As naive as this may make me sound, I think this attitude is hurting society. The idea that everyone is and should be trying to screw everyone else out of as much pleasure and profit as legal is, in my opinion, detrimental to society.<p>When we stop doing things that don't negatively affect us much and help others, we've lost the benefits of altruism that helped our species evolve beyond the rest.
It's painful to see so many intelligent people unable or unwilling to analyze the effects their actions cause. If you block ads on sites you enjoy without communicating with the producers of that site, you are lowering the probability that sites you enjoy will continue to be produced. There are several ways to mitigate this effect if you don't like ads:<p>1) Pay for a subscription.<p>2) If no subscription is offered, ask for one to be offered.<p>3) If you'd simply like less offensive ads, ask for less offensive ads.<p>Taking actions that in sum lower the probability of things you like being produced in the future is incredibly stupid.<p><i>"The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to.</i>"<p>Ars Technica doesn't expect you to look at their ads. They expect you to render their ads or pay for a subscription. If you choose to do neither of those, you are a parasite.
Ars Technica:
"I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical..."<p>This guy (first sentence, no less):
"There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical..."<p>Give me a break.
"If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down."<p>He makes it sound easy. As though there weren't a multitude of websites facing the same problem with covering their operating costs.<p>TV before cable faced a similar dilemma. Anyone could access it, but how do you pay for it? Ads did. Cable TV came along with commercial-free channels, but the consumer would pay for those directly. That solution has been discussed with some websites, and it's generally ill-received (e.g. NYT, Hulu).<p>I think ads can work, I wish they were done better in many cases. What I won't do is criticize them for their business model without offering a suggestion of my own.
<i>By contrast, books (for example) are awesome. I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads</i><p>Thats the issue, you paid money for the book, it's the business model the author used to make writing the book worthwhile.<p>Historically the Internet doesn't seem to support content producers this way.
<i>Stop making the world a garish and hideous place to live by flooding it with ads.</i><p>There are people so <i>soft</i> that they consider the world a "hideous place to live" because of some advertising? There are people who can barely eat each day without getting so offended by a few commercials.<p><i>It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being.</i><p>This is crazy talk. Is it even possible to argue against someone who resorts to saying they get "very emotional" when seeing any sort of advertising or that advertising "devastates" their well being? Is he scared of animal crackers as well?
I really don't understand this sentiment. If you don't like the ads, stop using the site.<p>There is a coffee shop in Tempe, AZ that I very very rarely go to. Why? Because the wifi there is horrible. It's slow; there are too many people there using pandora and not enough bandwidth to go around.<p>Would it be appropriate for me to whine about this while continuing to go there?<p>When using a website (or any service) you are basically choosing to endure a bit of inconvenience (spending money, or viewing ads) in exchange for something you want (coffee, content). I get that people want to skip the first part, but I don't get how they think that could ever work.
"If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down."<p>Easier said than done.
While the arguments about ethics and morality are relevant, I prefer to focus on the implicit challenge: Can more publishers find ways to make money from ad-free content?<p>Adblock is like Napster. People want the content; the vast majority of publishers only have one business model; a lot of consumers doesn't like the price they're being asked for the benefit they're getting, and many of them are willing to take the content without paying.<p>There are always people who won't pay no matter what - in the music world, filesharing is still around. But a lot of people started paying for music again when Amazon and Apple and eMusic changed the price structure to something they were willing to pay.<p>There are a few sites like LiveJournal and MetaFilter that have ad-free options for paid users. Maybe this is a small niche and will never be big business. But maybe there are a lot more user who would pay to support ad-free content - if the price is right.
What if someone made a browser plugin where every time an you visited a website it gave that website 1/1000th of a cent (and took 1/1000th of a cent out of your paypal/google-checkout/etc. account), and in exchange that website saw the plugin and served you a version with no ads. How many people would choose to use this plugin?
Profit is not wrong. Profit is not screwing someone. Any freely contracted trade results in a net benefit for <i>both</i> parties. It has to by definition, or else it wouldn't be entered.<p>When someone says ads are "screwing them over", I have to laugh and wonder what kind of life that person leads that annoying ads are considered an atrocity. If you want to see being "screwed over", look no further than our tax code. Our tax code is a system where one does not own 40% of their life, where there is an explicit understanding that anyone above a certain income level is not going to get out of it what they pay into it, where there has become a rational expectation that the money will largely -- to the order of 90% -- be wasted on bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. In all of the battlefields of life, you choose <i>online advertisements</i> to rail against? Hell, give Sally Struthers a dollar a day already.
"The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant."<p>The author seems to be saying that he is entitled to take from the creator of content without having any obligation to give something in return. I believe that this misses one of the most basic principles of our economy - namely the idea of a value-exchange. You get, you give. I believe it's morally wrong to get, get, get, and not be willing to give.<p>No, he has no obligation to stare at an advertisement, but if he's not willing to stare at the ad he should look at other ways to compensate the creator of content or else not feel entitled to view the content.<p>Not that it matters, but the author's post is obviously link-bait also.
OK, a thought experiment: what about an ad blocker that downloads the ad, but doesn't display it? Because the argument seems to be that it is not necessary to look at the ad, only to download it, so that the site get's paid.<p>I am pretty sure such an downloading ad blocker would be considered a kind of click fraud.
You know, I'd like to not block adds. I really don't want to. But some sites make me.<p>I didn't block them until a few months a go. But there were some adds that were just so obnoxious. The worst were these ones that played really loud sounds -- they made me keep my speakers mute, because I didn't want my computer to spontaneously start playing music and wake people up.<p>One day I was just utterly fed up. I went to Mozilla's site, downloaded an add-blocker, set it to the default settings, and voila! Everything was much nicer.<p>I'm going to reinstall my OS soon -- I find using apt-get to upgrade break things -- and I'll use the Internet without an add-blocker for a few days. If things are as bad as they were, I'll use one again. Maybe try and find a list that only blocks obnoxious adds, though.
Ars article was about how when they blocked the ad-blockers people complained.<p>If you have the views espoused in this article you should have no problem using an ad blocker which tells the web-server that it's blocking ads and leaves it's up to the website whether it chooses to return you content sans-advertising.<p>If you're using an ad blocker that specifically misleads the website into thinking ads are being viewed when they're not, then that's clearly unethical.<p>Imagine if you asked someone for a favour and they asked you for a favour in return. And then they did what you wanted but you only pretended to do what they wanted. That's exactly the same situation as this.
I rather like Ars. The content is a bit varied in quality, but I do have a look at it most days. The best content makes me reminisce about Byte Magazine.<p>The ads are annoying. The alternative is $50/year. It just feels like quite a big sum of money when the extra benefits are not that interesting. $50/year that also gives me a good daily iPad edition, with articles I can save, without ads and full archive access may start being in the right realm for me.<p>Maybe I should just pony up the $50 to experiment, I did save it on my dropped newspaper subscription recently. :)
This discussion reminds me that the only site where I haven't minded the ads so much (and I think I might have even bought something from an ad there once), is Penny Arcade. The reason is that they carefully choose ad campaigns to be tasteful and only advertise stuff that they themselves consider worthy of purchase. I still don't like them enough to turn off adblock specifically for that site though, so I guess that counts as collateral damage.
The solution seems obvious. Run adblock, and also run a background script that reads your browser history and hits the same sites, ads included, without displaying anything. You get your clean Internet and as far as the advertisers can tell, they're getting their "impressions."
I think that advertising is indeed devastating to our collective well being, but not for the miserly reasons you enumerated. I think that advertising conditions us to associate happiness with things or circumstances external, rather than from a place inside ourselves. Which is fundamentally fucked.<p>To the author: I think that if you cut the paranoia, you would actually be wealthier in spirit as well as material "net worth".
The real culprit isn't people blocking ads; it's the free-market nature of internet economy that allows companies/websites to rely solely on advertisement, causing internet ads to be so populated.