[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.

[baddox]

> What does javascript have to do with it? It's trivial to display images inline through data URLs.

My point applies to that too. Images, text, CSS, video, etc. I'm saying I don't have a problem with requesting an HTML file, receiving it, and then choosing to not render/execute/display certain parts of it.

> 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.

I agree, but that doesn't sound like your previous position.

> 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.

I'm not talking about programmatically requesting large amounts of content. I just meant a single individual running a single cURL command.

> 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 guess I'm arguing that you don't need to be a hypocrite, because it's not troubling behavior.