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

181–190 of 227 posts

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

#181

Post by beefield »

_yosefk wrote: post #144
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 i…

I see the difference between the set of human rights assigned to "publicly distributed information" and "human beings" very much a question of principle and not just a question of degree.

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

#182

Post by digi_owl »

nl wrote: post #123
itistoday2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know what the Internet is like for folks in countries like Sweden where welfare systems are far more capable. For example, do Swedish websites also rely heavily on advertising? How does the economy of Swedish content (in Swedish markets) compare to American content in America? BTW: I should be clear that I am not advocating any particular type of welfare system. It does not even have to be govern…

The profit motive exists just as much in Sweden as in the US. Welfare acts as a safety net for individuals, not companies.

As such, a welfare system may allow capitalism to function better. Because it makes it easier for disgruntled employees to start a competing company, or reduce the worry about companies shutting down (though you may get a chain reaction depending on its size etc).

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

#183

Post by rhino369 »

godzilla82 wrote: post #105
alecdbrooks wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why dont you lobby for the government to raise minimum wages for waiters.

We don't tip because their min wage is so low, their minimum wage is so low because we tip.

Tipping is a cultural thing. And practically wait staff make much more from tips than they would if they were paid hourly by their employers.

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

#184

Post by tomjen3 »

trimbo wrote: post #143
comex wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alterna…

>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.

If they do I am done watching. I don't think I am alone in this (I don't watch broadcast TV or youtube on my phone for the same reason).

Also their content isn't as exclusive as they like to think: you can get it on pirate sites.

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

#185

Post by pandler »

xorcist wrote: post #169
s3r3nity wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

I think they were referring to taking a course at a university.

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

#186

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

>Nobody wants to be part of a sales funnel. Maybe not, but lots and lots of people are wanting to buy things. I my case it is a car - if I go to a car dealer I become part of a sales funnel (a particular unprofitable one, but that is a side issue).

>If the product is actually good and useful, it will sell itself by word of mouth.

The cure for cancer will sell itself that way, yes. But even things that should sell, such as cheaper cellphone plans, don't.

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

#187

Post by tomjen3 »

greggman wrote: post #17

I'm as scared as the next person of all the data being sucked up but if I wanted to be charitable, ... a different pov is perfect advertising which would effectively read your mind and present you info exactly when you need it. Thinking about going on vacation to Vietnam? perfect advertizing would devine that and show you ads for good hotel deals, flights, attractions, restaurants, events, markets, etc in Vietnam. Pe…

Funny, I wrote a blog post on why ads suck (http://www.tomjen.net/why-ads-suck/), but the key take away message is that you don't get ads for the best products as often as you get ads for not so good products. In your example you would get ads for bad vacations, less decent flight deals, etc.

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

#188

Post by zaroth »

mirimir wrote: post #156
zaroth wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really never heard of Aaron Swartz or Andrew [Weev] Auernheimer?

Getting from those cases to circumventing adblockers seems quite a stretch. What do you mean by "entirely alternate program"? Curl vs wget vs Firefox?

I agree - programming your browser through an extension to selectively retrieve elements is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized access.

But I think it has been shown that iterating curl from a bash script was exceeding authorized access in Weev's case. Standard HTTP GET's to which the server replies "200 OK" but after the fact was deemed to be illegal.

Hence, there is some space between Point A and Point B but it's quite mirky IMO how large that space actually is.

We know, from a copyright standpoint, for example, that it's illegal to use an extension to surround someone else's material with your own ads. So you can't add ads, but you can remove them?

I don't know if there exists a case where a site has gone after users they knew to be using blockers (it wouldn't be difficult to determine this from the logs). But it would be an interesting case, to be sure.

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

#189

Post by na85 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #186
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…

>Nobody wants to be part of a sales funnel. Maybe not, but lots and lots of people are wanting to buy things. I my case it is a car - if I go to a car dealer I become part of a sales funnel (a particular unprofitable one, but that is a side issue). >If the product is actually good and useful, it will sell itself by word of mouth. The cure for cancer will sell itself that way, yes. But even things that should sell, su…

>But even things that should sell, such as cheaper cellphone plans, don't

Source?

Anyone who's specifically shopping around for cell phone plans doesn't need to be force-fed advertisements. If anyone's unhappy with their cellular plan, they'll be shopping around.

The hassle of switching cell phone plans greatly outweighs my dissatisfaction with my carrier at present. Therefore even if there are cheaper plans, they aren't so cheap that I give a shit. If Bell starts a 5$/mo plan with unlimited talk/text/data, word will get around and I'll switch.

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

#190

Post by _ofdw »

_yosefk wrote: post #144
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 i…

>I honestly don't see a difference except in degree

Well, that's pretty concerning.

Post reply on HN