Visiting sites consume resources. If you walk into a store and take a gift card you're still consuming resources meant to be paid for, even if they're mostly digital resources. Regardless of the car or shoes you used to do it.

I don't welcome a world of paid products that also include ads. Yet ads do make some paid products cheaper, like say a Kindle or a TV. Folks blocking ads from a premium product probably have a stronger defense. Those blocking ads from an entirely ad supported service less so.

> Yet ads do make some paid products cheaper

1. Companies selling paid products see ads as an additional revenue and not a way of filling a hole in the budget caused by price reductions. The price wasn’t reduced. That’s a fairy tale.

2. Even if (1) wasn’t true, the consumer seeing ads ends up spending more. They pay for the goods and services being advertised. If they didn’t spend more the whole ad business model wouldn’t work.

A false equivalency. Websites want to entice you to visit, stores do not want to entice you to steal gift cards.

As for whether you can make blocking ads an ethical imperative, I'd agree that without ads, there likely wouldn't be an incentive to provide helpful, free services. If anything, it's theft of the value that other ad-consenting visitors are providing.

Stores want to sell you gift cards paid for by your money. Websites want to 'sell' you website content paid for by showing you ads. Some sites even sell you the content ad free by paying them directly.

This is an interesting, yet bewildering take. Do you work for Unity by chance?

Most stores will gladly have you enter their store at a cost, the hardest and most expensive part of the process is getting you there.

I work for a company that helps sell ad free and bonus podcast content. Yet I've had these opinions far longer.

> Visiting sites consume resources.

Less if you block their ads and JS.

but are ads actually served using resources of the site? i just assumed that the ad was served from the ad provider. the only resources used of the site was the initial JS code. redirecting through the host seems very inefficient.

Ads are displayed on my machines. Using the processor cycles and RAM of my computers. Powered by my electricity. Consuming my limited attention span. Injecting information I didn't ask for and do not want to remember into my mind.

So avoid sites with ads?

No.

Why not? Do you prefer they keep making the ads worse to compensate? Or they paywall more? Or make the ads 'native' and indistinguishable from useful content?

People don't want to work for you for free.

> Why not?

Because I don't have to.

> Do you prefer they keep making the ads worse to compensate?

They'll only be punishing users that haven't installed uBlock Origin yet.

> Or they paywall more?

No objection to that.

> Or make the ads 'native' and indistinguishable from useful content?

If I figure out someone is doing that, I'll never trust them again. I'll literally blacklist the site and if I see it posted here or anywhere else I'll point it out.

> People don't want to work for you for free.

They should start charging money then. Return 402 Payment Required instead of a free HTML page. If they send me ads, I will delete them. I won't be losing even one second of sleep over the matter. I'd delete real life ads too if could get away with it.

Just because a company has found a way to make money off of ads doesn't mean we're morally obligated to look at those ads, nor even incidentally be exposed to them. Consider an example applied outside of the internet.

Let's say I open a restaurant that advertises itself as "FREE PIZZA", and I give them a free pizza if asked but I also hand them a 2cm thick stack of ad flyers. Is it morally wrong to take that stack of advertising and just throw it away without looking at it while still eating the pizza? I (and I think most people) would say that throwing away the ads is totally acceptable; they're the fools giving away the free pizza with the hope that they'll drive business for the advertisers. If the free-pizza shop goes out of business because everyone throws away the ad flyers, that's something we consider totally ok because that's probably not a great business approach.

The only reason we consider ads online different is because it's become so normalized. We the users have come to expect many services for free, and the folks making their money by including the ads have become vocally entitled to users eyeballs and the money it makes them. They say "my business will fail if you block my ads; you owe me your eyeballs." Yeah, that's not my problem; I'm an audience member who owes the content-provider/service nothing and who's agreed to nothing (TOS's and EULA's have tried to move the goalposts on this after decades, don't be fooled), the only party the content-provider/service is actually doing business with is their advertising network, so they should figure it amongst themselves.

I think a more fitting analogy would be walking into a store to sit down and cool off with no intent of buying anything. You are "taking" passive resources (air conditioning, space, potentially employee attention). Would you consider that to be unethical?

Personally, I don't believe ad blocking is unethical because I don't believe the ways in which advertisers collect and sell their data is ethical.

If you could loiter in a store and automatically bypass seeing anything being sold there then that would be unethical. Some places even have rules against loitering because they just don't have capacity to serve as a hang out spot for all the people living nearby.

Our data* It's not their

This is misguided. Just like visiting a site consumes resources on their server, visiting a site consumes resources on my system, in fact, if I don't block ads it consumes even more resources. In many cases I would argue that fetching and rendering the whole flashing shebang of ad garbage some sites ship these days consumes considerably more resources than simply serving the files on a server.

Seeing billboards and print ads consume brain cycles. Walking into a store takes energy, even stealing some prepaid cards consumes calories. That they require you do some effort doesn't mean it's ethical to consume their resources without exchanging a bit more.

By your logic not looking at billboards would be unethical. Surely you can see how that makes no sense. Just because someone spent energy on something doesn't mean you have to want it in any measure.

> This is misguided. Just like visiting a site consumes resources on their server, visiting a site consumes resources on my system, in fact, if I don't block ads it consumes even more resources.

Did the site force you to visit?

> Visiting sites consume resources.

Not our problem. They're the ones sending free web pages to any client who requests. Their servers are free to return 402 Payment Required if they require payment.

I think you are overreacting

> This stance is absurd.

It's not 'absurd', because he did say "arguably", meaning that there's an argument to be made for either side of the issue (and a poster below makes an argument).

Pointing out that ad-blocking is arguably unethical is fine. If he had said "it's unarguably unethical", then sure, that's absurd, but the poster qualified his statement quite nicely.