He mentioned that uBlock can use the same "reasonable" filter list as ABP, it's just better to use uBlock since it's more efficient.
We have very different opinions, because I don't see it as a bargaining situation. The reasonable and acceptable level of spam, web advertising, malware, and user tracking is zero. I won't accept any more than that because (very near) zero is easily achieved using the currently available tools.
Given that you put advertising in there with the other items, I assume this means that you pay for all websites that you block ads on? Because it seems to me that your model is "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else".
No, that's putting the cart in front of the horse. The World Wide Web was built for users by users, not for publishers by publishers. It's nice that publishers, who are themselves users, can make use of it. Good for them. If they can support themselves, even better.
However, any user has the moral right to filter any content delivered to them, as he or she sees fit. If publishers don't like that, they can build their own Internet instead of using ours, the users', Internet.
In fact, I would say it is a moral obligation for any Internet user to oppose any content-provider that attempts to put undue technical restraints on their content under threat of not publishing that content at all.
Interstate highways were created in the same manor. That is fun reading if you research it a bit.
We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get away with being parasites, but it's not sustainable if we want to maintain quality content. The moral obligation, if any, is 'play fair'. If someone asks that you see an ad along with the rest of the content, then the moral answer is to view that ad if you want to access the content. It's 'play fair', not 'play selfishly'. If you don't want to play fair, then either don't consume the content, or don't pretend you're being moral.
Also, just because you can access certain content streams with technical trickery doesn't mean you're morally clear to do so. A clear example is private data. Just because I might be able to get someone else's private data with a few http requests doesn't make it moral for me to do so.
Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it.
> We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get away with being parasites, but it's not sustainable if we want to maintain quality content. The moral obligation, if any, is 'play fair'. If someone asks that you see an ad along with the rest of the content, then the moral answer is to view that ad if you want to access the content. It's 'play fair', not 'play selfishly'. If you don't want to play fair, then either don't consume the content, or don't pretend you're being moral.
It's not really a moral issue. There's a moral obligation to spend 2 minutes trying to punch the monkey or whatever ridiculous thing they're doing now? Give me a break.
The rest of that doesn't hold water, either. People will pay straight away for quality content. The pre-internet movie, music, and publishing industries are proof of it. Quality content will survive because if people have to pay for it they will.
There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.
> Also, just because you can access certain content streams with technical trickery doesn't mean you're morally clear to do so. A clear example is private data. Just because I might be able to get someone else's private data with a few http requests doesn't make it moral for me to do so.
If a company has private data publicly accessible to the internet then the moral thing to do would be to tell them so that they can fix it, not for everybody to close their eyes and pretend there's not a problem.
Good thing that that isn't what I said.
> People will pay straight away for quality content.
No, no they won't. The fact that you had to say 'pre-internet' proves that the convenience factor is significant. People paid for movies because that was the only way to get movies. To claim that paid-for movies were therefore 'quality' is arse-backwards.
> Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it.
That's fine. You're not the one claiming it's moral what you do (that was another user that I was responding to). I'm also of the opinion that your model is the "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else" model.
I'm midway on this myself, by the way. I use NoScript and no ad-blocker. Plain ads get through, but obnoxious ads don't (like the ones that cover text while you're reading). What I don't pretend, however, is that I'm choosing some sort of moral path in doing this.
> private data
My comment on private data was just an illustration that just because you can access something online, doesn't mean it's moral to do whatever you want with it. Another example of such is revenge porn.
> There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.
Advertisement funds listicles and clickbait in a vicious cycle.
That is the kind of content that can only exist because of Internet advertising. That is the kind of content you "pay" for with your attention-span.
Investigative journalism is being actively replaced by clickbait, listicles and bullshit because Internet advertisements are so much more profitable. Because you don't need to be good any more, you just need to hack weak minds on scale.
THAT is the kind of Internet you're arguing I should support by not blocking advertising.
Actual quality content has so many ways of monetizing itself (online and offline) it's disingenuous to ignore. Just not this one. Real life dead tree newspapers also take a dive in quality when they go down the hole of cheap shitty advertising.
It will always lose against the low quality fire hose swamp of shit content because it's just as profitable (often more) and so much cheaper to produce. That is why people have been blocking Internet ads since forever. The ad-companies themselves are often shady, parasites come automatically with the territory.
I'm blocking ads until that shit goes out of business. Not because "fuck everyone else" but because "fuck everyone that supports it".
They were "quality" in the sense that people willingly paid for them. The sad reality is that a huge amount of web content doesn't even meet that low bar.
And I said "pre-internet" mainly to avoid the issue of piracy from bit-torrent, but it probably wasn't necessary. A ton of movies here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...) were made post-internet and they still made hundreds of millions of dollars. Likewise, the music industry is doing great.
The news industry is in the dumps because they were the ones stupid enough to devalue their content by giving it away for free on the web along side trashy advertising.
A URL is just an advertisement for a resource which is available on the web. Since when does seeing an advertisement obligate you to go acquire the object being advertised? Must I compensate the makers of highway billboards for the work they did presenting those advertisements, if I happen not to want to purchase their products?
No, it doesn't work like that. Web publishers can hope all they want that I choose to accept their invitations to download ads and look at them, but it's my machine and I'm paying for my own bandwidth, so I'll make my own choices about what to do with it. An adblocker is nothing more than an intelligent assistant for making those choices.
And FWIW I do pay for or donate to several online services that I use often and that provide real value for me. At the same time, it's very unlikely that I'll ever pay to read somebody's blog, twitter, facebook, personal website, etc.
But I'm curious why you wouldn't put web advertising in with spam, tracking, and malware? They're all heavily entwined, AFAICT.
Some have already transitioned to crowdfunding (see patreon, the dice tower getting funded on kickstarter,...) micropayment, subscriptions.
But this case of "your failed business model is not my problem" is not to blame on adblockers alone but also on dwindling ads revenue among others reasons due to facebook driving prices down. When facebook investor story time will come to an end the whole web advertising ecosystem might crumble on itself.
The day the usual website will receive 12 to 20Billions views a month and occupy 10TB of disk space, then we could use wikipedia as a representative example. Until then wikipedia should not be used as an example of how well the usual ad-supported website would fare with an alternative revenue model.
IINM wikipedia has chosen a business model not based on ads which successfully funds the project for about 10+ years.
Yes, that was my point — Wikipedia is probably the absolute best-case scenario for a free website that isn't supported by ads, and they're still panhandling. The usual ad-supported website would fare much, much worse, and would probably just stop providing its service to the world.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports#Fun...
If it were a pay-per-search model then I'd have to make a mental decision every time I do a search. This would impose massive cognitive overhead and present a deadweight loss.
If it were a subscription model, building a competitive search engine would suddenly become much harder. Right now, I can freely experiment between different search engines to find the right one for a given query. If I need a subscription, then it would much more firmly entrench the dominant player.
People spend a lot of time railing against advertising without considering how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years.
> how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years
... wait are you trolling?
Ad-blockers grew out of a need. It's been "only" a few decades, and before that advertisement wasn't quite the same thing, was it?
Nobody felt they needed an always on filter to protect their focus and attention from a constant 24/7 barrage of shitinformation screaming at you. Because advertisement hasn't always been doing that. Yes it's been lying a lot, maybe a lot more, maybe it always has, and I hate it for that as well, but that's a different discussion. That's not the discussion we're having today. We could have had that discussion but advertisement decided it wanted everything and right now it is paying people to flood the web with clickbait, listicles and other bullshit.
[0] at some point (more than 10 years ago), you started to have to be clever and use smart queries to filter and step around the shit advertising. but for years now Google basically stopped returning anything as results that deep. the pages still exist but they won't let you dig deep into the index any more because the 99.9999% shit finally tipped over into rounding error. for a while they called you "robot" if you tried and give you a captcha because robots were mining the trash for different (less noble) purposes. you still get these captcha's some times but they seem to be stale filter triggers from threats long gone. most of the time you just get zero results for 2-3 word queries that used to return hundreds in an era the Internet was 1% of today's size. actually no most of the time you get results that have nothing to do with the query. you just get zero when you insist. and no verbatim mode doesn't help here.
I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".
In the event of google search disappearing, affected people would use other search engines and it would make room for better search engines to emerge which is hardly possible right now as google owns the market.
They might have the money but why should they give it away? They are not a charity.
> it would make room for better search engines to emerge
How would those search engines fund themselves? what would their business model be?
But they only have this money because of AdWords. That means that, in this world, Google would still exist, but no-one could come enter the search space to compete with it—and surely that's not a desireable outcome.
How they reconcile this with the name "AdBlock" I'll never know.
or maybe adsellads [1]
[1]:http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12890050/adblock-plus-now-...
That's not to say AdBlock Plus does a great job (I don't know) but some people think collective bargaining is a good thing.
For more read about countervailing power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervailing_power