> 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.

If your time is so important why are you wasting it visiting pages with ads?

>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?

> If your time is so important why are you wasting it visiting pages with ads?

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.

>social objects - other people are visiting those pages, so I have to check them out too in order to participate in the conversation.

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.

You seem to imply there is something questionable about blocking ads. The cost of not seeing ads is the time I spend setting up and configuring the ad-blocker. It's a lower cost than the attention spent on ads, so I block them.

Your analogy doesn't work, because this is about ownership. I own my machine, so I get to decide what will run and how.

"The cost of not seeing ads is the time I spend setting up and configuring the ad-blocker." - there is also the externalised cost that the sites which rely on ads will eventually go bust if everyone does the same thing as you do. Given the current state of things, you are defecting on a massive Prisoners' Dilemma.

That's not a cost, that's a benefit. There's not one ad-supported site I care about that I wouldn't be willing to donate to. And I'd be ecstatic if Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/BuzzFeed/etc. went out of business.

It can be argued that those sites going bust is actually a good thing. So the payoff matrix favors ad blocking both short and long-term.

if you dont have money for a site, you can't have one, that is the universal law of life, i would like to have a alienware, but i can't afford it, i don't go spamming people around....

>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 own your machine but not the text.

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...

>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.

You're free to do what you want, but not to read content.

So you just follow random links people send you? That seems like a horrible waste of your most precious commodity.

YouTube offers a way to pay for an ad free experience. Are you a paying member?

> So you just follow random links people send you? That seems like a horrible waste of your most precious commodity.

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.

So you're willing to trade your time for feeling connected?

That's a shame. They offer Prime video in Poland? I don't even think we get it in Australia :/

> So you're willing to trade your time for feeling connected?

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".

Sadly not, Australia is actually usually pretty far behind. Luckily being Canadian and having lived in the US I have access but it's a pain.

Why would I pay YouTube for an ad free experience, when I already have an ad free experience?

I'm not saying YOU would. I'm saying the people saying they would happily pay for an ad free have the choice to and their choice to use an adblocker instead of paying says a lot about their actual beliefs than their claims on forums.

I for one would pay YouTube for an ad-free, smooth and offline-cacheable experience. At least now, that I have spare cash.

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 :).

Check out youtube-dl, get-flash-videos or one of the other video downloader tools.

Well, I know them, but they belong to the same category as ad blockers - external tools you use because the service is not good enough :).

"So you profess to care about your lung health and gave up smoking, but you still live in a polluted city? Since people are perfect and can fix every problem in one go, you must be a lying hypocrite and not really care about your lung health at all. Also my judgement of what is or isn't a waste of your attention is valid, I have a right to judge that for you".

Actually it would be more accurate to say "You profess to care about your lung health and gave up smoking but you go and hang out in every airport smoking room you can find?"

You can think it's a joke, but I agree with parent completely. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, since I get to choose what runs on my hardware, and I choose not to see ads.

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?

I don't steal from or scam stores even if I can get away with it, because while I don't deep-down care if they make a profit, I do feel it's wrong to cheat them out of it. If I want what a store is offering, I feel like I should deal with them fairly. If I don't want it, I just don't patronize the store.

My program (Browser) can ask their program (Server) do things. It may deny ANY request it wishes based on ANY criteria that THEY get to set. Their program is under no obligation to do anything my program asks.

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.

Given the same premises, you can prove invasive tracking to be "reasonable and fair." I mean, they're just using information you sent them, right? In fact, it's not right, because this deliberately blinkered view of the interaction misses a lot of important details.

>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?

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 seem to think that all content costs only the creators time to develop. I think that says a lot.

Stating an untrue statement as fact and hoping your opposite number will debate it, thus tacitly accepting it, is an extremely low quality argumentative technique, sitting somewhere between "responding to tone" and "ad hominum" on the hierarchy of arguments[1].

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?

[1] http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

You're calling for a minimum income for them or suggesting they just do it as a side project(supplemented with a regular income).

The fact is a lot of great content is expensive to produce.

Ah, I see the problem. Because I have suggested that content can be created as side projects or could be encouraged by a basic minimum income, you have made an inference that I do not understand the costs involved in making good content.

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.

Saying they should do it for free or an unsustainable price(they need side jobs) does actually say that you don't understand the cost of good content.

You complain about the cost of your attention while suggesting people spend their time building free stuff for you.

> As it becomes more of an issue you start seeing more and more anti-blocking scripts.

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.

Ad blockers aren't a problem for advertisers since people using ad blockers likely aren't going to click on your ads anyhow. They are a problem for content creators.

Not all advertising requires clicks. Brand awareness works by finagling associations in to your brain. No matter how immune to suggestion one things they are these things work to some extent.

they become a problem for advertising networks when they are no-longer able to proved enough money to be worth the content creators time to accept/administrate.

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.

Where do you expect the advertisers will switch to? Nah whats going to happen is that sites will just start doing one of two things. a) they will start blocking users that appear to be using ad blockers. b) they will start including ads in ways that make ad blockers ineffective. Embedding them in content or proxying the ads to come from the host itself.

Ads aren't going away.

> a) they will start blocking users that appear to be using ad blockers.

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>

Ads don't have to go away, but it's thinking like yours that leads to this adversarial atmosphere.

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.