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Comment by johnward | Hacker News Reader

Leaching content is not much different than the early days of MP3s. So I'm hopeful we'll find a new business model that works without me having to pay for every site on the web I want to browse. I can't remember the last time I pirated an album. The ease of streaming services has made it so convenient that I don't want to manage local files.

Still I don't buy the argument that just because you don't want to pay for the content (by viewing ads) that you should still be able to consume it without ads. From a technical perspective I guess the client can do whatever it wants with the data returned but it's still not "right".

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We're not talking about dodging a toll booth or throwing a hat over the security alarms while walking out of a store. I ate a sample at Costco without buying the product. I got a spray of cologne at Macy's without asking what brand it was. I went to 7/11 on "free slurpee day" and got my free slurpee and nothing else. I'm an extreme couponer who walked out the door owing nothing.

I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free. Pirating is one thing. You're getting something for free that the distributor expects you to pay for. You're going out of your way to get something for free that you know you have to pay for. My ad blocker doesn't get me into Netflix for free, nor does it get past the NYT's paywall. It doesn't do anything fundamentally different from hitting "Reading Mode" built into my iPhone. Hell, it doesn't do anything fundamentally different from the Chrome extension "Cloud to Butt". It doesn't get me for-pay content for free. It couldn't possibly be any further from pirating MP3s.

> I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free

logical fallacy. You took it for free, but it had a price. If the ad has a $3 RPM it means you seeing the ad pays $0.003 to the content producer.

The price was just to let that ad load. not even to watch it or to read it.

It was free for you because you took it, by using a browser extension that lets you watch the site in a different way than the one that was intended.

All ISPs should be required to convert to nonprofit organizations, and the portion of a user's monthly bill that used to be profit for the ISP needs to instead be evenly distributed in a fair way to the owners of all sites visited by the user.

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not.

Sites could easily refuse to serve content to people who run adblockers or who turn off Javascript.

Instead, by serving their content upon request, the sites are implicitly agreeing to my terms. So, I'm not doing anything wrong by running an ad-blocker on my computer.

I think it would be great if someone codified this too. If servers can have Terms of Service, so can users. Wouldn't it be great if my browser could send a TOS to each site once before I accepted content from them? A simple notification of my terms, via a custom header sent from a browser extension would work today, but I don't feel that I need to do this since most servers happily give me their content.

Actually, ad blockers work hard to make sure this can't happen. I'd like for a site to be able to identify those users and decide not to serve content but there is a reason why adblockers don't want this. If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

There is no way to identify an ad blocker in the initial request. If there was the adblocker would just spoof those params anyway. The way most of the scripts detect ad blockers is to load some JS class in an file that is likely to be blocked by an ad blocker. If the class is loaded they assume that ads are not blocked.

Actually, there are sites that already can and do detect adblock so however hard the adblockers are working to stop this, it's not working. Getting hung up on the fact that you can't do it in the initial request is introducing a strawman.

> If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

Well, then you'd be an asshole. Running an adblocker on my computer is not malicious, so some site responding with a possibly illegal action wouldn't be a good solution for anyone.

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