> Do consider what killing off most of the independent professional info websites will do to the Internet.
Where do I sign up for that?
The web was never a platform for publishers, it was a platform for users (some of them publishers). Big publishers never wanted it and hated it but were forced to use it or face irrelevance. Now they act like they own the place and are entitled to their business model.
If you don't want your readers to be able to triage content and data once they receive it, go build your own network and publish on there.
Using advertisement blockers is not only not an unethical thing to do, it is the right to do to force back those who seek to usurp and abuse a popular commons that was build to serve all equally.
Calling that line of reasoning tenuous would give it too much credit. I'm not surprised to hear it - it's a fairly common approach in the tech world. We only stop to think if we can do it, not if we should do it.
Which has landed us where we are, in an arms race around ads, where everybody mostly only cares about their personal interests and technological feasibility. It's time we started talking about ethics. And if you open up that dialog, what you're doing is deeply problematic - you deliberately violate an unspoken assumption, that content creators deserve some kind of remuneration for their work.
It is, in the limit, giving up on the social compact in favor of pure individualism. It's never worked out in human history, and it won't work out this time, either. We can either all return to the table and try to find solutions that respect everybody, or we can devolve into individual greed followed by social chaos.
It's just the fact of the matter.
There is no "unspoken assumption." If content creators deserve renumeration for their work, there are plenty of systems they can use to generate it. Display advertising based on third party serving/tracking technology is proving to be a bad one. Ad blocking is merely the signal to let content creators know they should look for better options.
This absolutist view - "ad blocking is always OK, because you can do it" - is what I take issue with, because it has ethical problems. It's wildly different from the article's stance that it is an ethical responsibility to use adblockers to cause a systemic shift away from the attention economy.
And yes, there is an unspoken assumption that work deserves to be remunerated. It underpins our society. There is also an unspoken assumption that in that interaction, there has to be respect for the consumers attention, resources, and desires. The ad industry is often violating that part of the equation.
If you use an ad-blocker as a tool to force the other side to rethink their approach, based on the stance that there's an ethical violation on their part, I fully respect that. I'm not certain it is a good solution, but at the very least, it is rooted in an ethical foundation, with an ethical goal.
"I'll always block it, just because I can" has no such foundation whatsoever, even if the actual effect is currently the same as the principled stand.
I actively want a "systemic shift way from the attention economy" and believe that ad blocking is, somewhat bizarrely, the best practical tool to achieve that end. If there are some people who ad block for reasons I don't endorse, that is up to them.
I actually think ad blocking should be seen as, on balance, a powerfully good force for beneficial change. It's easy, it works, it makes the individual user experience better and has the ultimate effect of encouraging a better web generally. Doc Searls calls it the biggest boycott in history. He's not wrong.
One of the bigger categories here is journalism. Newspapers made - in hindsight - a giant mistake when they bet on advertising instead of subscriptions. The house is already rapidly collapsing around them. I'd like them to get out before the place gets levelled, so to speak. Because functioning journalism is absolutely crucial to a democratic society.
There's also the fact that there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising per se. It's how it's done that truly matters. Respect for privacy and attention is crucial here.
It's a large set of problems, and it affects a tremendous number of people. Which is why I think it matters to question our motives for anything we do there - and hence my objection to "because I can". That's the same attitude that got us here.
Firefox has this already - don't think the others do though.
If all those who make websites to peddle ads were forced of the net, maybe there would be a space for those who have a passion and love to create.
On the other hand, for any given query there is only 10 spots on the first page of google, and I really rather not have any of them taken over by spammers.
If you are trying to make more than that, beyond of course the actual work that you put in, the reason you want to do so is because of the massive capital investment that you have to justify. Capital investment that was attracted because of the promise of advertising revenue.
You don't know shit about me, about my worries and about what give my life meaning so gtfo.
I take issue with this statement. The websites back then were small but they were not irrelevant. If anything they featured more relevant and original content than the majority of sites today. Combined with the tech of today like free CDNs I don't think we'd be much worse off.
I would enjoy it. I doubt you would enjoy one day getting some random malware through your ads that you leave unblocked.
Honestly, I'm okay with that, most info I get is from Wikipedia, scientific papers or tiny random blogs. What sites are you afraid of it killing? Junk news sites? Reddit? I can live without them. I struggle to think of any with significant value.
If only one could use a normal news reader to access it.
Mostly HTML, what little java or flash there was was usually trash video games sites.
You'd search (Lycos!) for content and what you got was raw data from crazies all over the world. Not the curated "don't hurt yourself" BS hits you get in the first 100 !g results. Or 100 sites trying to sell you trash.
The 90s internet was many the best of an otherwise weak decade! (and Seinfeld, of course)
EDIT: And the content was avilable with 28k to 56k modem. Today I can't even check my email (why not??? grrr) with that.
We don’t live in a world of Faustian bargains where we have to put up with excessive pollution—either of the informational or physical sort—as an unavoidable byproduct of value. There are better solutions out there, and all it takes to realize them is to take the minds that are wasted on tricking people into seeing or clicking on ads and put them to work on more useful endeavors.
How does a lack of advertising revenue kill off independent publishers? Anyone can get a VPS for $5 / month and host whatever they want. 99.9% of them will never achieve a level of traffic that would either require additional investment or produce any significant advertising revenue anyway.