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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

Why? Because I believe they're wrong. I think it's just wrong to engage with any business and disable, sidestep or circumvent their way to make money. It's like shoplifting. It reminds of people who open up a box at the supermarket, eat the food, and then claim that the barcode was on the box so that must be what's for sale.

I want the Internet to have ad supported content. I want the people who create this content to have a chance of making a fair, market-determined income instead of relying upon things like Patreon.

The saddest part for me is that I'm going to get voted down here because the support for this kind of behavior is strong here. Some day all of you will experience a business being undermined by freeloaders and thieves. This is the kind of low-trust world that you're building and it will come for your livelihood too.

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While I strongly disagree that using an ad-blocker is a kind of theft, I have sympathy with your underlying point.

The problem is that ads come with so much spying. That's what kills the trust.

I don't use an adblocker per-se, but I do stop JS and various trackers, which have the side-effect of stopping most ads. It's purely a self-defense thing on my part. I'll still see any ads which are just ads and not spying platforms.

If the use of ad blockers threatens the livelihood of web sites, perhaps that would encourage the websites to stop abusing their readers.

The freeloaders and thieves who ruined the trust work in adtech.

They could have simply not abused their position.

Do you also deliberately trigger red light and speed cameras, purchase and maintain a horse and buggy, and rent office space that you don't use?

Saying that ad (aka surveillance) based businesses are "undermined" by adblocking carries a fallacious assertion that those businesses have some inherent right to exist as they want. In reality, nobody is entitled to a business model. From my perspective, "freeloaders and thieves" describes those who have built businesses around attempting to hijack attention spans and create surveillance profiles about users. The fundamental dynamic of the Internet has always been that servers represent the server owners' interests, and my user agent chooses how to interpret what is received in my own interests. The Schelling point of the protocol is what separates the authorities/concerns of two parties with diverging interests.

I never understood this stance either. I am sympathetic that these venues need income generation. However, if they are losing so much money over the loss of advertising then they need to change their business model. The free market is that simple.

I don't think it's that simple. Ads emerged because people couldn't connect their wallets to the Internet.

It's a different situation today, but it's still there. Especially teenagers. I would pay $1 for a newspaper easily, but I would never pay for online news. Maybe if it charged me 8 cents and only needed a thumbprint to pay, I would. Maybe if there was a comic section, I would.

We had a business which was basically media ecommerce. Instead of making a site about football and selling ads related to footbl fans, we'd sell shoes. We'd make recipe apps then sell hard to find ingredients.

This worked great. It made money. Good profit margin. But 80% of the work became logistics. We ended up outsourcing content creation and then became a logistics company.

I agree with you, that's why I support any website that uses contextual ads and not profiling/tracking ads deactivating my adblocker for them.

I have zero sympathy for sites that try to profile me, I consider personal data protection an inviolable right and act in that sense

You want supporting content creativity by relying on third party content creativity? Why not just pay directly.

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