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Well that "now I'm not going to visit your site" depends on a lot of things. I may not want to visit that site, but most sites I go to are linked from somewhere
by Detrus 16y ago
Well that "now I'm not going to visit your site" depends on a lot of things. I may not want to visit that site, but most sites I go to are linked from somewhere like fb, reddit, digg, hn, so it's hard to remember which sites I don't want to go to.
It is a reader's "right" to block advertising and "get all your stuff with no ads." That's because it's the collective responsibility of site owners to maintain usability of their sites, because that ensures overall usability of the web. If people could shove popups forever, if there were no consequences, maybe they would and there would be no web.
Consequences are necessary, and different consequences send different messages. If people stop coming to your site you think the content is bad. If people block your ads or restyle your page that means your design is bad. It tells the site owner what he needs to work on.
- tptacek 16y agoNo. Site owners have no obligation to be usable. They don't owe you anything. Just because we don't like sites with "abusive" ads doesn't mean they're obliged to change to suit us.
- Detrus 16y agoThey owe it to people who care about the web. Those people will make them pay and it's easy enough to do. Simple JS scripts to extract big chunks of text or aggregators that will take your content without linking back. Not to mention players like digg or reddit adding filtering for bad usability. I wouldn't expect people who built the open web to sit back and watch site owners abuse users. They did not sit back when popups were the norm. Browser makers actually lose money if users are scarred off the web. The ultimate consequence is from collective misbehavior. The web as it is can be endangered by ad abuse and the only way out is to go back to the old walled garden ways of Prodigy, AOL or Apple's App Store, where there is adult supervision.
- tptacek 16y agoNo. They simply don't owe "people who care about the web" anything.
- Detrus 16y agolol, ok the site owners don't "owe" web carers, but they're very vulnerable to their actions. People who are building the web and profiting from it are not people to cross. Either the web stagnates as they give up, and you lose, or they block your abuse, and you lose.
- cabalamat 16y ago> Site owners have no obligation to be usable. They don't owe you anything. And people who look at websites equally have no obligation to look at the ads, or even to configure their software in ways that make the ads appear.