> doesn’t entitle them to my attention
if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
The fact that they made it available to be looked at in such a way, perhaps?
HN users just love twisting themselves in circles to justify their belief that they're somehow entitled to consume content from private websites without consuming the ads that support that content. (If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! No one's forcing you to!)
And as a user, if the person hosting the website doesn't want me to look at their content without also looking at their ads, there is a simple solution: don't serve me your content until after you force me to look at your ads.
You do not get to have it both ways. Either the content is available for free and you can hope that the user also views your ads, or the content is not available for free and you can force the user to view your ads.
I believe that humans are social animals, and that a view on enshittification that ignores society is useless. Media is, IMO, holistically worse now than in the mid-90s. An individual cannot undo that. The negatives are not wished away by "no one's forcing you".
The fact that their HTTP server replied 200 OK. If they want to put up a paywall or use a different protocol they're totally free to do so, but permission was inherently granted by the act of serving the content.
Acting like anyone who views a webpage has any obligations regarding how they render or reproduce it is like putting a barbecue on the side of the road with a free sign on it after hiding a bill inside, then getting mad when you don't get paid. Trying to tack on riders that fundamentally alter the mechanics of the underlying protocol is fundamentally invalid.
The reason very few actually take that route is because they want to have their cake and eat it too: the openness of www/http but the monetizability of AOL-esque pseudointernet schemes. If a publisher wants to fuck off to corponet with blackjack, hookers, DRM and WEI they're more than free to do so, but traffic may not follow them. Mine certainly won't.
to play the devil's advocate, this is why google proposed the WEI (https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...). Be careful what you wish for...
I also use adblock, but I'm honest with myself - ads suck, and I'm a dick who doesn't care about most content creators. If they ask for money (e.g. on Substack), I pay them or stop reading them. If they use ads I block them cause I don't care. Kinda like speeding on a highway - probably not a right thing to do, oh well if they catch me I'll pay a fine... no need to invent some bogus defense about how speed limits are wrong.