I don't welcome a world of paid products that also include ads. Yet ads do make some paid products cheaper, like say a Kindle or a TV. Folks blocking ads from a premium product probably have a stronger defense. Those blocking ads from an entirely ad supported service less so.
As for whether you can make blocking ads an ethical imperative, I'd agree that without ads, there likely wouldn't be an incentive to provide helpful, free services. If anything, it's theft of the value that other ad-consenting visitors are providing.
Most stores will gladly have you enter their store at a cost, the hardest and most expensive part of the process is getting you there.
Less if you block their ads and JS.
People don't want to work for you for free.
Because I don't have to.
> Do you prefer they keep making the ads worse to compensate?
They'll only be punishing users that haven't installed uBlock Origin yet.
> Or they paywall more?
No objection to that.
> Or make the ads 'native' and indistinguishable from useful content?
If I figure out someone is doing that, I'll never trust them again. I'll literally blacklist the site and if I see it posted here or anywhere else I'll point it out.
> People don't want to work for you for free.
They should start charging money then. Return 402 Payment Required instead of a free HTML page. If they send me ads, I will delete them. I won't be losing even one second of sleep over the matter. I'd delete real life ads too if could get away with it.
1. Companies selling paid products see ads as an additional revenue and not a way of filling a hole in the budget caused by price reductions. The price wasn’t reduced. That’s a fairy tale.
2. Even if (1) wasn’t true, the consumer seeing ads ends up spending more. They pay for the goods and services being advertised. If they didn’t spend more the whole ad business model wouldn’t work.
Let's say I open a restaurant that advertises itself as "FREE PIZZA", and I give them a free pizza if asked but I also hand them a 2cm thick stack of ad flyers. Is it morally wrong to take that stack of advertising and just throw it away without looking at it while still eating the pizza? I (and I think most people) would say that throwing away the ads is totally acceptable; they're the fools giving away the free pizza with the hope that they'll drive business for the advertisers. If the free-pizza shop goes out of business because everyone throws away the ad flyers, that's something we consider totally ok because that's probably not a great business approach.
The only reason we consider ads online different is because it's become so normalized. We the users have come to expect many services for free, and the folks making their money by including the ads have become vocally entitled to users eyeballs and the money it makes them. They say "my business will fail if you block my ads; you owe me your eyeballs." Yeah, that's not my problem; I'm an audience member who owes the content-provider/service nothing and who's agreed to nothing (TOS's and EULA's have tried to move the goalposts on this after decades, don't be fooled), the only party the content-provider/service is actually doing business with is their advertising network, so they should figure it amongst themselves.
Personally, I don't believe ad blocking is unethical because I don't believe the ways in which advertisers collect and sell their data is ethical.
Did the site force you to visit?
Not our problem. They're the ones sending free web pages to any client who requests. Their servers are free to return 402 Payment Required if they require payment.
> This stance is absurd.
It's not 'absurd', because he did say "arguably", meaning that there's an argument to be made for either side of the issue (and a poster below makes an argument).
Pointing out that ad-blocking is arguably unethical is fine. If he had said "it's unarguably unethical", then sure, that's absurd, but the poster qualified his statement quite nicely.