Call it well-developed banner blindness. Too well-developed, I&#x27;d say, as I caught myself at times (and ended up in an IRC flamewar once because of it) missing pieces of content because they looked too much like ads. It&#x27;s amazing how your brain can learn to filter out the noise before it reaches conscious level. I also don&#x27;t care that much about security implications other than malware. All that combined with me a) generally not visiting mainstream sites, and b) being too lazy to install a new extension meant that I managed to run without ad blocker for a few years.<p>Ultimately it was YouTube ads that play before videos that were the last straw; I sometimes run YT as music source and I got too pissed off about having to listen to 30 seconds of unskippable advertising in order to get to 120 - 240-seconds long video. Mostly it&#x27;s mood-breaking.