[kbenson]

That's your choice, but I don't think it addresses whether the action is moral or not (unless you also ascertain that you refrain from all morally ambiguous actions), or whether it's bad manners (as the initiating comment termed it). I think there are a great many slightly immoral things that people do every day and justify by weighing how small the moral infraction is against the perceived benefit to themselves. The perceived benefit of not being annoyed by ads outweighs the slight immorality of circumventing those ads.

It feels like a negligible harm to the other party, so we justify it to ourselves as victim-less, but it's not. The combined harm of all those that do so adds up the what is certainly a non-negligent level of harm in many cases. This is not unique to advertising, we fall prey to this reasoning in many ways, and in some ways we've seen that harm manifested in obvious ways that have then changed our behavior. Consider littering. The harm of a single person dropping a small amount of trash on the ground is negligent, the cost of most of a nation's population doing so is definitely not.

[effie]

Mr. kbenson, you and many of your kind are trying to foist on the idea that people filtering the information companies give to them are doing something immoral. I do not think even you believe that, but perhaps there is a profit-seeking based incentive to seed a feeling of guilt in the people who avoid ads, or perhaps to make yourself feel good by verbalizing your frustration with decreasing profits from online ads. Whichever the motivation for such church-like patronizing and false analogies, private profit from ads is not and will not be more important than fundamental freedoms of people to read only that which they want. My recommendation to you is to stop crying and seeking the ones guilty for the decreasing profits from online ads and think of some different business model that instead of bothering people with ads, does something good for them.

[kbenson]

> Mr. kbenson, you and many of your kind are trying to foist on the idea that people filtering the information companies give to them are doing something immoral.

That's a simplification of my argument as to be meaningless. The information was not given, it was traded. The consumer's portion of the trade is paid in viewing the advertising.

> I do not think even you believe that, but perhaps there is a profit-seeking based incentive to seed a feeling of guilt in the people who avoid ads, or perhaps to make yourself feel good by verbalizing your frustration with decreasing profits from online ads.

Do I believe in your rephrasing of my argument that drops the salient points? No. Am I in an industry that does advertising in any way? Also no.

> Whichever the motivation for such church-like patronizing and false analogies, private profit from ads is not and will not be more important than fundamental freedoms of people to read only that which they want.

Meaning you have a right to content which is owned by someone else without compensating them? I don't believe that is a fundamental right or freedom. If you mean something else by this, which I hope and assume you do, then please elaborate.

> My recommendation to you is to stop crying and seeking the ones guilty for the decreasing profits from online ads and think of some different business model that instead of bothering people with ads, does something good for them.

I'm not in advertising in any way, I don't care if advertising as a form of revenue survives. I don't like advertising most of the time. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything I've said. I haven't made a case that advertising is good, or advertising is moral, or that you should choose content with advertising and them watch the advertising. I'm simply saying that if you agree to content in return for viewing ads, and then you deliberately prevent your viewing of those ads, then I view that as a slightly immoral thing to do.

Maybe it's my terminology that offends you, by using immoral. I could use different terminology, if any lended itself to this that I knew of. I'm using it as a way to describe behavior where one party reneges on a contract with another. I could has used unethical instead, but really that's because I think it's both. I think it's immoral, and additionally societally I think it's unethical.

But it's unethical and immoral on a very, very small scale. That doesn't mean many of those actions from many individuals don't have a real cost.

[quadrangle]

We have an attention economy. You try to get my attention so you can sell it to advertisers. My attention is scarce, and I don't want to sell it so readily. I don't know whether your content is great until I experience it, and I have little power in negotiating my side of the bargain of what you do with my attention aside from taking more control over my attention.

The practical side of it is this: You want as much attention as possible. If I give you my attention but block your ads, it could still mean that if your content is good, I promote it to others and the net effect is a win for you.

I try to pay attention only to people who respect my attention and don't sell it to the highest bidder. However, I don't wish to be excluded from the common discourse of society around me, so if my attention is brought to a site that wishes to sell it, I may give my attention but retain as much control as I can. I did not agree to the sale of my attention. There are better and more respectful ways to build our economic support for creative work.

[kbenson]

> We have an attention economy. You try to get my attention so you can sell it to advertisers. My attention is scarce, and I don't want to sell it so readily. I don't know whether your content is great until I experience it, and I have little power in negotiating my side of the bargain of what you do with my attention aside from taking more control over my attention.

And yet, that's the deal which is on the table. You feel justified in selling your attention, and then not delivering? Keep in mind that the content provider is rarely making any statements as to the quality of the content )in the subjective sense. There are of course often guarantees as to measurable qualitative attributes, such as resolution and/or bitrate in some mediums).

> We have an attention economy. You try to get my attention so you can sell it to advertisers. My attention is scarce, and I don't want to sell it so readily. I don't know whether your content is great until I experience it, and I have little power in negotiating my side of the bargain of what you do with my attention aside from taking more control over my attention.

Since when is it the right of one party in a contract to withold their goods because they feel it's better for the other side? That's the right of the other party, you've already given up your claim on that resource.

> I try to pay attention only to people who respect my attention and don't sell it to the highest bidder. However, I don't wish to be excluded from the common discourse of society around me, so if my attention is brought to a site that wishes to sell it, I may give my attention but retain as much control as I can. I did not agree to the sale of my attention. There are better and more respectful ways to build our economic support for creative work.

Yes, there are. I'm not arguing in support of ad-based revenue systems. I'm arguing that there's a contract between the consumer and the content producer (which not everyone agrees with, but I believe), and that by entering into it with no intention of following through with their side, content consumers running ad-blockers aren't exhibiting the best behavior.

Indeed, I run an ad-blocker, so what I'm saying is that I'm not exhibiting the best behavior. I'm not willing to stop, but I am fully willing to admit it's not very fair to the content sites.

[quadrangle]

I didn't sell my attention so readily. I didn't sign any contract. My attention is constantly being asked for. It's a sellers market here, sorry. I choose to most readily give attention as a gift to those I like most and who respect my attention most. Wikipedia has no ads.

There are cases where the business model of ads has near monopoly. I use Pump.io but most people and connections are on Facebook / Twitter etc. — it's completely unacceptable for those entities to demand that they have power over censoring my access to interact with my friends who those companies have captured into their system. I don't want Facebook or Twitter at all, I want to interact with other regular people in the world. I'd prefer to do it outside those platforms and do when I can. Blocking ads on those sites is perfectly reasonable, a tiny defense against powerful offensive entities — this is not an exchange between two parties with equal power making an agreement.

Meanwhile, efforts like https://snowdrift.coop are in the works to fund creative work from reasonable and respectful people.

[kbenson]

> I didn't sell my attention so readily. I didn't sign any contract.

I think there's an implied contract from not your acceptance of the content, which happens before you necessarily know the terms, but from when you can see it and the ads[1].

Regardless of how you feel about specific cases that may be a monopoly, that doesn't work as an argument for running an ad blocker for general viewing, as it's obvious every site you visit is not a monopoly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract

[effie]

> The information was not given, it was traded. The consumer's portion of the trade is paid in viewing the advertising.

For something to be traded, there needs to be negotiation between the parties and agreement on the price. Ad hosts usually do not require any agreement from the consumer, they send the web pages anyway (with exceptions). The sole act of requesting the information (HTTP request for an URL) does not imply the requestor agrees with conditions the provider may store somewhere on his web. As far as I know, most ad hosts do not even ask consumers to agree with reading ads, far from requiring they comply. So not really - no trade is happening when I download a web page from an ad hosting website.

[baddox]

> It feels like a negligible harm to the other party, so we justify it to ourselves as victim-less, but it's not. The combined harm of all those that do so adds up the what is certainly a non-negligent level of harm in many cases.

Think of it this way. Ad revenue is based on CPM, or cost per thousand ad views [0], which is itself based on the expected return of an ad view. The expected return obviously depends on how many people make purchases for the products advertised to them. So, using your same logic, you could conclude that refraining from buying a product that you see an advertisement for is causing harm to sites that are ad-supported.

[0] Yes, most web advertising is not CPM. I'm simplifying for the sake of the analogy, and the same analogy holds for other ad models.

[kbenson]

That only follows if you believe that viewing an advertisement is a discrete event with a discrete outcome, and has no outcome on future actions. Considering how much advertisement happens when you aren't in a position to immediately buy something, and how much research has gone into advertising and human perception, I don't believe that. Brand recognition works, at least in a lot of cases.

But that doesn't even matter. I believe you agreed to a trade, in this case attention for content, and what justification do you have for not following through on your end? It's not within your rights to decide that your portion of the trade doesn't really benefit the other party so you will withhold it, if they have delivered on their portion. That is their decision to make.

[baddox]

> I believe you agreed to a trade

It sounds like this is our fundamental disagreement. I do not believe that requesting an HTML resource is an agreement to load all external resources and execute all JavaScript referenced in that HTML. I submit the request, and the remote server returns some HTML. In my view, that is a complete interaction with no unfulfilled obligations.

According to your argument, I am not within my rights to cURL a URL if that URL happens to point to an HTML that references some ad-related JavaScript.

[kbenson]

So how does it affect your argument if the page was returned in it's entirety with all content inlined? If the ad-blocker could detect ads through some heuristic that was accurate enough, would that then change your view on its use? At that point you would be presented a singular resource. Is that enough to change your thoughts on what is acceptable? I suspect we are getting closer to the specific place where our beliefs and assumptions mismatch, but I'm not sure we've found it quite yet.

[baddox]

> So how does it affect your argument if the page was returned in it's entirety with all content inlined?

No, that doesn't change anything. I already mentioned executing JavaScript.

What are your thoughts on my mention of cURL? Do you think it's acceptable to run `curl www.cnn.com` from the command line? How about browsing the web with JavaScript turned off, or using a text-only browser?

[kbenson]

What does javascript have to do with it? It's trivial to display images inline through data URLs. Javascript provides for some of the more onerous types of advertising, but it is by no means necessary to the process. We've all seen plenty of ways CSS could be leverages as an alternate solution.

Re: text only browsing, that still allows for advertising, and it's up to the content provider to either take advantage of the mediums available to the client or take steps to attempt to block that access. There are plenty of legitimate cases for text only internet (such as access for the blind).

Re: cURL, now we are getting more into scraping, and I think it's event more clear cut that it's not the intent of the provider for their content to be used that way, and there are much more often AUPs that specifically cover this in a non-ambiguous way.

This is something I've thought quite a bit about, as at times some of my major work projects have been based around web scraping. I've come to terms that some of the things I have done, and do, for work, are morally ambiguous (or even immoral) to a degree (although others may not see it that way at all).

Similarly, I myself run an ad-blocker, as I find the web untenable without one. I'm aware of how hypocritical this is. My argument has never been "do not run ad-blockers", it's always been just to point out what I see as a set of troubling behavior that I see, which I also contribute to. I would prefer not to block ads, but I don't see that as a strategy that's currently useful. That may make me worse than those that I view as ignorant of their actions. I'm prepared to live with this, at least in the short term.

Really,I'm just pushing what I see as introspection.