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

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

#201

Post by _yosefk » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 10:37 AM UTC

weland wrote: post #171

_yosefk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 (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.) Except for that thing about human rights and dignity, the violation of which is fundamental to the reason why there's jail time for transgressing upon it. Whereas ads are... really just ads, as long as we don't have anything…

What if I wear something terribly ugly according to a street artist and he throws a pie at me?

What if I paint the walls of my house and a street artist decides my taste is intolerably poor and sprays the walls?

What if I own a shop and advertise something in that painting and it gets sprayed?

What if it's a corporation who puts up the ad?

What if a guy (say Bill G) runs a corporation that someone dislikes and throws a pie at them (as someone in fact did?)

What if someone doesn't like seeing women or people of color on ads and sprays them? (a real-life situation)

Where's the line - when are you free to act in public disregarding others? I for one would imaginably prefer a pie thrown into my face to having something I painted on a wall sprayed over. Why is the former a question of "dignity" while the latter isn't? Is it because corporations have no dignity? What about a model whose image is altered by misogynists - is she entitled to "dignity"?

I think that being too particular about rights ("ads are just ads" hence not covered by rights etc.) is the way to lose all the rights.

(By the same token - not being too particular - all the cases above should cost the perpetrator the same IMO, 15 days of detention, tops I'd guess, although the guy throwing the pie at Bill Gates is much less scary to me than the ad-spraying misogynists; unless you manage to prove the latter constitutes hate speech or such.)

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

#202

Post by _yosefk » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 10:50 AM UTC

beefield wrote: post #181

_yosefk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

How about:

* "publicly distributed information" is a shop's name and a perpetrator adds racist slurs to that name (the shop is operated by a member of a race disliked by the racist in question.)

* the act of "rearrangement" performed by a "street artist" to a human being is having a pie thrown at them. the human being in question ran a Ponzi scheme and just got out of the courtroom, having proven plausible deniability.

Which one feels subjectively worse? Is this example consistent with "rights assigned to information" and "rights assigned to human beings" residing on entirely different planes?

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

#203

Post by acheron » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 11:11 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #118

Is there anyone arguing that adblockers are immoral other than somebody on Twitter? In the US, the legal issue has been settled. Fox tried suing Dish Networks over their commercial-skipping feature. Fox lost.[1] The main problem with ad blockers is that they're not very good technically. They're usually regular expression based and need too much information about the exact format of ad code, so they need constant upd…

Unless it's changed recently, I'm pretty sure "Ghostrank" is off by default, and you have to opt-in, but yes, it will track you if you turn it on. (The ABP "allow some advertising" option is an opt-out though IIRC.)

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

#204

Post by evandentremont » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 11:36 AM UTC

I was wondering why my twitter feed blew up all of a sudden.

was the first person to jump on that guy and compared it to "muting commercials" which is more technically correct (and less illegal)

I think he was being obtuse for the sake of being obtuse based on his profile.

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

#205

Post by godzilla82 » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 11:45 AM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #183

godzilla82 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But isnt it some kind of circular logic to say that, waiters are paid less (by restaurants) because it is common knowledge that they are tipped. And customers must tip, because, they are paid less by their employers. Dont you think it would be simpler if there was no expectation of tips. You know what I think, its the employers who are getting away with cheap labour. It is like some companies that have a variable pay included in the offer, over which the employee has no control.

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

#206

Post by enraged_camel » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 12:16 PM UTC

dsjoerg wrote: post #26

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

Just because I'm searching for a term doesn't mean I want to see ads for it. I hope this helps, thanks.

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

#207

Post by galfarragem » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

infamouscow wrote: post #23

edias wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

> You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable.

Not necessarily. There is a threshold of value that must be met to make people pay directly for it. For example I run a niche site that gets 5K uniques each month - clearly I'm providing some value - but I doubt that what I provide is enough to make people pay me directly. Ads are the most effective way of solve that problem: reward content producers that can't meet that threshold but still add some value.

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

#208

Post by eropple » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 12:41 PM UTC

comex wrote: post #132

eropple wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to smarm about a better business model, I invite you to find it yourself. It's much easier to perform that smarm than find one, but I guess if you have to rationalize free ridership it's a good line. And it means you don't have to come to grips with the idea that it's a social problem instead of a free-market-hallowed-be-thy-name problem; it does mean you can mostly wave away that the money needs to come…

I claim that part of it at least is a technical problem. No, really. Compare user payment habits on desktops/websites versus mobile devices. Sure, there are the issues that users have become attuned to $1 apps, that many are incredibly reluctant to pony up even that, etc. etc. But at least some users pay $1, because it only requires a few taps and the purchase is associated with their existing $devicevendor account;…

I suppose it depends when those micropayments had become a thing. I don't think, for example, that the various "pay a sliver of money when you hit a page" services out there have any chance, nor would they have had a chance five years ago. Content on the internet is Free, and when it's not Free, it's time to get boiling and resentful.

Ten years ago, fifteen? Maybe. At this point I feel like the entitlement of free ridership has won pretty hard.

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

#209

Post by 16bytes » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 12:53 PM UTC

buzzworth wrote: post #87

A lot of misplaced anger here. The most beloved services and content exist because of advertisers. Put yourself in the shoes of somebody trying to create a new Internet publication, casual video game, search engine, social network, or most any other online business. What do you imagine a successful business plan will be? Paywalls? Good luck with that :-p The rant is written as though advertisers snuck into the media,…

I actually don't mind most ads. If you've got a static ad related to the content I'm browsing, it doesn't bother me. I actually might click on it. I feel the same way about ads in newspapers and magazines.

But then there's the increasing minority. The get-in-your-face-as-much-as-possible ads. The interstitial ads. The noisy video play-by-default ads. The scroll-over ads. The ads that follow your mouse down the page. The ads that go as far as they possibly can to disrupt whatever I'm browsing.

No. That's too far. That's why I block ads.

If there was a way to white-list "responsible" ads, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Until then, no, I won't subject myself to that arms race.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 1:09 PM UTC

infamouscow wrote: post #23

edias wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

[deleted]