Comment by akoboldfrying | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akoboldfrying | Hacker News Reader

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> I never saw most of the offending ads because of my adblocker

Using ad blockers is unethical. No one who uses one (probably 99% of people on HN) wants to hear this, but the conclusion is inescapable really.

You may commence your downvoting.

ETA: Why do I claim it's unethical? Every ad-supported page is an implicit contract: If you want the good stuff on this page, you need to pay for that by giving some of your attention to <these shitty ads that we all probably hate>. Nothing more. If the trade-off isn't worth it to you, that's fine: you have the right, and the ability, to reject it -- to cease interacting with the site at all. OTOH, using an ad blocker to access the site without "paying" (with your attention) is violating the contract in the same way that hacking a parking meter downtown to park your car for free is. Running websites isn't free, and even if it was, it's the site owner's prerogative whether and how much ad-attention to "charge". If the fundamental idea of capitalism is sound (and perhaps it isn't -- but then let's discuss that), exorbitant ad burdens attached to desirable content will eventually be outcompeted by other sites offering similar content for free with fewer ads, or for actual cash.

There's a more self-serving argument, too: If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist, and nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people. Using ad blockers is only "sustainable" in the same way that mafia protection rackets are "sustainable" -- by being a sufficiently small drain on the rest of society.

There are valid reasons for using ad blockers, hence why the general US Intelligence Community both uses and recommends the use of ad blockers "as a critical security measure to defend against "malvertising" and data collection threats".

All other arguments are moot in the shadow of this. However, if you're talking about how a media company can stay afloat without advertising, then you're getting very much closer to ethical arguments. I currently just point to the first paragraph in such an argument.

The advertising industry needs to sort out its inability to appropriately and safely scale before any ethical arguments are able to put roots down.

I hear you on malvertising and overzealous data collection. I certainly think online advertising needs to be carefully regulated for essentially safety reasons. But in an ideal world where such regulation was firmly in place, I think it would not be appropriate (because it would not be necessary) for government or influential industry groups to endorse ad-blockers.

BTW I've added an ETA to my original post with my reasons.

I am not sure ethics have much to do with it nor implied contract.

In the past there was no ethical issue nor contractual issue with going to the bathroom during a network commercial break, no ethical issue with skipping multi page magazine ads. We were free to change the radio channel during ad breaks.

My parents would often mute the tv in commercial breaks and talk.

I find that 99% of ads are blocked simply by disabling Javascript. Does that suggest that disabling Javascript is unethical? Or does it suggest that those blocked advertisements were over-stepping the bounds of the implicit contract?

> OTOH, using an ad blocker to access the site without "paying" (with your attention) is violating the contract in the same way that hacking a parking meter downtown to park your car for free is.

It's not the same thing at all: I wouldn't hack a parking meter downtown, but I would if it was installed in my garage!

What runs on my PC is up to me.

adverts are unethical, they use psychological manipulation to influence people against their will and often without their knowledge.

Because I am pro-capitalism, I utterly disagree with your premise. In a real contract, parties can negotiate and come to a meeting of the minds. Here's how it actually works:

* A website serves me a page with a place to put ads on it.

* I reject their offer to serve me ads.

* The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup. If they continue to serve me, they've agreed to my proposed contract alterations.

* If they choose not to serve me, I can decide to accept their final offer (by disabling my ad-blocker) or reject it (by closing the tab).

What on earth makes you think that the negotiation ends with the initial offer? That's not how bargaining works. This isn't some Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario.

Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?

If not, at what point during your milk purchase does the negotiation step that you hold to be important for capitalism take place?

I put it to you that take-it-or-leave-it-ness is orthogonal to the capitalism-socialism axis, and that the take-it-or-leave-it nature of viewing an ad-supported website is no more socialist (and no more alarming) than buying milk.

Regarding "negotiation":

> * The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup.

Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol? Because if so, I would agree that this amounts to a negotiation with the website as you say.

But this would certainly be news to me. It must be a recent change, since for most of my life, ads have simply been hyperlinked images/objects/videos/IFrames, or sometimes inline text generated server-side or on the client using JS, and the only mechanisms available to implement ad blocking were implicit, and based on subterfuge: By preventing fetching of that content in the first place (in a variety of ways), or by fetching it but then hiding/obscuring the result in some way. None of which amount to "negotiation", obviously.

> Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?

No. You can ask. They'll say no, almost surely, unless you're talking to the manager about something that's about to expire and then anything goes. But you can ask. Your idealized scenario is where the initial, and only, offer is "see this with ads or don't see it" with no room for negotiation.

> Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol?

As far as it's possible to express this arrangement in HTML, yes, of course. The page gives your client a document describing which resources it may wish to fetch, among other things. It's not expected that you'll fetch all of them. You may already have the cached data. A resource may be of a type your client doesn't know how to render. It may be in a tag your client doesn't know how to process. It may include executable code that your client might be configured to execute or not to execute. It may have several media types for scenarios that don't apply to you, such as for printing or working with a screen reader for people with visual impairments, and those media types may refer to resources that your client won't fetch because they're not relevant to you. 100% of those decisions can be made by your client. It's not obligated to execute your JavaScript, even if it has Bitcoin mining code and you lose out on the would-be cryptocurrency that my browser chooses not to mine for you. It's not obligated to use your fonts, or figure out how to display your odd graphics format, or render your PDF, or load your Java applet, etc.

And thus with ads. Your web page says "here's an image tag for you to display an ad", or more likely, "here's a ball of malware for you to execute that also displays an ad". There's no legal or moral or technical scenario where my client is obligated to choose to display or execute it, simply because your site told me how to do it if I chose to participate.

Oh, I'm happy to tolerate decent and fair advertising.

But since the ad-tech industry (worth billions) is now dedicated to invading my privacy, using underhand tactics to avoid the GDPR and is busy sniffing my underwear to work out what I had for breakfast, then they can all follow the advice given to them by Bill Hicks.

And I will run an add blocker.

You may get downvoted because you are making a bold statement without any reasoning behind it - what exactly is unethical about it? ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unethical )

Thanks, that's fair. I've added my reasons in an ETA on the original post.

I disagree exactly for the reason BLKNSLVR wrote so I won’t repeat it but upvoted your comment :)

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