Yeah I love this attitude. You know you're doing something that is unethical but you ignore that because you got 'em on a technicality.

Congrats.

The same argument applies to DVR ad skipping and previews on movies. If your profit model depends on people not blocking advertisements, your profit model is broken.

I much prefer the way movies and podcasts so it, as in, having the advertisement as part of the content itself. Instead of plugging in ads on the side, podcasts have a small segment where the host mentions a product and gives their personal experience with it. Moves place products in the shot, which is also a kind of approval from the studio. Webpages, however, just throw in ads with no context, and it's completely jarring.

Part of the problem is that placing ads is much easier than working ad placement into an article, and another part is that paying for things online is a painful experience. I don't mind paying to remove ads, but I'm not going to sign up for a subscription service just to read an article without ads. I really hope something like GNU Taler becomes popular to make these types of microtransactions easier to manage. Even better, I would like something like Netflix, but for quality journalism where I pay a subscription for a variety of content.

I want content producers to get paid, I just don't like advertisements and juggling subscriptions.

Technicality? Huh? I asked for a document and you sent it so now I'd better make sure I only read it with software that also requests every link in it and runs any code it finds? LOL no. No technicality about it.

People tend to forget that websites are just documents. Especially those who are not deeply familiar with the web technology. So, to those who are not aware, I'd like to add: web is nothing more than a protocol in which a user requests a document, and a server generates and returns a text response. It is up to the user what they will do with this text response. For example, they may open it in a browser which parses special tags and turns it into a nice visual page. They also can choose to open it in a browser which cherry-picks which tags to parse and which tags not to parse. They can also just read it as an unparsed text. This is simply how web was designed.

Unethical to do what exactly? Only consume part of it? Is it unethical to ignore the coupons you get at a supermarket?

(for people who haven't been to the US: coupons are printed on the back of the receipt)

What's unethical about reading the parts of a webpage that you want to read? It's like getting a free newspaper and then covering up the ads inside before you read it.

Well not quite. It's more like having someone else remove the ads so you're never exposed to them. Which I would say is a little unethical considering the newspaper is free for a reason.