[xg15]

> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what's happening, people start talking about how it's their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway".

What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?

The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).

Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).

"Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.

[rakoo]

The quote also perpetuates the free market myth: every actor is on an equal foot, has infinite amounts of time and energy to consider options, the alternatives exist and/or are essentially free to build, and money is not a problem. That's never been true. Somehow, there is no environment, no society at large, no inequality. I understand how someone living in the richest country working for the richest company could fool themselves into believing it, but it's incredibly shortsighted.

The society we live in demands that you earn money, if you don't want to die. The only thing that you have in a high enough amount is time, so if you use time to do anything, at some point it must earn money or you die. In the digital world there is no scarcity, so the old model of physical stuff you sell for $X a piece doesn't work. There are no systems to guarantee a life to everyone, everyone has to fight for themselves. If you want to produce content, content that is not necessary to live, you necessarily enter non a competition for attention, for money, against everyone else. If people justifiably can't give you money, you must resort to the only way that gives you a survival fee: shove crap in the eyes of the reader. Give them not what they want, but what others want. Influence their decisions.

It's a shitty system. The analogy is interesting because if there's a single vendor that holds what you need to survive, and they price it at an outrageously high price just for their profit, is it acceptable ? Is it OK, as a society, to say no to this practice ?

[erfgh]

That's not what a free market is. A free market is merely one that is not regulated by the state. Stop perpetuating this strawman please.

[kaba0]

> A free market is merely one that is not regulated by the state

No, a free market explicitly applies only to well-regulated markets, as per the very creator of the word. It doesn’t matter what regulates the market, but for all practical purposes it will be the government(s). And this is the reason why European markets are often “more free” per several metrics.

A good analogy to this topic would be sport competitions. A free market is a fair, say running, race. But an anticompetitive/too large company exerting its power in different segments would be akin to someone tying the other racer’s shoes together (but I wouldn’t put past the analogy even shooting the others)

[UncleMeat]

Property itself does not exist without regulation by the state.

[makeitdouble]

But that doesn't exist either, as the state sets the rules for businesses (what tarrifs apply on which goods, what property is protected, what barrier are set for entry, etc.) and is also potentially a major client of the market, deciding which services is chosen based on state's own criteria.

[loudmax]

This is true in just the same way that a free society would have no have no government at all. No taxes, no laws, no police or judiciary, just complete freedom to do whatever you want to your neighbors.

Ayn Rand's utopia. I wouldn't want to live there.

[BizarroLand]

It's almost as if the people who think absolute capitalistic libertarianism is a good idea always think that they'll be on the good side of it and get to reap the benefits of being a monarchical overlord and not the bad side of it where their organs are being sold overseas for a week's worth of food credits for the rest of their starving family.

[nonameiguess]

It seems clear to me that was is meant is a perfectly competitive market, because according to basic welfare economics, that is the set of conditions under which a free market will lead to socially optimal outcomes. Aside from very hardcore non-aggression principle absolutists and sheer nihilists who are just rich and don't give a shit if the rest of society suffers, that tends to be the argument for why a society should be more capitalistic and have liberal markets. The further we get from those conditions, the less the argument holds.

And, of course, welfare economics itself is just a mathematical model. Whether it really holds true empirically is hard to tell given the impossibility of society-wide RCTs and enormous confounders when trying to compare across time and space.

[ideamotor]

Both of you need to stop throwing around “free market” as an argument point since you both evidently have no clue what it means.

[pleb_nz]

Please do share the knowledge

[yakubin]

I find the entire analogy dubious. When I see a link, I don’t know what sort of ads or JS is on the page it leads to. By blocking ads I am not renegotiating any transactions, because I never entered any transaction. If anything, it seems the author of the post thinks it’s okay for website owners to unilaterally dictate the terms of transaction and force visitors into them.

When I buy a banana, I see the price beforehand. With ads on websites it’s more as if upon me taking the banana, the banana seller gained the right to search my pockets and take anything they fancy.

[safety1st]

Also, let's not forget what's really going on as a part of this "transaction," which is that a website is sending data to my computer, which I own. That data includes requests for my computer to perform certain operations, show me some ads, maybe hand over my online banking passwords, etc. etc.

I am absolutely within my rights if I instruct my computer to honor some of these requests and not others. Any other perspective is crazy when you think about it. I own the computer, I choose the programs that I run. I'm not leasing this computer from Google or from the business that owns the website in question.

This is really a matter of property rights. If somebody wants me to use a computer which is unable to block ads, they can offer to lend me a free computer which has that limitation, I suppose. I mean I'd say no, but other people might say yes.

[josephg]

Yep. I adore the philosophy behind the browser as “user agent” - the browser acts on behalf of the user who runs it, as an agent of the user’s will in the world.

I wish more technology worked that way.

[Joeri]

This is why it is perfectly fine to use an ad blocker by default, and perfectly fine for a website to refuse access with ad blockers enabled. At least then there’s a negotiation going on.

[RunSet]

Further reading:

https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-...

[jefftk]

> perfectly fine for a website to refuse access with ad blockers enabled

And yet ublock origin tries to work around this. About a third of their issues are "this site refuses service to people with adblockers": https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...

[nonameiguess]

Because they don't refuse access. They kindly ask you to disable, but don't require it, and the users of an ad blocker know damn well they're not going to voluntarily disable it if it's possible to browse the site at all with it on, so rather than rote click "continue" 90 times every two hours, let the blocker block the nagging popup as well.

If these sites really don't want you there with an ad blocker, they can actually block you. I imagine they realize there is value in getting more eyeballs even without ads, whether that be that users might still recommend and create links to your content that other people without a blocker then follow, or you actually sell something and some of those people might buy it. Whatever it is, by revealed preference, those site owners seem to be indicating it's worth it to allow people to browse with an ad blocker.

[gorhill]

By default we try to work around sites which require that the user disable their content blocker, as this is not acceptable since content blockers are used for more than to just block advertisement. In uBO, trackers and malware sites are also blocked, and thus it's not acceptable that sites require to wholly disable uBO.

By default, we do not try to work around sites which make a polite demand that the users disable their blockers without preventing access, this way the final decision is up to the users.

[jefftk]

> Because they don't refuse access

Nope; uBlock Origin will work around that as well. Skimming recent issues, in https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/15338 atozmath.com detects that people are running an ad blocker [1], explains what they're doing, and refuses access. The discussion is how to make the site think ads aren't blocked, though they haven't succeeded yet. In https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/13801 there's a simpler one with https://www.magicgameworld.com where it refuses access but doesn't provide reasoning, and that one was fixed.

[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/90739617/196804351...

[endgame]

With ads on websites, it's more as if upon glancing at the banana, the vendor went through your pockets, photographed your ID, and sent it off to who-knows-where.

[haspok]

> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads...

Yes, it absolutely is. Ads not only cost me my time and attention, but also consume resources (network bandwith, CPU time, screen real estate) that I might not want to be consumed. Just open any consumer-oriented webpage these days, and I can guarantee you will get 2-3 videos (!) or animations autoplay immediately, and a large part of your screen eaten by "garbage". Sometimes reader mode helps, sometimes it does not...

One thing that I usually do is when a page shows an explicit ask to turn my adblocker off, I close that page. This is fair enough, you can call this a transaction, and I can opt out of it.

[busyant]

> Ads not only cost me my time and attention, but also consume resources (network bandwith, CPU time, screen real estate) that I might not want to be consumed.

Story time. In the 1970s, my grandfather wrote a letter to our local newspaper, asking them to omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the news. "I never read them" he said.

Then my mother had to explain to him a little bit about mass production.

He would have loved ad-blockers.

[SalimoS]

>Yes, it absolutely is

following your reasoning it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?

no, the browser job is to display what he receive from the resource YOU requested what the server put in that resource is between you and it (you can "cheat"(not my word but liked/steal it from another comment) by drop the ad or choose to not requesting the resource all together).

[haspok]

The proper analogy would be that the media player would play random extra videos in addition to what you are watching, in overlays or even opening new windows. Can you imagine VLC working like that?

In-video ads are usually OK, the way they do "sponsor" segments on Youtube for example, they are "uninteresting" but usually short and non-obtrusive. Again, I consider these as transactions and don't skip them if otherwise I wanted to watch the video. The best creators (Jay Foreman comes to mind) do these so well that I actually look forward to watching them!

Completely unrelated ads that are forcibly and blindly inserted into the video stream (again, Youtube is an example) are not okay, and I expect the browser/ad blocker to weed them out.

[kaba0]

Not directly related, but there is sponsorblock, where the community will mark the parts of a video that has a sponsored part, and so you will just skip those parts.

[savingsPossible]

> The best creators (Jay Foreman comes to mind) do these so well that I actually look forward to watching them!

Nice. I see this pattern around: when X wants Y to (say) watch an ad, X's first instinct is to try to force Y. When X does not get to do that, they tend to discover much less coercive ways to do it

[amf12]

> The proper analogy would be that the media player would play random extra videos in addition to what you are watching,

FWIW, its not the browser "including" the adds. The ads have been included in the video itself.

[_Algernon_]

The fundamental "transaction" of the web is that the client requests files from a server one behalf of the user. The server can deny that request on behalf of the business by for example returning an 403 access denied error.

If the server returns a file, the user hasn't implicitly agreed to some limited use of that file or that it must be processed in some specific way, but the business has implicitly agreed to the user's usage of that file. The user (or the client on behalf of that user) can choose to ignore that file, not execute it or not even request it in the first place. This can be done either manually or assisted by tools (e.g. sponsorblock, ublock origin).

Anything else puts arbitrary restrictions on the weaker party (individual vs. large business), and negates their property rights of being allowed to choose what runs on their general computing device. If the business doesn't want a file to be used, don't serve it in the first place.

[danuker]

> it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?

It is. And it has a time scroller and speed controls, unless you're watching an ad.

A piece of software not doing what you want is following the wishes of its creator, which differ from yours.

[bmn__]

> it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?

Of course. That's why Sponsorblock exists.

Who is in control? I am in control over my time, my attention, not the middlemen between the video author and me.

[SalimoS]

The same as adblock exist (im not agains ad blocked, im using them already it's just trying to explain that the moment you requested the webpage it's up to the website to put whatever it wan't(his right), the job of your browser is to display it and your right to refuse the ad, hide it, block it or automate it in the browser level by an extension or your OS level (blocking DNS)

PS:in another comment i tried to explain how i see it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919824

[matheusmoreira]

> following your reasoning it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?

Yes. Proper video players and media files have support for chapters for the express purpose of skipping what you don't want to see and getting to the point. YouTube refuses to do it because of its stupid advertising bullshit? People will do it for them with SponsorBlock.

> no, the browser job is

The browser's job is to be the user agent. It acts on our behalf and represents our will. Its job isn't to display some website's little ads. Its job is to do whatever we, the users, want it to do, even if it hurts the interests and bottom line of some corporation. If blocking ads is good for users, that's exactly what browsers should do, literally no questions asked.

[xg15]

I never requested the ad.

[SalimoS]

no you request a resource (webpage) the ad was sent to you by the owner of the resource (it's his right to put whatever he want the the webpage) as your right to not request it/block it

PS:in another comment i tried to explain how i see it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919824

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's like going into a hotel, restaurant, college lecture theatre, or library and immediately being mobbed by sales people.

The owner/landlord may have given permission. But it's still not a welcome intrusion, and wearing a "No salespeople here" anti-mobbing suit is a completely legitimate personal freedom.

[xg15]

> as your right to not request it/block it

But that's exactly what an adblocker does. It's something different than not requesting the entire website though.

I don't think anyone demanded that browsers block ads without the user's consent.

[tgvaughan]

I agree, although it's never "cheating" to block ads on our own devices, unless we accept that it's okay to force people from looking away Clockwork Orange-style. (Even the term "blocking" seems wrong: it's not like the ads are coming down a pipe and my "ad blocker" is bouncing them away.)

[everdrive]

No one seems to mind this as much as I do, but I remember well over a decade ago when I first tried the Spotify thick client. It would play ads, and if you turned off your volume, it would PAUSE the ads. Spotify has been banned in my household ever since.

[SalimoS]

The way i see it (an example) you as a user want to read a story that i wrote in my website but when you request it i'm embedding an ad with the story, it's my right to embed the ad and not showing what i wrote without it and it's your right to not open the website

it's not perfect, im using an ad blocker and i can't understand how people can surf the internet without one but hopefully we can find a solution the change the whole free internet based on ad with something else

[concordDance]

You include ads in the hope people will look at them, but there is no obligation to do so. Their eyes can just flick down and ignore the ad or they can configure their browser to do this automatically.

If you want money reliably you need to explicitly ask for it.

[xg15]

But the thing is that you're just sending me code. The thing that is executing the code (rendering the website) is software and hardware that I supposedly own. So I think it's reasonable to expect that those work in my interest and not in the interest of the website.

[LunaSea]

They are since you are able to read the article which wouldn't be possible without the ad.

[xg15]

It's perfectly possible to view the article without the ad if I use an adblocker.

[LunaSea]

No, because the article wouldn't have been written without the ads.

[matheusmoreira]

> it's your right to not open the website

It's also my right and in my power to open your web site on my browser, delete your ad and read what you wrote. Once your web page leaves your server and enters my computer, it's no longer yours. You are no longer in control. You cannot dictate to me what can and can't be displayed on my screen.

[nonameiguess]

> The way i see it (an example) you as a user want to read a story that i wrote in my website

This is very rarely the case, though, and also the fundamental error the original article is making. The vast majority of page loads are blind link clicks. The user doesn't know what is behind it before clicking. They're trying to take a quick sample and maybe stay on the page and read something if it proves sufficiently interesting and not obnoxious compared to the thousands of otherwise identical pages with near identical content.

It is not people trying to grab your magazine to take home without paying. It's people at the magazine stand browsing through all of them trying to decide if any are worth buying. While thumbing through the covers, we don't want autoplay videos taking over our speakers and waking up our sleeping spouse, malicious JavaScript querying the OS to figure out what our hardware capabilties and settings are to fingerprint us, thumbnails of a bunch of women with E cups in tight shirts with no relation to a story trying to get us to browse through to something else. We just want to see if whatever the hell we clicked on is actually worth reading. You're automatically assuming we made that decision before loading the page.

[abecedarius]

You know how e.g. Netflix requires a DRM plugin in your browser, and some standard for that kind of thing got into the WWW standards? Now that AI with camera access is basically competent to tell if you're watching, it'd be natural to require something analogous to confirm you see the ads. "This website requires Telescreen(TM). Please enable it to continue."

[matheusmoreira]

Please drink a verification can to continue.

[BoxOfRain]

>unless we accept that it's okay to force people from looking away Clockwork Orange-style

Black Mirror did a delightfully dark take on this, it might have even been the first episode.

[matheusmoreira]

Second episode, Fifteen Million Merits.

Guy can buy out the ads, spending currency to skip them. One day he doesn't have the money and is forced to watch the ad. Literally forced. If he averts his eyes, the ad follows them. If he closes his eyes, they torture him with high pitched noise until he opens them. It drives him to the point of physical violence.

It's one of my favorite episodes. The incredible inhumanity of it all, and I bet these ad tech companies would think nothing of it.

[kgwxd]

It’s the browsers job to be an agent of the user, full stop.

All other forms of advertisement are a deal between 2 businesses. They work out all the details of when and where an ad will be shown, and what methods will be used to verify the deal is being upheld, none of which rely on the consumer. It would be insane to expect consumers to volunteer their time and effort to fetch the ad and show it to themselves, especially before they even know what they’re getting out it. Add to that expecting the consumer to answer a large list of personal questions, and it’s downright certifiable.

[matheusmoreira]

> Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what's happening, people start talking about how it's their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction.

It is our right.

These corporations do the exact same thing, they change their little terms of service all the time, often without notice, and we're forced to swallow it. Why is it suddenly wrong when we do it? Because it costs them money? Fuck their money, we owe them nothing.

> Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway

Complete bullshit analogy. There is no "transaction". There never was, not even once, a "transaction". Only assumptions.

They are not charging us anything. They're giving us the banana for free after putting some advertising stamps on it. They're hoping we'll look at the ads but the fact is we are under exactly zero obligation to do so. We invented technology that peels the bananas automatically and gives us the fruit while throwing the trash away and the ads along with it.

Our attention is not currency, nor can it be sold to the highest bidder. We are under exactly zero obligation to "pay" with our attention. Zero.

> "Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.

Absolutely agree. Businesses are the ones that come to us with their idiotic "our way or the highway, take it or leave it" deals. Functionality such as ad blocking is absolutely vital for consumers because it empowers them to alter the deal. It doesn't really matter what the corporation thinks, the deal is gonna be altered whether it likes it or not.

Such is the power of adversarial interoperability, the nightmare of every monopolist.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

[poszlem]

Yeah, that part of the blog post is probably the best example of: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

[izacus]

This obviously goes both ways - some people also utterly refuse to understand just how many businesses exist because of the revenue driven from ads. Which then results in some comments here that are utterly detached from reality.

It's kinda tiring really - seeing people constantly bark past each other with no understanding of nuance. But that's the modern internet I guess.

[concordDance]

Some of us just want to go back to the days when almost all internet content we saw was made by obsessive hobbyists.

[ufmace]

I understand both sides, but it feels like the ad world has been in a race to the bottom for a long time. I wouldn't really mind a few simple static banner ads here and there. But it seems like every site with ads has stuck dozens of them everywhere with video and animation, and sometimes semi-malicious scripts too.

[jansan]

Not only frome the ads revenue, but also from being able to advertise their product to others. That is the original idea of ads. You have a products that you think is useful to others, and you need a way to let others know that this product exists and can be purchased.

[catiopatio]

We understand that many businesses and services wouldn’t exist without ads — we just don’t care.

In fact, it’s not apathy, it’s antipathy.

I think the world would be a better place if ad-supported businesses, advertisers, advertiser-driven tracking, and ad-tech companies simply did not exist.

[tjoff]

> What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?

Can anyone really make that argument though?

Maybe making sites repulsive is the default because those that push that default earns money on it?

You recognize these dark pattern modal boxes that absolutely ruin a site and you feel the complexity. The mom and pop site most assuredly did not invent this, and if they believe they even wanted it is because they were tricked into it.

[mysterydip]

Remember when popup windows were a thing? Originally a feature for pages to show alerts or confirmations, naively implemented when the web was a less hostile place. Then sites started abusing them for their own gain, and browsers started shipping popup blockers as a feature.

Sites that are "well behaved" with ads are fine to me. The problem is too many abuse the css/js capabilities of the browser to make a result similar to the popup problems of yore. The only sane solution from a consumer point of view is block by default and whitelist the good places.

[whywhywhywhy]

> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads

May not be the job of a web browser but it’s the job of MY web browser. I either have a web browser that blocks ads or I have a broken web browser that’s soon to be replaced.

[criddell]

I have no problem with a business that wants to generate revenue through ads. If you want to place an ad on a billboard or on a bus or in a newspaper or a non-tracking ad online, great!

The business that I'm boycotting with uBlock Origin is the one that tracks me as I move around the internet and builds a dossier on me that they sell ads against.

[isleyaardvark]

> What if every business owner decided to make their business repulsive

It’s not even a “what if”, we all experience it on a daily basis.

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/