171–180 of 226 posts
If you use an ad blocker and consume content supported by ads, you are a thief. It may be the best case scenario for your security, time, etc and there are cases where thievery is justified, but you are a thief nonetheless.
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I am not suggesting they should have a unilateral right. I am asking for suggestions on how to solve this so that content producers can get paid without posting ads, something no one has yet to really respond to. The Internet has created a situation that did not previously exist. It is natural that we don't automatically know what the solution is.
A basic income is probably the only way writers survive writing; there just aren't enough people willing to pay enough for content for a majority of writers to survive off of it.
It's the same reason that thousands of naive 20-somethings move to LA every year.
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It's not slavery; it's volunteerism. No one is forced to produce content for the web. Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.
Let me put that another way: People currently try to monetize by putting ads on their sites. Other people use adblockers, denying them payment but benefitting from their labor. If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people. I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of peo…
Imagine the following:
In a busy shopping mall, a busker starts to play music. A crowd starts to form enjoying the music.
Then, a strange thing happens - people with clipboards and cameras start to walk through the crowd taking photos of the shoppers and their children, making notes of their genders, heights and weights, clothing, and the shopping bags they are carrying, plus whether or not the women are pregnant.
A minute or two into the performance, more people walk through the crowd, holding placards with brand and product names on them. They walk up to each person, holding the placard in front of them and blocking their view, using a stopwatch to make sure they do so for at least 30 seconds.
One of the women says - 'hey, that's not cool - stop being so creepy'.
The clipboard and placard people remain silent, but the busker shouts - "hey - that's how I get paid! If you don't like it you are a criminal, stealing my performance".
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But websites don't ask for my consent before they show me ads, and I have no idea what they expect the "price" of an article to be before I click on it, nor what I'll be getting in return. Why does the author of an article have a unilateral right to decide the terms of exchange? Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've b…
> Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've blocked the ads. The better option is to ask the user to turn off their adblocker and explain why (and say that the adverts are vetted for malware properly).
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A basic income is probably the only way writers survive writing; there just aren't enough people willing to pay enough for content for a majority of writers to survive off of it.
Writing (like music, acting, art, fashion, etc.) has always been a lottery economy. A very very tiny fraction (JK Rowling, Dan Brown, EL James) of writers will become staggeringly successful, spurring millions to dream of matching their success and working for free in the meantime. It's the same reason that thousands of naive 20-somethings move to LA every year.
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So desktop chrome and Firefox is also attacking the open web? They have had ad lockers in their app stores for a very long time.
Neither desktop Chrome nor desktop Firefox are pushing their own, competing method of distributing content that can't be adblocked and that they take a 30% cut on. Also, Firefox at least didn't intentionally add support for adblocking, they just had a powerful add-on system and didn't deliberately stop it. Apple is deliberately adding support for it on the web whilst pushing people to distribution channels they contr…
You're free to run 'Desktop Chrome' or Firefox on Apple's 'Deskrop' computers. Nothing anticompetitive there.
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>everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has bee…
But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there. Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.
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Billboards are illegal in Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine.
I wondered how they got around the first amendment - here's more info on that (not specific to those states) - http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/billboards
The supreme court ruled that billboard bans based on location (for city and land planning purposes) would be appropriate, but billboard bans which determined which kinds of content were appropriate for public discourse were unconstitutional. A blanket ban across the state is constitutional, but a ban which targets certain kinds of content is not.
This article, like all the ones before it complaining about AdBlock, seem to conflate all kinds of contents like they're all the same. Yet, they aren't. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and/or cable, etc. etc. The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not f…
How does your view consider high quality content which is supported by advertising?
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Five years ago, Sao Paulo, Brazil, banned all outdoor advertising. All. Not just billboards, large business signs had to go too. It worked out very well.[1] [1] https://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban
Wow. Thanks for that link. I'm not sure where the balance is. Too many is certainly bad for a city as well. LA has seen a big increase in strip club billboards. Not sure why that popped in my head. I actually enjoy the ads on trains in Tokyo and learn about all kinds of stuff from them from products to events at museums. I noticed the lack of ads in the Paris subway (in the cars themselves) left me kind of bored. It…