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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content.

Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.

One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place.

I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer.

The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for.

Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue.

But every visitor wishes for that outcome.

If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.

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Sometimes I do go for the content. Oftentimes this is only to be unable to access it because all the ads bring my browser to its knees, or even crash it.

Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem.

Instead I use an adblocker. And I try to be choosy about which ads I block, so that it's only the really obnoxious ones that kill my battery life or are a thinly veiled vehicle for digging through my kitchen wastebin for fingernail clippings to collect. I feel no sense of guilt about this.

If they don't want me accessing their site over this, and curating their ads to be less corrosive is not an option for whatever reason, then perhaps they can set up a special clickthrough agreement asking me to consent to abusive treatment before I view the content. Perhaps that will make it easier for us to negotiate a mutually satisfactory arrangement.

Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.

uBlock Origin runs just fine on Firefox Android.

Too bad my experience is Firefox Android doesn't run just fine on its' own.

I've been using with greater success than Chrome for a long long time now. I also run HTTPS Everywhere on it.

Really, after using it for some time I can't see how people who have used a browser with plug-ins on the desktop can stand using one without them on mobile.

It tends to crash for me, but I still use it.

That's why I stopped browsing from my phone and tablet. Completely. I read some headlines, and if I remember, I read them again using the desktop browser.

By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all...

I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.

The New York Times exists first as a print publication. Wikipedia has never shown commercial ads. HN doesn't show normal blockable ads. Reddit is replaceable. Xkcd doesn't show ads.

Really, I think those work better as examples of how little value advertising actually brings to the Internet.

>By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all...

That's a strange leap of logic.

>Wikipedia

Asks for donations, it doesn't show ads.

There are many other websites that are internally funded in other ways that exclude direct ads.

And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally:

1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available

I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries is paid for by these ad systems.

I work in tech and I am not supported by ads. If you are in tech and are supported by ads, find a different line of work in tech.

If you work in tech the first thing you should do is take the moral argument and throw it out the window. Moral systems of obligation do not work well on the net. You run into one of two conditions quickly. The first is immoral operators/providers will push moral operators out of business (free services where you are spied on by unknown agents, but the spies pay for your usage, such as free email has been for years). Or, immoral users sharing other people's work for free. Some of them want to share everything freely. Other just want to share work that is difficult to find legally. Paid services don't work well because they quickly become fragmented leaving the user to buy Youtube Red, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc because each content producer wants to maximize their profits. Digital piracy succeeded because of its utility. There is low to no cost to the end user and the end product had more utility than the paid product. Pirated movies didn't have ads. They could be played on more players. They didn't have country content restrictions. DRM didn't randomly fail. They by definition are a product of a free market competing with other piracy groups.

Of course Hollywood has a huge amount of power and has the FBI as their lapdog to prevent their product from being infringed. The ad industry does not. You will see more of a push for them to push ad blocking as a type of legal infringement.

If you don't mind my asking, what industry are you in? It is very hard in the modern economy to find things not supported or at least augmented by advertising (or at least marketing).

I'm a touch reminded of the Lloyd Dobbler buy/sell/process monologue from "Say Anything".

Full disclosure I we work in ads...

I'm confused. Both I and my computer just send a request "may I have this article/video", and the server responds "yes" and sends the data. However, it also sends along a bunch of other stuff (advertising).

At no point in this did I ever agree to have anything other than the requested data sent to me. And at no point did I see a screen that said "please watch this ad to view this content." The ad was just sent anyway.

If you need me to pay money to consume some content, then why aren't you asking me for money? Or if I'm "supposed" to view an ad, why isn't that agreement formalized?

Basically, it's my computer, and I'm not restricted by any kind of agreement to watch ads. So why should I?

What possible moral grounds are there that says I have to allow you to serve me extra garbage data that I never consented to receiving, and even more extreme, that I am somehow obligated to consume the advertising that I never consented to receiving?

I say fuck the ad services... yesterday I made the mistake of researching something on my phone, half the results were content stuffed, worthless and so many ads it brought my phone to a crawl.

If websites weren't putting 6+ ads on a page, each with iframes in iframes several layers deep, it wouldn't be so bad... and you know what else... if the ads were delivered first party, then the ad blockers wouldn't be able to know the difference.

To be clear, I pay for youtube red so that I don't have to deal with ads. Same goes for netflix and several other services. My point isn't that I think ads are awesome, but that doesn't make ad blocking OK.

You are saying it isn't my right to consume what I choose? Like is lynx an ad blocker, because it's text based?

What is the difference between lynx and an ad blocker?

>You are saying it isn't my right to consume what I choose?

That's what the law says actually. Not trying to be snide here but unfortunately the law does not allow for sovereign domain over one's own body (at least in the US -- and elsewhere) in many cases. Though I realize you are asking in regards to advertisements.

Which law are you referring to?

Vice laws

But, can it go too far in the other direction? Can ads be abusive or is anything a content publisher does to monetize fair game?

For instance, apps that use dark patterns that make it difficult to dismiss an ad without "accidentally" clicking through the ad...are these cool? Or would you say that one simply should not use the app?

> apps that ...

An app is not analogous to a junk page with no useful content. You installed and use it repeatedly in spite of the ads because it provides some sort of benefit.

Any app which contains a clickable element which leads to malware infestation, or shows children inappropriate content, is malware. Regardless of whether that button is on an ad or elsewhere, and regardless of whether it is contrived to make it easy to press by "accident" or not.

An ad that constantly interposes itself to be clicked by accident is merely annoying, and probably counterproductive (users will give the program a bad rating).

To annoyed users, I would say "don't use the app".

To malware purveyors, I'd ideally like to say, "3 to 5 years".

Junk pages with no useful content do not tend to survive, hence that is not a valid comparison. Just as you "install and use repeatedly" apps that are useful, you only revisit pages that are useful.

So, the relevant analogy is between a page of some value and an app of some value. If ads weren't a problem on pages that fit this description, then we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Annoyance is annoyance in any context, even if it stops short of outright malice.

The most of the content and value of sites like Wikipedia, Hacker News, and Reddit is generated by the users. I'd be interested to know the relationship between contributors and ad block use. If it turns out that a high percentage of contributing users make use of an ad blocker, then isn't that fair enough? Why should a contributor "pay" twice?

If the NYT online ads were as benign as their print ads with respect to tracking and profiling me, I wouldn't block them.

I also wonder why they treat the front page of their online site so different than the front page of the paper. Today I opened nytimes.com and 1/2 the window was filled with a Hilton ad. Have they ever filled have the front page (or even just the half above the fold) of the paper version with an ad?

So I'm not a fundamentalist that thinks advertising is evil. I probably am a fundamentalist when it comes to the ad-tech that watches what I do to opaquely build a profile around me.

Ummm... Wikipedia doesn't show ads and never will.

Thats incorrect. Wikipedia sometimes shows ads asking for donations. Just because its a 'internal' ad means nothing.

Oh come on off it. That's a totally different thing, and it only ever happens once a year. It's perfectly reasonable, and they don't use content trackers, or anything else that's nasty. It's ridiculous to say otherwise.

> Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.

Why are you there then? The fact that you spend your time there, that you spend both your bandwidth, your cpu time, etc.. and theirs, means there's something "valuable", it's probably way less than a cent, but it's value.

That's the beauty of ads, even though the value isn't much, it's still enough. I don't want to pay 0.1 cent, but that ads does it for me.

> But every visitor wishes for that outcome.

That's freak, stop going there if you wish for their death!

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