I really wish people would stop calling them adblockers too, they’re wide-spectrum content blockers, and they’re not blocking ads, they’re blocking malicious ad-networks which is necessary for user security. Given the prevalence of online spyware it should be a basic feature built in to all web browsers.
It just gives spyware-promoting sites the ability to say “but you’re hurting our revenue” which is a completely separate issue.
I really think that’s a separate issue, which needs to be discussed as a completely separated issue. I agree ads by their nature are manipulative, they serve the website and the advertiser not the user. I think that once ads are non user-tracking then we can have a discussion about advertising ethics and deceptive advertising (online ads have always been terrible even before they were privacy invading) but you can’t have that discussion when it’s mixed in with privacy issues. Only once you take away the privacy issues then we can have the conversation about ad-pollution versus website revenue.