This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.
> For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.
Honestly? In my long time of adblock-free browsing I've noticed an interesting correlation - the more ads there are on a page and the crappier they get, the less trustworthy and useful the site itself is. Moreover, heavily advertised products tend to be crap designed to extract money from you by luring you into a suboptimal choice. Ads are a good proxy for both crappiness of the product and of the site that shows them. From what I see, if AdBlock kills anything, it kills sites that have no business being on the Internet in the first place, because they waste people's time.
Ideally, of course, everyone could charge what they want for what they are trying to do, and everything would be flawless regarding to that. However, if we try to live by this idealism in this digital world, we also have to accept that the road to that said idealism goes through DRM, walled gardens and broken net-neutrality. Basically, to achieve that idealism with modern day digital devices we have to give up digital liberties (including privacy more or less).
I prefer the digital freedom over the anti-piracy idealism anyday. I suppose "digital anarchism" and "digital totalitarianism" would be descriptive terms for the (exaggerrated) ends of the spectrum.
Being an European, I at times praise the American gun culture and how the American constitution is such a holy thing over there (not that I want the guns over here though, but the attitude). What I would love to see is a similar attitude taken towards not guns, but computing. Fuck the authorities who try to whitelist sequences of instructions to execute on my general purpose computer in the name of protecting their copyright or patents, or corporate profits or local monopolies of digital information exchange.
If we ever go to this digital dystopian future (as if some wouldn't claim we are there already!), I firmly believe, and am afraid, that it is first and foremost lead by arguments in favor of entertainment industry (and to some extent by "protecting children" and "catching terrorist", how else...).
This is why the copyright laws and the whole notion of digital copyright enforcement is meaningless for me, and I personally am opposed to them regardless of being well aware that it's almost certainly a battle which can't be won. Not because we'd be wrong, but because digital liberties undermine ability to make profit in many ways. Oh well, at least there were us who tried.
They can earn a living in other ways. Some examples:
- having a day job (this obviously means they won't have as much time to put in the site, I know)
- Service As a Software Substitute (this doesn't work for sites that just display information)
- subscription/premium model (for press sites like Arstechnica, it seems like an alternative)
- donations (this usually doesn't scale up to a salary, but can sometimes cover hosting and more)
- sponsoring
Most of the content is by people who make it available for free: blogs (a good part of the links on HN), forums and community sites (HN itself, StackOverflow, Reddit, ...), non-press sites (personal sites, project site, etc). An overwhelming majority of those don't rely on advertising to exist.
It might be hard to have a "service" that's massively used and that you can host and make available for free (i.e. no ads), but I bet it's not impossible (especially if you can upsell something else. See GitHub, Travis, DropBox).
I'd argue that a libre p2p service is more useful to have (e.g. http://tox.im) than a centralized, "gratis but ad-supported" centralized service like TPB.
It's a valid argument, but does not address any privacy issues. The author of µBlock describes it well: "Foreword: Using a blocker is NOT theft. Do not fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of "blocking = theft" is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy."
There's a difference between ads and ads that are likely to end up loading malware with a few accidental clicks or distasteful ads for pornography, or ads that talk, or ads that do all three.
"Are you a boy or a girl?" Popping up when I'm in my office at home is something that makes me want to use adblock. And I don't use adblock.
You could equally argue that people who build products that do not sell but thanks to (heavy-handed) advertising are freeloading off the rest of society.
Ah sorry, I'm honestly quite naive on this topic, so you'll have to excuse me if this is boring/tiring. Maybe it's best to give me some links to rtfm on in you can be bothered (otherwise I'll just google it myself of course).
But just thought experimenting.. Say everyone uses ad blockers. Websites receive no ad revenue, websites die as main source of support to stay alive is ads. Now who gets affected by this? People who like the website and essentially are 'subscribed' to it right (keep coming back for more)? As opposed to those who just visit probably most commonly once for some particular piece of info or news.
So eventually it should go back to the days before ads infested the internet right, where everyone hosted because they could / was useful / original content etc? What's so scary or immoral about that, if anything that's even better right?
But that's only good for small websites, today's internet literally runs the world, sophisticated, large and complicated systems. Would this mean that to run the world without such ads (assuming I actually want the world to continue to being run by the internet), as everyone would use ad blockers anyway, these big websites would start charging for their content/functionality? Is that bad? I think maybe yes, that might be worse than just being gratis, but with ads (paywall → privacy concerns just to surf the internet). And so now I've come full circle and contradicted my original position. What other efficient ways are there to easily support large websites financially as ads can, if any?
---
Why do I avoid ads though in the first place?
1. Often (as in 99% of the time), they are very distracting. There are times when I'm on a computer without adblock, and I don't know how I ever survived without it. (Actually, I always inspect element > deleted, but to bother to do that everytime before I can read the content makes a point right?)
2. _Tracking → privacy concerns._
3. Because not what I came for. Captain obvious here.
So at the end of that, I think personally I wouldn't be opposed to non-tracking and non-distracting ads. But how do you confirm they do not track you? Can you? Is it possible to stop potential tracking attempts, without blocking the non-distractive (or unobtrusive) ads themselves?
---
I don't care if a site cannot support itself without ads and dies, I don't think it's immoral to not care about them if I don't care about their content in the long term.
Also, I don't think it's immoral to continue to use a site with adblockers when knowing full well that it might be functioning just due to those who do. I can understand why people think it's bad and is freeloading, but I think it's still justified because ads fuck you over privacy wise anyway, and so I think it's more important to protect yourself and your privacy than to have the only way to pay for the content compromise that. Just a too extreme form of payment.
Ignoring whether or not it's actually practically enforceable (because I don't think it is, nor do I think it should be possible), should it be the case that accessing a site's content is all or nothing. I.e. you get both the content and the ads or nothing at all. But even if you accept the all or nothing concept, you still have to compromise your privacy. I don't want the internet to be a place that's only useful if I 'accept' to give away my privacy. And I just realised how much of a simpleton I am regarding this topic..
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
If everyone blocked ads the websites that rely on ad revenue would lose money and have to shut down.
Sure, if only some of the users block ads they can probably survive, but someone had to see the ads. How do I justify that I get to block ads while others don't?
That said, without adblock I do find NoScript to be a necessity when navigating some parts of the web (e.g. TPB), which has the side effect of being a sort-of ad-block. But that I can live with.
> > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
For what it's worth (and perhaps you intended it this way), this is a somewhat shallow application of the categorical imperative. There are other ways to justify using AdBlock (and in fact, condemn not using AdBlock) by means of the categorical imperative. For example: "If everyone uses AdBlock to prevent sleazy ads that can contain malware, then those ads will no longer have value, and they will cease to exist." If you think of AdBlock as a vaccine, then by the categorical imperative, it's necessary to vaccinate everyone[0].
Or, "If everyone uses AdBlock, then websites will have to invent monetization tactics that don't involve auctioning off its user's eyeballs and privacy". If you consider ads to be an intrusion and invasion of privacy, then killing the ad-supported model could actually be a good thing.
I don't really want to get into a debate on adblockers in general, because the topic has been beaten to death on HN before, but I just felt compelled[1] to make this note about the categorical imperative for the sake of others reading this.
[0] This is also a somewhat simplistic reduction, but you get the idea.
I'm suspicious of products that are heavily promoted. If anything, I'm doing the ad purchaser a favour by not having their blinking ads shoved down my throat.
Pretty much any form of animation on a page causes me to stop reading it, until I can find some way of eliminating it. Too many ads are animated to risk going without an adblocker, flash blocking and disabling of autoplay etc.
And it's not just ads. It's currently fashionable to have all sorts of slide overs as you near the end of an article. Those cause me to stop reading too, until I've killed the elements that caused the slide over. Similarly with floating page headers (vertical space is at a premium), floating social button menus, etc.
And of course, then there's custom fonts. For years, I viewed the web with custom font downloading disabled, until the near ubiquity of FontAwesome forced me to concede. But I still run a plugin to disable font choices, and will run pages through a Readable bookmarklet if the designer has prioritized style over legibility.
I don't really see the relationship between me and site publishers as a social contract. It's much more hostile than that. They try to ram an incredible amount of crap into my sensory input, and I defend myself from their assault every way I can.
Almost every form of communication between people is an attempt at manipulation. For instance, your comment is attempting to manipulate people into seeing advertising is a form of brainwashing.
As attempts at manipulation go, though, advertising is at least up front and overt about its intentions. Can anyone say the same about politics, the media, even Hacker News?
The difference is that I honestly believe that advertising is manipulative (and I think there is good evidence!). I don't stand to gain any money if I convince you.
I am not, I hope, spreading falsehoods. I'm certainly not preying on your innate desires for food or sex. I'm not installing malware on your computer. I'm not building a profile of your interests. I'm not autoplaying a video if you mouseover this comment!
For the record, I am perfectly happy with ads that are just the name of the product and a static picture (a la the Deck).
I can certainly agree with you that there should be no place for malware, aggressive or intrusive advertising on the web.
I'm not convinced that they're effective enough that they're dangerous, though. I'm more concerned by viral advertising than I am web banners. Arguably, the only reason viral marketing exists is that advertising is so useless, otherwise, online.
And realistically, not everyone advertising is trying to deceive. There's nothing necessarily wrong with trying to convince someone to buy your product if you think you have a product worth selling.
I disagree; all communication has a purpose, but manipulation is communication that intentionally conceals it's true purpose and tries to deceive you. For example, saying "buy tickets for concert of band X at venue Y at time Z" or "if you have haemorrhoids, buy drug W", are "good", non-manipulative ads. On the other hand, "click here to earn 1000 a day", "you are 1000th visitor, you win", or displaying an image of a happy family in an attempt to anchor your brand to the viewer's idea of happiness is "bad", manipulative kind of advertising.
I don't oppose "good" advertising; I just think it should be limited (to information boards, Google, Craigslist, ...). However, most advertising is the bad kind, and I categorically oppose it.
Honestly I just see it as blocking a list of domains or whatever right? I mean yeah if you care about the site and the loss in revenue of you using adblock may hurt you too if the site is hampered/dies, and so it may be in your interest to not use adblockers.
But, in my opinion of course, I don't think it's 'immoral' to block ads and stop their revenue if you don't care about it, we should have the ability to block domains right? The question is whether or not it's right to do so, if I'm thinking correctly. But believe it or not, I'm actually quite new to this 'debate'(?), just my first raw thoughts on this. I guess it's probably not as simple as what I just said..
