4 ms·

Why It’s OK to Block Ads

36 points by __Joker 11y ago

snogglethorpe 11y ago
In the end, it seems kind of irrelevant. Whether ad-blocking is "OK" or "not OK" certainly accounts for a lot of the arguing, but it probably won't play a huge part in determining whether people use ad-blockers or not. I think the general public can be swayed by ethical arguments, but the threshold is pretty high, and an appeal to the financial well-being of companies almost certainly doesn't make the cut. [Note that despite the enormous amount of money and effort that has been spent in an attempt to demonize copying of music/movies, the public still doesn't care a whit about those arguments, and copying is still generally considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do as long as you don't get caught.]
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  I tend to think that people underestimate the cognitive load that would be imposed as a result of dealing with the world in such a 'rational' way, and that's why we don't see it. Permit the use of an analogy. I've been poor. When you're poor, you agonize over every financial decision. At least, I did. You walk through a supermarket trying to buy the absolute cheapest variety of protein. Maybe you go to another supermarket and see if you can get it cheaper. Do you get the bus to see a friend? It'd be a lot better to stash that five quid away for some inevitable future expense. It's paralyzing. You spend so much time playing this little game for every minor thing that others may well take for granted that you hardly get anything done if you're not careful. Having battled my way through that.. it seems as if there's a whole new level, a new stage, called 'ethics', that people seem to be taking to an extreme extent in some areas. I choose my battles; there are a few things I do personally that most don't, to 'save the world'. But for me to deeply care about the full externalities of everything I do (and seek out alternatives) is simply untenable. There's too much out there. Blocking ads is so far along the spectrum of 'things I might do that might be bad' that it doesn't even register. Similarly I'm not going to think about the carbon impact of every foodstuff I buy. I'm not going to agonize over taking the bus. I just do things, to get on with my life. It's really probably not all that bad; sometimes I wonder where people get the energy, the wherewithal, from, to inject so much drama into seemingly minor problems. I block ads; I don't block ads; the internet exists; the content might change; it really doesn't matter. The world continues to spin. We didn't even have this 'Internet', a few short decades ago. We may not even have it soon. Enjoy it; revel in it! edit: to elucidate further... If I have a particular issue that I really care about; say it's animal welfare. It benefits my cause; it benefits me directly; if I (mostly) single-track in order to deal with it. Maybe I care about global warming, but maybe it's easier for me to make the Vegan Festival if I take the car. That really is it, I think. People fixate on the activity itself (ad blocking) and don't look at the general framework of the life it fits within. Too... extreme.
DanBC 11y ago
I'm tolerant of ads. I recognise the argument that in order to provide me content people usually need some kind of payment, and ads are currently that payment. But ads are so hostile, and are everywhere, and result in really unpleasant behaviour (spamming; slurping as much data and not keeping it safe; etc). I recently got a machine with Windows 8.1 with Bing, and ads are baked into whatever the start menu is called now. It's WEIRD seeing click bait ("18 bizarre home remedies that really work") on that panel page. So I love this article, and I'm probably going to move to ad-blocking (and different OS) soon.
teaneedz 11y ago
The insidious tentacles of ad tech touch every corner of today's economy. There are so many players (legal and criminal), varied interests and wealth involved, that it's difficult to imagine that enough users will ever embrace ad blocking on the scale that's required to achieve the change that this article suggests is needed. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is finally acknowledging a need for some change with LEAN (http://www.iab.com/news/lean/ http://www.iab.com/news/lean/), but I doubt it's interests really favor users. It's vested in advertising and grabbing our attention. We're not dealing with just one bad player, like Flash that's easier to kill and yet took way too long to do it. It's still not completely dead either. Ad blocking is a moral obligation and just a basic tool for cybersecurity these days. Good UX will win at the end of the day, but it's going to require a lot of effort.
makecheck 11y ago
I think that the ability to filter out content is a basic right that should be built-in to any Internet application, not forced to be an "add-on" and vilified by being seen as synonymous with attacks on the advertising industry and content providers. And since regexes on URLs would be complicated and error-prone for most people, I think the onus is on content providers to throttle themselves, baked right into a user-agent protocol. For example, the USER should be able to cage the provider with certain limitations that must be met in order for content to be displayed: - "I am granting you no more than 500K of my data plan. Please send me a version of your page that meets these requirements." - "I am granting you no more than 1% of my battery per week. If your site exceeds these requirements, your site will feature prominently as the cause of battery problems in a report that is periodically presented to your users." - "I do not consider this site to be an 'application' so I have restricted several dynamic behaviors. Please send me a version of your page that can operate in a quarantined scripting environment." And of course, browsers would be expected to provide sane defaults for these settings. This approach isn't particularly hostile to any one industry; it doesn't specifically block ads (if they fit in that 500K, be my guest).
rebekah-aimee 11y ago
One could argue that the text or simple image ads are not a moral sinkhole like the article suggests. A lot of the text ads, I've found, are just the people who would normally rely on word of keyboard, except they're trying to get their first hundred users or whatever. Sometimes I would be part of their initial user base because what they're selling would genuinely make my life easier/better. That's not wrong. The big, flashy ads (you know, the ones that are animated, or play sound or video, or do something dumb if you mouse over them for 1/4 second) are generally purchased by makers of lesser products in order to manipulate users into choosing them, because they can't rely on the quality of their products to advertise for them. I don't feel bad about blocking them. So, I don't think unobtrusive ads are so bad. The trick is figuring out how to let them through. I turn off AdBlock on certain smaller sites with less obnoxious advertising and find that sometimes the bar is set too high for what's considered unobtrusive; the ads would theoretically be acceptable under the AdBlock description of what's unobtrusive, but get blocked anyway somehow. As the market improves, advertising may gradually go away. That first clause is kind of difficult though. The other question is how we can support people making content like blog posts and so on... without limiting the people who actually can't pay for stuff like that (kids with no jobs, etc). It's the same question as the one faced by music and software producers. When you can find an answer to that, well...
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  I think one point the article makes that is easier to miss is that the ads themselves are not that important. Text/simple image/flashing video/smell doesn't really matter that much. Ads are ads. The real problem is how ad-dependence deforms content. Clickbait being the most blatant example.
devopsproject 11y ago
An infected ad killed my computer several years back. I block all ads everywhere for everyone I know.

36 points by __Joker 11y ago

In the end, it seems kind of irrelevant. Whether ad-blocking is "OK" or "not OK" certainly accounts for a lot of the arguing, but it probably won't play a huge part in determining whether people use ad-blockers or not. I think the general public can be swayed by ethical arguments, but the threshold is pretty high, and an appeal to the financial well-being of companies almost certainly doesn't make the cut. [Note that despite the enormous amount of money and effort that has been spent in an attempt to demonize copying of music/movies, the public still doesn't care a whit about those arguments, and copying is still generally considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do as long as you don't get caught.]

stegosaurus 11y ago
I tend to think that people underestimate the cognitive load that would be imposed as a result of dealing with the world in such a 'rational' way, and that's why we don't see it. Permit the use of an analogy. I've been poor. When you're poor, you agonize over every financial decision. At least, I did. You walk through a supermarket trying to buy the absolute cheapest variety of protein. Maybe you go to another supermarket and see if you can get it cheaper. Do you get the bus to see a friend? It'd be a lot better to stash that five quid away for some inevitable future expense. It's paralyzing. You spend so much time playing this little game for every minor thing that others may well take for granted that you hardly get anything done if you're not careful. Having battled my way through that.. it seems as if there's a whole new level, a new stage, called 'ethics', that people seem to be taking to an extreme extent in some areas. I choose my battles; there are a few things I do personally that most don't, to 'save the world'. But for me to deeply care about the full externalities of everything I do (and seek out alternatives) is simply untenable. There's too much out there. Blocking ads is so far along the spectrum of 'things I might do that might be bad' that it doesn't even register. Similarly I'm not going to think about the carbon impact of every foodstuff I buy. I'm not going to agonize over taking the bus. I just do things, to get on with my life. It's really probably not all that bad; sometimes I wonder where people get the energy, the wherewithal, from, to inject so much drama into seemingly minor problems. I block ads; I don't block ads; the internet exists; the content might change; it really doesn't matter. The world continues to spin. We didn't even have this 'Internet', a few short decades ago. We may not even have it soon. Enjoy it; revel in it! edit: to elucidate further... If I have a particular issue that I really care about; say it's animal welfare. It benefits my cause; it benefits me directly; if I (mostly) single-track in order to deal with it. Maybe I care about global warming, but maybe it's easier for me to make the Vegan Festival if I take the car. That really is it, I think. People fixate on the activity itself (ad blocking) and don't look at the general framework of the life it fits within. Too... extreme.

DanBC 11y ago

I'm tolerant of ads. I recognise the argument that in order to provide me content people usually need some kind of payment, and ads are currently that payment. But ads are so hostile, and are everywhere, and result in really unpleasant behaviour (spamming; slurping as much data and not keeping it safe; etc). I recently got a machine with Windows 8.1 with Bing, and ads are baked into whatever the start menu is called now. It's WEIRD seeing click bait ("18 bizarre home remedies that really work") on that panel page. So I love this article, and I'm probably going to move to ad-blocking (and different OS) soon.

teaneedz 11y ago

The insidious tentacles of ad tech touch every corner of today's economy. There are so many players (legal and criminal), varied interests and wealth involved, that it's difficult to imagine that enough users will ever embrace ad blocking on the scale that's required to achieve the change that this article suggests is needed. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is finally acknowledging a need for some change with LEAN (http://www.iab.com/news/lean/ http://www.iab.com/news/lean/), but I doubt it's interests really favor users. It's vested in advertising and grabbing our attention. We're not dealing with just one bad player, like Flash that's easier to kill and yet took way too long to do it. It's still not completely dead either. Ad blocking is a moral obligation and just a basic tool for cybersecurity these days. Good UX will win at the end of the day, but it's going to require a lot of effort.

makecheck 11y ago

I think that the ability to filter out content is a basic right that should be built-in to any Internet application, not forced to be an "add-on" and vilified by being seen as synonymous with attacks on the advertising industry and content providers. And since regexes on URLs would be complicated and error-prone for most people, I think the onus is on content providers to throttle themselves, baked right into a user-agent protocol. For example, the USER should be able to cage the provider with certain limitations that must be met in order for content to be displayed: - "I am granting you no more than 500K of my data plan. Please send me a version of your page that meets these requirements." - "I am granting you no more than 1% of my battery per week. If your site exceeds these requirements, your site will feature prominently as the cause of battery problems in a report that is periodically presented to your users." - "I do not consider this site to be an 'application' so I have restricted several dynamic behaviors. Please send me a version of your page that can operate in a quarantined scripting environment." And of course, browsers would be expected to provide sane defaults for these settings. This approach isn't particularly hostile to any one industry; it doesn't specifically block ads (if they fit in that 500K, be my guest).

rebekah-aimee 11y ago

One could argue that the text or simple image ads are not a moral sinkhole like the article suggests. A lot of the text ads, I've found, are just the people who would normally rely on word of keyboard, except they're trying to get their first hundred users or whatever. Sometimes I would be part of their initial user base because what they're selling would genuinely make my life easier/better. That's not wrong. The big, flashy ads (you know, the ones that are animated, or play sound or video, or do something dumb if you mouse over them for 1/4 second) are generally purchased by makers of lesser products in order to manipulate users into choosing them, because they can't rely on the quality of their products to advertise for them. I don't feel bad about blocking them. So, I don't think unobtrusive ads are so bad. The trick is figuring out how to let them through. I turn off AdBlock on certain smaller sites with less obnoxious advertising and find that sometimes the bar is set too high for what's considered unobtrusive; the ads would theoretically be acceptable under the AdBlock description of what's unobtrusive, but get blocked anyway somehow. As the market improves, advertising may gradually go away. That first clause is kind of difficult though. The other question is how we can support people making content like blog posts and so on... without limiting the people who actually can't pay for stuff like that (kids with no jobs, etc). It's the same question as the one faced by music and software producers. When you can find an answer to that, well...

NoGravitas 11y ago
I think one point the article makes that is easier to miss is that the ads themselves are not that important. Text/simple image/flashing video/smell doesn't really matter that much. Ads are ads. The real problem is how ad-dependence deforms content. Clickbait being the most blatant example.

devopsproject 11y ago

An infected ad killed my computer several years back. I block all ads everywhere for everyone I know.