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It’s OK to block ads (2015)

blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk

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Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#81

Post by amadeuspagel »

ndriscoll wrote: post #79
amadeuspagel wrote: post #77

This is one of the many cases where the dishonest rationalization of a selfish act is worse then the act itself. I block ads because it's convenient, but I don't deny that I'm free-riding on websites that only exist because other people view ads, I don't pollute our shared understanding of ethics, economics and the web with some bullshit rationalization of something I only do because it's convenient.

The FBI literally suggested people block ads to avoid being defrauded. My understanding of the web was that it was first and foremost a non-commercial space, and spammers have always been impinging on that. Blocking their nonsense has always been the correct course of action. In the case of children, I actually strongly believe it is immoral to allow then to be inundated with ads. It runs completely counter to teachi…

The web is not one space, it's a protocol for everyone to have their own space. Someone putting ads on their own website is not spamming.

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#82

Post by porridgeraisin »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #22
martin-t wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel working on something that is zero-sum (does not produce positive value for society, only changes where the money goes)? Would you change jobs if a positive-sum job became available? And to risk being seen as preaching, have you read https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re... ?

I work in retail media. There is a large difference in the kind of value we capture - rather than creating incentives for annoying or addictive behavior, we only show advertisements on ecommerce pages. If you are seeing our ads, you already have the intent to buy a kind of product, but the kinds of ads we show are trying to convince you to buy a specific brand of product. Perhaps you searched "laptops". You see a han…

The reason behind the banner reveals to us the incentives that drive the way the whole system functions, which in turn decides the quality of the majority of advertisements.

If the reason is "because they paid us to" then it leads to the absolute horror show we all see these days.

And no, papering over this issue by maximizing click-through rate along with revenue in your optimisation problem does not cut it. The only advertisements I will accept are those that dont have any weird incentives backing them. Example that is OK: shopkeeper recommending dell laptops because his previous customers have given good reviews for it. But if the shopkeeper takes even a bottle of wine from a dell salesman, oops, I'm blocking that ad.

In my "analysis", approximately zero advertisements in the internet today run the way I accept them. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that google/meta run most of the ads and they definitely take money from merchants:).

It logically follows from this that I need to use an adblocker everywhere.

Same goes for all of marketing and sales: all forms of deceit (something that we are taught as kids to be morally wrong) that are normalised today. Entire trillion dollars companies' primary product is deceit.

It is possible to do these things without deceit, but the tragedy of the commons dictates that the deceitful win.

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#83

Post by npc_anon »

OldfieldFund wrote: post #80
npc_anon wrote: post #71

People block ads and/or not pay for content because they can. Simply because it's possible. People have been conditioned to consider any and all digital content to be worth zero. Yet continue to consume it for hours on end every day. When not paying at all is an option people will reliably pick that option. They'll even go into extremes to avoid paying. I know somebody that plays a particular mobile game about an hou…

"all digital content to be worth zero." People are making millions/year just by writing articles on Substack. Just look at the "paid leaderboards", number of paid subscribers, and multiply by 70% of the annual price of the newsletter. Our newsletter is doing mid-6-figures. You simply can't find that content anywhere else, and I am not aware of a newsletter-piracy phenomenon. Even if it existed, I think many people wo…

When I say "all" and "zero" it's obviously tongue-in-cheek, not a scientific assessment that is to be taken literally. Of course there's exceptions.

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#84

Post by ndriscoll »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #81
ndriscoll wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI literally suggested people block ads to avoid being defrauded. My understanding of the web was that it was first and foremost a non-commercial space, and spammers have always been impinging on that. Blocking their nonsense has always been the correct course of action. In the case of children, I actually strongly believe it is immoral to allow then to be inundated with ads. It runs completely counter to teachi…

The web is not one space, it's a protocol for everyone to have their own space. Someone putting ads on their own website is not spamming.

In the sense that someone sending you a surprise crypto miner with their webpage or bundling a botnet trojan into a program they give you is just them putting it on their own space, sure. If they send it to me though, my security software will promptly filter it out or otherwise not allow it to run. My firewall will block connections to their known-dodgey payload hosts from all computers on my network. My computer is not for running someone's miner, and that's not the intended purpose of allowing scripting. Likewise, my screen is not for displaying ads; it's an abuse of scriptable documents that gets filtered out. Opening a web page doesn't create some obligation to run malware.

fwiw making an offline analogy, I also live in a city where outdoor advertising signs are generally banned (with some exceptions like saying the land is for sale, or small ground-level signs with height/width restrictions at an entrance indicating which businesses are on a lot), so even on their own land/their own space, businesses putting up things like billboards would be spam and disallowed.

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#85

Post by npc_anon »

jen20 wrote: post #72
npc_anon wrote: post #71

People block ads and/or not pay for content because they can. Simply because it's possible. People have been conditioned to consider any and all digital content to be worth zero. Yet continue to consume it for hours on end every day. When not paying at all is an option people will reliably pick that option. They'll even go into extremes to avoid paying. I know somebody that plays a particular mobile game about an hou…

Many things do not give you that option, and the ads are obnoxious and invasive to privacy. If that is the only option, you will get nothing from me, and your ads will be blocked. Furthermore if there is a content subscription involved, I will only ever consider it via Apple because I refuse to risk having to telephone someone to cancel something I signed up for online. The well has been poisoned by an obnoxious indu…

You're just retrofitting reasons to justify the behavior I describe.

Forget about those reasons. They don't matter. They can have merit or not, it's irrelevant. Because the behavior takes place regardless. When people can legally avoid paying for something whilst still consuming it, they'll do that.

The idea that if only ads were more privacy-friendly people would not block them or start paying for content at any scale is laughable. They won't. When there's a free path, people take that path.

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#86

Post by amadeuspagel »

ndriscoll wrote: post #84
amadeuspagel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is not one space, it's a protocol for everyone to have their own space. Someone putting ads on their own website is not spamming.

In the sense that someone sending you a surprise crypto miner with their webpage or bundling a botnet trojan into a program they give you is just them putting it on their own space, sure. If they send it to me though, my security software will promptly filter it out or otherwise not allow it to run. My firewall will block connections to their known-dodgey payload hosts from all computers on my network. My computer is…

Displaying information is most basic feature of the web. An ad is simply information that someone paid for. It is not at all like a crypto miner or a botnet trojan.

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#87

Post by ndriscoll »

charcircuit wrote: post #30
martin-t wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel working on something that is zero-sum (does not produce positive value for society, only changes where the money goes)? Would you change jobs if a positive-sum job became available? And to risk being seen as preaching, have you read https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re... ?

Connecting people with goods or services they may find valuable provides a positive value to society.

Yes, honest retailers that find good products to offer create value. People who take money from sellers to give fraudulent recommendations do not.

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#88

Post by jmholla »

npc_anon wrote: post #85
jen20 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things do not give you that option, and the ads are obnoxious and invasive to privacy. If that is the only option, you will get nothing from me, and your ads will be blocked. Furthermore if there is a content subscription involved, I will only ever consider it via Apple because I refuse to risk having to telephone someone to cancel something I signed up for online. The well has been poisoned by an obnoxious indu…

You're just retrofitting reasons to justify the behavior I describe. Forget about those reasons. They don't matter. They can have merit or not, it's irrelevant. Because the behavior takes place regardless. When people can legally avoid paying for something whilst still consuming it, they'll do that. The idea that if only ads were more privacy-friendly people would not block them or start paying for content at any sca…

Then why do people pay for services like Spotify, Netflix, and other subscriptions when they have the ability to pirate?

Further, ads are often sold as a way to keep access "free".

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#89

Post by ndriscoll »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #86
ndriscoll wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sense that someone sending you a surprise crypto miner with their webpage or bundling a botnet trojan into a program they give you is just them putting it on their own space, sure. If they send it to me though, my security software will promptly filter it out or otherwise not allow it to run. My firewall will block connections to their known-dodgey payload hosts from all computers on my network. My computer is…

Displaying information is most basic feature of the web. An ad is simply information that someone paid for. It is not at all like a crypto miner or a botnet trojan.

In practice ads are delivered by adware (and bundled with spyware), and are pretty much always a type of trojan (you never receive warning that a site is going to send you ads). Characterizing them as information is also misleading; their entire purpose is to get people to make suboptimal if not poor decisions. They're somewhere between noise and disinformation.

Without the malware part, there would obviously be no objection on the grounds that you're "free-riding" since there would be no measurement. But even simple images or text can be and frequently are a malicious attack on one's mind (e.g. soda/fast food ads, links to fraudsters), so even without a software component, it is good security posture to filter them.

The scripting capabilities of the web are meant for people like [0] to use. Using them for surveillance and propaganda distribution is abuse.

[0] https://ciechanow.ski/

Re: It’s OK to block ads (2015)

#90

Post by moritzwarhier »

Dfiesl wrote: post #29
maximus_01 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you value your time? A lot of people think like this and I'm not judging you or saying this applies to you. But I find it kind of odd when people I know who earn hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour won't pay even $0.10 for something that took them say 15 minutes to read. If their own time is worth $200 / hr, they thought it was valuable enough to use up $50 of their time. If they refuse to pay anythi…

Its a neat and rational way of looking at things but does it always make sense to give your time a monetary value?

Also, when I'm.. ehm.. accidentally reading blogspam in my spare time, who's reimbursing me?

And if I'm actually reading instead of working, isn't the time I spend more of a debt than a declaration that I want to donate as much money as I wasted by not working for X minutes?

Employers haven't paid me for spending a lot of time with them so far.

But let's stick with the argument and claim that our time is worth the hourly rate of whoever creates what we consume. That also doesn't make sense, no matter how charitably I view it, for media.

Even if I want to live in a radically equal society where everyone's time is worth the same amount of money, it would only make sense when trading 1:1 - for example, I can compare my hourly rate to that of my barber, if I pretend there are no corporations, no taxes etc.

But yeah, to be brief, no, it doesn't make sense to give all of your time a monterary value. And when it comes to non-working time, I even find it to be a deeply gross way of thinking. Not regarding the willingness to pay, it's fair to think about your own income and how other workers have to make ends meet and to put it into perspective.

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