
A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers - zdw
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdblockingAndMorality
======
RodericDay
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life,
take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall
buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that
imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.
They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the
most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with
it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are
forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and
copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with
total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no
choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and
re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like
asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies
nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They
owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."

~~~
_yosefk
"Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or
not is yours."

That's an interesting conception of one's natural rights in a public space,
given that basically _nothing_ in a public space "gives you choice whether you
see it or not" by the definition of "public space." The following does not
sound different _in principle_ from the quote:

"Any member of the opposite sex (who with their looks implies you're not sexy
enough and all the fun is elsewhere blah blah BLAH) who gives you no choice
whether you see them or not is yours. They're yours to take, 're-arrange and
re-use'."

I honestly don't see a difference except in degree (and hence in jail time I'd
prefer to see resulting from actions based on each of the attitudes, roughly
15 days and 15 years, respectively.)

There's a big difference between blocking ads on my machine and spraying ads
in a public space. The latter is a small-time prank of course and nothing
close to a serious crime, but the philosophical basis for it cited above
couldn't be more off IMO.

~~~
weland
> I honestly don't see a difference except in degree (and hence in jail time
> I'd prefer to see resulting from actions based on each of the attitudes,
> roughly 15 days and 15 years, respectively.)

Except for that thing about human rights and dignity, the violation of which
is fundamental to the reason why there's jail time for transgressing upon it.

Whereas ads are... really just ads, as long as we don't have anything
equivalent for them.

~~~
_yosefk
What if I wear something terribly ugly according to a street artist and he
throws a pie at me?

What if I paint the walls of my house and a street artist decides my taste is
intolerably poor and sprays the walls?

What if I own a shop and advertise something in that painting and it gets
sprayed?

What if it's a corporation who puts up the ad?

What if a guy (say Bill G) runs a corporation that someone dislikes and throws
a pie at them (as someone in fact did?)

What if someone doesn't like seeing women or people of color on ads and sprays
them? (a real-life situation)

Where's the line - when are you free to act in public disregarding others? I
for one would imaginably prefer a pie thrown into my face to having something
I painted on a wall sprayed over. Why is the former a question of "dignity"
while the latter isn't? Is it because corporations have no dignity? What about
a model whose image is altered by misogynists - is she entitled to "dignity"?

I think that being too particular about rights ("ads are just ads" hence not
covered by rights etc.) is the way to lose all the rights.

(By the same token - not being too particular - all the cases above should
cost the perpetrator the same IMO, 15 days of detention, tops I'd guess,
although the guy throwing the pie at Bill Gates is much less scary to me than
the ad-spraying misogynists; unless you manage to prove the latter constitutes
hate speech or such.)

------
pudquick
People are publishing content on the internet without putting it behind a
login/password/restricted access.

Not only are they publishing it, they're announcing its presence on social
media, performing "search engine optimizations", and cross-promoting it on
other non-web technologies (radio, tv, printed media, etc.).

... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so
much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you
will look at the ads being shown here".

I also haven't agreed to such things for cable tv or radio - but guess what? I
don't generally consume those media products, in large part because the
formats are linear and full of "unskippable" ads.

Nothing is stopping the web from moving to this format. There are many sites
out there that present an interstitial of some sort before moving onto the
main content. And every time I end up on one of those sites, if my ad blocker
isn't dealing with it somehow, I generally remember and avoid visiting the
next time.

If you want me to pay for the web content that you're publishing because
that's the business model you've decided on, be up front and attempt to get a
paid agreement from me. Or deal with the fact that I'm part of the audience
that doesn't look at the ads in print media, mutes or skips channels on TV,
and installs ad blockers for the web.

~~~
alecdbrooks
>... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so
much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you
will look at the ads being shown here".

Isn't it common knowledge that many sites rely on ads for their revenue? Sit-
down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're
expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum
wage because customers are expected to tip. Yet, it's generally considered
rude to not tip even though it's even easier than installing an ad blocker and
restaurants won't refuse you service, whereas some websites try to block ad
blockers.

Edit: Added last sentence.

~~~
scrollaway
> Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're
> expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid
> minimum wage because customers are expected to tip.

That's also something the rest of the world scratches its head about. I'm not
sure the best way to make your point is to use an example of how absurd the US
is.

~~~
alecdbrooks
American tipping isn't a particularly good system, but it's unkind to not tip
if it means cheating the wait staff out of their wages.

Similarly, ads have issues, but blocking them is not fair to the creator, who
reasonably expected ad impressions in exchange for creating the content and
paying for visitors' traffic.

~~~
godzilla82
Then why dont you lobby for the government to raise minimum wages for waiters.

~~~
rhino369
We don't tip because their min wage is so low, their minimum wage is so low
because we tip.

Tipping is a cultural thing. And practically wait staff make much more from
tips than they would if they were paid hourly by their employers.

~~~
godzilla82
But isnt it some kind of circular logic to say that, waiters are paid less (by
restaurants) because it is common knowledge that they are tipped. And
customers must tip, because, they are paid less by their employers. Dont you
think it would be simpler if there was no expectation of tips. You know what I
think, its the employers who are getting away with cheap labour. It is like
some companies that have a variable pay included in the offer, over which the
employee has no control.

------
calbear81
I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been
the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical
capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them" as the ad
networks are simply a platform for which there are buyers of ads/eyeballs
(advertisers) and sites/apps that display said advertising. It's the sites
that you use that have chosen to include the code snippets needed to display
ads or track you (not withstanding those terrible ad injector add-ons).
Without your favorite sites providing it space to advertise on, there would be
no advertising network.

In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we
are in today. Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content and
advertising is much more lucrative for the sites you patronize. Who's paying
for that "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" quiz on Buzzfeed that you
gleefully wasted 5 minutes of you life on? Certainly not you; it was the
advertiser who paid in exchange for an opportunity to influence you in some
way (either direct action or indirect branding).

When you think about the 'morality' of ad blockers, it's not about the ad
networks that we're talking about, it's the publishing sites that produce the
content you consume. When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site.
Simple as that.

~~~
trimbo
> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state
> we are in today

Then how come, every time I pay for content, that content still has ads? The
paywalled newspaper sites I frequent do this. Or, notice how they do this in
every movie theater in America now -- you can't sit there in peace before a
movie. Instead, before the trailers start, you're subjected to a barrage of
loud ads.

Even on the March Madness app -- I've logged in with my Comcast credentials,
they are going to show me the regular TV ads, and yet they make me miss live
game action to show me ads specific to the app! And they do this every time
you leave the app and come back.

Every place that an ad can be placed, it will eventually be placed, in every
medium and whether a consumer paid for that content or not. Throwing ads in
our face is so widely abused that I'm completely unsurprised that adblockers
are mainstream and still growing. Our web browser is one of the few places we
still have control.

~~~
Potando
The newspaper used to cost $1 (each! every day!) and it was full of ads.
Probably about as much percentage of area as a typical news site today.

There must be a balance between "no payment" and "no ads" \- the optimum
profit doesn't necessarily happen at one of the extremes. Do you think you'd
choose a higher priced subscription if it offered no ads?

~~~
GhotiFish
well, newsprint ads have the benefit of curation so that they are not overly
sexualized or from scam artists, and they don't attempt to track and collate
you. They also have the benefit of being bought by local services in your
town, if it's a local paper. So advertisements actually serve a useful
function there.

That said, if my local paper started producing the swill I encounter merely
seconds after turning off adblock, I would consider the "no bullshit" version
as well!

------
miles
Tim Swanson in 2007[1] on ad blocking:

 _There is nothing ethically or morally wrong with an ad-blocker. It is no
different than using any other technology to filter language or explicit
content. No one is being harmed nor has property been destroyed or stolen (the
owner was not deprived of their property)._

 _Plain and simple: if you do not want to pay for the bandwidth and hosting
charges, don 't put material online. Just because you are trying to make a
living does not mean anyone should partake in your business model. After all,
should everyone that visits your site be required to click on one of the ads?_

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070422181056/http://blog.mises...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070422181056/http://blog.mises.org/archives/007149.asp)

(Interestingly, in the current link to this article,
[http://mises.org/blog/whats-wrong-blocking-ads](http://mises.org/blog/whats-
wrong-blocking-ads) , the author credited is B.K. Marcus, despite there being
no change in the article.)

------
SwellJoe
I finally installed an ad blocker a couple of years back, after two decades of
browsing without. It had become too much for me to cope with. The popups that
took advantage of me clicking to focus on their page to get past my popup
blocker, the ads with sound that didn't start muted, the overlay ads that
blocked out the whole page until acknowledged, etc. This doesn't even begin to
address the privacy concerns. I spent too much time being angry at nameless
faceless advertisers and the asshole coders who serve them.

I never liked advertising, but I usually liked the sites I was visiting and
wanted to support them, so I didn't kill the ads. Even now, I let a small
number of sites serve me ads, if they have shown themselves to be responsible
and respectful of my attention. reddit is one of the very few, for example,
because they almost never serve a really obnoxious ad.

And, of course, I have never heeded the alligator tears of the online
marketing industry (or any other marketing industry...physical junk mail
producers can rot in hell). I respect the desire of websites to support their
business. But, I'm not obligated to accept the method by which they want to do
it, if it includes behavior that I consider unethical or just annoying.

------
sarahj
I have run an ad blocker for at least the last 6 years, probably longer - it
has been a staple in my browser setup for so long I cannot stand browsing
without one.

The author linked to a tweet which I think requires further examination "ad
blocking is shoplifting for the Web".

This argument fails on several fronts, the main one is consent - by loading a
website, I am not required to load any or all resources that the server
presents to me - certainly in many cases e.g. text-based browsers there is no
point to loading these resources - they simply cannot be displayed to the
user.

An adblocker is the same, it is a consent mechanism - the server presents my
browser with resources that it thinks would be worth rendering with the
content, I am free to allow or not allow these resources to be loaded as I
choose - and this includes offloading the decision making to other code on my
machine.

I don't have a solution for the content creators, I wish I did - I regularly
buy books from authors I first discover online. I would be open to micro-
payments - however I am skeptical surrounding current implementations as it
requires me to submit my browsing history and likes to a third party which is
one of the other reasons I run an adblocker in the first place.

~~~
segf4ult
I wish bitcoin could enable micro-payments like this. I would love to donate
small (or large) amounts of money to websites that I found a useful answer on.
Unfortunately, for this to be possible every website has to enable or provide
a way for me to pay them (be it bitcoin or something else) and all of the end
users also must have this same payment system set up, which will just never
happen. I just wish there were a better way for content creators to make money
than ads. A ubiquitous bitcoin type solution would definitely be a step in the
right direction.

------
unholiness
There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away
from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads
_alongside_ my content is ads _inside_ my content.

Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native
advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they
sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of
any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to
distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly
vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization
remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.

I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make
a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are
supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.

I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's
being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum
of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth
the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the
problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but
the alternative is positively bleak.

.

TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my
kitchen.

[1]
[https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts](https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts)

~~~
xorcist
> paywalls don't work.

That's not a serious discussion. There are tons of websites out there,
especially those with professional content, that you pay for. For trade
magazines, one trick is to get your employer to pay.

LWN has presented the most quality content on Linux and related tech for about
ten years now, and they do it professionally.

There are also lots of communities with entrance fees, like Metafilter. And
even open access journals have business models of their own.

You can't survive on fees with a flood of mediocre content, but that doesn't
invalidate the model for everything else.

~~~
unholiness
> That's not a serious discussion.

You're right. Let's discuss paid content.

There is absolutely a place for paid content on the internet. But I don't
think paying for content is a replacement for the majority of things currently
funded by ads. The internet is inherently open. Paid content is inherently
exclusionary. If we're talking about a genuine substitute for ads, that right
there is a non-starter. Whether I'm paying for it out of pocket or through my
company, the fact is that there are _loads_ of people out there who are not
getting access to that content.

A lot of what sucks about paywalls is the friction, and the trust needed of
the host (that the content will be worthwhile). But even in a world that's
solved these problems, there's still the fundamental problem that the majority
of the world won't have access that content because they don't have the money
to throw around.

~~~
xorcist
As is often the case on the modern Internet, the majority of things currently
funded by ads is spam.

Then there's all the low-quality content, which isn't outright spam, but no-
one in their right mind would pay for. Most people would probably not mourn
that either.

The problem with news, if that's what we're discussing, is that they can't
decide which side of the fence they want to fall on. Celebrity gossip and
researched content is vastly different and there is no reason to believe they
fall under the same business model.

------
DodgyEggplant
On a broad scale, we have moved from a culture of ads as info, to ads that
push you to buy whatever the factory produces. This huge supply and false
demand for things we don't really need has a huge impact of consumption
culture, personal distress - an ongoing feeling that you always lack
something, ecological waste and people wasting their hard earned dollars on
things they don't really need. God bless ad blockers.

~~~
edias
But its the content creators being punished, not the ad companies. If anything
ad blockers are in their interest since the type of person who blocks ads is
probably the type of person to ignore them anyway.

~~~
infamouscow
That is a weak argument. You don't need advertising to make money if what
you're doing is valuable. People will compensate you for it because they know
it will go away if they don't. Take the No Agenda Show[1] for example, they
have no advertising. Two podcasters make a living creating six hours of
original content every week and are solely supported by their listeners.

[1] [http://www.noagendashow.com/](http://www.noagendashow.com/)

~~~
edias
That sounds nice in theory but in actuality is complete BS. On a site like
Teamliquid.net, a video game/eSports forum and team, over 50% of visitors have
ad blocked enabled and they in no way make of this missed revenue from
donations or TL Plus ($5/mo for ad free).

Everyone always says they only have ad block on for obnoxious sites, but
that's such a load of shit. The free internet is run by ads, like it or not,
and as someone who uses ad block I accept that I actively hinder it.

I don't mind if people use ad block, it's just the moral high ground people
take that annoys me.

~~~
Blackthorn
I'm responding to this post because it's a good segue (esports). I'm an
esports fan myself and count as one of that 50% on the few times I visit that
site. It is, unfortunately, not their fault. I have on several occasions
uninstalled my ad blocker for a time -- one time it was a few months, one time
it was a couple years. Both times it was ended by a single website that was a
bad actor. Once it was autoplaying audio ads, which frustrated me enough that
I nope'd right into installing AdBlock Plus. The second time it was a flash ad
that, after about 30 seconds on the page, began consuming about half of my
CPU. After I figured out why I immediately nope'd on over to AdBlock Plus once
again.

For me, at least, it's a tragedy of the commons out there. All it takes is one
bad actor to spoil it all.

------
Animats
Is there anyone arguing that adblockers are immoral other than somebody on
Twitter? In the US, the legal issue has been settled. Fox tried suing Dish
Networks over their commercial-skipping feature. Fox lost.[1]

The main problem with ad blockers is that they're not very good technically.
They're usually regular expression based and need too much information about
the exact format of ad code, so they need constant updating. Some have
deliberate holes. AdBlock Plus sells "block bypassing" to "good" advertisers.
Ghostery blocks tracking but then does tracking itself. (If you use Ghostery,
go to its preferences and opt out of "Ghostrank".) BlockSite became adware.

There's no money in the ad blocking business. Last year, the AdBlock Plus guy
was trying to make money by selling hoodies. An automatic ad blocker with
machine learning to adapt to new ads would be a nice open source project. You
won't make any money, but you'll get lots of publicity.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_Network,_LLC#AutoHop)

~~~
acheron
Unless it's changed recently, I'm pretty sure "Ghostrank" is off by default,
and you have to opt-in, but yes, it will track you if you turn it on. (The ABP
"allow some advertising" option is an opt-out though IIRC.)

------
bane
Does anybody remember the internet in the early 90s? Before it started getting
rammed full of ads and get quick rich startup schemes? It was kind of awesome,
kind of a mess. People just put up whatever personal scratch they wanted to
itch paid the then outrageous hosting fees ($20/mo for 1MB of space!) and the
world was good.

My point is that these days, it seems like providing the same experience for
most people, involves millions of dollars, thousands of dollars a month in
hosting fees, forming a company and having a marketing department that buys
ads on ad networks.

We can all dream of making our millions, but sometimes it's just cool to have
a modern personal site and get on with life.

~~~
joepie91_
Very relevant here:
[http://www.textfiles.com/thoughts/advertising.html](http://www.textfiles.com/thoughts/advertising.html)

~~~
bane
Jason Scott is _exactly_ what I'm talking about. He's almost singularly
keeping the promise of the Internet alive. Long after most people have given
up and signed on with the ad networks, he spends his days trying to catalog
and make available human knowledge.

------
robbrown451
I think if you step back a bit from this problem, the real source of the
problem is that typical capitalism -- supply and demand and all that -- fails
miserably for such things as web sites and services, where there is zero
marginal cost.

Subscriptions or other kinds of paywalls are the closest to a capitalist
solution, but they require artificially limiting supply. The most dramatic and
poetic discussion of the evils of artificially limiting supply to increase
profits would have to be chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath:
[http://genius.com/John-steinbeck-grapes-of-wrath-
chapter-25-...](http://genius.com/John-steinbeck-grapes-of-wrath-
chapter-25-annotated)

Ads produce such a tiny amount of revenue that the web ad industry is in a
position of just giving up altogether, or trying to milk every penny out of
the ads. And as others have noted, that's not pretty. Everything from
obnoxious in-your-face-ads, to ads that don't let you leave the page, to ads
that don't let you view the content for a few seconds, to video ads with audio
that comes on automatically, to ads that track you all over the web.

I don't have a perfect solution, and I am not going to blame people for using
ad blockers, especially if privacy and tracking are big issues for them. But I
suspect that if everyone used ad blockers, a lot of web sites that we know and
love would disappear. The best thing I can think of is that the big ad
companies should offer a plan where you skip all ads, but pay the same amount
the ad would pay to the advertiser for the privilege of viewing the page ad-
free.

~~~
alexashka
I don't think there is a problem to be honest. It's just the market playing
itself out - if you can't provide content with ads that I'd like to see, then
you should go bankrupt.

I am subscribed to some weekly email newsletters - they have a few ads, that
make sense. I don't mind it, I like it when a product I may actually be
interested in, is advertised to me.

Gruber has weekly sponsors - I don't mind, at all. I like it.

When google provides me with an amazon link when I search for a book, I am
fine with that.

On and on. The only folks moaning at the ad-revenue being decimated are the
ones who thought annoying their users with ads they don't want is ok. It's not
ok.

------
enraged_camel
I envision a future where the default mode is silence, and all advertising is
opt-in. If I need to buy a t-shirt, I press a button that temporarily
subscribes me to a "channel" of advertisements from t-shirt brands, along with
whatever relevant preferences I decide to filter the ads by. In other words, I
give companies explicit permission to advertise to me. Once I buy a t-shirt
and fulfill the need, I unsubscribe from the channel and it's back to silence.

The benefit to users is obvious. But there's also a lot of benefits to
advertisers. After all, what can be better than a prospective customer saying,
"I need to buy something, show me ads"? Instead we spend untold billions
developing technologies and algorithms to predict people's behavior and end up
invading their privacy and pissing them off.

~~~
alexashka
Advertising for a loooot of products works based on CREATING demand that was
not intrinsically there. Would we really know who Justin Bieber and what his
mediocre music is if it wasn't for advertising? Who'd opt in to discover Kim
Kardashian? It'd be status-suicide to admit you are looking for stupidity. But
when it's spontaneously there, well then...

That's what TV advertising banging you over the head over and over again is
meant to do. Sure you don't consciously go 'oh nice chicks X brand of beer'
but when you're awkwardly standing at a bar, you'll recall that maybe if you
get that X brand of beer, it'll be more like that party in the tv ad instead.
This is of course not conscious.

If western society ceased creating unnecessary demand (apple watch anyone?),
we'd live in a very different world. So yeah, not happening. They want to show
you ads even if you hate it and they will, because you can't do anything about
it. Ad blockers are allowed only because they largely hurt the folks without
any power, the small timers.

All big companies are interested in forcing ads on you, make no mistake about
it.

~~~
tomjen3
>It'd be status-suicide to admit you are looking for stupidity.

In our tribe yes, but in general no. Otherwise "normal" people wouldn't be
talking about it on Facebook.

>apple watch anyone Status symbol: nobody needs a 10k gold watch, which is why
it allows you to show that you can afford to throw 10k away.

------
borgia
I'll pay for good content - and I do with WSJ, Nat Geo and more - but I'm sure
as hell not going to disable my adblocker any time soon.

I'm sick of marketing and marketers. They bombard us 24/7 on every medium they
can.

\- Turn on the TV and you're not only swamped with blatant ads, but they've
pushed subtle product placement into everything possible.

\- Turn on the radio and you're blasted with ads.

\- Go on Facebook and you're hammered with "tailored" ads, clickbait,
autoplaying viral videos and more.

\- Go on Twitter and every popular hashtag is flooded with people advertising
unrelated products.

\- Walk down the street and ads are everywhere.

\- Open a "free" news site and you're bombarded with ads and ads disguised as
articles. Look up a tutorial and you're presented with a slide-based site that
loads up new ads every time you click, or throws extra ads in on every other
slide.

It's a battle and I will never entertain a "morality" argument from those in
charge of the above.

Completely "free" content online is total junk for the most part. I wouldn't
pay to read Reddit, anything from the Gawker network, ReCode, etc. as they
haven't content worth paying for, and I won't support their ad revenue either
as it makes no difference to me whether they survive or disappear. I would
have previously considered paying for some of the mainstream tech news sites
but they've absolutely ruined their content in recent years in the name of
getting easy clicks for ad revenue.

------
na85
Could not agree more. And it doesn't just cover display ads, but marketing
emails and social media posts too. All equally odious.

An entire industry predicated on the idea of getting me to pay for something I
don't want, and using my bandwidth to do it. Every advertiser tries to justify
it, too.

"We only send emails to people who want them" or other such tripe. Nobody
wants to be part of a sales funnel. If the product is actually good and
useful, it will sell itself by word of mouth.

~~~
tomjen3
>Nobody wants to be part of a sales funnel. Maybe not, but lots and lots of
people are wanting to buy things. I my case it is a car - if I go to a car
dealer I become part of a sales funnel (a particular unprofitable one, but
that is a side issue).

>If the product is actually good and useful, it will sell itself by word of
mouth.

The cure for cancer will sell itself that way, yes. But even things that
should sell, such as cheaper cellphone plans, don't.

~~~
na85
>But even things that should sell, such as cheaper cellphone plans, don't

Source?

Anyone who's specifically shopping around for cell phone plans doesn't need to
be force-fed advertisements. If anyone's unhappy with their cellular plan,
they'll be shopping around.

The hassle of switching cell phone plans greatly outweighs my dissatisfaction
with my carrier at present. Therefore even if there are cheaper plans, they
aren't so cheap that I give a shit. If Bell starts a 5$/mo plan with unlimited
talk/text/data, word will get around and I'll switch.

~~~
tomjen3
As it turns out people don't tend to talk about which cellphone plan they use,
unless actively asked.

And you are totally right that people will be asking around if they are
unhappy, but how could they know they should be unhappy with their current
plan if they don't know yours is so much better?

------
buzzworth
A lot of misplaced anger here. The most beloved services and content exist
because of advertisers. Put yourself in the shoes of somebody trying to create
a new Internet publication, casual video game, search engine, social network,
or most any other online business. What do you imagine a successful business
plan will be? Paywalls? Good luck with that :-p

The rant is written as though advertisers snuck into the media, as though they
infiltrated, they used subterfuge to penetrate an otherwise non-commercial,
innocent world of dollar-free self-expression.

The whole thing is backwards. Advertisers and the advertising industry were
the parents and premise of this world, not its covert invaders. I find it sad
to see folks forgetting which industry we have to thank for the very forums on
which we (piously!) castigate it.

As somebody who would like to build a business himself on the back of the
Internet, my feeling on the existence of so frictionless a currency as
advertising is mostly gratitude.

~~~
__david__
> The rant is written as though advertisers snuck into the media, as though
> they infiltrated, they used subterfuge to penetrate an otherwise non-
> commercial, innocent world of dollar-free self-expression.

Apparently you never used the web in the old days? It _was_ a "non-commercial
innocent world of dollar-free self-expression".

> Advertisers and the advertising industry were the parents and premise of
> this world.

They absolutely were not. Web sites existed without ads and without
sponsorship and they still can.

It's as if you are claiming that record studios invented music.

------
meritt
Ad blocking software, until it comes default in a browser, actually helps the
industry. The sort of people who run the software are also the same people
that ignore ads anyway. By removing yourself from their audience profile, they
are able to decrease CPMs/CPVs for their advertisers, since they aren't
wasting impressions on you.

~~~
cube00
Part of web advertising for the bigger companies is brand awareness. Every ad
viewed is absorbed at some level, it can't be fully ignored. Even if you don't
click your awareness of the brand has increased.

~~~
mirimir
That's why I never knowingly view ads.

------
greggman
I'm as scared as the next person of all the data being sucked up but if I
wanted to be charitable, ... a different pov is perfect advertising which
would effectively read your mind and present you info exactly when you need
it. Thinking about going on vacation to Vietnam? perfect advertizing would
devine that and show you ads for good hotel deals, flights, attractions,
restaurants, events, markets, etc in Vietnam. Perfect advertising would also
not present ads for things you'd already done there unless it knew you'd
probably want to do them again. It would know if you're an adventurous eater
or a conservative eater and present you with restaurants that meet your
preferences. If you're a thrillseeker it would present you with thrilling
activity options. If you're a clubber you'd get ads for the best clubs
featuring the artists that fit your preferences best.

Perfect advertising could read your mood tonight and suggest restaurants if
your mood indicated you wanted to go out. I could know which ones are already
booked solid and not present them. It would would know if wanted a quiet
intimate dinner or a louder venue. It would know which friends are free and
suggest asking them along.

Yes I'm scared of some of the repercussion of getting to that state and all
the abuse and how it will probably never get there but it's certainly a fun
thought experiment to imagine what perfect advertising might be.

~~~
isomorphic
No. Perfect advertising will convince you to buy the advertiser's product,
regardless of what that is. This is the mindset described in the original
article.

You're describing perfect advertising _for you_.

Even if the ads were limited to a topic you deemed relevant, the advertisers
would still essentially lie (or elide truths). E.g., they'd show you good
deals on hotels in Vietnam without bothering to mention that people are
regularly knifed in those hotels, or that they have bedbugs, etc., etc.

Perfect advertising for the informed consumer would be a list of objective
specs that can be compared between similar classes of products, allowing the
consumer to choose the best product within their budget, needs, etc. If you're
a company that produces an inferior product, how would you advertise it in
that scenario? Reduce the selling price, or lie, lie, lie?

~~~
greggman
As soon as people are knifed that will make it back to review sites and the
ad's rep and the firm behind it are over.

So no, scamming people is not perfect advertising even for the advertizer

------
dotdi
Look, if I don't install uBlock on my parents' (and, to be frank, every other
non-technical person's I know) machine, they will be calling me next week
because google.com redirects to malwareinjector.com and facebook.com goes to
fuckbook.com. On another note, the author cites some random twitter dude. Who
gives a damn about what he says? He is probably just upset because he invested
money in some weird ad-scheme business and it turned out bad for him.

------
dbg31415
Kill ads using a host file. You have to update it every few weeks but it makes
the web so much easier to look at.

Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck (as much) ||
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

For backup blocking...

Adblock Plus - Surf the web without annoying ads! ||
[https://adblockplus.org/](https://adblockplus.org/)

~~~
barsonme
The host files part was pretty cool. I might not add all the ad/tracking
sites, but I definitely added the shock/malware because I know for a fact I
won't ever want or need to visit those.

------
crandycodes
I'm so torn on Adblockers. While I agree that advertisers generally don't act
in good faith, the penalty falls unfairly on content producers. Two wrongs
don't make a right, but maybe the middle ground is to be a responsible website
owner who uses best privacy practices around advertising while consumers un-
adblock their site. Seems like it's really just an arms race not benefiting
content producers, as it is now.

~~~
cfeduke
I disagree that the penalty falls unfairly on content producers. The content
producers choose their business model. If technology makes that model
untenable then the content producers must change their model.

~~~
technomancy
Imagine a site that started their business when ad networks were less abusive.
Over time people started running ad blockers, and the ad networks saw revenues
declining, so they started amping up the annoyance factor--more animations,
more noise, more tracking. This drives more of the site's visitors to
blocking, which makes the ad networks more desperate. Revenues continue to
decline even though the site does nothing except produce more valuable
content.

None of this is the fault of the site running the ads. Maybe it's inevitable,
and maybe they just need to suck it up and evolve or join the ranks of
obsolete business models, but it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the
unfairness of the situation.

------
jotux
>The ad industry has spent years cultivating a 'fuck you' attitude where they
would do everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on
people and shovel ads on top of them. To now suddenly be concerned about the
'morality' of what other people do is the height of hypocrisy. The ad industry
has lived by the sword of 'technical capabilities are all that matters' (to
the detriment of basically everyone else on the Internet), so it's only fair
that they may now die on that sword, like it or not.

"They were mean in the past so we can be mean to them now," is not really a
valid argument.

~~~
deciplex
I'm more concerned with the anthropomorphism of an entire industry. This line
of reasoning ignores the fact that The Ad Industry is not A Person With A
Memory And Coherent History but rather just an almost-random sample of people
with jobs. If the industry was immoral ten years ago, that doesn't mean it's
immoral now, and it doesn't mean that most of the people that make it up are
immoral - then or now.

But, your counter-argument is not really a valid counter-argument, either. If
we _act as though_ the present incarnation of the ad industry is to be held
responsible for its past actions, that will encourage moral behavior going
forward and discourage hypocrisy. Of course, I'm still anthropomorphizing the
ad industry here, and assuming that it's even _capable_ of "learning a lesson"
might be assuming too much (for the record, I think it mostly is assuming too
much). But I think that's supposed to be the point - sort of. By
anthropomorphizing a thing, we might force that thing to behave somewhat
anthropomorphically. Or, we might not.

I think we're all just trying to rationalize our behavior which is that we
don't like looking at ads, and we have the technical means to block ads, so we
block ads. Anything more than that feels awfully post-hoc.

By blocking ads, you're denying revenue to people whose content you wish to
consume. There is no way around this fact. Maybe, by doing this, you will
encourage forms of revenue generation that are less intrusive, or maybe you
want to encourage a culture where revenue generation isn't necessary, or any
of a thousand other 'reasons'. But, I think that if you tell yourself that
this is the primary reason that you block ads, as opposed to 'I find ads
irritating and don't wish to view them', you should take special care to look
_really hard_ for some cognitive bias in your thinking, because you'll almost
certainly find some.

------
lettergram
Two things,

(1) I always assume morality doesn't exist, laws do, consequences do, but
running on the premise that someone will make a decision for increased short
term revenue is a sound one.

(2) I use affiliate links in my articles, and although I don't make a lot,
$100 - $200 every month isn't bad.

I've also considered adding ads that don't use javascript. i.e. someone pays
me to add an image to my content or has me do a write up about a product. Both
of these, because you trust me, and I can decline to advertise for the advisor
makes a much higher quality ad.

------
GreaterFool
There's something I rarely see discussed: plenty of ads out there range from
distasteful to plain disgusting. Sometimes I wonder if people realize what's
being show on their websites.

------
sandworm
Adblockers do not block ads. They block BANNER ads.

If advertisers want to pitched their products, they should contract with
websites for that website to display a relevant, clickable, ad hosted by the
website. Such schemes are no different than buying space to paint a poster on
a stadium wall. And as adblockers only target ads delivered by third parties,
such displays will go untouched.

(Yes, i know adblock allows ad hoc image blocking, but the user will see the
ad and must choose to block it every time it is updated.)

Advertisers than want to buy open-ended ad space on websites, that want to
display different ads depending on who views the space, who want to track
users to better target ads, who want to use "ads" as a Trojan horse for
installing tracking cookies ... they can all rot alongside the good people
from "windows technical service department" who called me at 4am this morning.

------
mikelat
Google has bothered me for a while with their lack of advertising ethics. I
recently cleared and disabled my youtube history and they're still doing
targeted advertising for videos I had searched for and watched weeks earlier.
Clearly my history was not truly removed, which was my assumption anyway but
the fact they so blatantly show it off is rather disrespectful from a user
standpoint.

Honestly I think the best bet moving forward for sites is to have a small
minimalistic form of advertising (the way HN does advertisement with job
postings for example, even while its just for Ycombinators benefit, is a good
example of non-intrusive advertising done correctly), and probably a small
subscription fee ($1.99? $4.99? pay what you want? hard to set a price) for
users to hide advertising and support the site/service they enjoy using.

------
Nilocshot
The major argument against adblockers (at least as far as I have seen) is that
it deprives content creators a source of revenue. I can't disagree with this
statement because it is true, it is a (read: singular) source of income that
we (read: users of an adblocking program/method) are eliminating. I for one
believe that they should ge something.et paid for their work, but ads just
don't seem to be the right solution. I know there is paypal donations, and
patreon subscriptions (or similar services) but these don't seem to draw
people to contribute. I can't seem to think of any other alternatives to
these, but I'm sure there must be something. Anyone have any ideas?

~~~
nfoz
That people don't pay for content online is partly a social, historical, and
technological problem. Crowdfunding is slowly but increasingly becoming
viable, as it enters the social awareness/expectation for content creation.

Other options include government (known for relatively high-quality content in
many parts of the world: for news, science, education, art, and other works
that are widely considered to be a part of the common good).

But I'd like to see more of a rise in crowd-sourced "content pools" that, for
example, would commission many works/creators in an ensemble centralized
around broad topics (e.g. "participate in commissioning a cabal of high-
quality tech blogs" if that's your fancy).

~~~
Nilocshot
As sort of an aggregator of content or a commission based system? Or more like
a business with employees that produce content, such as columnists / reporters
for a newspaper?

------
tilsammans
The advertising industry comes with its own hidden costs. Thousands of
extremely bright engineers are working every day on delivering a particular ad
to a particular person. Optimizing the delivery for the last milliseconds or
targeting the ad just right, if they had this or that data point.

Now imagine that advertising was solved. (I rather like the idea posted here
of subscribing to an ad channel. It's not perfect, but a huge improvement) But
just imagine that all the engineers currently employed by ad networks, are
solving more acute problems of humankind? Cancer? Feeding the world?
Harvesting solar power?

------
ender7
I don't think framing the issue as one of individual morals is very
constructive. Here's how I tend to think about the future of web advertising:

1\. The tracking data that the online advertising industry gathers is bad for
users and will ultimately be bad for advertisers. It should go away. Doing so
will require a combination of technical and political restrictions on the way
that advertisers do business. Solely one or the other will not be sufficient.

2\. Advertising is and will remain the lifeblood of the Internet. The past is
littered with the calcified husks of arguments claiming that subscription
plans or microtransactions are capable replacements for advertising revenue.
If a majority of users install ad blockers, society as a whole will suffer as
content creators are squeezed out of the market. Whether or not this is a
moral behavior is not the point -- users with ad blockers are game-theoretic
parasites that feed off this weakness in the system. Societies have
traditionally addressed such weaknesses by classifying such behavior as
undesirable, shameful, or immoral. The movement to classify ad blockers in
this category has already begun: in the future, either ad blockers will attain
a majority or plurality install base among users or this movement towards
demonizing ad-blocking users will intensify.

~~~
sauronlord
"If a majority of users install ad blockers, society as a whole will suffer as
content creators are squeezed out of the market."

Oh noes, you mean there won't be more Buzzfeed crap or their ilk?

If your art is good enough, people will find a way to pay you.

Beethoven, Newton, Einstein... their content is SUPREME. They would have done
what they did regardless. They didn't need advertising, and neither should
you.

------
soheil
We would simply not have many of the greatest web companies today if it was
not because of ads. It's one solution that works and works really well. To
call it immoral is to ignore everything that it has given us. You can complain
about the annoyances of it and rightly so, but if you are going to bring in
morality, first you must consider and imagine an internet or world without
some of the most beloved businesses in it. I don't believe in a
consequentialist argument either that just because something good comes out of
an immoral thing then it justifies it given the benefits outweigh the harms. I
would agree with you if that were true. I simply disagree with the assertion
that ads are immoral or immoral to the extend that you seem to imply, I'd
argue they're more of annoyance than anything else. And the burden of proof is
really on you to tell us why ads are immoral since you're the one making the
assertion, so far I haven't seen that, and until then or until when we find an
alternative, ads are here to stay, and rightly so if I may say.

~~~
jcoffland
Beloved businesses? Do you mean Facebook? Or perhaps Google? Come on. The best
parts of the Internet have always been free. Advertizing made that possible
like the lampray made the trout.

------
justinpaulson
I used to be in defense of the targeted ad movement, but I have completely
changed my views. When I finally found out that even my gmail was being
surveyed to build a profile about me, I decided that personally it had gone
too far. But if we really want to change it we have to stop playing into the
business model and we have to start educating the users. That is one of the
main reasons that I started Rebil (shamless plug: rebil.co ). I plan to fight
this battle not with adblock, but by creating products that are open and
honest with their consumers and deal openly in currency rather than hidden
data transactions. The question is, will consumers value their data and their
privacy enough to pay for services? I think they will and I am betting on it.

------
zaroth
My personal opinion is if the site wants to make it a requirement to view the
ads, they can write the front-end and back-end code to enforce that.

Not requesting a particular asset over the network is probably not
circumvention or exceeding authorized access. Accessing the APIs to retrieve
content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed
circumvention and the site would have a case against anyone who tried it. Not
that the court of public opinion would come down on their side, but the law
certainly would.

I think in a world where using curl can get you charged and convicted,
adblockers certainly stray dangerously close to exceeding authorized access
under the CFAA. I don't think this is right, but I do think it's the reality
we currently live in.

~~~
mirimir
"Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program,
unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case
against anyone who tried it."

Do you have a cite for that?

~~~
zaroth
You really never heard of Aaron Swartz or Andrew [Weev] Auernheimer?

~~~
mirimir
Getting from those cases to circumventing adblockers seems quite a stretch.

What do you mean by "entirely alternate program"? Curl vs wget vs Firefox?

~~~
zaroth
I agree - programming your browser through an extension to selectively
retrieve elements is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized
access.

But I think it has been shown that iterating curl from a bash script was
exceeding authorized access in Weev's case. Standard HTTP GET's to which the
server replies "200 OK" but after the fact was deemed to be illegal.

Hence, there is some space between Point A and Point B but it's quite mirky
IMO how large that space actually is.

We know, from a copyright standpoint, for example, that it's illegal to use an
extension to surround someone else's material with your own ads. So you can't
add ads, but you can remove them?

I don't know if there exists a case where a site has gone after users they
knew to be using blockers (it wouldn't be difficult to determine this from the
logs). But it would be an interesting case, to be sure.

------
terryf
"Shoplifting for the web" \- so where do you draw the line? If I mute the TV
during commercials, is that stealing? If I change the channel, is that
stealing? If my monitor is too small for the ads to show on the side of the
article, is that stealing? If my internet connection for some reason drops all
connections to doubleclick.net is that stealing? If I don't have ad blocker
enabled, but have conditioned myself to not even notice the ads, is that
stealing?

If the first two ads in google search results are exactly the same as the
first two actual search results, which link is is moral for me to click?

------
freework
I say we abandon the concept of advertising completely. Everyone should switch
to models where consumers pay the content creators directly.
[http://autotip.io](http://autotip.io)

------
lostsock
When websites look like this[1] without an adblocker I am amazing that
everyone doesn't have them installed.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/T6tji3g.png](https://i.imgur.com/T6tji3g.png)

~~~
zaroth
You should show the before and after!

------
motbob
I am not sure that the "morality" argument re: adblock has anything to do with
the "ad industry and its supporters." Rather, people generally speak in terms
of the needs of websites who host ads and the harm done to them by adblocking.
For the argument expressed here to have weight, we would have to go one step
further and say that since websites who advertise necessarily dealt with the
evil ad industry in hosting ads, they do not deserve the benefit of a moral
argument now.

I am not prepared to view my favorite sites as evil because they attempted to
exist.

------
mhuffman
The thing about current ads is, even if they are perfectly relevant, that they
are so overwhelming that the distraction is not worth the potential benefits.

------
xorcist
There seems to be a clear need for an ad blocker that doesn't block ads, just
runs them in an invisble sandbox.

That way the site owner still gets paid, and you can still get your character
test fix, and no one has to suffer through blinking autoplaying crap.

This strategic technology is a game changer that can disrupt online
advertising! Remember where you heard it first!

------
evandentremont
I was wondering why my twitter feed blew up all of a sudden.

was the first person to jump on that guy and compared it to "muting
commercials" which is more technically correct (and less illegal)

I think he was being obtuse for the sake of being obtuse based on his profile.

------
crystaln
If consumers are to consider the morality of adblockers, I wonder when
advertisers will consider the morality of their emotional manipulation and
large media organizations the morality of the advertising content the include.

------
venomsnake
I stopped using adblockers - reasons - they don't work well, hog resources,
the dev console gives me enough power to get rid of something nasty, and my
intrinsic ad ignoring ability is over level 9000 now ....

------
billwilliams
How is this a new point? This is literally why everybody uses adblockers.

~~~
billwilliams
More importantly, no big publishers / ad networks really care about adblock. A
vocal minority use it and think their convenience is socially progressive. The
only people feeling the burn are niche sites that happen to have a core
demographic which overlaps with adblocker users. Big companies don't care, and
the second they do - they'll just block people from using their service who
have adblock until its disabled.

~~~
billwilliams
And as long as we're all whining in one direction or the other, the average
U.S. citizen still watches more than 25 hours of tv per week. So we're all
just yelling into the ether of the tech-haves for the next 20 years while that
number slowly drops.

~~~
billwilliams
To continue said yelling, a point that I haven't noticed mentioned on here yet
- since when do consumers get to decide how much they pay for a service? Or
how? If I want to sell you x for y - we don't live in a society where you get
to decide what y is, or how to pay it. I think capitalism is dumb - therefore
I won't pay in money but I will pay in labor I do for you. And you have no
choice in the matter. I will take your hamburger and be in your house at 8am
sharp. I will rake your leaves. Your yard will be the envy of the whole
neighborhood. This is my anarchism. I will inflict it upon you, you cursed
content publisher.

~~~
billwilliams
I like how much heat this topic on the hacker news. I wonder if its extra
touchy given how much "hacker" culture overall developed with online
advertising - the big tech successes often depending on sweet sweet ad money.
Everybody likes react, hadoop, chrome, mozilla etc, but the truth is that a
huge proportion of development on the web was due to ads. And this feels ugly
to people. Hackers like to believe their beautiful meritocracy was independent
of the advertising bureaucracy. The privileges of the tech elite were made by
ads, but now that we're all here in this beautiful (and fully deserved)
technological enlightenment, we think we're somehow above it.

------
randalk
I don't even care if it's immoral to block ads, or if the ad companies are
moral or not, I just don't want ads. I'm puzzled as to why the question even
matters.

------
toddkaufmann
I would like to see a study done on how much ad-blocking can _save_ in terms
of energy costs (not running flash ads), bandwidth, and reduction of risk from
malware.

------
jroseattle
I'm not certain it's possible (for me) to care less what other parties think
of ad blockers. Or any other set of software, for that matter.

------
zer0rest
friends don't let friends go without an adblock

