5 ms·

> You're right, it's like subscribing to a service that does it for you. You mean the blacklist services? Those are just a list of URL rules for your browser t

by baddox 11y ago

> You're right, it's like subscribing to a service that does it for you. You mean the blacklist services? Those are just a list of URL rules for your browser to reject. You still request the content from the web and the content provider obliges. > No, if they had an easy way to enforce your viewing of ads that scaled, I think it's fairly obvious they would Given that I have seen several websites that do this, I think you must be wrong. > It's more like the distributor responding with both marketing material and content with the understanding you are to view the marketing material along with the content, and you routing the marketing material to the trash from the post office Yes, it is like that, and I having no qualms with doing that. If I received a free magazine full of good content, along with a separate booklet of ads that are intended to be views with the content, I would have no problem reading the content and ignoring the ad booklet.

kbenson 11y ago
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.
- baddox 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      > 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 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        > 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?
- effie 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.

by baddox 11y ago

kbenson 11y ago

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.

baddox 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        > 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?
effie 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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.