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The Pirate Bay is counting down

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Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#91

Post by officemonkey »

MattConfluence wrote: post #79
jumpwah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think adblockers are immoral? Genuine question, not trying to stand on some moral high ground, just curious of your opinion, is all.

Kant's categorical imperative: > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. If everyone blocked ads the websites that rely on ad revenue would lose money and have to shut down. Sure, if only some of the users block ads they can probably survive, but someone had to see the ads. How do I justify that I get to block ads while others don't? That said, w…

>websites that rely on ad revenue would lose money and have to shut down.

I'm okay with a world like that.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#92

Post by TeMPOraL »

sysk wrote: post #73
jumpwah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think adblockers are immoral? Genuine question, not trying to stand on some moral high ground, just curious of your opinion, is all.

This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

> For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

Honestly? In my long time of adblock-free browsing I've noticed an interesting correlation - the more ads there are on a page and the crappier they get, the less trustworthy and useful the site itself is. Moreover, heavily advertised products tend to be crap designed to extract money from you by luring you into a suboptimal choice. Ads are a good proxy for both crappiness of the product and of the site that shows them. From what I see, if AdBlock kills anything, it kills sites that have no business being on the Internet in the first place, because they waste people's time.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#93

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #87
sysk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

So ironic to be talking about freeloading off a site that exists to freeload off content creators.

[deleted]

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#94

Post by _asummers »

aktau wrote: post #44
expose wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get with the times: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh...

I can heartily recommend µBlock as well, it's low on resource usage (much lower than abp) and blocks nearly everything. I do tend to combine it with ghostery/disconnect to be extra sure (not that ghostery is developed by an ads firm, though they say their opt-out options is legit).

Check µMatrix, too. Same guy who made µBlock, I believe.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#95

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #92
sysk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

> For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service. Honestly? In my long time of adblock-free browsing I've noticed an interesting correlation - the more ads there are on a page and the crappier they get, the less trustworthy and useful the site itself is. Moreover, heavily advertised products tend to be crap designed to extract money from you by luring you into a suboptimal choice. Ads are a good proxy fo…

So people who don't or can't charge money for their services don't deserve to earn a living?

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#96

Post by foobarqux »

sysk wrote: post #73
jumpwah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think adblockers are immoral? Genuine question, not trying to stand on some moral high ground, just curious of your opinion, is all.

This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

People who don't buy advertised products are freeloading off those who do.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#97

Post by TeMPOraL »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #95
TeMPOraL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service. Honestly? In my long time of adblock-free browsing I've noticed an interesting correlation - the more ads there are on a page and the crappier they get, the less trustworthy and useful the site itself is. Moreover, heavily advertised products tend to be crap designed to extract money from you by luring you into a suboptimal choice. Ads are a good proxy fo…

So people who don't or can't charge money for their services don't deserve to earn a living?

Of course they do. Where did I suggest they don't?

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#98

Post by amelius »

chimeracoder wrote: post #85
MattConfluence wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kant's categorical imperative: > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. If everyone blocked ads the websites that rely on ad revenue would lose money and have to shut down. Sure, if only some of the users block ads they can probably survive, but someone had to see the ads. How do I justify that I get to block ads while others don't? That said, w…

> Kant's categorical imperative: > > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. For what it's worth (and perhaps you intended it this way), this is a somewhat shallow application of the categorical imperative. There are other ways to justify using AdBlock (and in fact, condemn not using AdBlock) by means of the categorical imperative. For example: "…

I knew nothing about Kant's imperative before I read this, still I thought almost exactly the same thing.

I say it's a good thing we can vote with our adblockers.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#99

Post by Dylan16807 »

laumars wrote: post #58
laumars wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that was a joke or not, but this problem has already been solved in CSS (@font-face). Though the downside to that would be that they'd then have the issue of hosting copyrighted content (ie the typeface).

Why on earth was that voted down? It wasn't rude, spam, nor factually inaccurate. I'm getting quite fed up with people who abuse their negative karma privileges. I mean, at least justify your peer moderation with a follow up comment when the reason for the penalty is as ambiguous as it is in this instance. I excepect I'll just get down voted again though, for daring to have a rant about people who do "hit and run" do…

Because it was wrong.

It's not a penalty, it's just a downvote. Penalty would be flagging.

Honestly sometimes I wish people had to justify upvotes...

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#100

Post by idlewan »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #95
TeMPOraL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service. Honestly? In my long time of adblock-free browsing I've noticed an interesting correlation - the more ads there are on a page and the crappier they get, the less trustworthy and useful the site itself is. Moreover, heavily advertised products tend to be crap designed to extract money from you by luring you into a suboptimal choice. Ads are a good proxy fo…

So people who don't or can't charge money for their services don't deserve to earn a living?

They can earn a living in other ways. Some examples:

- having a day job (this obviously means they won't have as much time to put in the site, I know)

- Service As a Software Substitute (this doesn't work for sites that just display information)

- subscription/premium model (for press sites like Arstechnica, it seems like an alternative)

- donations (this usually doesn't scale up to a salary, but can sometimes cover hosting and more)

- sponsoring

Most of the content is by people who make it available for free: blogs (a good part of the links on HN), forums and community sites (HN itself, StackOverflow, Reddit, ...), non-press sites (personal sites, project site, etc). An overwhelming majority of those don't rely on advertising to exist.

It might be hard to have a "service" that's massively used and that you can host and make available for free (i.e. no ads), but I bet it's not impossible (especially if you can upsell something else. See GitHub, Travis, DropBox).

I'd argue that a libre p2p service is more useful to have (e.g. http://tox.im) than a centralized, "gratis but ad-supported" centralized service like TPB.

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