Yeah - we're talking morals!
You won't find a mathematical equation to define the moral line.
> ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts
Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing, I just think it's morally dubious. I didn't say anything like I thought it was criminal.
> Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages?
I think so yes.
> It just doesn't make sense to say that something is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient
Well yeah, again it's morality, it's human and fuzzy.
Automation is often a line for morality. Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.
This isn't some kind of new idea.
Not for arbitrary reasons though, there are tangible effects from automation that we worry about in those systems. We draw distinctions because there are parts of the manual process that we can point to as valuable.
We worry about automated weapons because they take a safety check out of the system. We kind of are saying what I mentioned above, that we want killing to be kind of difficult and emotionally hard to do. But that doesn't map to ads, unless you're saying that one of our goals is that we want blocking ads to be emotionally draining/difficult. But I don't think that's what anyone believes about ads.
Similarly, people don't oppose automated speed cameras because they think automation is a moral line, they oppose taking humans out of the decision making process for whether or not someone should get a ticket. But this doesn't really map to ads unless we think it's important that humans have to consciously decide to skip content, which... why would we think that? Some people also don't trust the automated cameras to be reliable. This also doesn't really map to adblockers, because adblockers aren't being used by other people to make decisions about you.
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> Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing
I should phrase this differently, that's totally my bad.
I can't think of any way of defining an implicit social contract between website operators and consumers that wouldn't also define an implicit social contract between consumers and advertisers themselves. It is weird to me that people think it's morally dubious to do things that deprive website operators of profit, but that it's not morally dubious to do things that deprive advertisers of profit.
If we say that advertisers don't have a right to ask us to look at content, I'm not sure why website operators should be different.
I think that's a really arbitrary line. Screenreaders skip ads. Scrapers/apis skip ads. There isn't a clear division between an automated tool and a tool with manual intervention.
In some ways this feels like the same legalism that popped up in spam phone calls where to get around auto-dial rules businesses would have someone on their end sit in a room and press a button over and over to complete the call. In the exact same way, we could imagine a version of Ublock Origin where every time the page loads it comes up as a blank screen, and then I hit a button on my keyboard, and then the screen renders without ads. I don't think that advertisers would see a difference between those systems.
Remember that from the perspective of the advertiser -- the person actually paying for the content -- you walking out of your room during a TV commercial and a piece of software skipping the TV commercial are the same thing. The advertiser does not see a distinction between those actions because the advertiser is not paying for content in exchange for the privilege of streaming data to your computer, the advertiser is paying for content in exchange for your attention.
It is weird to me that people are able to latch on to the idea that ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts, but don't view circumventing advertising through other means as stealing money from advertisers. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that when we say that it's fine for people to block content manually but not using user agents, what we are effectively saying is that it's fine for them to ignore ads as long as they're not particularly good at ignoring them. But even that isn't a great argument.
Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages? What if I make a machine with image recognition that does the same thing? It just doesn't make sense to say that ad blocking is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient, and then it becomes immoral.