See the history of Reddit. It was manually curated sock puppets before bots were viable, and now that bots are viable, I strongly believe the bulk of comments and posts in the popular subreddits are bots (and many are run by reddit themselves).
I've recently used a ruby script with a bunch of methods that I can configure with a few yaml files to generate a shell script which I can then run.
Each run generates a timestamped folder with not only the bash script, but also a copy of the configs used to generate it, and all the data that the commands in the bash script needs (json files). I find this style of generator a common pattern for commonly used but frequently tweaked scripts.
- I ask for a resource
- you give it to me
- any linked resources (stylesheets, scripts, images etc) are up to me to request
Therefore there is no "ethical" conundrum in blocking ads. The ad industry brought this on themselves by trying to push malware, spam and actively trying to make the web worse.
That paper has a (simplified) model for the economics of free and proprietary software in the same marketplace. It basically shows that the best programmers have incentives to work on free software. It also shows that the price that the proprietary software maker places on the product directly affects the number of programmers working on the free alternative. Very cool paper that I reviewed for an economics course.