A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers • Hacker News Board

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#21

Post by barbs » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:57 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #14

Does anybody remember the internet in the early 90s? Before it started getting rammed full of ads and get quick rich startup schemes? It was kind of awesome, kind of a mess. People just put up whatever personal scratch they wanted to itch paid the then outrageous hosting fees ($20/mo for 1MB of space!) and the world was good. My point is that these days, it seems like providing the same experience for most people, in…

Surprised you haven't heard of neocities, sounds a lot like a modern version of what you're talking about :).

Neocities is a community of 42,200 sites that are bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We provide free hosting and tools that allow anyone to make a web site. Only your imagination is required.

https://neocities.org/

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#22

Post by motbob » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:57 AM UTC

I am not sure that the "morality" argument re: adblock has anything to do with the "ad industry and its supporters." Rather, people generally speak in terms of the needs of websites who host ads and the harm done to them by adblocking. For the argument expressed here to have weight, we would have to go one step further and say that since websites who advertise necessarily dealt with the evil ad industry in hosting ads, they do not deserve the benefit of a moral argument now.

I am not prepared to view my favorite sites as evil because they attempted to exist.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#23

Post by infamouscow » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:57 AM UTC

edias wrote: post #5

DodgyEggplant wrote: post #2

On a broad scale, we have moved from a culture of ads as info, to ads that push you to buy whatever the factory produces. This huge supply and false demand for things we don't really need has a huge impact of consumption culture, personal distress - an ongoing feeling that you always lack something, ecological waste and people wasting their hard earned dollars on things they don't really need. God bless ad blockers.

But its the content creators being punished, not the ad companies. If anything ad blockers are in their interest since the type of person who blocks ads is probably the type of person to ignore them anyway.

That is a weak argument. You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable. People will compensate you for it because they know it will go away if they don't. Take the No Agenda Show[1] for example, they have no advertising. Two podcasters make a living creating six hours of original content every week and are solely supported by their listeners.

[1] http://www.noagendashow.com/

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#24

Post by SwellJoe » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:57 AM UTC

I finally installed an ad blocker a couple of years back, after two decades of browsing without. It had become too much for me to cope with. The popups that took advantage of me clicking to focus on their page to get past my popup blocker, the ads with sound that didn't start muted, the overlay ads that blocked out the whole page until acknowledged, etc. This doesn't even begin to address the privacy concerns. I spent too much time being angry at nameless faceless advertisers and the asshole coders who serve them.

I never liked advertising, but I usually liked the sites I was visiting and wanted to support them, so I didn't kill the ads. Even now, I let a small number of sites serve me ads, if they have shown themselves to be responsible and respectful of my attention. reddit is one of the very few, for example, because they almost never serve a really obnoxious ad.

And, of course, I have never heeded the alligator tears of the online marketing industry (or any other marketing industry...physical junk mail producers can rot in hell). I respect the desire of websites to support their business. But, I'm not obligated to accept the method by which they want to do it, if it includes behavior that I consider unethical or just annoying.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#25

Post by click170 » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:58 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #9

Could not agree more. And it doesn't just cover display ads, but marketing emails and social media posts too. All equally odious. An entire industry predicated on the idea of getting me to pay for something I don't want, and using my bandwidth to do it. Every advertiser tries to justify it, too. "We only send emails to people who want them" or other such tripe. Nobody wants to be part of a sales funnel. If the produc…

What gets under my skin is the perception that they have this "right to be seen".

Where 'being seen' means robbing me of my attention for a moment to try to sell me something I likely don't want, and every company and their dog is lining up around the block to be seen.

This author has nailed it: "The ad industry has spent years cultivating a 'fuck you' attitude where they would do everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them. To now suddenly be concerned about the 'morality' of what other people do is the height of hypocrisy."

When Ad companies start respecting my wishes, I'll consider respecting theirs.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#26

Post by dsjoerg » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:58 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #6

I envision a future where the default mode is silence, and all advertising is opt-in. If I need to buy a t-shirt, I press a button that temporarily subscribes me to a "channel" of advertisements from t-shirt brands, along with whatever relevant preferences I decide to filter the ads by. In other words, I give companies explicit permission to advertise to me. Once I buy a t-shirt and fulfill the need, I unsubscribe fr…

You're sort of describing Google Search, with its ads on the side. Neat

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#27

Post by pudquick » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:58 AM UTC

People are publishing content on the internet without putting it behind a login/password/restricted access.

Not only are they publishing it, they're announcing its presence on social media, performing "search engine optimizations", and cross-promoting it on other non-web technologies (radio, tv, printed media, etc.).

... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you will look at the ads being shown here".

I also haven't agreed to such things for cable tv or radio - but guess what? I don't generally consume those media products, in large part because the formats are linear and full of "unskippable" ads.

Nothing is stopping the web from moving to this format. There are many sites out there that present an interstitial of some sort before moving onto the main content. And every time I end up on one of those sites, if my ad blocker isn't dealing with it somehow, I generally remember and avoid visiting the next time.

If you want me to pay for the web content that you're publishing because that's the business model you've decided on, be up front and attempt to get a paid agreement from me. Or deal with the fact that I'm part of the audience that doesn't look at the ads in print media, mutes or skips channels on TV, and installs ad blockers for the web.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#28

Post by jotux » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:58 AM UTC

>The ad industry has spent years cultivating a 'fuck you' attitude where they would do everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them. To now suddenly be concerned about the 'morality' of what other people do is the height of hypocrisy. The ad industry has lived by the sword of 'technical capabilities are all that matters' (to the detriment of basically everyone else on the Internet), so it's only fair that they may now die on that sword, like it or not.

"They were mean in the past so we can be mean to them now," is not really a valid argument.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#29

Post by derekp7 » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:59 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #6

I envision a future where the default mode is silence, and all advertising is opt-in. If I need to buy a t-shirt, I press a button that temporarily subscribes me to a "channel" of advertisements from t-shirt brands, along with whatever relevant preferences I decide to filter the ads by. In other words, I give companies explicit permission to advertise to me. Once I buy a t-shirt and fulfill the need, I unsubscribe fr…

I wonder how effective the ads were in Computer Shopper back in the day, vs other advertising? People bought that magazine almost strictly for the advertising in it, very similar to your model.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#30

Post by meritt » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 3:59 AM UTC

Ad blocking software, until it comes default in a browser, actually helps the industry. The sort of people who run the software are also the same people that ignore ads anyway. By removing yourself from their audience profile, they are able to decrease CPMs/CPVs for their advertisers, since they aren't wasting impressions on you.