So products have 3 choices.

1- No ads. 2- Transparent ads. 3- Opaque ads.

By removing option 2, you only leave options 1 and 3.

If the product has costs (always true), then option 1 means that there is no gratis tier. So you force companies to remove their free tier, or to make ads opaque.

If you want to enjoy a free product without paying and without ads, then do so, but don't pretend you are an activist for doing so, just pay the ethical cost instead of trying to avoid paying that as well.

This isn't complex either, the only reason you don't get it is because you don't want to get it, you want things that are gratis without paying for them, and you want the free things to be given to you on your terms, and you don't want to be guilty about it. It's easier to think of yourself as righteous than to recognize that you want to be a leech.

Ah yes, the classic "my business plan is your moral problem; you owe me your eyes on my ads because I'm the idiot giving things away for free."

People don't want ads. You imply that "if you accept ads then things will be free" but they will not. Never accept ads. Not for a free service, certainly not in a paid product. Ads exist to enable leaching in both direction in exchange for what ends up being nearly mind control. But it is two-way leaching - companies benefit without the friction of explicit payment, consumers get a service without explicitly paying via money. The downside is neither can stop the bad-incentives motivating bad actions from the other side.

Ads are a deal with the devil, and rejecting them outright is allowed via that deal, just as companies can withdraw their free service. It cuts both ways.

The user can choose not to use the service instead of breaking the terms and services, no?

Presumably you wouldn't even want to use the service since it's so evil, so we probably agree that people ideally shouldn't use adblockers.

I don't know if you can hear me from way up on your high horse - I'll try to speak up.

Running an adblocker today isn't so much about blocking ads, as it's about blocking the hostile advertiser industry who spy, profile, fingerprint and scam and whatnot. Blocking advertising is the only moral choice; these people are criminals. I would never let my mom browse the Internet without an adblocker. You think she knows which download button is the correct one to pick?

Making advertising unprofitable is the activist goal, so choice "1: no ads", in your scenario, becomes the only available option.

Please don't reply to a bad comment with another bad comment. It just makes things worse.

Oh no. Will you be adjusting my daily allotted posts further down? Yea I know about your shadow ban. Classy.

Please don't sneer. My comment was about as mild an ask as we ever make. We won't be adjusting anything, and indeed we'd happily turn the rate limiter off if you just respect the guidelines. This is only a place where people want to participate because we have guidelines and people make the effort to observe them. There's no reason why you couldn't be one of them. We want this to be a place where the full range of positions and perspectives can be represented and discussed, but snark and contempt just drags the place down, regardless of anyone's ideology.

You're assuming 2 and 3 are mutually exclusive.

Even if they have 2, they can still make even more money by also including 3, so almost certainly will do so.

Not necessarily mutually exclusive no, mathematically I'd say they are inversely proportional, hard to disagree with that no?

I think you're overestimating the marginal cost of doing one of them after you've already done the other. If a company has a bunch of ad-buying customers and a bunch of transparent ads, putting together some work to make a bunch of opaque ones for the exact same customers is not necessarily going to be that hard. I don't see how you can claim that it's mathematically guaranteed that the number of customers who decide that they'd pay more to have both is not enough to make that work turn a profit.

You are right on two counts.

First that i should have said correlated rather than proportional.

Second that even if there's an inverse influence, there's also a positive influence between both forms of advertisement.

But in terms of proportion I still maintain that if you eliminate one type of advertisement the ratio will become 100% of the other, which is as undeniable as it is tautological.

You've been asked before to make your points without swipes. Please make the effort to observe the guidelines; the only reason this is a place people want to discuss things is that we have them and others make the effort to observe them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> 1- No ads. 2- Transparent ads. 3- Opaque ads.

> By removing option 2, you only leave options 1 and 3.

My point is that these are not exclusive options, and in practice, most companies will not feel constrained to only pick one of them.

> This isn't complex either, the only reason you don't get it is because you don't want to get it, you want things that are gratis without paying for them, and you want the free things to be given to you on your terms, and you don't want to be guilty about it. It's easier to think of yourself as righteous than to recognize that you want to be a leech.

No, I'm arguing that because companies in practice are going to use multiple of these when they can, my attempts to influence them by keeping the door open on 2 will not have any effect whatsoever, so I might as well close the door on it.