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by danijelb 2456 days ago
Is it ok to skip ad pages in printed magazines? Or to switch a TV channel during commercials?
1 comments

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.