21–30 of 93 posts
Why is there no opt-in ad blocker? "eff these guys i'm blocking their ads." Or like if your resources go over some threshold they get blocked? I want to punish bad actors, not all.
If you don't think you have an ethical obligation to read your spam emails, then you also don't have one to view advertisements.
Also, nobody should be able to force you to run their code. The publisher's rights end where your computer begins.
The whole current conversation about this is weird. Why are people acting like ad blockers are new when iOS, a mobile platform with a small market share, stops banning them and gets back in line with everyone else?
Similarly how this "dilemma" is again rehashed because Mozilla made a content blocker. Not that about 10 others sprung out since September where the content blocking support was introduced.
"Whomever you think is to blame for the sorry state of Web browsing, content blockers have a kind of ratcheting effect: Once you turn one on, chances are you won't see the kind of high-quality ads that might convince you to turn it off again. It also involves the risk that you'll miss whatever advertisers or publishers come up with to make the Web better again.", said no one ever.
There is no ethical dilemma on the user side. No web user guarantees making any particular request, and no one is owed the viability of a business model. The ethics of defending the descent of the ad system into such destructive behavior is an interesting discussion, perhaps.
They (the media companies that took ads too far and ruined the experience for us) did this to themselves. Ad blockers would have never proliferated, had the web not come to a state where 25% of web requests were ads and tracking requests.
> Mozilla’s newest app perfectly captures the ethical dilemma of blocking
> the parts of the web that slow down your Internet, spy on your online
> activities and generally make Web-surfing a tedious experience.
In the end, I want to know about things that would interest me (and which I'd like to pay for), and those selling those things want me to know about them too. If we do it right, it's in both our interests.
The problem is that it's also in the interest of the guy selling to show me things I'm not interested in. But if an ad service targets me sufficiently well, filtering out the nonsense, my life is actually better than otherwise.
It's time to move to a new model and stop trying to cling onto the past by calling users of such tools unethical.