[coldpie]

I think publishers broke the moral contract first by making the distribution of malware and supporting Internet scams their primary business model. Once they broke the moral contract, we responded by developing ad blockers to protect ourselves from their maliciousness. I think if publishers stopped distributing malware, misleading ads, and Internet scams, then there would be far less demand for ad blockers. They created the problem, it's up to them to fix it.

Unlike a subway ride, it's impossible to tell whether a website has ads or not before you visit it. So I can't know whether I've violated the morals you're talking about until I already have done it.

I think publishers are welcome to create adblock-blockers, and I don't have any interest in working around them. I suspect it's not a feasible business model, but that's their problem, not mine.

[Klathmon]

> I think publishers are welcome to create adblock-blockers, and I don't have any interest in working around them.

And i'm fine with that as well. If you want to block ads that's cool with me, but don't expect to get the content as well.

[type0]

You see, there is a problem calling website pages "content", unless I know what that articles contains there is no way for me to know if it is of any value or not. Serving malicious ads and slowing down my internet speed just adds insult to the injury. I don't think it's okay to block adblockers, this is equivalent to discrimination IRL (e.g not letting someone into the restaurant because of their religion or skin color etc). If they want to get payed by the readers, there's always subscription model (lock it behind the paywall), don't discriminate me because of the software I'm using.

[coldpie]

> I don't think it's okay to block adblockers, this is equivalent to discrimination IRL (e.g not letting someone into the restaurant because of their religion or skin color etc).

Oh my god it's not even close I can't believe you said this.

[Klathmon]

If I start a news website, and I give you 2 options:

1. Pay $1 a month to view my content without ads

2. View ads

And you block ads without paying, i'm going to block you. You seem very pragmatic about what is best for you and your PC, well this is me being pragmatic about it as well.

If you block ads, and don't pay a subscription, you give me no value. It only costs me money to serve you content. So you aren't getting served content if you are going to be blocking ads.

It's not "discrimination" any more than a movie theater only letting people that pay in is.

[type0]

> If you block ads, and don't pay a subscription, you give me no value.

If you implement it on your backend, without me needing to run your adblocker blocking js code, which I will block. I'm okay with that if you implementation is based on your servers, you just can't decide what software I will or will not run on my machine. So even you implement some form of Digital Restriction Management one would still find a way to circumvent it (against the law in many places), actually one should do it as a form of civil disobedience. People should control their own technology, not the other way around.