecting readers and restricting freedom of information, which should be punished.

Reddit is a notable source of traffic for some media sites, so the introduction of a “black list” of the media will be a signal for them.

Activists offer everyone to express their thoughts: whether it is necessary to develop such a black list. In advance, you need to define clear criteria for banned sites, establish rules for supporting and moderating the list. You should probably create a feedback mechanism so that users can report on new sites that are starting to use the unsightly practice of blocking blockers.

By the way, the example of the DuckDuckGo search engine shows that you can make money without a forced display of ads. If anyone knows, DuckDuckGo recently announced the distribution of grants of $ 225,000 for nine Open Source projects, including Tor, Freenet, SecureDrop, OpenBSD Foundation, Cryptech, and GPGMail.

Nearly a quarter of a million dollars is a considerable amount that DuckDuckGo has allocated from its own earnings earned on advertising. So, DuckDuckGo not only does not prohibit the use of blockers, but even offers each user to turn off the display of ads in the site settings.