Some people aren't selfish assholes and want the sites they use to continue to exist.
When we built the first reddit ad system, none of us liked ads, and we knew that a lot of users didn't either. We knew that we had to make useful ads if we wanted people not to block us. We knew we had to make them unobtrusive and even enjoyable.
We knew that we had to build an ad product people enjoyed if we wanted them to be effective and not get blocked.
And we knew some people would block them anyway, and that was fine. Heck, we even added an option to turn them off if you paid us, so that people had options.
I used to not run adblock as a way of supporting sites I liked, but then all the ads got so bad I just couldn't do it anymore. Now I just find other ways to pay for the sites I love.
The ideal situation is never advertising ad blockers, never bragging about them, never making a big deal about them, and keeping some mild barrier of entry. This way the average person who has less of a concern about ads will not run an ad blocker, and meanwhile the one who never makes money for the company to begin with doesn't have to deal with it.
Ads of all of these types generally compete for the same slot in an auction.
So yes, a user who has adblock is worth less than a user who doesn't have adblock but also doesn't click ads.
Sites wouldn't exist without the users, so they should keep in mind user experience when deciding how to monetize.
Many people here confuse such a thing being possible with such a thing being morally justifiable.
Properly pay wall it. The site does have control that it doesn't want to exercise. Why does it want to have control over your device to display what it wants.
Your content has left your property to land on mine. I can choose what kind of content I let in and not.
I don't have to store your ads and tracking cookies. Private platforms like reddit won't host all the content I send to them why should I be obliged to.
I'd argue the opposite. It's fundamentally selfish for a site to assume that _it_ gets to decide, without my agreement or consent, how I must consume the content it has freely and unconditionally sent me. If a site wants to negotiate a fair payment in exchange for its content (whether that payment be currency or merely displaying ads on my screen) it is free to do so, but without a mutual agreement neither party is under any moral obligation to the other. I'm not obligated to view the site in any particular way, and they're not obligated to serve me the content.
I would be perfectly willing to let all the sites that can't survive without ads die.
Internet would be smaller but still enormously powerful tool.
And most of the problem people complain about web and internet today (fake news, social bubbles, , ...) came out of ad tech and its desire to optimize for engagement and tracking.
We cant put genie back into the bottle but I can use ad blockers to at least mitigate some small amount of damage.
The descriptive sense obviously can't be selfish but the normative one can. So the question is then as follows: are the activists who further this narrative, out of a normative belief, selfish?
I personally don't think so. I believe that people like Aaron Swartz are among the most selfless people to ever exist.
Him being in ads doesn't change the validity of the points he's making. Websites have to make money somehow. If you don't pay for a subscription, and don't allow the ads to run, why should you still feel entitled to consume their content?
To be super clear: I'm in the ad-blocker camp, but I don't think we can really pretend that it's somehow justified. Ads annoy the bejesus out of me, I'm not willing to pay for a million little one-off subscriptions, there's this lovely back door that gives me all the content with no ads, so, me being of low moral fiber, goes the adblocking route.
Now him making money from ads also doesn't give him the right to call someone a selfish asshole for not displaying them.
If a website wantsto block me for using an ad blocker that's fine by me, I leave the website no harm no foul.
But to act as if it's theft to view a page with adblocker on is just asinine, and he also did just that.
As others have said it's not just the ads, its the invasive tracking, resource hogging, auto playing videos et al. Ads have had their chance and pissed enough of us off that we said enough is enough.
We did not agree to be served an ad you jjst present it to us upon landing on your site. Ask away so we can deny but let's not for one second pretend any of us owe you our attention or our cpu just because we clicked some random link.
Yep and in all honesty it's their resource use (slowing down web pages), sometimes intrusiveness (e.g. modal popups), masquerading as news articles (those Taboola boxes), and cross-site user tracking/data sharing behavior that annoy me more than anything else.
If ads were just inline hyperlinked images I'd find them much less annoying, and would probably not bother blocking them if that is all they were.
I have a website. It doesn't make money, yet it continues to exist. Weird, I know.
Does Hacker News make money?
I am surprised he was so venomous when he had the obvious pointed out to him.
1. Even first-party ad networks often track and fingerprint users without consent, and may even share the data they have with other websites. This has personally happened to me, specifically in which eBay and Amazon serve their own first-party ads, but shared data about my searches, purchases, and clicks with other platforms. Even though it may have been a part of their ToS to do that, I consider that type of cross-business sharing of user data, without a clear opt-in/opt-out option presented to the user, to be a malicious term and effectively user bullying by monopolies in e-commerce.
And of course there are the million other sites you don't need to agree to any ToS to use.
I think that the concept that a ToS is considered by you to be malicious, yet you agree with it anyway in order to receive services is where the problem lies. That seems intentionally deceptive to me. If you disagree with the ToS why still use the site?
Because I still need to buy stuff?
eBay is a monopoly in online auctions and secondhand goods from non-local locations. I don't have a choice. This isn't 1980 where you probably had a lot of options for auctions that didn't track your user data. Those auctions are largely gone.
Amazon is a near monopoly in e-commerce in that there are lots of things I buy that are more or less only available on Amazon, or perhaps Walmart which also a similarly malicious ToS.
Either way, I actually buy stuff from these websites. Probably upwards of $10K in purchases per year, at least. It makes zero sense for them to kick me off for thwarting their user tracking and data sharing attempts. It would be a lose-lose for them to do that.
There are a lot of things a ToS can reasonably require, for example, setting limits on how much you are allowed to use the service, and limits on how you may use data obtained in the course of using the service. I respect those. But when it comes to how my data is shared externally with other companies, I think it crosses the line for a ToS to require that of a user to use the service. In fact, I think there should be legislation requiring it to be a clear opt-in on part of the user, and I would go so far as to say that a default opt-in setting should be illegal.
Sure, but presumably that should be their decision as the service provider, not yours.
Also, note that a big part of this is also that the ToS was not bilaterally negotiated. They, as a near-monopoly, presented a ToS that they were not willing to negotiate with, and required agreeing to it to provide service.
In much of the contract world, both parties negotiate terms before signing -- for example, investor term sheets, contractor work, business partnerships. In situations like that where I have a voice, and have a fair share of negotiating space with an agreement before signing, I am normally very respectful of what I agreed to, but if I was not offered that opportunity, to hell with it, I will go by my idea of what I think is right, and they can kick me off if they want to and lose their $10K/year in revenue. Most of the time, they'd probably rather take the $10K than pick a fight over ad blockers.
https://www.wired.com/story/pop-up-mobile-ads-surge-as-sites...
EDIT: Oh, I see you're massively limiting this scope to first party ad networks. I guess I have never really experienced issues with first party ad networks, as I practically never experience them. If they're truly first party ads, then they probably won't be blocked the ad blockers I run, because they'll be served by the same site I'm trying to access being first party and all.