No one likes ads, but the belief that you're owed content for free is absurd.
Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all.
https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads
https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metave...
You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense.
If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it.
You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing the content does not make you virtuous, no matter how you might attempt to distort reality. It makes you a thief.
"I don't how you do things, so I am going to steal your product!"
Yeah, that's a formula for a better society.
None of that remotely resembles theft.
What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences.
If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.
You don't like ads. You have zero respect for the product supplier. You consume their work product and delete the ads, using an artificially-constructed moral high ground to justify it.
The web would not exist if your world view had been dominant from the early days. Few people are interested in paying for anything directly. Gmail has 1.5 billion users. Care to guess how many pay for the service? Nobody is going to pay for search, and yet it is one of the most valuable tools on the internet, arguably the one thing that makes it work. A service like YouTube is incredibly valuable, not just from an entertainment perspective but also for learning and more. Once again, nobody wants to pay for it.
I could go on. There are millions of excellent sites beyond what Google has to offer. What's more important is that none of these services would have been built to where they are today were it not for the use of advertising as a revenue generation channel.
At a higher philosophical level, the question might be:
What future valuable service or product would we not allow to germinate if nobody wants to pay for anything and everyone uses ad blockers. Like it or not, this is one of the easiest ways for entrepreneurs to finance their dreams and ideas on the web. Given the vast majority of people will not pay for anything, the options become very few. This is certainly true at inception. Later on, as a business matures, other potential revenue streams surface.
Go try and start something like Facebook (about 3 billion users) and ask people to pay you just $1 per year. Aside from the fact that it would be impossible to support the infrastructure and people needed to run such a beast, well, nobody is going to hand you even $1 per year for the service. I don't care what features and privacy enhancements you might offer, nobody is going to pay. What's left? Well, initially, advertising. That's the only way. Sad, but true.
We don't have to like reality, but we should understand it.
How I spend my time and attention on the site is my personal decision, not the site owner's decision, not your decision, and not anyone else's decision. I don't care if an unsound and generally unaccepted ethical theory like the one you're advocating for disregards my individual right to spend my time and attention as I please. I don't care if you would rather prioritize someone else's profit over my autonomy. My time and my attention belong to me.
I don't use Gmail, and I would prefer Gmail's user base to be distributed among many smaller companies that compete with each other to provide better products. I don't use Facebook, and I would prefer it to be completely supplanted by fediverse services that don't violate the privacy of users and non-users, and don't create poor working conditions for its contractors.* YouTube is not irreplaceable either, and I would rather see a variety of platforms like PeerTube instances and Vimeo break YouTube's near-monopoly of online video content in the U.S. and many other countries. I fully understand the reality of online advertising, which only amplifies my support for ad blocking.
* https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
I've since resubscribed as their site no longer does this. It seems so crazy to me that I tried to search for when The Economist changed their policy and found nothing relevant, other than a spate of 2015 stories about how they contracted with an ad-tech firm to determine how many subscribers were using adblockers, but the service subjected their readers to malware.
Newspapers have always made their money by selling their audience to advertisers. However, it wasn't too hard to ignore the ads in print and there is a limit to how malicious a print ad can be.
Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.
My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really.
If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole.
You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
> If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist.
Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.
I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web.
But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.
I have 600 records, pay directly for a YouTube show, pay for 5 substack blogs, I have hundreds of dvds, 500books, endless video games for multiple consoles, Netflix, hbomax, Hulu, boomerang, Shudder, Amazon, I've had sling, CBS watch, wb archive, criterion, and others.
I go through periods of Pandora or Spotify.
The reality is every company wants to charge but they all want to be on the open web at the same time.
Can't have it both ways.
I control what downloads on the internet I pay for, on the device I own.
If you didn't erect a paywalls? Your fault. Not mine.
I wouldn't bed a stranger without a condom
I don't browse without an ad blocker. Or privacy badger.
People who understand ad blockers but don't use them are corporate sychophants.
I will browse news and articles sometimes -because- they are free. If they were not, I simply no longer visit said page. I don't feel I'm owed their content in any way, and I'm OK just walking away if they decide to paywall it.