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Comment by iaabtpbtpnn | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of promotion, ad blocking is inevitable on the web. Imagine if your TV could distinguish a sporting event from the ads and logos displayed on the field, and automatically hide (in real time) everything but the game you want to watch? Advertisers would lose their minds... but this is exactly how the web works and always has. The site delivers instructions for drawing its parts, and my browser can choose how/if to render that content. The business model has always been tenuous, and that's not my problem, because it's not even a problem, it's just the fact of the matter.

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The example of automatically removing logos from video seems like a great computer vision project.

There have been lawsuits over exactly that, I think - specifically about ad-skipping DVRs.

ReplayTV back in the day. Man, was that an awesome, if underappreciated, product for its time. Seriously loved the upgrade capability and user-centric features (like commercial-skipping, until litigation came along).

Yes. The Internet wasn't created to support someone's ad network.

That's why web advertisers are pushing publishers to create more video content. Ads inserted at the beginning of a video can't be blocked with current tools.

Because of that, for all browsers I'd like a setting to block video auto-play, as I rarely watch the video "content".

Firefox has this already - don't think the others do though.

"When I shoot you, you might be dead. It's not even a problem, it's just the fact of the matter"

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.

Um, did you actually read the article? It's precisely about the ethics of ad blocking.

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.

Kindly note that I'm replying to GPs assertion that it's not their problem, and ad-blocking is simply "just a fact" - not the article itself.

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 appreciate the serious answer, and I suspect we don't disagree all that much.

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.

I can't say I'm entirely unsympathetic to the view. I'm concerned that after everything settles, the floor will be littered with the bodies of ad-dependent companies, many of them actually a net positive for society before their demise.

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.

There is no unspoken assumption that content creators deserve some kind of remuneration for their work at any and all cost to consumers of the work. The current methods go to far and deserve all the backlash they get.

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