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Comment by kjhughes | Hacker News Reader

I find it distasteful, perhaps even unethical, to encourage removal of ads from ad-supported services.

Google offers substantial functionality in exchange for the opportunity to show its users ads.

Distasteful, or maybe imprudent, sure, but I don't think it's unethical. When I signed up for Gmail, ads weren't part of the bargain.

"Gmail is built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun. After all, Gmail has: Lots of space. Over 7538.321890 megabytes (and counting) of free storage."

If just using the service obliges me to view the ads, doesn't it also oblige me to click on the ads? If I don't, I'm lowering the efficiency of their ad network, and thus the value of their advertising product. Maybe I'm even obliged to buy some of the stuff advertised?

That seems crazy to me. They didn't mention the ads when I signed up, so I just don't care. I don't owe them my attention any more than they owe me customer support.

What I find makes it slightly worse is they're asking for donations.

That's interesting. If you DVR a show do you feel obliged to sit through the commercials? This feels somewhat similar.

TV either comes over public airwaves, or through a cable service that I pay (a lot) for.

So no, I don't feel obligated to sit through commercials.

My GMail account, on the other hand, is a great service provided directly to me. The ads on it are well done and don't interfere with my usage. Sometimes I even see ads I click on, since they are interesting. Seems like a good deal.

Broadcast is forced into your home over public wavespace, yes. But cable is something you signed up for, and ads are part in for the deal, like Gmail. You are paying Comcast, not the content producer of the channel you watch. A better argument against cable is that it's a monopoly product, so you feel entitled to renegotiate against the anticompetitive agreement that got cable in you neighborhood.

Given that my DVR is 1) provided by that same cable company, and 2) rather awful (5 years old, and yet still the newest model available), I still don't have any sympathy.

The ad-supported model is robust enough to still work without 100% attention of the audience. Side conversations, bathroom breaks, fast forwarding, not reading every ad, not clicking on every ad, etc are all very different than systematically eliminating ads from any possibility of consideration.

Isn't this similar though? You could argue "Well, only a couple of % of Gmail users at best will use the service. Google will be just fine in the big picture". I'm actually impressed that several people objected to removing an ad-supported revenue stream.

The main risk of advertising is that it will be ignored. It comes with the territory.

Surely you're not equating "removed" with "ignored" right?

In this case, yes, since it's an extension available for individual users to install. I don't see much of a distinction between removed/ignored if it's a personal preference. For example, it would be wrong of my postman to discard advertising flyers for everyone on his route, but please don't tell me that I'm unethical for immediately discarding them simply because they help subsidize low postage rates.

Systematically preventing consideration of all ads is quite different than the natural risk that a given ad could be ignored.

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