I've seen that Brignull piece before! Some of those examples are so damn infuriating.

The problem is, they work.

That's what I realized a while ago. The tricks work. Ads work. And I hate them for that. I see them mostly as passive conditioning, slowly occupying my mind with materialistic products that I never asked for. Screw the Joneses, I'm tired of keeping up with them.

But on the other hand, so many great content creators and websites live off ads that it would be foolish to abolish them. I just can't fathom that this is the best money making model we have. There is a problem with your business model if you have to resort to dirty tricks like these to get people to respond. Maybe they're just poorly managed, but I think it is more likely that there is something structurally wrong.

The only way to fix this issue is to (1) make them not work as well or (2) shame them excessively until it's in bad taste to have these lightboxes.

I hope that someone will create an extension similar to Adblock to get rid of them. It's either that, or waiting for someone to screw their site up so badly that it will have a large impact. Maybe if Wikipedia slips up or something.