111–120 of 211 posts
Is BlockBear a good solution on iOS? I switched to iOS from Android because they were the only ones making a good, small-ish phone (on Android, I'd just use Firefox and uBlock Origin), but I had no idea what ad blocker to pick. What I have kinda works, but I do still see ads sometimes, and the app seems kinda skeevy. Would be happy to try something else if it is recommended.
> It's important to note that blocking ads is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea, which is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy. This is something I've never actually focused on but it's wild the amount of people I've installed AdBlock and ublock for who think it's something nefarious.
Practically, of course, it’s a different story.
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Visiting sites consume resources. If you walk into a store and take a gift card you're still consuming resources meant to be paid for, even if they're mostly digital resources. Regardless of the car or shoes you used to do it. I don't welcome a world of paid products that also include ads. Yet ads do make some paid products cheaper, like say a Kindle or a TV. Folks blocking ads from a premium product probably have a…
A false equivalency. Websites want to entice you to visit, stores do not want to entice you to steal gift cards. As for whether you can make blocking ads an ethical imperative, I'd agree that without ads, there likely wouldn't be an incentive to provide helpful, free services. If anything, it's theft of the value that other ad-consenting visitors are providing.
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Visiting sites consume resources. If you walk into a store and take a gift card you're still consuming resources meant to be paid for, even if they're mostly digital resources. Regardless of the car or shoes you used to do it. I don't welcome a world of paid products that also include ads. Yet ads do make some paid products cheaper, like say a Kindle or a TV. Folks blocking ads from a premium product probably have a…
This is an interesting, yet bewildering take. Do you work for Unity by chance? Most stores will gladly have you enter their store at a cost, the hardest and most expensive part of the process is getting you there.
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Is it also unethical to not read the ads in a newspaper? Or to not watch the commercials on TV?
If it was automated and you still consumed the other resources (paid largely or entirely by ad impressions) then that case could be made.
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Visiting sites consume resources. If you walk into a store and take a gift card you're still consuming resources meant to be paid for, even if they're mostly digital resources. Regardless of the car or shoes you used to do it. I don't welcome a world of paid products that also include ads. Yet ads do make some paid products cheaper, like say a Kindle or a TV. Folks blocking ads from a premium product probably have a…
I think a more fitting analogy would be walking into a store to sit down and cool off with no intent of buying anything. You are "taking" passive resources (air conditioning, space, potentially employee attention). Would you consider that to be unethical? Personally, I don't believe ad blocking is unethical because I don't believe the ways in which advertisers collect and sell their data is ethical.
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… Absolutely yes? Governments are amoral entities, and this particular relationship is based entirely on power (pay us or else), not mutual respect or any of the other things that characterize human social relationships. If we must anthropomorphize them anyways, then they have paid back in taxes many times more than they were given to start. Any such "implicit" debt was long since paid, so they could move with a clea…
Not to take this conversation too far off track, but the reverse argument could just as easily be made. Companies are amoral entities, existing only to deliver whatever value their owners wish to extract. Governments, meanwhile, are just the manifestation of the will of the people who live in a place. Even currency itself is just a creation of the people by way of the government; no business has any particular right…
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If it was automated and you still consumed the other resources (paid largely or entirely by ad impressions) then that case could be made.
Why does it matter whether it's automatic?
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Kind of fascinating that their biggest cost is site moderation! This seems... odd for a site whose main mechanic really isn't social networking.
There is all kinds of player bad behavior that needs to be manually verified - cheating is the obvious one, but there's also smurfing, excessive sandbagging, clock abuse (e.g. letting your clock tick down to zero in a loss, just to be annoying).
EDIT: I ask because I was once accused of smurfing (I'm only a casual player) in the chat during the endgame.
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I get where you're coming from. The free content is possible because of the advertisements, and you are sort of consenting to the ads when you choose to visit the site. It's not an explicit agreement but it is at least an understanding of what lets the wheels keep turning. However, when ads are so obtrusive that they slow down my computer or ruin the use of the site completely, or if they have malware payloads (does…
To consume the content without even considering ads makes it unethical.