Comment by LesZedCB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LesZedCB | Hacker News Reader

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This feels reminiscent of the arguments over piracy and content distribution media. Back before spotify and netflix and itunes, pirating music was just the way of life. People made moral arguments one way or the other and they both had credibility. Now that we have essentially moved away from that model, I've noticed discussion about piracy drastically fall off many discussion forums.

Now the same thing is happening with advertising and ad blocking. Both sides have reasonable arguments, and the discussion really doesn't seem to be getting anywhere at all. "Ads pay for your free content!" "This content is so full of other garbage it isn't even consumable in the first place!" etc, etc. The google service to pay for ad space was interesting, I am curious if that will translate to the new "spotify" of the music industry. People might be more willing to pay monthly subscriptions for high quality, ad-free content. I most likely would be.

However, the most disappointing thing from that article is the search history for "do not track." That is why I run an ad-blocker. The amount of web tracking that happens is super creepy and ethically grey at best. I don't want to be a part of that system, and if running a script blocker does that, that supersedes any ethical qualms I have with blocking ads.

Blocking ads is no different from skipping commercials with DVR. If you answer my http request with 200 OK I am doing nothing unethical by discarding part of the response I'm disinterested in, just as I'm doing nothing unethical by pressing "fast forward" on my Tivo.

I'm generally in agreement with you. I'm just trying to present the arguments equally from both sides.

The other side has no argument. You can't give something away and then dictate how it is used.

Do you think using an ad blocker online is more unethical than using a DVR to skip television ads? Is it unethical to ride the bus and not read all the ads plastered everywhere?

I'm not arguing one way or the other as to the morality of these situations, but I don't think that they are analogous. Each of the following should be considered separately:

1. The transfer of money from the advertiser to the ad venue

2. The viewing of the ad by the consumer

3. The effectiveness of the ad campaign as perceived by the advertiser

In the case of the bus, the most important consideration for the bus company, whether it was paid for the ad, is unaffected by whether or not you choose to look. Also, the advertiser knows beforehand that it is only paying for the probability that a passenger will sit near their ad. The fact that someone did not diligently view all the ads will not change their estimation of the ad campaign's value, since it is already factored in.

In the case of online ad blocking, all three are affected to the maximum degree. You have no chance to view the ad, the effectiveness of the blocked ad is known by the advertiser to be zero and the site is not paid.

Unfortunately, Do Not Track was dead on arrival. It was a poorly-defined voluntary practice, which the advertising industry had no reason to follow. The only effective way to avoid tracking now is to avoid all advertisements and many scripts.

It also didn't help that Internet Explorer ended up making it enabled by default.

From a users perspective Do Not Track should have been a opt-out process, as in all users are protected by default and can white list sites. In that scenario Ms and IE were right. It was the obvious reaction by the ad industry to this that showed their true colours; they predictably threw their toys out the pram and began ignoring Do Not Track requests. It was the advertising industry's response to the obvious needs of users that was the death knell for DNT.

Privacy should be the default. But playing the long game, it might have worked better if DNT defaulted off, MS and Mozilla lobbied to give it the force of law (like "do not call" lists), and then defaulted to on.

I think you have something here. Piracy was a problem due to high cost and poor availability of content. Now there are multiple paid-for content aggregators that will serve music and video on most devices at reasonable prices, worldwide.

So it sounds like what we need are text content aggregators that work. What we need is easy syndication: RSS with money. But people have been trying to build paywalled text aggregator sites since Compuserve and not really succeeded.

Maybe the people paying should be the link-discussion sites. Reddit lets you give "gold" to users, but not to the websites hosting submitted links ...

The problem is what is trying to be sold, not the medium it is distributed in. News can't be copyrighted and is willingly distributed for free. Most news is actually cheap to produce as well.

So the problem is that a previously lucrative business (news) is no longer lucrative at all, and in fact that are many people who will give it away for free just for fun.

Unfortunately for those in the business of news I don't think there's a "fix" for this, it's just the onward march of progress.

This is the real issue. It used to be hard to come by news. It is really easy to share and read news now.

During protests and riots, the best news comes from the people on the ground with smartphones. Not a news crew with cameras and lights. My coworker texted me the other evening that the train was out of service. I didn't hear about it on Twitter or on CTV. And I read a blog post about Dieselgate before I saw the headlines on CNN.

News article text absolutely can be copyrighted. It's just the parts that are pure reported speech or excerpts from someone else's press release that can't.

News is also fairly worthless without comment, analysis and context.

Those are not monetarily valuable things though; plenty of people will write about the news for free.

Investigative reporting is the exception in that it's difficult and can be expensive to produce.

I like the patreon model a lot, though it certainly doesn't scale to corporations well. Nautilus and other subscription news works out well enough. Reddit gold I think is pretty genius too.

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