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

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

#161

Post by vacri » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:18 AM UTC

rosser wrote: post #149

vacri wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 habi…

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

You were complaining above that you were presented with content from a third party that you hadn't consented to, and didn't have a contract with.

I'm not the one arguing ad-blocking is an ethical position.

If you're not arguing about the ethics of it, why have you been talking about consent and the structure of contracts between parties? Nothing in your first, largest comment has anything to do with aesthetics, it's all about consent. Why, in the same paragraph as this statement, do you demean advertisers quite heavily about issues other than appearance? (deservedly or otherwise)

I'm still interested to hear your opinion on walking out on a bill because you don't have your own contract with the third-party EFT vendors.

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

#162

Post by Terr_ » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:22 AM UTC

alecdbrooks wrote: post #60

pudquick wrote: post #27

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 retu…

>... 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". Isn't it common knowledge that many sites rely on ads for their revenue? Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum w…

> it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum wage because customers are expected to tip

"Common"? No it isn't. ~65% of Americans live in states where that would be ILLEGAL, and those employers would be committing the crime of wage-theft.

http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm

Maybe the real problem is your state's laws.

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

#163

Post by joepie91_ » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:27 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…

Very relevant here: http://www.textfiles.com/thoughts/advertising.html

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

#164

Post by Nilocshot » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:31 AM UTC

nfoz wrote: post #54

Nilocshot wrote: post #16

The major argument against adblockers (at least as far as I have seen) is that it deprives content creators a source of revenue. I can't disagree with this statement because it is true, it is a (read: singular) source of income that we (read: users of an adblocking program/method) are eliminating. I for one believe that they should ge something.et paid for their work, but ads just don't seem to be the right solution.…

That people don't pay for content online is partly a social, historical, and technological problem. Crowdfunding is slowly but increasingly becoming viable, as it enters the social awareness/expectation for content creation. Other options include government (known for relatively high-quality content in many parts of the world: for news, science, education, art, and other works that are widely considered to be a part…

As sort of an aggregator of content or a commission based system? Or more like a business with employees that produce content, such as columnists / reporters for a newspaper?

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

#165

Post by Terr_ » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:35 AM UTC

alecdbrooks wrote: post #89

scrollaway wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum wage because customers are expected to tip. That's also something the rest of the world scratches its head about. I'm not sure the best way to make your point is to use an example of how absurd the US is.

American tipping isn't a particularly good system, but it's unkind to not tip if it means cheating the wait staff out of their wages. Similarly, ads have issues, but blocking them is not fair to the creator, who reasonably expected ad impressions in exchange for creating the content and paying for visitors' traffic.

> it's unkind to not tip if it means cheating the wait staff out of their wages.

Very likely "unkind", but I categorically reject your framing of it as "cheating by the customer".

The practical and ethical responsibility for a livable wage lies with the employer, even if your specific state's laws permit them to violate it.

The real culprits are (collectively) the lawmakers and their donors, who allow this "race to the bottom", followed by the employers who benefit every day from the workers' powerlessness.

Or, to put it another way: "Donate cash to my salaried employee out of pity, so I don't have to pay them for their actual work! If you don't do it, they'll starve and it'll be all your fault!"

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

#166

Post by rosser » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:37 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #161

rosser wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 habi…

No, using that rationale, I should be blocking any work done by anyone I choose to block You were complaining above that you were presented with content from a third party that you hadn't consented to, and didn't have a contract with. I'm not the one arguing ad-blocking is an ethical position. If you're not arguing about the ethics of it, why have you been talking about consent and the structure of contracts between…

I didn't say there weren't ethical arguments to be made around ad blocking. In fact, I offered what I thought was a pretty clear position on what I found to be the most compelling issue in that vein. I didn't lead with that argument in my original reply to you because it wasn't on point; I was replying to your specific language about contracts with an argument about my duty to honor a contract I wasn't a party to.

As for your question about skipping out on my restaurant tab because I don't have a contract with that restaurant's EFT vendor, I have two thoughts:

1. It's disanalogous, and so irrelevant. If some restaurants give away their food, some restaurants charge a monthly fee and let you eat as much as you want, and some charge per plate, and I don't know which is which before entering — before ordering, even — your question might be cogent.

As it stands, however, it's pretty much universal that if you walk into a restaurant, you'll be paying for your meal. So, I guess, to move that analogy to websites, if every website always had ads, and I was making an argument about blocking them on the basis that "I didn't know I'd be seeing an ad", I'd be full of shit.

But that's clearly not the world we live in, is it? So, moot.

2. Pursuant to my point above, that we live in a world where one always (or so close to always as to be practically indistinguishable) pays for one's meals at a restaurant: if Joe's Diner only accepts payment via Whiz-Bang EFT, Inc. and I don't have the means to transact with Whiz-Bang EFT, Inc. (say, I only have cash, or I don't have their app installed on my employer-provided phone — which is the only phone I'm carrying — and don't have rights to install new apps on that phone [1], or whatever), then it's not my fault if I can't pay Joe's Diner for my meal, is it?

My contract isn't with Whiz-Bang, else I'd already have a means of transacting with them, but I do have an (implicit) contract with Joe's to pay them for the food I ask them to serve me — again, we're talking about a world where one pays for one's meals, on a per-meal basis. If Joe's imposes an insurmountable obstacle to my fulfilling my contractual obligation, they're the ones who've voided that contract, not me.

Again, however, this is disanalogous to ads and websites, so I don't think it's terribly relevant. I'm just answering the question you specifically re-asked.

[1] Yes, that's unlikely to the point of absurdity, but so is this entire argument.

EDIT: formatting, phrasing, and clarification.

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

#167

Post by dotdi » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:45 AM UTC

Look, if I don't install uBlock on my parents' (and, to be frank, every other non-technical person's I know) machine, they will be calling me next week because google.com redirects to malwareinjector.com and facebook.com goes to fuckbook.com. On another note, the author cites some random twitter dude. Who gives a damn about what he says? He is probably just upset because he invested money in some weird ad-scheme business and it turned out bad for him.

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

#168

Post by Terr_ » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:48 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #72

alecdbrooks wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... 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". Isn't it common knowledge that many sites rely on ads for their revenue? Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum w…

> Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum wage because customers are expected to tip. That's also something the rest of the world scratches its head about. I'm not sure the best way to make your point is to use an example of how absurd the US is.

Note: That's true only for a minority of the US' individual states.

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

#169

Post by xorcist » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:49 AM UTC

s3r3nity wrote: post #90

sohkamyung wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. One way I'm trying to overcome that is to actually pay for content. I've started in a small way by supporting people who producing the content I care about at Patreon.

+1 to you and I agree this is a nice step - though it doesn't work at scale, nor is it 100% appropriate for the ideals of the web. If you think about the web as the penultimate democracy for content, where content of the highest quality is available to even the poorest person, then saying "pay for this or you'll remain ignorant" is just not fair. Example: I would be more ok if Coursera/Udacity and the like went with…

Where do you earn "1000s of $$" per visitor? Are you serious?

Part of why ads are so irritating is that they shove tons of attention seekers on every page just to earn a tenth of a cent.

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

#170

Post by tilsammans » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:58 AM UTC

The advertising industry comes with its own hidden costs. Thousands of extremely bright engineers are working every day on delivering a particular ad to a particular person. Optimizing the delivery for the last milliseconds or targeting the ad just right, if they had this or that data point.

Now imagine that advertising was solved. (I rather like the idea posted here of subscribing to an ad channel. It's not perfect, but a huge improvement) But just imagine that all the engineers currently employed by ad networks, are solving more acute problems of humankind? Cancer? Feeding the world? Harvesting solar power?