[copsarebastards]

> If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people.

No, I desire the business model to change.

> I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor.

My ancestors were literally kidnapped out of their homes and forced to do backbreaking work for little pay in intolerable conditions, often while being raped and beaten daily. You have a shitty business model and you want to compare your business failure due to incompetence to that? No, fuck that. Your comparison is outright offensive. Your failure to monetize your labor is not equivalent to slavery and it's disgusting for you to claim it is.

[Mz]

There is current!y a running battle between people using ads to try to monetize their work and people using ad blockers. Lots of formerly well monetized businesses are being hit hard by this. This is not one individual's personal incompetence. It is a widespread trend that is de facto denying people a "living wage" who previously had a very successful business model.

I am sorry you are offended. But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse. Not all slaves were also actively abused. But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.

[copsarebastards]

> But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse.

I disagree, slavery is about force against consent. I agree that abuse isn't necessary for slavery to be bad, but force is. Nobody is forcing content creators to create content without their consent.

> But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.

I do plenty of labor for the benefit of others without recompense: I volunteer. Again, it's not about labor without recompense, it's about force. Slave labor and volunteerism are both labor without recompense: the difference is that slave labor is forced against the laborer's consent.

But let's go back to the ownership thing for a second: are you really claiming that people who use ad blockers are trying to take ownership of content creators and/or their content? Really? Even if I did agree with you that slavery is about ownership, your argument doesn't make sense.

EDIT: At a more fundamental level, it's completely arrogant and entitled to assume that just because you performed labor someone should pay for it. I've put a lot of labor into learning how to play guitar. I could probably post a bunch of recording of my guitar playing and get a bunch of people to listen to them and view ads. But I couldn't get anyone to pay for my recordings, because I still suck at guitar. Am I entitled to recompense for the many hours I've spent practicing?

[Mz]

This has nothing to do with assuming that anyone is automatically owed compensation, regardless of the value of what is produced.

As I said before: Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed. People doing things that are actually valued by others, where the site gets substantial traffic and ads previously paid for staff. This is not an argument that anyone who slaps something on the web deserves compensation. It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online. The expectation that all web content be provided for free is not a healthy or realistic expectation. And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that, or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.

[copsarebastards]

> Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed.

This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.

> It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online.

"Worked" is not what I would say about the current state of ads on the internet. It certainly doesn't work for me.

> And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that,

Volunteering? Play? Definitely not slavery. If you don't want to labor for free, just don't do it. This isn't a complicated situation, you're smart enough to figure this out.

> or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.

Well, I was on the internet in the 90s, and there was some great content back then. I'll actually posit that the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher then.

Also, funded content disappears all the time. If that's the effect you're concerned about, this isn't the cause you're looking for.

[Mz]

> Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed.

This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.

One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.

[copsarebastards]

> One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.

I'm not sure why anyone would care that these businesses don't work. Why are we expected to prop up businesses that don't work?