adjl posted... I mean, viewing an ad-supported website while blocking the ads does constitute availing yourself of a service without paying the requested price for that service. In that sense, it's absolutely an example of piracy.
On the other hand, though, community websites profit from people actively using them whether they view ads or not (since that activity draws other viewers who won't necessarily block ads), social media platforms make most of their money selling your information anyway, and in many cases ads are so deliberately intrusive, obnoxious, and even outright dangerous that I'm convinced advertisers want people to block them. The actual harm is even more debatable than with formal piracy, and the fact that ads are so overtly hostile to users that the FBI officially recommends that everyone block them for security reasons means I'm not too concerned about that potential harm. If a physical store had a display of items out front that were for sale, but - by design - paying for them meant walking through a 20-foot hallway lined of clowns tickling you and honking their noses the entire time, I'd be inclined to steal a few things just to register a protest of their tickle-clown policy.
Is that basically the same philosophy as the "piracy is a customer service problem"? Adblock is a user experience problem?
Makes sense, really. Every once in a while I'll get ads that trigger my AV software until adblock updates to block those ads again.