It looks like he just felt uncomfortable making money off of his friends' and colleagues' loss. Makes sense, really, even if some posters can't seem to fathom giving up money to sleep soundly at night.
Anytime you sell a product in a competitive market, you do this. Those ad companies are happy to steal costumers' attention from other companies.
You could potentially argue that the intended viewer of those ads is now capturing that value, however real world examples of paywalls and various other business models suggest that general web users don't value not being shown ads as much as advertisers value showing them ads.
Ad-blockers don't set their users' money on fire. Of course someone will make that money.
Or maybe it creates value by allowing me to spend my money on things I care about, rather than bandwidth for video ads?
Or maybe it creates value by speeding up the web for me, giving me the one precious and non-reneable resource: Time?
Or maybe it create value for me by giving me privacy? I value that.
Ad blockers are simply moving value around. If people didn’t think it created value, they wouldn’t have paid for it.
That's basically the position a lot of us hope to see ourselves in.
This is like kicking kittens and then announcing to the world that you're going to stop kicking kittens. Then why kick kittens in the first place?
No one made Marco create an ad blocking app. No one demanded his coordination with Ghostery. No one demanded that he announce it with great fanfare on his site. Moralizing about him stopping it ignores that it was just a few short days ago that he started it.
And now he deserves accolades for stopping it? This is an incredible discussion. Countless other people with the ability and the means, who actually had convictions about this topic, didn't create ad blockers (much less for personal reward). Others still, who have convictions that favor ad blockers, did and stand by their moral compass. Either groups are in a far better position than Arment's "have it both ways" perspective.
Sure. That having been said, people do things all the time without realizing how it's going to make them feel. Marco made an ad blocker, turns out it made him feel bad, so he's going to stop doing it. Fair enough.
I'm not trying to suggest Marco is some Saint here. Like you said, he created this problem for himself in the first place. I just can't believe how unwilling HN's readership is to believe that there isn't some ulterior motivation behind him pulling the app.
Not really, because now all those who bought "Peace" in good faith feel bad. We trusted this guy to deliver a good product and then it disappears under us. Grrrrr..
Also, he himself clearly says that he doesn’t think blocking ads is somehow undoubtedly immoral (like kicking kittens) or something. He makes a much more subtle argument, basically saying it’s a complex issue and he doesn’t feel confident in his ability to make the right decisions looking forward in his stewardship of what would probably have been one of the most popular ad blockers on the platform.
He just doesn’t want to make those decisions. He feels uncomfortable making them. That’s it. I think that’s a very sensible argument for pulling the app, especially if you expected this app to be not very popular in the first place.
The anticipation about adblockers on iOS has been fervent and growing for a while now. Marco went and setup an agreement with one of the larger purveyors of block lists, then utilizing that to all advantages to corner the market. I find it highly dubious that he didn't think it would be lucrative.
The ramifications and gray area of adblocking are not new. They are not unknown. This has been a discussion for literally years. As with others, it seems obvious that there is something else that motivated this sudden change of perception, and personally I would wager that very shortly we'll see Ghostery skip the middle man and release their own blocker, probably with some financial considerations.
My post above is completely accurate. The moral grandstanding is an embarrassment, and it's worse how well this noise works on HN.