Adblock isn’t immoral
blog.plague-dev.de
blog.plague-dev.de
I guess you can argue semantics and how it's your bandwidth so you can decide (although, it's their bandwidth too...) -- but the reality is that by blocking the ads you're breaking a "gentleman's agreement" that someone is providing you something (that you clearly want if you're there) and in return you view the ads they have. If you want a "moral" way to block ads, blacklist sites with crappy/annoying ads.
I'm over the overly dramatic obsession with ads people have. They really aren't that bad, get over yourself.
> For every thousand people suffering from ads..
> It stresses the brain
> exhausting for humans and machines. Many Website owners force all these negative implications
eye roll
My experience with zero adblock has been pretty good - I discovered Atlassian via ads and really like their products. I can't remember the last time I was more than slightly inconvenienced in any way by an ad. I get more annoyed with the thesaurus powered rants than I ever will from ads.
> If they don't like my stopping those connections, they are free to not include them.
Or if you don't like it, maybe just don't surf their pages. You're not entitled to everything in the world on your own terms -- if you don't like the terms, don't engage.
It's just dishonest, ads are basically honor system. Of course you completely control your own machine and every single connection it makes -- no one can force that on you. But blocking ads is the digital equivalent of taking an egg and not leaving a quarter at the farm stand - at the end of the day they probably don't lose a sale because they throw out the extras (you didn't deprive anyone of an egg or them of a possible sale), but you benefited from someone else's time and work and refused to acknowledge it with a token amount.
You're not doing anything wrong in the "universal net-total", you're just being a selfish member of society because you want to benefit from someone else's work/resources but refuse to give a little bit of screen real estate back.
Also, you probably want to not try to guess my motives. The screen real estate isn't the problem, the tracking and the resource consumption is.
And ads as a honor system? With all the dishonest moves they pull? That is nonsensical to the point of being parody.
>if you don't like the terms, don't engage.
Exactly. If you don't like that I'm in control of my machine, don't send me content with the expectation of taking over my machine for your benefit.
... but you're the one requesting the site...
Ignoring the drama of your comment (I've never had my "machine taken over") -- no one is sending you content you didn't request. The person providing you that content would like it if you viewed an ad for them since you're gaining something from their content (or you wouldn't be reading/viewing it). Refusing to do that is dishonest -- it's not illegal, you're not stealing, you're just being selfish and entitled.
> Also, you probably want to not try to guess my motives. The screen real estate isn't the problem, the tracking and the resource consumption is.
Yeah, you want to consume someone's content and you feel entitled to do it on your own terms.
Because no one in the history of the internet has ever dealt with a completely inappropriate popup that they clearly would've never chosen to see.
While I don't dispute the horribleness of some ad implementations out there, ads represent a way to monetize off one's entire audience — an infinite increase in accessibility as compared to a paywall. Freedom of information is one of the core tenets of the web. I'd rather pay with my time than see a popup asking me to pay up.
Although it might not be immoral to block ads (depending on your worldview,) the reverse is true as well. Webmasters aren't obligated to spend server resources on people who block ads. If the author is so adamant about all services having equal or better alternatives, I'd love to see his reaction if Google suddenly stopped serving requests to clients with ad blockers.
I personally wouldn't react at all other than simply laugh, seeing as how I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago, and how there are at least four other search engines out there that I could use (Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu; in order of preference).
Google not serving requests to those who use ad-blockers (like myself) would just give me yet another reason to not use Google, and would do absolutely nothing to win me over or stop using ad-blockers.
> Not everyone has the ability or desire to pay for information.
He addressed this by mentioning Wikipedia, which is arguably one of the largest websites and yet is able to survive perfectly fine on donations and (maybe) merchandise sales alone.
Does the site-owner take any responsibility (moral, legal, or social) for the performance/stability issues, privacy risks, or security threats they want to expose me to?
No? Then the side-effects on their revenue model are not my (moral, legal, social) responsibility either, as I defend myself from those dangers that they have unilaterally introduced.
If you believe we are in an "implicit contract" of view-ads-for-content, that can work... but both sides need to be legally liable for their half of the transaction.
Do you gain anything from reading/viewing their content?
Yes? (You wouldn't have requested their site if you didn't) Then why should they not gain something in return?
> as I defend myself from those dangers that they have unilaterally introduced.
You were "unilaterally introduced" to dangers from the site you specifically requested by either clicking the link or typing into your browser?
This is all pretty dramatic - they're ads.
That's an completely separate argument from whether what they're actually trying to get is proportional, reasonable, and safe.
I don't care how good your TV show is, if you insert commercials that advertise fraudulent products, try to hack my DVR with malformed data, or are even just ridiculously loud... you've already broken the "implicit contract" and I don't have to feel any guilt about defending myself.
> You were "unilaterally introduced" to dangers from the site
No I wasn't. Why? Because I disabled javascript, plugins, etc. before visiting.
> This is all pretty dramatic - they're ads.
First, it's no more dramatic than people talking about ad-blockers being immoral or "theft".
Second, ad-networks are exploited to serve malware all the time.
If a site can prove itself to be a good Internet citizen and prove its value, I have no problems whitelisting it. (Or preferably, tossing a buck a month into their Patreon or so)
but i was also thinking that, the story didn't go into the fact it is nearly impossible to block whitelisted ads.
If you want me to consider your product, there are a couple of techniques I'm receptive to:
* focus on getting independent reviewers to show its superiority relative to competitive offerings.
* provide relatively unbiased free content about ways to solve problem XYZ that your product solves, with honest pros and cons relative to other good solutions, so I can determine if the product is a good fit for my specific situation.
* Make your product incredibly easy to try - provide something fully featured for free, with excellent documentation. Make your money on support and an enterprise version with turn key scalability/durability/recovery features.