I think running an ad blocker is freeloading, the same as using paywall-bypassing software. There are worse things people regularly do, but I do think it's minorly wrong and I don't run an ad blocker.
I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off. But uBlock Origin etc don't just block ads, they also pretend to the site that the ads aren't blocked.
Let’s say there’s a hamburger restaurant. Now, this hamburger restaurant has an interesting business model. They way it works is, they give out burgers for free. They do that because they get money from lettuce producers to put lettuce in their burgers. It’s a pretty good model right? People get free burgers and lettuce producers get their lettuce in the peoples mouths.
I personally don’t like lettuce. I removed it from my burgers. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my burger? Am I forced to consume lettuce?
And before you tell me to look for another burger place, let me remind you there’s no other burger place. All burger places have this business model. All burger places give burgers for free sponsored by Big Lettuce.
So let me ask you again. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my own God damned burger?
This is a pretty weird analogy, because I don't see what the lettuce producers are getting out of it. But ok, let's say that the government is strongly in favor of people eating more vegetables, and richly compensates lettuce producers for each leaf of their lettuce is eaten. The deal the burger producers have with the lettuce producers includes putting cameras in the restaurants, so money only changes hands when people actually do eat the lettuce. The government audits these logs, to ensure their subsidy is being spent effectively.
Then yes: in this contrived analogy by taking the burger but not eating the lettuce you're freeloading. The more people that do this, the less likely the restaurant is to continue being able to provide free food to anyone that wants it. And I think it would be pretty reasonable for them to have signs like "patrons who do not eat their vegetables will be asked to leave" and "strictly no takeout".
The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
I suspect there's issue with the term "freeloading". It doesn't really make sense for someone to make a business model where they give me something for free and then say I'm freeloading when I take the free thing and don't provide something (attention, time, whatever you want to call it) in return.
There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention for the free thing and, in fact, the free thing was nominally offered to me as free.
The decision to publicly provide the content for "free" with advertisements was made without my input and coordinated without my help. The worst thing my ad blocker does is expose the difficulty with executing that business model.
That's reasonable! I wouldn't say someone who blocks ads (or doesn't eat lettuce) is breaking an agreement. But I do think by doing this you undermine a business model that is letting a lot of people read things (or eat burgers) for free, and that's making the world worse.
Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?
> Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?
When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business.
As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloading, another could consider that the paywalling content provider is just trying to capture rent for data that's otherwise freely available.
I can admit that it is not necessarily rent-seeking (I've seen some cartoons from the 90s / 00s on streaming services, which were in mind when for that comment) but it still seems to me that it is a problem with the business model. It's the business owners' fault that they ran out of money and can't produce any more shows because they tried to make a broken model work especially if the reason they couldn't gather revenue is that people were simply able to bypass their attempts at doing so.
(So a restaurant is unable to gather revenue when people "simply bypass" their attempts with a dine-and-dash. Not sure how I feel about that, to be fair.)
Similarly, I don't really think people who pirated cable TV a decade or two ago were freeloading. As soon as it's being delivered directly to my living room via speed-of-light communication, and I have control over the machines that perform the delivery, the product is practically worthless. Comparing that to feature filmmakers who sell licenses to movie theaters, where I would need to physically tamper with machines I don't own in order to obtain the video data, there's a not-explicitly-for-the-sake-of-the-business reason for me to fork up money for the movie ticket. (Granted, they could give me the video data directly, but they don't.)
Reading this again, it doesn't seem obvious to me that this is justified so I'll try to explain.
Let's say every copyright owner decides tomorrow that it's not worth trying to enforce copyright and, similarly, everybody who is currently paying for streaming services just starts downloading and seeding torrents for all of the content said services have licensed. In my mind, this only exposes the lack of scarcity, and that the value that these streaming companies provide amounts to hard drive space.
Anyway, that's kinda off-topic copyright stuff. When it comes to, for example, WSJ, I dunno. I would really like it to work with some way of providing creative text without the consumers being required to contribute financially but I would not say that it's the fault of the bypassing consumer when it doesn't work.
It's especially difficult to find a "real-world" example; I can't compare it to stealing from Walmart because WSJ doesn't have to replace what was stolen. If I download a game from TPB instead of Steam, the worst thing that happens is that Steam and the developer of the game lose a sale, whereas if I go down to Best Buy and take one of the packaged discs from their shelf and take it home without paying, Best Buy loses the sale and also needs to replace what wasn't sold (granted, the game publisher still gets paid because they provide the discs and packages).
It's interesting to think about but ultimately, the line I choose to draw is at the scarcity of the product / service: if it's not natural, then it's a fundamentally flawed business, paywall- or ad-driven.
The fact that you admit to working in an industry that actively tries to take as much agency away from others as it can without (apparently) feeling bad about it is really terrible.
I don't think advertising is harmful in general, and I think an ad-funded web is likely much better than a paywall-funded web. More: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads
In theory, ads are great, I'd like to hear about products and services that can solve problems or improve my quality of life. In practice, my experience of ads on the web is to degrade the user experience of the page I came to see and to build intrusive personal profiles on what my interests are believed to be (which often seems to result in being repeatedly fed the same ads for products I've already purchased)
Anecdotally the best advertising I have engaged with and bought the most as a result of is content based, not personalised for me in any way (i.e. podcasts before dynamic ads became a thing)
- Watching a board game video, here are ways to buy the game/expansions/similar games
- Listening to a book review, here are ways to buy the book/other books by the author/art related to the book
- Listening to a tech podcast, here are tech related services that may have been discussed
I'm sure it's different for many people and perhaps personalisation helps in many cases, but for me the context of what I'm doing/looking at is most important, causing a context switch/distraction from what I'm trying to do is more likely to be irritating
First off, some of your comments have referred to ad-blocking being wrong due to conflict with existing business models.
Businesses are not entitled to the success of their business models. If a business model fails due to consumer behavior, the business was in the wrong for expecting different behavior.
> I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off.
Distracting content (most ads), color schemes with bad contrast, bright images on dark pages, etc. are accessibility hazards (particularly cognitive accessibility hazards). Restricting the use of page-alteration software (e.g. color and font alteration, disabling images, and blocking frames) is therefore a discriminatory practice.
In a sibling subthread:
> The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
The libertarian perspective is a two-way street. Nobody is forcing a person to publish content on the Web. If the "comply with the user's wishes" model of the Web is problematic to a content creator, they don't need to participate in the Web.
I think my biggest issue with paywalls is that I wouldn't mind it if they showed the search engine only what the viewer can see as well. Then the search engines can try to prioritize the content that the user actually wants to see. As it is now, though, sites will often show the search engine different content than what's revealed to the user. Which is against the terms and conditions of most search engines (known as "cloaking"). Many of the paywall-bypassing software just let the user see what they freely serve up to the search engines. It wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't know how much effort was put into not only serving different content to the spider, but also how much effort is put into trying to make sure the search engine doesn't detect that they're doing it.
Sites are usually quite careful about this because they don't want to get banned. Google's rules, for example, are quite complex, allowing the search engine to get the full content of every article but with users seeing a small number of free articles and then a paywall after that: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...
It sounds like your proposed change would have the search engine use its influence to push sites away from paywall models?
I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off. But uBlock Origin etc don't just block ads, they also pretend to the site that the ads aren't blocked.
(I used to work in ads)