Newspapers slam ex-Mozilla CEO's new ad-blocking browser

So you agree to stop consuming it?

If the content has value you read it. If it doesn't you don't.

Yeah we could go back to a time when all you had was rumor before ad supported newspapers arrived, is that the world we want to be in where only those who want to support their view and who undertake subsidizing those views get to disseminate news and engage in journalism?

Citizen journalism is not the solution. First they may have bigger biases than professionals and they don't have an editorial board overseeing and critiquing their works, it may be more unbalanced and may have less access to the halls of power. So traditional journalism still appears to have a function.

You're making some pretty radical assertions without any attempt to justify them, so I'll draw a bit of an analogy to show why I feel like I'm missing something.

I don't see why your comment wouldn't apply almost 100% the same to shoplifting. I know the usual distinction drawn is that the marginal costs are different, but I don't really see how that's relevant: there's a (low) marginal cost to serving each page that's being lost. And anyway, the idea that the marginal cost is all that matters is beyond bizarre to me. There's a reason you buy bubble gum for more than the retailer paid for it, and it's because you're not only defraying the cost of the bubble gum to him.

> If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place.

  "If retailers can't make money on goods without charging money for it, then those goods didn't need to be createdd in the first place".  What does the mode of monetization have to do with whether the goods "needed" to be created?  Isn't continual consumption of a site's content a revealed preference that pretty much by definition means that they're getting value out of it?

"Selling bubble gum, to me, represents a monetization strategy that says 'I made something, you want it, so I deserve to get paid' ". Again, I'm not seeing the difference in this case. The idea that something that many people choose to read has no value seems so obviously insanely wrong by definition that I must be misunderstanding you somehow.

It'd be interesting to see if that's true for very many people. As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page.

That way users who don't want to reward content creators with money from adverts would no longer see the content they're refusing to pay for. And if the content creator gives users the option to pay instead of seeing adverts then a simple direct payment would make the site work because the ad blocker would no longer block anything.

I'm actually tempted to give that a try to see what impact it has on my browsing.

As a result of advances in technology, news, scholarly research, books, music, film, etc. can all be created and distributed by _anyone_, because it can be done at lower cost. This is bad news for some old school money-making schemes, but good news for consumers.

Perhaps consumers on the web are getting accustomed to "free" without any focus on quality. The classic arguments that lower cost means lower quality may be weakening.

Poor analogy: The computers we use today are less expensive than the ones we used in the 1980's. But who argues that they are lower quality? (I am not suggesting whether they are or not, just pointing out the arguments that people make.)

The only kind I can think of is uncompensated word-of-mouth recommendations based on prior good experiences. But I don't really consider that "advertising", as it isn't the beneficiary itself causing this promotion to happen.

For years, everyone has been hooking up their own TVs (browsers) to their service (internet) and have had to watch and listen to really noisy, distracting ads that subtract from their experience (web ads that track, reduce performance, and are really distracting).

Recently, some people came up with interceptor boxes and DVRs (extensions) that let you either silence and block out ads or record what you want to watch and play it back while skipping ads. Many people loved this and started actively using them.

Now someone came up with a new TV (Eich's browser) that automatically removes ads and replaces them with quieter, less distracting ads. That's all it is.

Until today, I didn't know that Brave was available on other platforms, since I only use it on Android (it replaced an app I was previously using, link bubble). I gotta admit it's pretty decent, although it's unlikely that I'll be using it to replace my usual desktop combo of Google Chrome + uBlock Origin.

They created a corrupt model that serves them at the expense of the users and then act aggrieved when the users retaliate.

It's saddening that this is even a question in anyone's mind.

Is it okay to use Lynx? curl? Is it okay to save what I downloaded with curl?

What would be the argument that it's not okay? To me your argument is like saying that it's okay to buy a book and draw on the cover with a green pen, but not okay to draw on the cover with a red pen. If I bought the book, I can modify it how I want; the colour of ink I use shouldn't matter.