[horsawlarway]

Even worse, associating blocking ads as something akin to stealing is morally bankrupt.

It's an incredibly slippery slope that leads to complete loss of autonomy for individuals.

If I refuse to read roadside billboards, am I now stealing?

If I tear up newspaper ads and throw them away, am I now stealing?

If I turn off my tv during ads on a cable show, am I now stealing?

I think any sane person would definitively say "NO!", I think it's an incredibly dangerous line of thought that associates loss of attention as theft.

Fundamentally, we have the right to choose what we pay attention to. Some sites block me when I have adblockers enabled, I think that's fine. But don't serve up your content and then complain that I choose to ignore parts of it. I have free will and autonomy.

[tombrossman]

In the past, when people have asked me about the ethics of using an ad blocker, I always ask the same question: "When you are watching TV, do you wait for the commercial break to go take a leak?" (Not my line, wish I remembered the origin so I could give proper attribution).

The strange thing is it's one of those conversation stoppers, the other person usually gives me a funny look and does not reply at all. This is perfect and I recommend trying it out.

[Freak_NL]

That's a good comparison. It's a shame that a lot of people will now answer that they just pause Netflix and go, and rarely bother with broadcast television.

[TeMPOraL]

I wonder why Netflix, and not one of the many free streaming sites serving pirated content. Might have something to do with ads.

[matheusmoreira]

>If I turn off my tv during ads on a cable show, am I now stealing?

I think this is an excellent analogy.

What if broadcasters transmitted control codes that could reconfigure your TV or even disable its functions? You're watching something, a commercial begins and suddenly your TV's volume is maxed out by the broadcaster because they want to reach people who left the room. You try to set it back to what it was, but the controls don't respond. You try to mute the TV but the function appears to have been disabled. Changing channel doesn't work. Turning it off doesn't work. It's as if they were saying "So... You actually thought you could get away with watching our stuff for free, huh? You think you're so smart... Now we've made it so you HAVE to watch this commercial. See how you like THAT!" This attitude is straight up hostile to the subscribers. It attempts to control them, lest they escape from the publisher's money-making machine. Such audacity, right? How dare they not watch my commercial! Can you imagine the rage and indignation the publishers must feel?

How much time would it take before TV manufacturers realized TVs which ignored the broadcaster's commands were objectively superior to those which didn't? The broadcasters would probably call use of such TVs "stealing", too. They'd probably call these manufacturers a "brotherhood of non-standard television manufacturers". They'd probably force narratives saying "hey I hate commercials as much as the next guy but really it's stealing if you don't watch them". They'd probably lobby for laws that criminalize devices which automatically remove ads from recorded footage. They'd probably try to introduce new ways to control the user's hardware in order to make the user do what they want.

This is what Javascript does. "I see you're using an ad blocker, so let me just put an overlay on top of the text so you can't read anything without "paying" for it." Sometimes publishers take issue with something as basic as copy-paste: "trying to select a portion of my page, huh? Must be a lazy pirate trying to clone my website. I'll manipulate the clipboard and make it contain a scathing message instead, just for you!" It's so hostile, sometimes I think they hate users and only see them as potential click-throughs and conversion rates. It's dehumanizing.

[CommieBobDole]

>If I turn off my tv during ads on a cable show, am I now stealing?

The former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, Jamie Kellner, thinks that you are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Kellner

[ddingus]

Yes.

Frankly, if the ADS have real value, and yes that is entirely possible to do, people won't block them anywhere near the level of concern.

Self selection will improve performance too.

An example I saw play out, and had a small hand in was an auto shop doing political ADS. They combined great advocacy and informed people, leaving their business info low key in there somewhere.

The returns on those were excellent. People actually considered them a part of the programs, and radio station identity.

[Jasber]

Didn't this come up with TiVo commercial skipping? The issue was with TiVo, the customer never even had a chance to see the ad, not that ads are mandatory to watch. Doesn't that apply here?

[skate22]

With some shows viewable with comcast they disable fast forward.

Ok that might be acceptable (even though the person was payin over 200 a month)

Heres whats really not ok:

I fat fingered the remote and pressed restart. Now i cant fast forward through any of the commercials OR the program i was 20 minutes into.

We shut the tv off

[bglusman]

Do you mean ReplayTV? I owned a Tivo at some point but replayTV was great because it auto-detected ads and had an option (or default behavior?) of skipping them automatically. Tivo you had to manually push 30 second skip 6 times.

[__david__]

TiVo currently has an ad-detecting feature. You used to have to fast forward through the ads (though at 30x speed that just took a few seconds). Now it's still not automatic, but when the commercial break comes you press channel up once and it skips perfectly to the end of the break. It's now almost as good as torrenting!

[Jasber]

I think the original TiVo's had this "auto-skip" feature but had to be removed due to this issue.

[ryan-c]

TiVo had a 30 second skip feature to make manually skipping ads easy that they "disabled" (there was a "cheat code" to turn it back on) to avoid legal issues. They also had a button to skip 8 seconds back, but that was far easier to justify.

[coolio2657]

On the contrary, blocking ads online is morally bankrupt.

You presented analogies, which I will respond to if you respond to my question at the conclusion.

With the case of billboards, it was never expected nor included in any societal contract that you are supposed to look at them: their sole purpose is to accidentally grab your attention, not mandate it.

With newspaper ads, as above, it was never mandated for you to look at them except incidentally as you flip through. Even after deciding to tear them up, you still had to have looked at them for a moment, at which point they have succeeded in doing all they ever tried to do.

With tv ads, I refer to the exact same reasoning used above.

Now for my question. Since adblock is most prominently used in the context of youtube, answer this - why should you be able to enjoy youtube's content for free without giving anything back to youtube? Are they a charity? And why shouldn't they choose the method by which you give back to them (via watching ads), since it is their platform?

Advertising can cross the line in many cases allowing for the self-defense of ad-blockers, but blocking all ads on principle is an even more dangerous, immoral line of reasoning.

[IloveHN84]

They made also the torrent and ed2k protocols look like stuff for pirated content, but at the end the protocols themselves are really valid and strong, maybe today they would have been better and have maybe prevented centralised information.

But no, they got a bad label and then every major ISP has blocked / tracked them since ever

[mozumder]

In all of those cases you're paying elsewhere for the service.

In the case of web ads, you're not usually paying for the content, and so they're expecting you to see the ads.

I don't know why people go to websites to read their content for free while block their ads. To me that just says "I am consuming too much shit."

You don't HAVE to go to these websites and consume everything in the world, you know? Life will go on without these sites.

Really, we need to get people to not consume so fucking much.

Just like TV, where the best thing is to not watch so much commercial TV.

If ads bother you, you're already doing way too much internet. And if you're going out-of-your way to block ads by setting up a network device, you're REALLY consuming too much internet.

[ionised]

> In all of those cases you're paying elsewhere for the service.

Recorded and enforced by a contract.

> In the case of web ads, you're not usually paying for the content, and so they're expecting you to see the ads.

It doesn't matter what they expect. I'm not obliged to view their ads.