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Adblock Plus now sells ads

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Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#311

Post by Goronmon »

beefield wrote: post #232
morgante wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that everyone shares your world view. I'm a happy Adblock Plus user and I like this move. Advertising, in general, does not bother me. I occasionally even find it valuable. Ads on sites like Google and Facebook are perfectly fine by me—I just don't want big, animated ads or (more frequently) broken ones which prevent me from reading content. In fact, I already go out of my way to disable ABP on sites…

> Contrary to what people on HN believe, advertising is not inherently evil. Most people are perfectly fine with ads so long as they're not invasive. I would guess most people have this idea (in most cases illusion) that advertisers are not able to manipulate them. I do not have that illusion, and I do not like people that are manipulating me for their own benefit. I do not know if they are evil, but I think it is fa…

I do not know if they are evil, but I think it is fair for me to try to avoid those kind of people.

This is a fine stance to have, but I don't see how it relates to the context of ad-blockers. It's a simple enough just to not visit websites that display advertisements. Why would you need an adblocker for that?

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#313

Post by Yuioup »

libertymcateer wrote: post #288
Yuioup wrote: post #78

This is extortion, plain and simple. Essentially they're forcing advertisers to funnel all ad content through them. Good thing for uBlock Origin because otherwise they should be indicted to anti-competitive behavior. No, I don't like ads and I run uBlock Origin. I don't work for an advertising company and couldn't care less about ads. But what Adblock Plus is doing here is illegal.

>But what Adblock Plus is doing here is illegal. What law are they violating? I'm a software lawyer. As far as I know, nothing they are doing rises to violation of any law or regulation with regard to this particular move. Is it unethical? Maybe. That doesn't mean it is illegal. It is certainly not coercive - you can freely install or uninstall adblock, and you are free to advertise or not advertise with them. They d…

Ok. I can't edit my original statement. I shouldn't have put it that strongly, I guess.

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#314

Post by Fifer82 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #189
Fifer82 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! I appear to have formed selective blindness from long term exposure which is quite useful! My eye appears to skip over anything considered an ad on most static mediums. I just don't notice them and if I do, my brain appears to discard it.

A lot of people think they can just ignore ads and that ads don't work on them. But there are a lot of very talented and creative people, a ton of research, and a whole industry, really, fighting hard against people's conscious or unconscious attempts to ignore ads, and they can be very effective, even if you don't consciously realize it. There's a lot of research showing that advertisement is effective. The point of…

They don't work on me though. I cannot be sold unless I go looking and then it becomes about quality, and then it becomes about price.

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#315

Post by nsgi »

Thought the point of Acceptable Ads was to force publishers to self-regulate the ads that they publish to provide a better experience for all users and restore the balance of power. By allowing publishers to only provide acceptable ads to Adblock users, this seems to defeat the point.

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#316

Post by godshatter »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #176
jackhack wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust. Performing the exact opposite of the stated and expected purpose of the application, for money, is a violation of trust. There is an implied belief that a product should do what it claims (and its name clearly states a purpose -- ad BLOCK), and the plain English reading of the title makes that pretty clear. Imagine a virus scanner that only blocked those viruses that didn't pay up.

This is a conflict of values between users and the devs. - Users want ads to just go away, period, the end. - The devs want ads to be nice . So they swat down the nasty ones and permit the nice ones. Ransomware was probably the wrong way to do that, but I can see why it was superficially appealing. "We check your ads for niceness, and then permit them. We won't give our effort away for free", being the idea behind it…

As a user, I do want ads to just go away. Since they started some 20-odd years ago, advertisers have abused the medium. If advertisers had had even a smattering of propriety, I wouldn't have been using an ad blocker since I first learned they were a thing.

If advertisers take a sudden "nice" approach, I'll keep blocking ads for another decade or so and see if the trend lasts. That's all I feel I owe them at this point.

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#317

Post by vegabook »

Animats wrote: post #312

Business plan: 1. Tell users you're doing something for them. 2. Get lots of users. 3. Change product to screw them. 4. Profit! This happens too often.

----------> erroneous comment deleted. Original suggested GPL was protection against dual versioning (Open Source/Enterprise) as opposed to permissive licences which enable @animats business model analysis.

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#318

Post by godshatter »

cptskippy wrote: post #162
pythia__ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it unethical? What ethical principle is being violated? (These are not rhetorical questions.)

Blocking Ad is itself unethical. Ads are placed on pages to pay for the content. By blocking ads you are depriving the content creators of compensation for their work. Replacing Ads with other ads is worse because you're not only depriving a content creator of revenue but then profiting off of their work. You could argue that it amounts to theft.

Ads are placed on web pages in the hope that people will click on them and make them money. It's not unethical to instruct my browser not to download them any more than it is unethical to avoid the lady giving out free samples at the grocery store.

If it means we go back to the days where people spent their own money to create pages because they were passionate about a subject, I'm fine with that. I miss that era. It sure beats advertisers thinking they are entitled to know where you go when you browse around the web.

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#319

Post by c22 »

y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #117
Intermernet wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you're coming from, but "open source" does not mean "I can read the source". If that were the definition, then Windows 2000[1] is open source. [1]: https://the.bytecode.club/showthread.php?tid=147

The OSI definition of "open source" is not the only definition. I would argue that most people see "open source" as software where the source is "visible" (no data to back that up). Then you have a gazillion of "Open source licenses", that can be less "free" to more "free", like BSD, GNU, MIT, Apache, the free source license, ...

My definition of open source is software where I can modify the source and use the resulting modified software without unnecessary roadblocks or fear of legal reprisal.

Re: Adblock Plus now sells ads

#320

Post by Grishnakh »

pmoriarty wrote: post #181
chii wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't have the right to their content... if they allow the public to view their content, they cannot dictate how the content is viewed. There's ways to block people from viewing content if ads are blocked - but a lot of sites don't do that, because they deem the traffic more important.

Forbes has started blocking their content if their site detects the use of an ad-blocker. Interestingly, their content is still viewable (though in raw form) when viewing the page source, at least for now, and there are extensions allowing you to view it anyway. The content-blocking / anti-content-blocking arms race has begun.

Yes, but viewing the source or using extra extensions is more work. Is it really worth all that trouble to view Forbes articles?

Here's what I did: when Forbes asked me to disable my ad-blocker, I politely ignored the request. When it demanded that I disable my ad-blocker, and actively prevented me from viewing the articles, I simply went elsewhere. Problem solved: they made it too difficult to see their site while blocking ads, so I stopped going to their site.

Every site which really believes that ad-blocking is "theft" should do the same. But as long as they happily allow me to see the site while blocking ads, I have no problem doing so. I'm merely politely declining to view the ads, just as I politely decline the extra warranty when buying stuff, or I might not bother showing up early enough to see the ads in a theater before a movie, or I don't bother looking at billboards on the highway, or I muted the TV and/or went to the bathroom during commercial breaks back in the days when I watched TV.

If you really want people to look at your ads, you need to enforce that, instead of just whining about it. But if you enforce it, you might drive some people away, but there's nothing you can do about that. You can't have it both ways.

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