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Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk

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Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#131

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

jefftk wrote: post #103
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say there’s a hamburger restaurant. Now, this hamburger restaurant has an interesting business model. They way it works is, they give out burgers for free. They do that because they get money from lettuce producers to put lettuce in their burgers. It’s a pretty good model right? People get free burgers and lettuce producers get their lettuce in the peoples mouths. I personally don’t like lettuce. I removed it f…

This is a pretty weird analogy, because I don't see what the lettuce producers are getting out of it. But ok, let's say that the government is strongly in favor of people eating more vegetables, and richly compensates lettuce producers for each leaf of their lettuce is eaten. The deal the burger producers have with the lettuce producers includes putting cameras in the restaurants, so money only changes hands when peo…

I suspect there's issue with the term "freeloading". It doesn't really make sense for someone to make a business model where they give me something for free and then say I'm freeloading when I take the free thing and don't provide something (attention, time, whatever you want to call it) in return.

There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention for the free thing and, in fact, the free thing was nominally offered to me as free.

The decision to publicly provide the content for "free" with advertisements was made without my input and coordinated without my help. The worst thing my ad blocker does is expose the difficulty with executing that business model.

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#132

Post by alkonaut »

We should call it tracker blocking, anti targeting or something.

I don’t block ads because they are annoying (although they can be). I block ads because of privacy. Seeing an ad for something I searched for on an unrelated site is creepy and unnerving.

Serve ethical ads: use the page content as the only targeting, don’t use third party ad networks. Just show a damn banner.

Does this not pay the bills enough? Is it more work to chase sponsors instead of just linking in an andnet ad? Started a paid subscription but not enough people pay for the subscriptions and with Adblockers more and more pervasive it’s getting hard to keep the lights on?

Then here is my advice: don’t keep the lights on. Your site doesn’t seem needed if the only way to sustain it was using tracking ads.

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#133

Post by jefftk »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #131
jefftk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty weird analogy, because I don't see what the lettuce producers are getting out of it. But ok, let's say that the government is strongly in favor of people eating more vegetables, and richly compensates lettuce producers for each leaf of their lettuce is eaten. The deal the burger producers have with the lettuce producers includes putting cameras in the restaurants, so money only changes hands when peo…

I suspect there's issue with the term "freeloading". It doesn't really make sense for someone to make a business model where they give me something for free and then say I'm freeloading when I take the free thing and don't provide something (attention, time, whatever you want to call it) in return. There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention f…

That's reasonable! I wouldn't say someone who blocks ads (or doesn't eat lettuce) is breaking an agreement. But I do think by doing this you undermine a business model that is letting a lot of people read things (or eat burgers) for free, and that's making the world worse.

Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#134

Post by JohnFen »

jefftk wrote: post #129
JohnFen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worth putting serious thought into whether this would actually be a better web; I think it would likely be worse. Most sites today are supported by ads I think it would be better. Most ad-supported sites today are pretty much garbage, in large part because they're ad-supported.

> Most ad-supported sites today are pretty much garbage, in large part because they're ad-supported. Would you include HN there? ;)

I said "most", not "all". :)

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#135

Post by throwaway22032 »

noelsusman wrote: post #94
throwaway22032 wrote: post #42

I find the idea that anyone, a single person, could consider blocking ads to be wrong to be hilarious. I've never met such a person. I can only imagine them to be barely human. What other bizarre opinions, internal or external, would they have? I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.

To be blunt, this comes across as incredibly small minded. Barely human? Really? It's not difficult to imagine an argument against ad blockers. Ads pay for the content you consume on the Internet. If you don't like the ads, then your recourse is to leave the site and go elsewhere. You're not entitled to just block the ads and consume the content for free. I don't personally subscribe to that theory, but I wouldn't de…

I get my friend to cut the ads out of a newspaper I bought. Maybe I make a machine to do it. Now I read it.

This is somehow immoral. Cutting paper I have in my possession.

Nah, that's insane, sorry. It speaks to a lack of logical thought processes.

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#136

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

jefftk wrote: post #133
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there's issue with the term "freeloading". It doesn't really make sense for someone to make a business model where they give me something for free and then say I'm freeloading when I take the free thing and don't provide something (attention, time, whatever you want to call it) in return. There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention f…

That's reasonable! I wouldn't say someone who blocks ads (or doesn't eat lettuce) is breaking an agreement. But I do think by doing this you undermine a business model that is letting a lot of people read things (or eat burgers) for free, and that's making the world worse. Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?

> Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?

When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business.

As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloading, another could consider that the paywalling content provider is just trying to capture rent for data that's otherwise freely available.

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#137

Post by jefftk »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #136
jefftk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's reasonable! I wouldn't say someone who blocks ads (or doesn't eat lettuce) is breaking an agreement. But I do think by doing this you undermine a business model that is letting a lot of people read things (or eat burgers) for free, and that's making the world worse. Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?

> Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading? When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business. As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloa…

> rent for data that's otherwise freely available

That seems like it breaks down when you consider that revenue from the streaming services is funding the creation of new shows?

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#138

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #136
jefftk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's reasonable! I wouldn't say someone who blocks ads (or doesn't eat lettuce) is breaking an agreement. But I do think by doing this you undermine a business model that is letting a lot of people read things (or eat burgers) for free, and that's making the world worse. Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?

> Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading? When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business. As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloa…

> ... that's otherwise freely available.

Reading this again, it doesn't seem obvious to me that this is justified so I'll try to explain.

Let's say every copyright owner decides tomorrow that it's not worth trying to enforce copyright and, similarly, everybody who is currently paying for streaming services just starts downloading and seeding torrents for all of the content said services have licensed. In my mind, this only exposes the lack of scarcity, and that the value that these streaming companies provide amounts to hard drive space.

Anyway, that's kinda off-topic copyright stuff. When it comes to, for example, WSJ, I dunno. I would really like it to work with some way of providing creative text without the consumers being required to contribute financially but I would not say that it's the fault of the bypassing consumer when it doesn't work.

It's especially difficult to find a "real-world" example; I can't compare it to stealing from Walmart because WSJ doesn't have to replace what was stolen. If I download a game from TPB instead of Steam, the worst thing that happens is that Steam and the developer of the game lose a sale, whereas if I go down to Best Buy and take one of the packaged discs from their shelf and take it home without paying, Best Buy loses the sale and also needs to replace what wasn't sold (granted, the game publisher still gets paid because they provide the discs and packages).

It's interesting to think about but ultimately, the line I choose to draw is at the scarcity of the product / service: if it's not natural, then it's a fundamentally flawed business, paywall- or ad-driven.

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#139

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

jefftk wrote: post #137
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading? When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business. As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloa…

> rent for data that's otherwise freely available That seems like it breaks down when you consider that revenue from the streaming services is funding the creation of new shows?

I can admit that it is not necessarily rent-seeking (I've seen some cartoons from the 90s / 00s on streaming services, which were in mind when for that comment) but it still seems to me that it is a problem with the business model. It's the business owners' fault that they ran out of money and can't produce any more shows because they tried to make a broken model work especially if the reason they couldn't gather revenue is that people were simply able to bypass their attempts at doing so.

(So a restaurant is unable to gather revenue when people "simply bypass" their attempts with a dine-and-dash. Not sure how I feel about that, to be fair.)

Similarly, I don't really think people who pirated cable TV a decade or two ago were freeloading. As soon as it's being delivered directly to my living room via speed-of-light communication, and I have control over the machines that perform the delivery, the product is practically worthless. Comparing that to feature filmmakers who sell licenses to movie theaters, where I would need to physically tamper with machines I don't own in order to obtain the video data, there's a not-explicitly-for-the-sake-of-the-business reason for me to fork up money for the movie ticket. (Granted, they could give me the video data directly, but they don't.)

Re: Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

#140

Post by paulcole »

rglullis wrote: post #59
paulcole wrote: post #24

I don’t block ads. If I hate the ads more than I like the site, I stop going to that site. It’s not that hard of a choice for me. Personally, I don’t subscribe to the But-My-HTTP-Requests defense and understand that ads and tracking are the trade I make for reading/watching/enjoying content without getting my wallet out. I also personally enjoy learning about new products and buying things I might like. Why do I earn…

Congratulations on being such a happy cog in the machine.

Thanks!
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