The society we live in demands that you earn money, if you don't want to die. The only thing that you have in a high enough amount is time, so if you use time to do anything, at some point it must earn money or you die. In the digital world there is no scarcity, so the old model of physical stuff you sell for $X a piece doesn't work. There are no systems to guarantee a life to everyone, everyone has to fight for themselves. If you want to produce content, content that is not necessary to live, you necessarily enter non a competition for attention, for money, against everyone else. If people justifiably can't give you money, you must resort to the only way that gives you a survival fee: shove crap in the eyes of the reader. Give them not what they want, but what others want. Influence their decisions.
It's a shitty system. The analogy is interesting because if there's a single vendor that holds what you need to survive, and they price it at an outrageously high price just for their profit, is it acceptable ? Is it OK, as a society, to say no to this practice ?
No, a free market explicitly applies only to well-regulated markets, as per the very creator of the word. It doesn’t matter what regulates the market, but for all practical purposes it will be the government(s). And this is the reason why European markets are often “more free” per several metrics.
A good analogy to this topic would be sport competitions. A free market is a fair, say running, race. But an anticompetitive/too large company exerting its power in different segments would be akin to someone tying the other racer’s shoes together (but I wouldn’t put past the analogy even shooting the others)
Ayn Rand's utopia. I wouldn't want to live there.
And, of course, welfare economics itself is just a mathematical model. Whether it really holds true empirically is hard to tell given the impossibility of society-wide RCTs and enormous confounders when trying to compare across time and space.
When I buy a banana, I see the price beforehand. With ads on websites it’s more as if upon me taking the banana, the banana seller gained the right to search my pockets and take anything they fancy.
I am absolutely within my rights if I instruct my computer to honor some of these requests and not others. Any other perspective is crazy when you think about it. I own the computer, I choose the programs that I run. I'm not leasing this computer from Google or from the business that owns the website in question.
This is really a matter of property rights. If somebody wants me to use a computer which is unable to block ads, they can offer to lend me a free computer which has that limitation, I suppose. I mean I'd say no, but other people might say yes.
I wish more technology worked that way.
https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-...
And yet ublock origin tries to work around this. About a third of their issues are "this site refuses service to people with adblockers": https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...
If these sites really don't want you there with an ad blocker, they can actually block you. I imagine they realize there is value in getting more eyeballs even without ads, whether that be that users might still recommend and create links to your content that other people without a blocker then follow, or you actually sell something and some of those people might buy it. Whatever it is, by revealed preference, those site owners seem to be indicating it's worth it to allow people to browse with an ad blocker.
By default, we do not try to work around sites which make a polite demand that the users disable their blockers without preventing access, this way the final decision is up to the users.
Nope; uBlock Origin will work around that as well. Skimming recent issues, in https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/15338 atozmath.com detects that people are running an ad blocker [1], explains what they're doing, and refuses access. The discussion is how to make the site think ads aren't blocked, though they haven't succeeded yet. In https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/13801 there's a simpler one with https://www.magicgameworld.com where it refuses access but doesn't provide reasoning, and that one was fixed.
[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/90739617/196804351...
Yes, it absolutely is. Ads not only cost me my time and attention, but also consume resources (network bandwith, CPU time, screen real estate) that I might not want to be consumed. Just open any consumer-oriented webpage these days, and I can guarantee you will get 2-3 videos (!) or animations autoplay immediately, and a large part of your screen eaten by "garbage". Sometimes reader mode helps, sometimes it does not...
One thing that I usually do is when a page shows an explicit ask to turn my adblocker off, I close that page. This is fair enough, you can call this a transaction, and I can opt out of it.
Story time. In the 1970s, my grandfather wrote a letter to our local newspaper, asking them to omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the news. "I never read them" he said.
Then my mother had to explain to him a little bit about mass production.
He would have loved ad-blockers.
following your reasoning it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?
no, the browser job is to display what he receive from the resource YOU requested what the server put in that resource is between you and it (you can "cheat"(not my word but liked/steal it from another comment) by drop the ad or choose to not requesting the resource all together).
In-video ads are usually OK, the way they do "sponsor" segments on Youtube for example, they are "uninteresting" but usually short and non-obtrusive. Again, I consider these as transactions and don't skip them if otherwise I wanted to watch the video. The best creators (Jay Foreman comes to mind) do these so well that I actually look forward to watching them!
Completely unrelated ads that are forcibly and blindly inserted into the video stream (again, Youtube is an example) are not okay, and I expect the browser/ad blocker to weed them out.
Nice. I see this pattern around: when X wants Y to (say) watch an ad, X's first instinct is to try to force Y. When X does not get to do that, they tend to discover much less coercive ways to do it
FWIW, its not the browser "including" the adds. The ads have been included in the video itself.
If the server returns a file, the user hasn't implicitly agreed to some limited use of that file or that it must be processed in some specific way, but the business has implicitly agreed to the user's usage of that file. The user (or the client on behalf of that user) can choose to ignore that file, not execute it or not even request it in the first place. This can be done either manually or assisted by tools (e.g. sponsorblock, ublock origin).
Anything else puts arbitrary restrictions on the weaker party (individual vs. large business), and negates their property rights of being allowed to choose what runs on their general computing device. If the business doesn't want a file to be used, don't serve it in the first place.
It is. And it has a time scroller and speed controls, unless you're watching an ad.
A piece of software not doing what you want is following the wishes of its creator, which differ from yours.
Of course. That's why Sponsorblock exists.
Who is in control? I am in control over my time, my attention, not the middlemen between the video author and me.
PS:in another comment i tried to explain how i see it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919824
Yes. Proper video players and media files have support for chapters for the express purpose of skipping what you don't want to see and getting to the point. YouTube refuses to do it because of its stupid advertising bullshit? People will do it for them with SponsorBlock.
> no, the browser job is
The browser's job is to be the user agent. It acts on our behalf and represents our will. Its job isn't to display some website's little ads. Its job is to do whatever we, the users, want it to do, even if it hurts the interests and bottom line of some corporation. If blocking ads is good for users, that's exactly what browsers should do, literally no questions asked.
PS:in another comment i tried to explain how i see it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919824
The owner/landlord may have given permission. But it's still not a welcome intrusion, and wearing a "No salespeople here" anti-mobbing suit is a completely legitimate personal freedom.
But that's exactly what an adblocker does. It's something different than not requesting the entire website though.
I don't think anyone demanded that browsers block ads without the user's consent.
it's not perfect, im using an ad blocker and i can't understand how people can surf the internet without one but hopefully we can find a solution the change the whole free internet based on ad with something else
If you want money reliably you need to explicitly ask for it.
The problem is that people are using their ad budget to compete with free content, but the free content is still going to be there it will just appear higher up in the search results if various bad actors aren't paying for a bunch of SEO.
Debatable.
For tech content this might be true but for general news, investigative journalism, reporters, etc. that probably won't be the case as the activity itself implies fixed costs.
You can see how well donation links work on content sites and open source projects for proof.
I personally pay $50/month on Patreon to various makers.
That's for long form video content (series, movies, documentaries, etc.).
Text content is rarely something people pay for.
How many newspapers are you subscribed to?
> I personally pay $50/month on Patreon to various makers.
Sure, but look what the ratio of Patreon subscriber to viewers is for Twitch streams or Youtube content creators is.
On the other hand, a whole lot of recycled content mills where all the $0.05/paragraph contract writers are about to be replaced by GPT-4 probably would.
It's also my right and in my power to open your web site on my browser, delete your ad and read what you wrote. Once your web page leaves your server and enters my computer, it's no longer yours. You are no longer in control. You cannot dictate to me what can and can't be displayed on my screen.
This is very rarely the case, though, and also the fundamental error the original article is making. The vast majority of page loads are blind link clicks. The user doesn't know what is behind it before clicking. They're trying to take a quick sample and maybe stay on the page and read something if it proves sufficiently interesting and not obnoxious compared to the thousands of otherwise identical pages with near identical content.
It is not people trying to grab your magazine to take home without paying. It's people at the magazine stand browsing through all of them trying to decide if any are worth buying. While thumbing through the covers, we don't want autoplay videos taking over our speakers and waking up our sleeping spouse, malicious JavaScript querying the OS to figure out what our hardware capabilties and settings are to fingerprint us, thumbnails of a bunch of women with E cups in tight shirts with no relation to a story trying to get us to browse through to something else. We just want to see if whatever the hell we clicked on is actually worth reading. You're automatically assuming we made that decision before loading the page.
Black Mirror did a delightfully dark take on this, it might have even been the first episode.
Guy can buy out the ads, spending currency to skip them. One day he doesn't have the money and is forced to watch the ad. Literally forced. If he averts his eyes, the ad follows them. If he closes his eyes, they torture him with high pitched noise until he opens them. It drives him to the point of physical violence.
It's one of my favorite episodes. The incredible inhumanity of it all, and I bet these ad tech companies would think nothing of it.
All other forms of advertisement are a deal between 2 businesses. They work out all the details of when and where an ad will be shown, and what methods will be used to verify the deal is being upheld, none of which rely on the consumer. It would be insane to expect consumers to volunteer their time and effort to fetch the ad and show it to themselves, especially before they even know what they’re getting out it. Add to that expecting the consumer to answer a large list of personal questions, and it’s downright certifiable.
It is our right.
These corporations do the exact same thing, they change their little terms of service all the time, often without notice, and we're forced to swallow it. Why is it suddenly wrong when we do it? Because it costs them money? Fuck their money, we owe them nothing.
> Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway
Complete bullshit analogy. There is no "transaction". There never was, not even once, a "transaction". Only assumptions.
They are not charging us anything. They're giving us the banana for free after putting some advertising stamps on it. They're hoping we'll look at the ads but the fact is we are under exactly zero obligation to do so. We invented technology that peels the bananas automatically and gives us the fruit while throwing the trash away and the ads along with it.
Our attention is not currency, nor can it be sold to the highest bidder. We are under exactly zero obligation to "pay" with our attention. Zero.
> "Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
Absolutely agree. Businesses are the ones that come to us with their idiotic "our way or the highway, take it or leave it" deals. Functionality such as ad blocking is absolutely vital for consumers because it empowers them to alter the deal. It doesn't really matter what the corporation thinks, the deal is gonna be altered whether it likes it or not.
Such is the power of adversarial interoperability, the nightmare of every monopolist.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
It's kinda tiring really - seeing people constantly bark past each other with no understanding of nuance. But that's the modern internet I guess.
In fact, it’s not apathy, it’s antipathy.
I think the world would be a better place if ad-supported businesses, advertisers, advertiser-driven tracking, and ad-tech companies simply did not exist.
Can anyone really make that argument though?
Maybe making sites repulsive is the default because those that push that default earns money on it?
You recognize these dark pattern modal boxes that absolutely ruin a site and you feel the complexity. The mom and pop site most assuredly did not invent this, and if they believe they even wanted it is because they were tricked into it.
Sites that are "well behaved" with ads are fine to me. The problem is too many abuse the css/js capabilities of the browser to make a result similar to the popup problems of yore. The only sane solution from a consumer point of view is block by default and whitelist the good places.
May not be the job of a web browser but it’s the job of MY web browser. I either have a web browser that blocks ads or I have a broken web browser that’s soon to be replaced.
The business that I'm boycotting with uBlock Origin is the one that tracks me as I move around the internet and builds a dossier on me that they sell ads against.
It’s not even a “what if”, we all experience it on a daily basis.
What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?
The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).
Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).
"Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.