It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment.
>They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable.
This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price".
The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model.
The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative.
I think the "recommended price" of this "pay what you feel it is worth" model, which is usually watching advertising and allowing myself to be tracked, is too high.
I have once or twice directly sent the creator $5-10, when they offered a payment method that didn't require a paypal account. If it's good content, that's pretty reasonable. Dans Data[1] /is/ good content, even if it's getting a bit dated these days.
So would you suggest (or would you even use) AdBlockers identify themselves to the website (so I can write "if($_SERVER["AdBlocker]){echo "Sorry, see ads or leave}"?
Because there are adblock blockers, and people write _adblock-blocker-blockers_.
When you buy a magazine from Starbucks do you tell the clerk what part of the magazine you intend to read what what you intend to ignore? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. The clerk & publishers are well aware I may ignore or even rip out any or all of the magazine pages and the magazine is priced accordingly.
Once or twice in all your years online you have agreed to an alternate funding method and you think that is sustainable for content creators?
You can make a lot of arguments for ad blocking. I ad block because it slows my computer down. Making the claim that you ad block because your attention is more valuable though is a joke.
It's not a joke. It's avoiding death by thousand cuts.
Time is literally the most valuable commodity we have. Anything you do to waste someone's time - like displaying obtrusive, annoying ads - is in my books an act of aggression.
>There's enough better content available for free and without ads
Surely you'd just stick with the better content that doesn't use ads all the time right?
Because I get linked to them. Also, social objects - other people are visiting those pages, so I have to check them out too in order to participate in the conversation.
Also, YouTube.
> Surely you'd just stick with the better content that doesn't use ads all the time right?
Yeah, and I mostly do.
So maybe that's the cost of not seeing ads, you don't get to participate in conversations.
It's like if Stallman would, instead of making GNU, hack into MS and put the source online because he "just has to".
Most of the time, taking a moral stand requires sacrifice.
Your analogy doesn't work, because this is about ownership. I own my machine, so I get to decide what will run and how.
You own your machine but not the text. Right now it's still somewhat hypothetical, but what would be your opinion if the major websites would put a T&C that you have to enable (Let's say it was safe JS) ads to view content. Would you still say "it's my machine and I view what I want when I want"?
How are adblock-blockers (which are counterbalanced by adblock-blockers-blockers by adblockers) different?
You don't get to own the text just because you can read it, see if you read this - it is still my text (because I wrote it!).
>what would be your opinion if the major websites would put a T&C that you have to enable (Let's say it was safe JS) ads to view content.
And how would I know it's safe? I don't even let the closest friends on the wifi because they don't run adblockers on their phone and I don't want my router to get pwned [1] just because someone like Forbes is making a buck using Ads.
> Would you still say "it's my machine and I view what I want when I want"?
It is still my machine, so long as I physically own it. If I run a virtual machine in the cloud it's not mine you see, because then I'm just renting it. If ad networks want to remove the ability to block ads they would have to own the machines and rent out those computers to users, they are free to do this.
[1] https://www.proofpoint.com/us/threat-insight/post/home-route...
You're free to do what you want, but not to read content.
YouTube offers a way to pay for an ad free experience. Are you a paying member?
See my point about social objects.
> YouTube offers a way to pay for an ad free experience. Are you a paying member?
They don't offer it in my country, so no. But I do am a paying subscriber of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime Video, FWIW.
That's a shame. They offer Prime video in Poland? I don't even think we get it in Australia :/
Well, yes - that's life, basically :). Writing a comment here is also me trading time for feeling connected ;).
> That's a shame. They offer Prime video in Poland? I don't even think we get it in Australia :/
I'm surprised, I thought Australia is usually right after US in such things. As for Poland, they've started offering it something like a week ago. I signed up immediately after I learned about it, mostly because I wanted to watch "The Man in the High Castle".
There is a rarely discussed topic of access for people who don't have funds or means to obtain it - like myself 10 years ago. It's tangential to ad blocking discussion, but a reason why I'm not sure if a pay-per-view Internet would be a good idea in general.
Oh, and if it helps me look better - I'm not really "ad blocking" per se, I'm doing responsive administration of my secondary OS (i.e. the browser) resources by using uMatrix, which makes me put some up-front decisionmaking work about which requests are or are not allowed on any page I visit ;). But it's fun, and I get to see how more and more insane the web is becoming :).
Whether something is sustainable for content creators is not the users' concern, you don't go around worrying whether Walmart can make profit, why do you worry whether a random internet blogger can?
Their program (Server) may ask my program (Browser) to do things and my program may deny ANY request based on ANY criteria that I get to set. My program is under no obligation to do anything their program asks.
This is all perfectly reasonable and fair.
It works fabulously as supplemental income for talented artisnal content creators who make their content because they care. They'll probably still need a day job like the rest of us, but there's a good chance people will hire them for those same skills that make them great content creators, whether they write interesting blogs or make neat-o electronics projects or produce great art or whatever.
I'm all about supporting inspired human creation. Maybe we'll implement basic minimum income and some of these people can safely dedicate their life to their talent, and inspire others along the way?
It can't possibly sustain content farms like buzzfeed. I consider this to be a great positive, and wish buzzfeed as swift and impactful a cratering as possible.
You strike me as a standup chap who would not resort to such techniques, so I'm sure you'll now be willing to explain to me how you came to such a conclusion, so I can help dispel your misconception?
The fact is a lot of great content is expensive to produce.
I'm afraid to inform you that the facts you have stated do not contain sufficient information to make such an inference. You cannot know with any certainty based on these facts alone whether I understand the costs involved in making good content.
You complain about the cost of your attention while suggesting people spend their time building free stuff for you.
That seems incredibly tone deaf. Advertisers should be working on fixing the problems. Get rid of tracking, get rid of scripts, make promises about acceptable ad size and latency and every year reduce those numbers.
And when a network ad-spots start drying up, the advertisers will have to switch.
at least, that's how I'd hope it would work.
Ads aren't going away.
Fine by me. I'll simply mark it as the malware that it is and never return to that domain again.
> b) they will start including ads in ways that make ad blockers ineffective.
This technology already exists but its ignored because harvesting and selling user data is a cash cow. This is perfectly possible today...
<a href="someplace.com"><img src="/somead.png" /></a>
Many of us hope for option c - that publishers work with ad networks to fix some of the problems that drive people to ad blockers in the first place. Some people object to advertising no matter how it is done, but I think that's a relative small number of people. Most people will accept well-behaved ads.
Give me a advertisement network which takes legal liability for what they advertise and follows local law, and we could start talking about what implicit deal exist when I visit a website. This mean no recording (data protection laws), no malware (anti-hacking laws), fair representation of the product, clear pricing, no alcohol, tobacco or advertisement towards minors, clear indication that its an advertisement, and the other rules that exist in advertisement laws here in Sweden. Tax laws involved are also always involved If there is a deal where service is provided in exchange for goods.
How do I know this without viewing ads that I don't agree to view?
> It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment.
The ego required to tell people who are explicitly not agreeing to your terms that they are implicitly agreeing to your terms is appalling. Surely we can believe people when they tell us what they agree to.
> This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
You loaded this hacker news page with the intent of reading other users' posts.
I've never once loaded a page with the intent of viewing an ad.
If you don't want to view my posts, I'd be entirely fine with you writing a browser plugin that strips my posts from your page. Consume the content you want to consume, that's your prerogative.