I unblock ads on sites I find useful, use frequently and want to actively support. If the ads aren't obnoxious, they stay unblocked.
Sites wouldn't exist without the users, so they should keep in mind user experience when deciding how to monetize.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a website. It doesn't make money, yet it continues to exist. Weird, I know.
Does Hacker News make money?
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.
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 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.
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.