31–40 of 93 posts
Sure, I have no ethics because I want to control what my computer executes and display.
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.
Exactly. 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.
Imagine an adblocker that blocks what we know are the worst. Then, implement an upvote/downvote overlay system to the ads and if downvoted, dynamically remove them from the page and future requests on a per user basis. The votes are tallied and if beyond a certain threshold, global block. Then, sell this information back to the advertisement agencies.
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.
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.
That being said, Opera had a proper pop-up blocker and didn't implement every junk feature from javascript (prevent closing windows, change clipboard, ...). Disabling js (on per site basis) was two clicks away as well.
With Chrome, you can't really use it without ad blocker. One bad site and you end up with dozens of new windows, unclosable tabs, ... So the browser itself is yet another reason why people turn to ad blocking.
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.
I'd like to emphasize this. Somehow there is a sense of entitlement. Many businesses got where they are today by driving competition out of business, preventing new entrants in their market, and/or 'disrupting' entire industries.
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.
The ethical dilemma I see is whether users should have tracking disabled by default. These users do subsidize much of the content on the internet; is it wrong to leave them be.
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.
The very incentive of web advertising has incentivized creation of massive knowledge content and created platforms to do so, for example Stackoverflow. To totally disregard it will be a bad decision and it would eventually drive everyone to pay per view/create way.
... a new business model. I have no problem with that.
These are ads paid for by corporations that regularly screw people with the "sorry, I have shareholders to answer to" line.
I have my life to answer to, and it is limited. I owe zero to your cdn.
It's so frustrating seeing people talk about ad blocking as some ethical issue. If your revenue model depends on the honor system (that a user will load what you send them) then it's inherently flawed and will eventually founder. It's time to move to a new model and stop trying to cling onto the past by calling users of such tools unethical.
How often do you hear your family talk about the ethical implications about ad blocking? What I mean is, how often do people with no dog in the fight talk about ad blocking ethics? For me, never. Of course websites that depend on advertising dollars are going to complain about the public blocking their advertising dollars.