Now, I get that you're probably coming at this from "But hosting costs money and advertising is a way to recuperate the cost, so visiting the site but blocking ads is leeching bandwidth from the host without providing value back in the form of ad revenue".
But this doesn't hold up. All the cards are held by the content provider. If they -actually- have a problem with this, they have ways to stop it.
1. A server will always serve a request. That's it's job. So there's some unavoidable up-front cost to being a server on the internet.
2. But once it gets the request, it might serve a response that executes client-side Javascript that detects that an ad-blocker is running. At this point the content provider has a decision. They could block the requester. For example, redirect to a "Disable your adblocker" page. Or even in extreme cases blacklist the IP the request came from (though practically this doesn't happen). Heck, if things devolved into an arms race around ad-blocking detection, you could probably detect this server-side with some mechanism around serving a request to a browser while at the same time issuing a request to an ad provider to see if they received a corresponding ad content request within a certain window and if not, you know the ad was effectively blocked.
Ultimately it's not an obligation to accept ads. It's the content provider's prerogative to decide to deny service to ad-blocking clients, but realistically most content providers want traffic even if it's not generating ad revenue because of those sweet engagement metrics. If they don't, they have the tools to stop serving those requests.
One can enter physically a theater and watch a movie without paying quote often. Depending on the timing and staff you may not be confronted for a long time or at all.
Does that mean theaters don't really care or obligate consumers to pay?
There is nuance because the behavior around physical spaces is well established by law and social norm. This is absolutely not true for the internet, as evidenced by this very debate.
If you will indulge the hypothetical, and we step back from the established social norms (people know you are expected to pay), who is responsible for making sure customers understand the need to pay? The theater. If the theater doesn't secure their doors and doesn't say anywhere "you must pay to enter," then it's a completely reasonable behavior for someone to enter and watch until they are asked to leave or pay. If they refuse to leave, they're trespassing. If they are told to pay before entering and they sneak in, this is clearly trespassing.
But this is not really the same thing as online advertising. Online advertising is more like, you ask them to deliver a DVD to your house, and the agreement is "we'll deliver the DVD if you also let us place a camera and microphone in your home to watch your reaction to the DVD." Then you allow the DVD in but refuse entry to the spy gear. It would be very problematic to try and force people to accept the spy gear, or prevent them from denying entry to the spy gear. It would lead to laws purposefully designed to deny people privacy and control over their own homes. A much better solution would be for the company to just not allow you to take the DVD unless you also take the spy gear and to create laws around that behavior if necessary.
This stance is absurd. It's your device, you choose what content you want to consume on it. Do you imagine a world where you buy a monitor and once every hour it shows you fullscreen ads from the device manufacturer without your consent? Maybe you do, but for everyone else that's a dystopia.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
One way to figure out if a case could be made, or if something is “arguably” true, is to try and make a case or argument and see if it works. Just speculating that it might be possible to make a case is kind of weasel-wordy.
I actively avoid ads in print and other media where it's not possible to just block them, and skip through paid for posts in Telegram channels without reading a single word from them. Once you get used to doing this, it becomes second nature — pretty much automatic behavior.
Because if you have to manually notice, recognize, then look away, then arguably you've already paid with your attention. If someone or something is doing it for you (and others) automatically then it eliminates the 'payment' and undermines producers ability to produce.
> If someone or something is doing it for you (and others) automatically then it eliminates the 'payment' and undermines producers ability to produce.
Doesn't it also undermine producers ability to produce if you just get really good at quickly looking away?
It seems from your argument the "case could be made" that it's at least a little unethical to not spend at least a little while paying attention to each ad when reading a newspaper.
Like there's some scale where the left side has "0 attention spent, 0 ethical" and the right side has "maximum attention spent, maximally ethical".
Fair point. I think advertisers understand people will learn to gloss over and mentally filter yet the impression is still something. And in aggregate that's enough. I don't think anyone expects people to feel like consumers must give their full, undivided attention, with eyelids taped open and hands bound.
If a person followed me everywhere, took extensive notes on every facet of my life, and also got in my face constantly trying to sell me goods and services by means of shoving fliers in my face and yelling at top volume, you'd call it unethical of me to close my eyes and cover my ears. That kind of behavior is grounds for restraining orders, detainment, and prosecution, and is part of why we have concealed carry permits. But somehow it being digital makes it all okay in your book.
You are being deceptive if you try and paint contemporary web ads as these cute little fairies that just want to help separate you from your money. Ads on the internet these days are by default stuffed with cookies and trackers they don't need in order to psychologically harass people who don't want to be subjected to that pollution.
Maybe instead of it being incumbent on the less-powerful end user to be perpetually disciplined where businesses aren't, businesses should stop employing invasive tracking and psychological warfare, and maybe if they don't choose to do that on their own they should have their business crushed under twelve-digit fines that come with the same penalties as US student loans until they decide to play nice with the rest of society. One investor did say we need to see more pain in this economy, and although this wasn't what he meant by that, I like my idea much better than his.
I get where you're coming from. The free content is possible because of the advertisements, and you are sort of consenting to the ads when you choose to visit the site. It's not an explicit agreement but it is at least an understanding of what lets the wheels keep turning.
However, when ads are so obtrusive that they slow down my computer or ruin the use of the site completely, or if they have malware payloads (does happen) then I'm quite happy to use an ad blocker. I didn't use one until I started encountering this kind of nonsense regularly.
Nothing at all unethical about it. We're not obligated to spend even one second looking at ads. They sent us free stuff hoping we were going to notice the ads they bundled alongside it. We're not obligated to do that though. It's that simple.
You're not ethical for consuming while also automatically bypassing even the possibility of an ad impression. It's the impression that pays for the content. No impressions. No content.
Guess the content just isn't gonna be paid for then. Not my responsibility to make their silly business model work. My attention belongs to me. I decide what I pay attention to. They aren't entitled to it. Sending me free stuff doesn't entitle them to literally anything.
> Because it is? Ad blocking is arguably at least unethical.
If all an ad was was a static image, I might agree.
As it stands though, with RTB being what it is, ad blocking is the only means to protect yourself from a massive unethical, unconsensual breach of privacy.
Flyers mailed by local grocery stores regularly let me know when stores I don't normally shop at are having a sale on something I need, which lets me save money. How is that immoral?
Ads are literal spam. And spam is bad because people are forcing others to look at crap that they never wanted to see in the first place.
If you find these flyers genuinely helpful, and you explicitly gave them your consent to send you the flyers, then by definition it is no longer spam, and thus it is not immoral. But if you did not give your consent, then they are spamming you. How are they supposed to know if you want the flyers if you don't explicitly give your consent?
Maybe if I mailed you my shit, you'd find it useful, maybe not. But if I just mail it to you every week without your consent, it is the same thing as mailing flyers without your consent.
By what logic am I being thoughtless and in possession poorly examined morals?
Is expressing a different opinion "pushing morals"?
So many accusations here. Apparently I'm subhuman, a bad person, and of low moral character. All because I think the exchange of ad impressions for otherwise free access to content is a tolerable bargain, and that subverting the trade is problematic.
I said nothing of your character. I only commented on the action itself. We are human and we make mistakes, but we're not defined by those mistakes.
Advertising is unethical. I would encourage you to start with considering that position, read some opinions on this topic, and spend time considering the harm that advertising causes not only directly on the human, but also the incentives and ecosystems and structures of capitalism that advertising enables and perpetuates that also harms humans.
It is possible you simply don't hold the same values as me and many other people. Namely that people should not be harmed, capitalism perpetuates a lot of harm, people have rights to protect themselves from harm, and whether the means justify the ends.
That's false. If you put something online without a specific paywall everyone can get it however they want. With or without ads. Simple as that. You want to get paid for your content - put a price on it.
Nope. My attention belongs to me and me alone. It's not currency to pay for services with. Ad blockers are not only ethical, they're justified self defense.
I would support legislation to hold advertisors accountable for distributing malware, even if just negligence. Yet that case can probably be made with existing laws. Perhaps the US DoJ will finally awaken to the threat.
