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.
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".