So yes, I run adblockers. I will also run coinblockers. You're not going to be mining on my laptop processor and battery. Not yours.
If you don't want me reading your stuff for free (which is perfectly reasonable!) then block me, instruct your server not to send content on those terms. I'm happy with that. But I will not render your ads, nor run your mining script.
I've also worked at multiple publishing companies and I can tell you that although their owned and operated websites were run with ad money, none of the people involved had a thirst for human dignity. It is more like, we all wanted to make a living and enough people simultaneously wanted to read the content AND didn't mind the ads enough to click away. Any time I've seen subscription or pay per content tried at publishers I've been with it fails dramatically because the percentage of willing readers is just too small unless you are a very niche and valuable or very large and famous publisher.
That already exists: a church-operated soup kitchen.
If I put a piece of electrical tape physically over the ad on my monitor, I am effectively blocking the ad, but in this case the content provider gets to lie to their sponsor and say the ad made an impression, which just pushes the cost onto the sponsor. The ethics haven't really changed yet it is absurd to suggest that I am not free to put tape on my monitor.
I think it is hard to say that I am ethically obligated to pay attention to the ad just because a content provider unconditionally gave me something I asked for. The choice for content providers then, is to be like the WSJ, and simply quit giving away content unconditionally. If the content can't support itself that way, well, so be it. If no one was willing to pay for the content, doesn't this necessarily imply literally nothing of value was lost?
If you do not want your stuff on the open web, stop putting it on the open web.. It's really simple
I make no promises about the way I'm going to render your site when I request data. I'm just requesting some data from the server.
I might be reading it in lynx, or over a slow connection with images turned off, or on an ancient browser, or whatever.
I prefer explicit to implicit - if you wish to enforce my rendering method, you shouldn't give me the data. I would even be happy with sending a flag in my request - XWillNotRender or whatever, so that you can filter me out easily if you wish. But once I have the data my device can show it to me however I wish.
Then people started using it to do naughty things. Javascript came along. Tracking cookies. Tracking pixels. Crosssite scripts, etc. Oi vey! But they didn't come along all in one go you see. We kept going to sites, and every now and then we noticed people slipping in little bits of naughty that we didn't explicitly ask for or expect when we visited their website.
So the technical amongst us kept up things as we always did, using the open web, but we just wrote a thing to block the naughty: say entries of particular servers into host files.
Then someone started packaging these things up into programs and lists of all the bad things people were doing on the web, and we realized we didn't have to do it ourselves anymore. So we just set ourselves up with our privacy keeping program, our cookie/javascript blocker, and our ad list, and kept on surfing the internet, just as we'd always been doing for years.
The thing to understand is: i've never seen an ad on you-tube not explicitly because i'm trying to screw youtube over, but because we were here first, we surfed the web, sharing content and when bad players appeared, we stopped/blocked them. Many of us just organically reached this position by taking action against things that made that the web experience worse...bit by bit. People started serving us things we didnt ask for, so we just blocked the scripts and servers for the things we didnt ask for.
It seems to me arse-backwards to ask why we don't block sites that have ads: its because the web and users and authors were here first and then the commercial sites and practices invaded. Why would we co-opt our behaviour and our communication to serve the needs of the immoral, the user hostile, the dishonest and the underhanded? So they can sell things? Oh please!
The web is not here to serve businesses and ads.
THEY IMPOSED THEIR VISION ON US! not the other way around!
I'm not spending my time to individually cater to the whims of invaders of the open web. I essentially just have automatic blocks of bad players and behaviours my computer won't talk to and won't participate in.
/incidentally, my blockers do automatically block a number of sites now. news.com.au is automagically blocked, presumably because its gotten to the point where its content to ads/hostility ratio is so low that asking it to serve up content is now indistinguisable to my blockers from a site being genuinely bad/hostile.
but youtube, etc is free to put up a wall or blocker any time they want to stop serving material on the open web. And if you serve something on the open web and people download it, i have the world's smallest violin here to play for you...
When ads are enabled, your browser is sometimes executing javascript to conduct part of some ad-auction thing to figure out which is the best ad to show you (i don't work in ad-tech, so this is probably 60% incorrect, but you get the idea).
I don't fundamentally see the difference between a website running unsolicited mining crapware in your browser versus unsolicited adtech crapware. So I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you -- if running mining crapware is regarded as "hacking", then we may as well regard all client side code execution related to adtech as "hacking" too.
Misuse of computer resources IMHO, no different to any other sort of code running on someone's machine with authorisation. We'd call this hacking in different circumstances.
I don't like the whole ad-auction-crapware thing, obviously, but it seems like it's a different thing to actually start using my hardware for your own calculations, using significant resources, without my explicit consent.
I'm sure salon aren't doing this, but I know I've stumbled across quite a few sites that do.
-- edit -- this just sparked something in my brain. Imagine Amazon Lambda but executed in the browser, by site visitors just like this...