5 ms·

Because you don't get to just chose the content on a page you load that you want to see. A news article with ads is paid for by those ads, and if you want to go

Because you don't get to just chose the content on a page you load that you want to see. A news article with ads is paid for by those ads, and if you want to go to their website to read it you are implicitly agreeing to see those ads. If you don't want to be "invaded" by ads, then don't go to pages with ads.

baddox 10y ago
> Because you don't get to just chose the content on a page you load that you want to see. What do you mean? Of course you get to do that. That's exactly what ad blockers do. > A news article with ads is paid for by those ads, and if you want to go to their website to read it you are implicitly agreeing to see those ads. You have no case to say I'm "implicitly agreeing" to see ads when in fact I am explicitly running software to prevent me from seeing them. This "implicit agreement" argument is the worst anti-adblocking argument. It would be like me ordering a pizza, picking off the olives, and being told that I have to eat those since I implicitly agreed to olives when I ordered the pizza. Nope, the act of picking off the olives is as explicit as I could possibly get that I don't want the olives.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  >That's exactly what ad blockers do. That's the same thing as saying that buying a lockpicking kit is the same as being given permission to enter private property. You are using an outside exploit to get around the terms that the provider laid out in order to see their content. You are confusing the ability to filter the content with the right to filter that content. > It would be like me ordering a pizza, picking off the olives, and being told that I have to eat those since I implicitly agreed to olives when I ordered the pizza. Nope, the act of picking off the olives is as explicit as I could possibly get that I don't want the olives. This is a completely ridiculous and useless analogy. You bought that pizza, and you own it. Period. When you go to a website, you are not buying or owning anything. You are requesting a set of data and refusing the price that comes along with it. >You have no case to say I'm "implicitly agreeing" to see ads when in fact I am explicitly running software to prevent me from seeing them. This completely disregards the fact that the website has little or no power to stop you from doing so. You are implicitly agreeing to it, and then you are failing to hold up your end of the deal. If you cannot see that, then you are just being self-entitled close-minded to the obvious truths that inconvenience you.
  - imagist 10y ago
    I did not and will not agree to see ads, nor am I obligated to clutter my mind with crap just because I viewed a webpage. You can't just claim that people agree to things because it's convenient to your business model.
    - BookmarkSaver 10y ago
      What kind of bullshit self-entitled nonsense is this? You are starting from the premise that you have some inalienable right to view a webpage, and no one including the legal commercial owners that provide that webpage are allowed to determine the way in which you do so. You are using their resources for a service that someone else is providing. And you are acting like a petulant child when they attempt to provide this in a sustainable way. Grow up.
      - imagist 10y ago
        No, I'm not claiming I have an inalienable right to view a webpage. People are free to put up ad-blocker-blockers and I'll happily leave them alone. I'll even leave a site if they simply request that I view ads to use their site, because I won't view ads (although this rarely happens). I'm old enough to remember when people put things on the Internet because they wanted to, and people still do that. I'm also happy to pay for services. But until I view a webpage, I have no way of knowing whether it's one of those pages, or whether it's one that's going to ram a bunch of crap down my throat. The idea that I can agree to a business transaction without even knowing it just by viewing a page is ridiculous. Let it be noted that only one of us has resorted to name-calling in this conversation.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    > You are confusing the ability to filter the content with the right to filter that content. What about parental controls, schools and libraries filtering proxies, corporate firewall and proxies and all other kinds of filtering software ? what about services such as readability ? Is there a difference between using flashblock so flash ads will only load after being clicked and not having flash installed preventing flash based ads altogether ? There's a whole industry or two based on filtering internet content. I have every right to put a firewall on my network to filter out all that I want to keep out, I could even mangle packets, replace words, remove or add content or turn the whole thing upside. There's even a browser provided user style mechanism that has precedence over the author's. > You bought that pizza, and you own it. Period. When you go to a website, you are not buying or owning anything. You are requesting a set of data and refusing the price that comes along with it. Now the pizza joint has one less pizza in stock made from materials that costed money, hence the attached price tag. When I visit a web page it doesn't disappear from the website because a digital copy is transferred to my computer at close to zero cost and this copy is mine to do whatever I want with it. If this webpage is not monetized or monetized with ads it is gratis and has no monetary price attached to refuse other than of having a computer and network hopefully not of metered kind or you would actually pay to be shown ads quite ironic isn't it ? As much as you would like it to be true, it is a wrong assumption expecting an imaginary implicit agreement to hold true. Your ethical conundrum is actually the other way around: …the question should not be whether ad blocking is ethical, but whether it is a moral obligation. The burden of proof falls squarely on advertising to justify its intrusions into users’ attentional spaces—not on users to justify exercising their freedom of attention.
bigbugbag 10y ago
>Because you don't get to just chose the content on a page you load that you want to see. Of course you do. That's a big part of the success of the web. curl + grep for a very basic example, wallabag, hosts file, firebug, flashblock, disabling images, disabling scripts, disabling animations, opera's content blocker to cite a few others. You can't tell if a page has ads until you get there, and some ads may be injected in every pages by your isp, your browser or various malwares so basically what you're saying is do not surf the web at all. Sorry, not sorry the actual solution to not be invaded by ads is to use and adblocker. It is a very broken assumption that people implicitly agree to see ads. It is actually the other way around historically, when reading a newspaper or a magazine and encountering ads I can skip them without even looking, I could even cut away the couple pages that I've interest in. Actually it's not even limited to ads, it applies to the whole thing. If an article doesn't interest me I will just turn the page. As you said the news article is already paid by ads so there's no need to see them. Until you factor in tracking that is. In a newspaper the advertiser paid the newspaper to print ads along with articles and that's about it because there's no way to track what user look at in a newspaper. On a website, advertising is just the visible tip of a huge tracking iceberg. Once again "your failed business model is not my problem". If you hoped you'd make money and you don't because you made bad assumptions, how am I concerned ?
- baddox 10y ago
  Note that BookmarkSaver isn't merely claiming that you are obligated to curl a URL without grepping the output. He/she is claiming that after you curl the URL you are obligated to parse the response and execute all code and make every request described in the document (recursively, perhaps). It's a more laughable (or horrifying, or some combination) position than you are portraying it to be.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Just taking this argument to its logical conclusion: Can I be held liable for theft if I load an article on my smartphone, and it loses connection before the ad can be requested and loaded? :)

baddox 10y ago

> Because you don't get to just chose the content on a page you load that you want to see. What do you mean? Of course you get to do that. That's exactly what ad blockers do. > A news article with ads is paid for by those ads, and if you want to go to their website to read it you are implicitly agreeing to see those ads. You have no case to say I'm "implicitly agreeing" to see ads when in fact I am explicitly running software to prevent me from seeing them. This "implicit agreement" argument is the worst anti-adblocking argument. It would be like me ordering a pizza, picking off the olives, and being told that I have to eat those since I implicitly agreed to olives when I ordered the pizza. Nope, the act of picking off the olives is as explicit as I could possibly get that I don't want the olives.

BookmarkSaver 10y ago
>That's exactly what ad blockers do. That's the same thing as saying that buying a lockpicking kit is the same as being given permission to enter private property. You are using an outside exploit to get around the terms that the provider laid out in order to see their content. You are confusing the ability to filter the content with the right to filter that content. > It would be like me ordering a pizza, picking off the olives, and being told that I have to eat those since I implicitly agreed to olives when I ordered the pizza. Nope, the act of picking off the olives is as explicit as I could possibly get that I don't want the olives. This is a completely ridiculous and useless analogy. You bought that pizza, and you own it. Period. When you go to a website, you are not buying or owning anything. You are requesting a set of data and refusing the price that comes along with it. >You have no case to say I'm "implicitly agreeing" to see ads when in fact I am explicitly running software to prevent me from seeing them. This completely disregards the fact that the website has little or no power to stop you from doing so. You are implicitly agreeing to it, and then you are failing to hold up your end of the deal. If you cannot see that, then you are just being self-entitled close-minded to the obvious truths that inconvenience you.
- imagist 10y ago
  I did not and will not agree to see ads, nor am I obligated to clutter my mind with crap just because I viewed a webpage. You can't just claim that people agree to things because it's convenient to your business model.
  - BookmarkSaver 10y ago
    What kind of bullshit self-entitled nonsense is this? You are starting from the premise that you have some inalienable right to view a webpage, and no one including the legal commercial owners that provide that webpage are allowed to determine the way in which you do so. You are using their resources for a service that someone else is providing. And you are acting like a petulant child when they attempt to provide this in a sustainable way. Grow up.
    - imagist 10y ago
      No, I'm not claiming I have an inalienable right to view a webpage. People are free to put up ad-blocker-blockers and I'll happily leave them alone. I'll even leave a site if they simply request that I view ads to use their site, because I won't view ads (although this rarely happens). I'm old enough to remember when people put things on the Internet because they wanted to, and people still do that. I'm also happy to pay for services. But until I view a webpage, I have no way of knowing whether it's one of those pages, or whether it's one that's going to ram a bunch of crap down my throat. The idea that I can agree to a business transaction without even knowing it just by viewing a page is ridiculous. Let it be noted that only one of us has resorted to name-calling in this conversation.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  > You are confusing the ability to filter the content with the right to filter that content. What about parental controls, schools and libraries filtering proxies, corporate firewall and proxies and all other kinds of filtering software ? what about services such as readability ? Is there a difference between using flashblock so flash ads will only load after being clicked and not having flash installed preventing flash based ads altogether ? There's a whole industry or two based on filtering internet content. I have every right to put a firewall on my network to filter out all that I want to keep out, I could even mangle packets, replace words, remove or add content or turn the whole thing upside. There's even a browser provided user style mechanism that has precedence over the author's. > You bought that pizza, and you own it. Period. When you go to a website, you are not buying or owning anything. You are requesting a set of data and refusing the price that comes along with it. Now the pizza joint has one less pizza in stock made from materials that costed money, hence the attached price tag. When I visit a web page it doesn't disappear from the website because a digital copy is transferred to my computer at close to zero cost and this copy is mine to do whatever I want with it. If this webpage is not monetized or monetized with ads it is gratis and has no monetary price attached to refuse other than of having a computer and network hopefully not of metered kind or you would actually pay to be shown ads quite ironic isn't it ? As much as you would like it to be true, it is a wrong assumption expecting an imaginary implicit agreement to hold true. Your ethical conundrum is actually the other way around: …the question should not be whether ad blocking is ethical, but whether it is a moral obligation. The burden of proof falls squarely on advertising to justify its intrusions into users’ attentional spaces—not on users to justify exercising their freedom of attention.

bigbugbag 10y ago

>Because you don't get to just chose the content on a page you load that you want to see. Of course you do. That's a big part of the success of the web. curl + grep for a very basic example, wallabag, hosts file, firebug, flashblock, disabling images, disabling scripts, disabling animations, opera's content blocker to cite a few others. You can't tell if a page has ads until you get there, and some ads may be injected in every pages by your isp, your browser or various malwares so basically what you're saying is do not surf the web at all. Sorry, not sorry the actual solution to not be invaded by ads is to use and adblocker. It is a very broken assumption that people implicitly agree to see ads. It is actually the other way around historically, when reading a newspaper or a magazine and encountering ads I can skip them without even looking, I could even cut away the couple pages that I've interest in. Actually it's not even limited to ads, it applies to the whole thing. If an article doesn't interest me I will just turn the page. As you said the news article is already paid by ads so there's no need to see them. Until you factor in tracking that is. In a newspaper the advertiser paid the newspaper to print ads along with articles and that's about it because there's no way to track what user look at in a newspaper. On a website, advertising is just the visible tip of a huge tracking iceberg. Once again "your failed business model is not my problem". If you hoped you'd make money and you don't because you made bad assumptions, how am I concerned ?

baddox 10y ago
Note that BookmarkSaver isn't merely claiming that you are obligated to curl a URL without grepping the output. He/she is claiming that after you curl the URL you are obligated to parse the response and execute all code and make every request described in the document (recursively, perhaps). It's a more laughable (or horrifying, or some combination) position than you are portraying it to be.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Just taking this argument to its logical conclusion: Can I be held liable for theft if I load an article on my smartphone, and it loses connection before the ad can be requested and loaded? :)