I'm ethically against taking money away from people who want to generate revenue through advertising, but I have no choice if I want to view the content at all.
Why do you say that? They're the ones who sent you HTML for free. They assumed you'd look at the ads, but you have absolutely zero moral obligation to validate that assumption. If you have a magazine, you can totally rip out the ads and throw them in the trash. If you have a newspaper, you can cut out the articles you care about and discard everything else.
Use the ad blocker and be proud. If anything, you're helping free the web from the scourge that is advertising. If they want money, they're totally free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of serving a free web page.
You can make all sorts of loose statements like this then draw the line where you feel it’s wrong. It will still be arbitrary.
To continue stretching examples. Developers chose to release software as is. Through some combo of your reasoning above, is it okay to pirate/crack software? Most of the time HNers will be against software piracy but for blocking ads.
I care more about the obvious social contracts in place and the obviousness of creators are supporting what they created by showing ads or charging for their software.
Another example was people getting mad at someone for wanting to split a Stratchery subscription. One big point was it’s against the TOS. Some of those people surely block ads and would not care if TOSs say you can’t. I actually find the Stratchery situation sympathetic because I believe the person was unemployed. Similarly if you have a super old computer or limited data dude to financial constraints. Yeah, that is an exception where the morals make sense.
However going against Stratchery, a pretty small time operation by splitting the cost amongst some people for one login is obviously not cool for the average middle class on up person.
> If they want money, they're free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required.
This is not true in the real world. The amount of backlash you can get for doing that will almost never be worth it. False positives are an issue as well.
Similarly, software that requires you to always be online and aggressively verifies you have paid for said software which ends up creating some friction, is frowned upon too.
Or Stratchery suspending you or sending similar headers for logging in via IPs far from one another. The false positives would be lead to a Streisand Effect
This is the antithesis of what I want the internet to be, so opt me out of that, please, because I'm going to come hither and taketh in that which I care to taketh in, that and nothing else.
Whenever this stuff comes up on HN. there’s the initial bits of anti ad self righteousness but never a continuation to see if the general ethos continues outside ads.
My purpose of all this is to point out the inherent hypocrisy. Not every ad has spyware or adware. Are those ads unblocked? No. I understand it would take far too much time to unblock specific ads. Which doesn’t help the point of being morally in the right.
Same with disagreeing with being able to crack/pirate all paywalls and SaaS subscriptions, et al. If the browser is to serve you.
Then there should be no problem for HNers who block all ads if hypothetically some situation comes out where all paid software and SaaS is able to be used freely on a person’s computing device. Since they should operate on the person’s behalf.
I doubt most HNers who directly or indirectly work on software/SaaS/apps, and live off that income, would be cool with this.
Nobody ever signed any social contract. You can't even navigate to the page's actual terms of service without being subjected to ads and surveillance capitalism. As if anyone even reads those terms to begin with.
Their invalid assumptions are their problem. Nobody else needs to worry about this. It's their business model, it's up to them to make it work. If they send us ads, we're gonna delete them. It's up to them to deal with that fact.
> is it okay to pirate/crack software?
Of course. DRM is a defect and cracks literally fix products. "Pirates" have the superior version of the software. You'd think it would be the other way around. Pretty sad.
> Most of the time HNers will be against software piracy but for blocking ads.
I'm against copyright itself. "Piracy" is not a concept that should even exist. It's how things would naturally be without the illusions provided by copyright.
Copyright made sense before computers existed. Back then it was still possible to infringe copyright. For example, people could copy books by hand. However, the scale of such operations was small. To operate at massive scales you had to be a major industry player and own machinery such as printing presses. It's trivial to enforce copyright against such huge targets. Therefore, artificial scarcity was easy to create and it made sense.
Fast forward to the 21st century. Networked computers exist and everything is data. Filling up an entire hard drive with copies is as easy as copy paste. It's trivial to duplicate information and transmit data to other computers. People now have worldwide networked computers in their pockets. People now infringe copyright on a massive scale without even realizing what they are doing simply because technology has changed the way people perceive copyrighted works. Nobody really thinks before downloading stuff and sending it to their friends even though this is unauthorized copying and therefore copyright infringement. Nobody thinks before editing some picture and making a funny meme out of it even though it's a derivative work. Nobody thinks before reposting someone else's work on social media. Copyright infringement has become natural.
The truth is computers make a mockery of copyright. The fundamental notion behind copyright is artificial scarcity. Computers make data infinitely abundant. It's incredibly subversive technology. Before computers you needed expensive hardware and logistics to produce and distribute a million books or a million records. With computers it's a trivial task. The world has been changed forever and there's no way to go back.
They're definitely trying to rewind the clock though. To create artificial scarcity of data in the 21st century, free computing must be destroyed. We must not be allowed to run arbitrary software or make our own software. Hacking as we know it must come to an end. They must lock down computers so that we can only run software they approve, software that obeys them instead of us, software that only copies when they authorize. This is completely aligned with government interests in banning civilian use of cryptography.
I say computers are too important to allow them to become mere tools of aging industries and oppressive governments. Copyright makes no sense in the 21st century, it's time to abolish it. The alternative is to give up our computing freedom. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than live in such a bleak future.
Copyright is also a tool that corporations use against other countries via political pressure by the US government. These corporations are extremely rich, they can afford to lobby the US government to the point it applies pressure on foreign nations. I've posted about this before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946738
I wish I could find one particular news article I remember reading years ago. It was about some MPAA official who came to my country to lobby the government on their copyright interests. Some journalist approached him and asked him point blank if he thought this should be a priority in a country that fails to offer even basic infrastructure such as sanitation to its entire population. Obviously he had no response.
Copyright holders also lobby governments in order to extend copyright duration indefinitely. They have effectively robbed us all of our public domain rights. I've written about this before too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29426856
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28813563
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28518061
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28413192
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22757439
You can see everything else I've posted about this using this query:
https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=copyright%20mathe...
So take out copyright. Any charging of any digital service, subscription, et al, can have similar morally backed reasons to get around paying + getting everyone to get around paying. Off top of head. World is inherently unfair. Being poor is unfair. Charging money for digital subscriptions keeps the rich, rich. Keeps poor people out. We should be for figuring out how to get around all digital payments for digital services + subscriptions.
> nobody ever signed a social contract
That’s not how social contracts work. Social contracts aren’t meant to be signed. There’s no signed contract for person A to do any of the following in public: not to purposefully smell bad enough to have peoples gag reflexes kick in, for Person A not to repeatedly throw up in their hands and very dramatically repeatedly consume it all again, or for person A to laugh to themselves and loudly comment to themselves about how ugly or silly or { insert any other negativity } people near them are.
I can give other examples that are digitally focused too.
in general nearly all people adhere to a number of social contracts and expect the same of others.
I'm in the camp where I'd gladly pay a fair cost to use a site, if there were a standard way to do so. The challenge here is that many people only view any given site on an ad hoc basis rather than being a devotee who's willing to pay for a subscription. If someone figures out how to solve this, especially the UI and adoption aspects, they'll be a billionaire.
I recently used Youtube with all the ads for the first time in a long while and its just abhorrent. From extremely low quality minutes long text-to-speech ads, some that make questionable/dangerous (and in my country illegal) health claims, videos getting interrupted more often than in the old tv days to entire sponsored music videos played before the music I actually wanted to listen to.
Maybe it is some wicked engagement strategy so people have to constantly pay attention and skip ads manually every few minutes instead of being able to just let YouTube run in the background on autoplay ...
I've always wanted an opt-in blocker. One that is off by default but on the worst offender sites can be turned on by the click of a button. This has never been possible easily but I haven't looked in around five years.