[akoboldfrying]

> The line is "I technically and able to do this" and "I am engaging with a system in good faith".

This is where the line should be, always. But in practice this criterion is applied very selectively here on HN and elsewhere.

After all: What is ad blocking, other than direct subversion of the site owner's clear intention to make money from the viewer's attention?

Applying your criterion here gives a very simple conclusion: If you don't want to watch the ads, don't visit the site.

Right?

[akoboldfrying]

I see downvotes, but no counterarguments.

Does anyone have a counterargument?

[ryantgtg]

I think the counterargument is that a while ago ads became super annoying. They move, they grow in size, they feature nsfw things, they have weird js that annoys you when you try to leave. Perhaps some of this has toned down in recent years, but the damage is done. The ads are not good actors. It’s not as black and white as subverting or not subverting the will of the site owner.

[georgefrowny]

You can also argue that the advertisers have abused their position with opaque and illegal uses of personal data, security hazards, and general scummishness that they are also guilty of doing where they can technically get away with rather than what they're "supposed" to do.

Not the that two wrongs make a right, and it's definitely a bit of an argument of convenience for people who find adverts annoying. But I think most people are less opposed to the idea of advertising as popularly imagined (i.e. paper newspaper-style where you just see an advert) to support their favourite blog than they are to the current web advertising model (just by viewing the advert to get an unspecified amount of information instantly stolen and sent off to a bunch of shady companies who process it and sell it on, and don't get any way to veto it before loading a website and having the damage done).

To stretch the park analogy it might be that the park sells a licence to a company to make some cash from advertising to its visitors, which it kind of expects to be things like adverts on the benches and so on. That company then starts photographing people from the bushes, recording conversations and putting Airtags in visitors' pockets to boost the profits it makes itself. Visitors then start wearing masks, stop talking and wear clothes with zipped pockets. You can say the visitors are wrong to violate the implicit park usage agreement that they submit to the surveillance to fund the park (and advertising company), or you can say that the company is wrong to expand the original license to advertise into an invasion of privacy without even telling the visitors what they were going to do before they entered, or, indeed, during or after.