Comment by ACow_Adonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ACow_Adonis | Hacker News Reader

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Ads are not avoided in the long run by paying for a service. Advertisers and businesses maximise revenue by expanding to the point where revenue = costs.

This is why ads appeared on cable TV. Why ads appear in the economist magazine even though its a premium paid product. Why celebrities shill products and there's product placement even though you pay to see movies and they already recieve multi-million dollar pay-cheques.

The only effective way to fight back against advertising is to go on the offensive: teach people to notice and avoid and react against advertising, produce content without it, switch off and do not use services that use it and support services that take a stand, destroy their tech or use it against them, change the relative cost of their activities so they retreat from various spheres, or use society and government to shame, ban or disrupt their activity.

So if its worth anything, you don't have to feel bad about selling your daughter's mind by not paying. That's like the sheep thinking they can placate the wolf by just giving a taste of blood and hoping he'll be satiated...

/apparently I'm in a radical place :P But having said that, I would also advocate paying people who do good things and produce good content for the world, assuming the market and your situation lets you...

> destroy their tech or use it against them

This seems ethically suspect, possibly illegal. Can you elaborate?

Not the OP, but I think ad blockers do 'destroy ad tech'. Not literally, but as outcome, if everybody would use them.

the real world is complex, so I expect each person to think about the ethics of their actions for themselves.

however, that being said, I personally would consider many forms of advertising ethically suspect today (without coming into the debate of what constitutes advertising).

So all I'm saying is, if a mugger comes at you with a knife, or there's a dark alley, or someone places a GPS tracker on your car without your consent, or someone bombarded you with messages about how you're not sexy enough or your kids are stupid and you're a bad parent if you don't buy X because they profile you, then you can (and probably should) break or take the muggers arm/gun/ķnife, light the dark alleyway, smash the GPS tracker or reprogram it out send it fake signals, block their messages/throw them in the bin/destroy them respectively.

You often hear messages about how people are obligated to watch/respect/load advertisements from advertisers, and this is just patently absurd, especially on the web and in public places.

I have no ethical problems myself with using ad blockers or technology to waste the resources of advertisers, trackers and telemarketers. at what point you take to the streets and start defacing billboards, covering signs, tearing propaganda down, disabling severs, breaking screens etc, I can't say without context, but I would say from my perspective civil and active disobedience certainly isn't inherently non-ethical. private property rights do not trump all other rights or civil responsibilities in a reasonable and ethical society.

Thanks for this interpretation. My first reaction was to associate destruction with physical violence or aggressive DDOS style actions. Other, more soft protests do seem more reasonable; though not entirely comfortable with then myself.

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