> I never saw most of the offending ads because of my adblocker
Using ad blockers is unethical. No one who uses one (probably 99% of people on HN) wants to hear this, but the conclusion is inescapable really.
You may commence your downvoting.
ETA: Why do I claim it's unethical? Every ad-supported page is an implicit contract: If you want the good stuff on this page, you need to pay for that by giving some of your attention to <these shitty ads that we all probably hate>. Nothing more. If the trade-off isn't worth it to you, that's fine: you have the right, and the ability, to reject it -- to cease interacting with the site at all. OTOH, using an ad blocker to access the site without "paying" (with your attention) is violating the contract in the same way that hacking a parking meter downtown to park your car for free is. Running websites isn't free, and even if it was, it's the site owner's prerogative whether and how much ad-attention to "charge". If the fundamental idea of capitalism is sound (and perhaps it isn't -- but then let's discuss that), exorbitant ad burdens attached to desirable content will eventually be outcompeted by other sites offering similar content for free with fewer ads, or for actual cash.
There's a more self-serving argument, too: If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist, and nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people. Using ad blockers is only "sustainable" in the same way that mafia protection rackets are "sustainable" -- by being a sufficiently small drain on the rest of society.
There are valid reasons for using ad blockers, hence why the general US Intelligence Community both uses and recommends the use of ad blockers "as a critical security measure to defend against "malvertising" and data collection threats".
All other arguments are moot in the shadow of this. However, if you're talking about how a media company can stay afloat without advertising, then you're getting very much closer to ethical arguments. I currently just point to the first paragraph in such an argument.
The advertising industry needs to sort out its inability to appropriately and safely scale before any ethical arguments are able to put roots down.
I hear you on malvertising and overzealous data collection. I certainly think online advertising needs to be carefully regulated for essentially safety reasons. But in an ideal world where such regulation was firmly in place, I think it would not be appropriate (because it would not be necessary) for government or influential industry groups to endorse ad-blockers.
BTW I've added an ETA to my original post with my reasons.
I am not sure ethics have much to do with it nor implied contract.
In the past there was no ethical issue nor contractual issue with going to the bathroom during a network commercial break, no ethical issue with skipping multi page magazine ads. We were free to change the radio channel during ad breaks.
My parents would often mute the tv in commercial breaks and talk.
> OTOH, using an ad blocker to access the site without "paying" (with your attention) is violating the contract in the same way that hacking a parking meter downtown to park your car for free is.
It's not the same thing at all: I wouldn't hack a parking meter downtown, but I would if it was installed in my garage!
I find that 99% of ads are blocked simply by disabling Javascript. Does that suggest that disabling Javascript is unethical? Or does it suggest that those blocked advertisements were over-stepping the bounds of the implicit contract?
LMFAO. You want to play the "ethical" games? I'll bring this to you, because you don't have any base for your hallucinations. You know who are the real unethical creatures that's written by World Wide Web Consortium? It's YOU, the ones who insult and want to prevent people blocking things on their OWN computer.
> 2.12 The web can be consumed in any way that people choose
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
There are no contracts here. Don't make up your own laws. Bring your lawyers to here. When people download the malwares you serve on your websites, do you web owners ever go to jail to compensate for their loss? Or you just laugh at your home and say "Oh, I am so ETHICAL!"?
You are just bunch of unethical malware spreading and personal information stealing psycopaths. If you have some thing to sell, just sell it. If your products are not attractive enough to make people, that's your own fault. Don't spread malwares and steal peoples's information and cry that it's hard to "earn" to provide "free" information (you are stealing things from peopel, it's not free) and pretend that you are ethical. There are many ethical people out there, selling their few vegetables on the street each day. They don't steal people's information and give people harmful things that destroy other belongings like you psycopaths.
Because I am pro-capitalism, I utterly disagree with your premise. In a real contract, parties can negotiate and come to a meeting of the minds. Here's how it actually works:
* A website serves me a page with a place to put ads on it.
* I reject their offer to serve me ads.
* The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup. If they continue to serve me, they've agreed to my proposed contract alterations.
* If they choose not to serve me, I can decide to accept their final offer (by disabling my ad-blocker) or reject it (by closing the tab).
What on earth makes you think that the negotiation ends with the initial offer? That's not how bargaining works. This isn't some Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario.
Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?
If not, at what point during your milk purchase does the negotiation step that you hold to be important for capitalism take place?
I put it to you that take-it-or-leave-it-ness is orthogonal to the capitalism-socialism axis, and that the take-it-or-leave-it nature of viewing an ad-supported website is no more socialist (and no more alarming) than buying milk.
Regarding "negotiation":
> * The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup.
Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol? Because if so, I would agree that this amounts to a negotiation with the website as you say.
But this would certainly be news to me. It must be a recent change, since for most of my life, ads have simply been hyperlinked images/objects/videos/IFrames, or sometimes inline text generated server-side or on the client using JS, and the only mechanisms available to implement ad blocking were implicit, and based on subterfuge: By preventing fetching of that content in the first place (in a variety of ways), or by fetching it but then hiding/obscuring the result in some way. None of which amount to "negotiation", obviously.
> Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?
No. You can ask. They'll say no, almost surely, unless you're talking to the manager about something that's about to expire and then anything goes. But you can ask. Your idealized scenario is where the initial, and only, offer is "see this with ads or don't see it" with no room for negotiation.
> Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol?
As far as it's possible to express this arrangement in HTML, yes, of course. The page gives your client a document describing which resources it may wish to fetch, among other things. It's not expected that you'll fetch all of them. You may already have the cached data. A resource may be of a type your client doesn't know how to render. It may be in a tag your client doesn't know how to process. It may include executable code that your client might be configured to execute or not to execute. It may have several media types for scenarios that don't apply to you, such as for printing or working with a screen reader for people with visual impairments, and those media types may refer to resources that your client won't fetch because they're not relevant to you. 100% of those decisions can be made by your client. It's not obligated to execute your JavaScript, even if it has Bitcoin mining code and you lose out on the would-be cryptocurrency that my browser chooses not to mine for you. It's not obligated to use your fonts, or figure out how to display your odd graphics format, or render your PDF, or load your Java applet, etc.
And thus with ads. Your web page says "here's an image tag for you to display an ad", or more likely, "here's a ball of malware for you to execute that also displays an ad". There's no legal or moral or technical scenario where my client is obligated to choose to display or execute it, simply because your site told me how to do it if I chose to participate.
There certainly is a contradiction, but it's so deeply ingrained that using ad blockers is OK that people can't see it even when it's right in front of their faces.
If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist, and nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people.
For Meta specifically, what exactly would be so bad about all their stuff disappearing? I can't think of much. Messenger is the only thing of theirs that has any value as far as I can see, and there's many alternatives now.
You could be right, but I personally am much more comfortable paying with a few milliseconds of my attention for news/email/short comedy clips/timezone conversion/etc. than even a single cent of actual money. And it has to be one or the other -- right?
BTW: For a tool that actually legitimately does this, look at Semgrep. Their playground example literally assigns 1 to a variable x, after which searching for "2" finds the expression "1 + x" in the code: https://semgrep.dev/playground/s/5rKgj
I'm impressed by how thoroughly you ignored the question of whether your own inaction was partly responsible for the outcome that occurred later, and which you dislike.
It has persuaded me that your own inaction was totally unrelated to this outcome.
Thank you for linking to this. Years ago I chanced upon this website, and it was my first experience of reading something about Buddhism that seemed to consciously strive for clarity, for intelligibility to an interested layperson, rather than for what I'll call "easy mysticism" for its own sake.
If folks expect someone to solve problems for them, than 100% people end up unhappy. The old idea of loyalty buying a 30 year career with vertical movement died sometime in the 1990s.
Ikigai chart will help narrow down why people are unhappy:
> If folks expect someone to solve problems for them
In this type of situation, the fundamental issue is that making progress depends on many people acting in unison to increase their bargaining power, which is (a) hard to arrange even if everyone who acted this way would benefit, and (b) actually may be detrimental to some people (usually the high performers).
I agree it is nearly impossible to alter the inertia of existing firms. Most have entrenched process people that defend how things are done right up until a company enters insolvency. Fine if you sell soda or rubber tires, but a death knell for technology or media firms.
In my observations it is usually conditioned fear, personal debt-driven risk aversion, and or failure to even ask if the department above you is really necessary. These days, it is almost always easier to go to another firm if you want a promotion. =3
I think it mostly happens because a little bit of abstraction is nearly always uncontroversially good. If you want to print a line of text 5 times, you'll instinctively write a for loop to do it, instead of copy-pasting the original print() statement an extra 4 times. The cognitive overhead upon reading this code is near zero, since we're all so familiar with it. This is abstraction, nonetheless.
So a little bit is always good, and more is sometimes very good -- even memorably good. Together these cause many of us to extrapolate too far, but for understandable reasons.
social media is the root of most evil in the society at present, pornography is just a bunch of people fucking around. while neither is healthy, if you had to choose you are better off watching people fucking
Using ad blockers is unethical. No one who uses one (probably 99% of people on HN) wants to hear this, but the conclusion is inescapable really.
You may commence your downvoting.
ETA: Why do I claim it's unethical? Every ad-supported page is an implicit contract: If you want the good stuff on this page, you need to pay for that by giving some of your attention to <these shitty ads that we all probably hate>. Nothing more. If the trade-off isn't worth it to you, that's fine: you have the right, and the ability, to reject it -- to cease interacting with the site at all. OTOH, using an ad blocker to access the site without "paying" (with your attention) is violating the contract in the same way that hacking a parking meter downtown to park your car for free is. Running websites isn't free, and even if it was, it's the site owner's prerogative whether and how much ad-attention to "charge". If the fundamental idea of capitalism is sound (and perhaps it isn't -- but then let's discuss that), exorbitant ad burdens attached to desirable content will eventually be outcompeted by other sites offering similar content for free with fewer ads, or for actual cash.
There's a more self-serving argument, too: If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist, and nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people. Using ad blockers is only "sustainable" in the same way that mafia protection rackets are "sustainable" -- by being a sufficiently small drain on the rest of society.
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