I feel like any argument that starts with the idea that blocking ads is unethical would inevitably lead to that black mirror episode where the ad pauses if you close your eyes or look away, and you must pay to skip it.<p>Closing your eyes is just another ad blocking measure, and the idea that that would be unethical ought to be utterly preposterous.
I have a degree in marketing, took a vow never to work in it, and use these words to describe advertisements -
Motivated deception, manipulation, mind control, inauthentic, inorganic, insincere, a betrayal by your peers.<p>They're using your own mind against you with psycological techniques you're blind to. Behind every advertisement is a group of real life people working hard to find new ways to control and manipulate YOUR mind and the people you love. They'll lie to your face as long as it "increases brand awareness in our target demographic". Why on Earth wouldn't you do everything in your power to block these people?
I find the idea that anyone, a single person, could consider blocking ads to be wrong to be hilarious.<p>I've never met such a person. I can only imagine them to be barely human. What other bizarre opinions, internal or external, would they have? I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.
A women told in a comment that after around 13 years old she would get ads on Facebook to become a cam girl. So FB with all the data they have on their user still pushed such a fucking ad to a child. I am expecting an ashole to respond and tell me that FB can\t afford to validate the ads they put in front of children and my premtive response is "Don't fucking put ads in fron of children, or at least put only the ones you validated" but Mark and his army of cool FB devs need a raise and new toys.<p>My conclusion, block ads, block ads on your family and friends devices, the companies will screw you and the poor bastard that payed for the ad to be placed in front of some relevant target.
On an ad-supported site, you're not the customer. The advertiser is the customer, you're the product. Making that even worse is social media, where being good on a technical level is only meaningful when we're talking about handling scale -- the rest is if people you care about are using the platform.<p>If you want to see how bad it gets, look at how Facebook abuses CSS in order to have sponsored posts say "Sponsored" at the top while avoiding a straightforward place in the generated html that says "Sponsored" and could be matched by adblockers. It's nightmarish.
Yes. When you use ads, you naturally tune your site to maximize profit from those ads. If that's your goal, great, but that's not the web I want to use. And maybe, thinking about it, it's not the web you want to create, either.<p>I've made a lot of content. It's available for free with no ads. I subsidize that work with other work.<p>If you offer me a way to see the content without ads, I'll go for it. I've bought a lot of content. If the choice is $5 for a movie without ads or a $0 movie with ads, I'll pay every time.<p>Otherwise, it's the ad blocker for you. Ads are mental poison. And they greedily use my CPU and battery. :) Want a turbo button for the web? Turn on ad blocking.<p>I was just thinking the other day that I'd probably tolerate black-and-white static ads on a site, like in [paper] newspapers. But these attention-sucking brainwashing CPU-hogging things... Forget them.
It's OK to block ads because it's my computer and I get to decide what it will and won't do. Period.<p>That said, I don't block ads. I block trackers and JS, which happens to have the side-effect of blocking almost all ads. If ads appear that don't track me or use JS, I will totally see them. I won't even mind too much.
To me ads seem only to negatively UX more than anything. Case in point, I have began noticing a more than usual amount of ads on Twitter recently. I now get a sponsored ad after very 3 tweets compared to the one or two quick ones on every homepage load, sometimes none at all.<p>This has put me off the platform until they either A) Shift back to the previous acceptable amount of ads. B) Show a negligible amount of ads am willing to compromise on. C) Go out of my way to bypass the ads using a controlled client.<p>Only reasonable option left here would be C meaning using 3rd party clients that are limited feature-wise and give a worse UX experience than not using Twitter at all. This route in the long run hampers my Twitter experience to the extent that I would rather go back to square one and avoid using Twitter altogether.
> Besides, they say, users who block ads wouldn’t have bought the advertisers’ products anyway.<p>Even if you bought the product, you can still hate the ad for making you do so, e.g. by inducing FOMO and by causing more overconsumption, of which you are now a part.
There are many contrived examples here about closing eyes and refusing to eat lettuce, but why not take one directly from software? Let's say I publish code on the internet and put praise to my coding skills in the comments. A publisher publishes an article with ads. You read the article with ads removed, and take my code to use in your closed-source commercial product, ripping out the comments. So far so good.<p>Now let's say instead I publish my code under GPL. And the publisher puts a big disclaimer on the website that you must turn off ad-blocker to view content.<p>Is it still ethical to block ads and ignore the disclaimer? Note I'm saying "ethical", not "legal". How is that any different from ignoring the LICENSE file and profiting from the GPL code in a closed-source commercial product? Mental gymnastics about what is "really a contract" aside.<p>To be sure, I block ads, but like other such things, e.g. speeding, I recognize it's a moral compromise I make with myself.
Aside from the well written article itself, it's remarkable the thought and time put into the commentary that follows. This reminds me how much the quality of commentary has reduced on most places that use them. As well as how much effort I put in to contribute. Valuable discussion used to be scattered across various blogs and HN is in some ways the last vestiges of it.
The most basic argument for online ad blocking is that I should be in control of my own equipment. It's my phone, my computer, an internet connection I pay for. Why shouldn't I do whatever I want with it. Websites should consider themselves lucky I let them run their stupid inefficient scripts on my machine.
We should call it tracker blocking, anti targeting or something.<p>I don’t block ads because they are annoying (although they can be). I block ads because of privacy. Seeing an ad for something I searched for on an unrelated site is creepy and unnerving.<p>Serve ethical ads: use the page content as the only targeting, don’t use third party ad networks. Just show a damn banner.<p>Does this not pay the bills enough? Is it more work to chase sponsors instead of just linking in an andnet ad? Started a paid subscription but not enough people pay for the subscriptions and with Adblockers more and more pervasive it’s getting hard to keep the lights on?<p>Then here is my advice: don’t keep the lights on. Your site doesn’t seem needed if the only way to sustain it was using tracking ads.
I have a friend that intentionally disables Adblock on YouTube in order to support the creators that he likes. He feels that, if he disables Adblock, the creators will get less money.<p>I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m very curious to hear other opinions.
I’m just grateful we don’t yet live in a world, where to proceed incrementally with content, I not only have to watch ads, but have to endure some sort of interaction on my part to make sure I understood what I just watched.
It is okay because website creators tolerate it. Once all website owners stop tolerating it, everybody would have to watch ads.<p>Just like if at the grocery store, you could choose to pay or not pay. It would be totally okay not to pay. But if the number of non-paying customers grew too much, the owners would make it mandatory to pay. This did not happen to the web yet.
Previous discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971443" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971443</a><p>I'm surprised Oxford University is unable to handle the load from HN. Someone already posted the archive.is link.
I don’t block ads. If I hate the ads more than I like the site, I stop going to that site. It’s not that hard of a choice for me.<p>Personally, I don’t subscribe to the But-My-HTTP-Requests defense and understand that ads and tracking are the trade I make for reading/watching/enjoying content without getting my wallet out.<p>I also personally enjoy learning about new products and buying things I might like. Why do I earn money if not to buy things?
<i>If enough of us used ad blockers, it could help force a systemic shift away from the attention economy altogether</i><p>It's worth putting serious thought into whether this would actually be a better web; I think it would likely be worse. Most sites today are supported by ads, and if that weren't an option we'd see some combination of paywalls, sponsored content, and sites shutting down.<p>(I used to work on ads)