Make plain, no funny-business HTTP GET, server responds 200 and sends some text. Guess they wanted me to have it. I'll decide what I do with it, thanks.
The same argument applies to DVR ad skipping and previews on movies. If your profit model depends on people not blocking advertisements, your profit model is broken.
I much prefer the way movies and podcasts so it, as in, having the advertisement as part of the content itself. Instead of plugging in ads on the side, podcasts have a small segment where the host mentions a product and gives their personal experience with it. Moves place products in the shot, which is also a kind of approval from the studio. Webpages, however, just throw in ads with no context, and it's completely jarring.
Part of the problem is that placing ads is much easier than working ad placement into an article, and another part is that paying for things online is a painful experience. I don't mind paying to remove ads, but I'm not going to sign up for a subscription service just to read an article without ads. I really hope something like GNU Taler becomes popular to make these types of microtransactions easier to manage. Even better, I would like something like Netflix, but for quality journalism where I pay a subscription for a variety of content.
I want content producers to get paid, I just don't like advertisements and juggling subscriptions.
Technicality? Huh? I asked for a document and you sent it so now I'd better make sure I only read it with software that also requests every link in it and runs any code it finds? LOL no. No technicality about it.
People tend to forget that websites are just documents. Especially those who are not deeply familiar with the web technology. So, to those who are not aware, I'd like to add: web is nothing more than a protocol in which a user requests a document, and a server generates and returns a text response. It is up to the user what they will do with this text response. For example, they may open it in a browser which parses special tags and turns it into a nice visual page. They also can choose to open it in a browser which cherry-picks which tags to parse and which tags not to parse. They can also just read it as an unparsed text. This is simply how web was designed.
What's unethical about reading the parts of a webpage that you want to read? It's like getting a free newspaper and then covering up the ads inside before you read it.
Well not quite. It's more like having someone else remove the ads so you're never exposed to them. Which I would say is a little unethical considering the newspaper is free for a reason.
If your server sends bits back to my computer when I request them, it is perfectly within my right to decide which of those bits I do and do not want to see.
This is like the people who say they can say what they want because of free speech.
If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.
If ad networks would behave ethically, I would agree with you. But they don't, so I don't.
It's not all black and white. If you want to charge me for content, charge me for content. If I think it's worth it, I'll pay. Don't force an unusable, emotionally-manipulative, probably malware-filled experience on me from the get-go because you don't otherwise have a sustainable business model.
You’re getting something you value (video, article, etc.) in exchange for looking at ads instead of paying money. If you don’t want to look at ads, don’t look at the content. Don’t hide behind server requests and technicalities.
It would be fine in the 1995 version of the internet where a page served up content plus a banner ad. I might click, I might not. But now we're faced with privacy invasion, tracking, data-collection, TVs that output tones during ads that our phones pick up and report back to advertisers, pages that are slow and unreadable because the ads have taken over more real estate than the content. The list goes on, and it's not a trade we agreed to.
Anti-patterns designed to trick us into clicking, signing up, giving up more data, view another few seconds of ads. It never ends! So yeah, we block it. I don't feel sorry. If you don't think it's ethical then you're not paying attention to what's really going on. I used to go around installing Firefox for people before it was called that. Then adblockers, and now I go to people's houses and help them with a raspberry pi loaded with pi-hole. Fuck ads. Fuck that entire industry. And fuck everyone that works in that industry enabling them.
Yes, it’s fine to skip ads in magazines or change the channel during commercials.
It’s not OK to get a robot that changes the channel for you or to have your magazines sent to a service who cuts the ads out and forwards them on to you.
You're setting arbitrary restrictions based on some feel-good criterion you've developed for yourself.
The implication of your ethical argument was that avoiding ads causes the content creator to fail to get paid, and that's wrong.
There's no material difference between whether I avoid ads manually, or have software do it for me automatically. The end result is the same; the creator misses out on ad revenue. You can't cherry-pick the ad avoidance methods and say some are ethical and some are not when the supposed unethical act is depriving creators of payment.
