Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 227 posts

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

#141

Post by unholiness »

There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.

Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.

I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.

I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak.

.

TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen.

[1] https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts

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

#142

Post by mirimir »

zaroth wrote: post #111

My personal opinion is if the site wants to make it a requirement to view the ads, they can write the front-end and back-end code to enforce that. Not requesting a particular asset over the network is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized access. Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case agains…

"Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case against anyone who tried it."

Do you have a cite for that?

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

#143

Post by trimbo »

comex wrote: post #122
trimbo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today Then how come, every time I pay for content, that content still has ads? The paywalled newspaper sites I frequent do this. Or, notice how they do this in every movie theater in America now -- you can't sit there in peace before a movie. Instead, before the trailers start, you're subjected to a barrage of loud ads. Even on th…

Thankfully, progress is not purely monotonic towards ads. In the old days, you either watched TV shows on air with commercials (except on HBO) or... waited for the entire season to come out on DVD or something. Or pirated them, once that became technically feasible. Now, Netflix, iTunes, and friends will sell you most shows ad-free, and this has become my only method of watching TV since it is such a better experienc…

> Thankfully, progress is not purely monotonic towards ads

You bring up good points, but thinking about this particular line more, I wonder if it really is heading that way.

Anywhere you find exclusivity for content provides the opportunity to put in an ad. You can be as customer-hostile as you like and get away with it because there's nowhere else to go. I put up with the March Madness app because I have no alternative -- I must watch that content there.

So if we're headed towards many players of exclusive content, why wouldn't a Netflix or HBO pull the same cash grab once their subscriber growth goes flat? Hey, I probably would if I was in charge over there.

Another example just from today: I saw an ad before an Amazon Instant video. Granted, it was for an Amazon product, but Amazon built an ad system of some sort to deliver it. Curious they made that.

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

#144

Post by _yosefk »

RodericDay wrote: post #8

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the wo…

"Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours."

That's an interesting conception of one's natural rights in a public space, given that basically nothing in a public space "gives you choice whether you see it or not" by the definition of "public space." The following does not sound different in principle from the quote:

"Any member of the opposite sex (who with their looks implies you're not sexy enough and all the fun is elsewhere blah blah BLAH) who gives you no choice whether you see them or not is yours. They're yours to take, 're-arrange and re-use'."

I honestly don't see a difference except in degree (and hence in jail time I'd prefer to see resulting from actions based on each of the attitudes, roughly 15 days and 15 years, respectively.)

There's a big difference between blocking ads on my machine and spraying ads in a public space. The latter is a small-time prank of course and nothing close to a serious crime, but the philosophical basis for it cited above couldn't be more off IMO.

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

#145

Post by itistoday2 »

ahaltindis wrote: post #133
itistoday2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. People's reluctance to pay and their aversion to advertising is, I think, understandable and reasonable. It is just a quirk of the time period that we find ourselves in that there is any "moral" dilemma attached to this situation. The reason people perceive it as a moral situation is because we've established a society in w…

> Our welfare system is not yet currently capable of providing people with the basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, clean water, healthcare, education, and equal access to opportunities. Even if the welfare system was capable of giving these, people would want more. We can examine this by looking current people model. Their desire to earn more is not decreasing when they reach the minimum or optimum level of n…

> I think the problem is life standards that emphasized to us by ads.

Heh, if that's true, that's another reason for folks to use adblockers. ;)

> So, I don't believe giving more to people solves anything.

When it comes to solving problems, the evidence is rather strong. Giving people more food, shelter, medicine, health care, education (even plain old money), results in striking benefits to individuals and communities.

This should not be surprising, but if you need studies, there are plenty:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/wiki/studies

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

#146

Post by millstone »

itistoday2 wrote: post #48
calbear81 wrote: post #18

I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them" as the ad networks are simply a platform for which there are buyers of ads/eyeballs (advertisers) and sites/apps that display said advertising. It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code…

> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. People's reluctance to pay and their aversion to advertising is, I think, understandable and reasonable. It is just a quirk of the time period that we find ourselves in that there is any "moral" dilemma attached to this situation. The reason people perceive it as a moral situation is because we've established a society in w…

I dread the day where the only content available is what artists can produce independently. Movies like Interstellar, or the TV show Lost, are by their nature very expensive, and it would be a great loss if this type of content could no longer recoup its expenses. I hope there's a place in the future for both indie work and expensive "blockbuster" content.

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

#147

Post by rosser »

vacri wrote: post #130
rosser wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's exactly my point: without loading an arbitrary page, I can't know whether or not there are ads embedded in its markup. If a page's headers could somehow tell me, "Hey! This page has ads! Do you still want to load it?", and I choose to continue viewing the page, then I've consented. Absent that kind of exchange, I am in principle being involuntarily subject to unwanted content.

The same is true of every element on the page, from the menu system to the related articles box. Shall we have headers for every single element on a page?

Navigation elements are an expected, and rather essential part of a site's functionality.

Ads aren't — as ad-blocking software perfectly demonstrates: the day a site legitimately doesn't work (in the sense of being unnavigable, or somehow otherwise unable to be utilized in the way its creators intended, irrespective of its revenue model) because advertising content — which someone has chosen to include in order to monetize my eyeballs — doesn't load, then maybe you'll have an argument.

It's as simple as this: ads, if they're on a page, aren't what induced me to view that page. If the stuff that does draw me to a given page doesn't work, that's a problem. If ads don't load, my (personal) experience of the page is, in fact, improved. How exactly is that a problem, again?

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

#149

Post by rosser »

vacri wrote: post #124
rosser wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a party to the contract between the advertiser and the content provider. In principle, I don't necessarily even have an expectation that a given content provider uses advertising revenue to support the provision of their content — they may use a subscription-based revenue model, and offer some number of "free" page views per day/week/month/whatever, as a teaser to encourage new subscriptions. They may just ha…

> I'm not a party to the contract between the advertiser and the content provider. > ... an agreement between two other parties It's irrelevant what the behind-the-scenes relations are. The party you are engaging is providing the webpage with all it's content; that some of it is outsourced doesn't matter. Using your rationale, you should also be blocking any work done by freelance journalists. If a company outsources…

Using your rationale, you should also be blocking any work done by freelance journalists.

No, using that rationale, I should be blocking any work done by anyone I choose to block.

EDIT: As far as the "ethics" of ad-blocking, I'm not the one arguing ad-blocking is an ethical position. For me, it's an aesthetic position (ads are ugly), and — as The Fine Article does point out — one of choosing to have my browsing habits remain untouched, unmolested, and unanalyzed and re-sold by the demonstrably unclean hands the advertisers are grabbing at me with.

I guess you can call that an ethical position if you want, but it's not about what's right or wrong in my behavior, so my ethics are pretty much moot.

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

#150

Post by zaroth »

mirimir wrote: post #142
zaroth wrote: post #111

My personal opinion is if the site wants to make it a requirement to view the ads, they can write the front-end and back-end code to enforce that. Not requesting a particular asset over the network is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized access. Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case agains…

"Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case against anyone who tried it." Do you have a cite for that?

You really never heard of Aaron Swartz or Andrew [Weev] Auernheimer?
Post reply on HN