I've never met such a person. I can only imagine them to be barely human. What other bizarre opinions, internal or external, would they have? I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.
From experience: When your government spies on you and locks folks up without due process, this is good because it keeps the children safe. And a host of other convictions that are so toxic I cannot say them online without feeling dirty. These are the kind of people that say "think of the children" without irony, that view the world in purely adversarial terms and do their best to hate as many things as they can. They live to make everyone around them miserable.
I have seen this repeatedly and only from this kind of person. I am glad I don't have them around me anymore, but sad that other people might.
> I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.
It being the case that these are the purest of bad faith actors, you can at least trust them to ruin whatever they touch. It's something :)
FWIW, I am against dragnet surveillance, in favor of due process, doubt I've ever said "think of the children" without irony, don't view the world in adversarial terms, enjoy looking for the positive aspects of things other people malign, and don't want anyone to be miserable.
It's not difficult to imagine an argument against ad blockers. Ads pay for the content you consume on the Internet. If you don't like the ads, then your recourse is to leave the site and go elsewhere. You're not entitled to just block the ads and consume the content for free.
I don't personally subscribe to that theory, but I wouldn't describe it as an insane opinion to have.
This is somehow immoral. Cutting paper I have in my possession.
Nah, that's insane, sorry. It speaks to a lack of logical thought processes.
I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off. But uBlock Origin etc don't just block ads, they also pretend to the site that the ads aren't blocked.
(I used to work in ads)
The fact that you admit to working in an industry that actively tries to take as much agency away from others as it can without (apparently) feeling bad about it is really terrible.
Anecdotally the best advertising I have engaged with and bought the most as a result of is content based, not personalised for me in any way (i.e. podcasts before dynamic ads became a thing)
I'm curious what you bought and how you interact with ads.
For me, I bought a house. I worked closely with a realtor to find my house. That experience was highly personalized.
- Watching a board game video, here are ways to buy the game/expansions/similar games
- Listening to a book review, here are ways to buy the book/other books by the author/art related to the book
- Listening to a tech podcast, here are tech related services that may have been discussed
It sounds like your proposed change would have the search engine use its influence to push sites away from paywall models?
I personally don’t like lettuce. I removed it from my burgers. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my burger? Am I forced to consume lettuce?
And before you tell me to look for another burger place, let me remind you there’s no other burger place. All burger places have this business model. All burger places give burgers for free sponsored by Big Lettuce.
So let me ask you again. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my own God damned burger?
Then yes: in this contrived analogy by taking the burger but not eating the lettuce you're freeloading. The more people that do this, the less likely the restaurant is to continue being able to provide free food to anyone that wants it. And I think it would be pretty reasonable for them to have signs like "patrons who do not eat their vegetables will be asked to leave" and "strictly no takeout".
The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention for the free thing and, in fact, the free thing was nominally offered to me as free.
The decision to publicly provide the content for "free" with advertisements was made without my input and coordinated without my help. The worst thing my ad blocker does is expose the difficulty with executing that business model.
Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?
When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business.
As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloading, another could consider that the paywalling content provider is just trying to capture rent for data that's otherwise freely available.
That seems like it breaks down when you consider that revenue from the streaming services is funding the creation of new shows?
(So a restaurant is unable to gather revenue when people "simply bypass" their attempts with a dine-and-dash. Not sure how I feel about that, to be fair.)
Similarly, I don't really think people who pirated cable TV a decade or two ago were freeloading. As soon as it's being delivered directly to my living room via speed-of-light communication, and I have control over the machines that perform the delivery, the product is practically worthless. Comparing that to feature filmmakers who sell licenses to movie theaters, where I would need to physically tamper with machines I don't own in order to obtain the video data, there's a not-explicitly-for-the-sake-of-the-business reason for me to fork up money for the movie ticket. (Granted, they could give me the video data directly, but they don't.)
Reading this again, it doesn't seem obvious to me that this is justified so I'll try to explain.
Let's say every copyright owner decides tomorrow that it's not worth trying to enforce copyright and, similarly, everybody who is currently paying for streaming services just starts downloading and seeding torrents for all of the content said services have licensed. In my mind, this only exposes the lack of scarcity, and that the value that these streaming companies provide amounts to hard drive space.
Anyway, that's kinda off-topic copyright stuff. When it comes to, for example, WSJ, I dunno. I would really like it to work with some way of providing creative text without the consumers being required to contribute financially but I would not say that it's the fault of the bypassing consumer when it doesn't work.
It's especially difficult to find a "real-world" example; I can't compare it to stealing from Walmart because WSJ doesn't have to replace what was stolen. If I download a game from TPB instead of Steam, the worst thing that happens is that Steam and the developer of the game lose a sale, whereas if I go down to Best Buy and take one of the packaged discs from their shelf and take it home without paying, Best Buy loses the sale and also needs to replace what wasn't sold (granted, the game publisher still gets paid because they provide the discs and packages).
It's interesting to think about but ultimately, the line I choose to draw is at the scarcity of the product / service: if it's not natural, then it's a fundamentally flawed business, paywall- or ad-driven.
Businesses are not entitled to the success of their business models. If a business model fails due to consumer behavior, the business was in the wrong for expecting different behavior.
> I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off.
Distracting content (most ads), color schemes with bad contrast, bright images on dark pages, etc. are accessibility hazards (particularly cognitive accessibility hazards). Restricting the use of page-alteration software (e.g. color and font alteration, disabling images, and blocking frames) is therefore a discriminatory practice.
In a sibling subthread:
> The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
The default behavior on the Web is one in which user-agents set their terms, and websites must agree to them: https://seirdy.one/notes/2022/08/12/user-agents-set-the-term...
The libertarian perspective is a two-way street. Nobody is forcing a person to publish content on the Web. If the "comply with the user's wishes" model of the Web is problematic to a content creator, they don't need to participate in the Web.
POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) note from https://seirdy.one/notes/2022/09/10/in-defense-of-content-bl...
Well that’s why. When you refuse to even listen/consider their argument, no one is going to argue with you. In addition, saying such a thing here gets you downvoted to oblivion. Doesn’t stop people from doing it; Just look at some of the other comments here.