[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.

[traverseda]

I'm okay with that. I can't help but think the internet was better when it was mostly unpaid hobbyists and personal blogs without commercial interests.

The problem is that people are using their ad budget to compete with free content, but the free content is still going to be there it will just appear higher up in the search results if various bad actors aren't paying for a bunch of SEO.

[bmn__]

That's false. Perhaps the author would not have bothered to write the article without securing economic compensation of some form, but advertisement is not the only possibility.

[nonameiguess]

I guarantee you no important information is going to go totally unreported anywhere, even if ads ceased to exist globally tomorrow.

On the other hand, a whole lot of recycled content mills where all the $0.05/paragraph contract writers are about to be replaced by GPT-4 probably would.

[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.