> adblockers will exist for as long as Google deems them unproblematic (...) the existence of such piracy is heavily dependent on the providing body, and as such, are existant by benevolence
Mmm, what? Adblockers aren't piracy.
Mmm, what? Adblockers aren't piracy.
Pirates often argue that they aren't causing a lost sale, because if the product wasn't free, the pirate customer simply wouldn't use the product in the first place.
Pirates however, generally aren't putting sustained load on the IP-holders' servers. Whereas adblockers are putting load on the companies' servers while not "paying" for the services, by blocking the ads.
If a website needs money to exist, paywalls and donations exist. If a website serves content without payment, that's their problem not mine.
The website owner is providing a service, paying hosting and is not getting paid by the advertiser.
If sites offered consent - like "Welcome to this site, you'll see 10 ads per page, sold through google's ad network. Our content is written by humans not robots. Please disable adblock and proceed." That's a different relationship. Perhaps then it's more like taking something without paying ("piracy").
Perhaps in a sustained relationship, where you repeatedly visit a site, you know what it offers you and you want it, but are unwilling to pay the price of ads... maybe that starts to edge towards a piracy like situation.
Ad blocking users won't reduce the entire ad revenue that is flowing through the system.
From the perspective of a company this is different of course - a company can increase revenue by maximizing the number of ads shown to users. But when you look at it from the perspective of the entire system, the more users are forced to view ads, the less valuable an ad becomes, so it's a race to the bottom.
The biggest problem is that ads are the wrong solution. In earlier times, many services that operate for free now were primarily paid services - paid voluntarily, which is based on respect and human dignity. And the ads were just printed in paper form, so there was a limit to how much money you could extract out of it. Ads had their place, but were limited in their scope. Publishers of paper newspapers would have never thought to maximize revenue by forcing users to actually look at an ad, because there was no technical way to do it. Now they think they are entitled to be intrusive, and to control user behavior while legally giving away something for free without any legal obligation for readers to return anything. So those who benefit from ads resort to moral pressure.
They have developed feedback systems, and the feedback systems are carefully designed to extract as much money out of people with no regard for anything else, which is dehumanizing, and this means ads (like all systems that use psychology to manipulate behavior) are actively destroying what makes us human.
They will only stop once the ad system has been dried out, and when that happens we finally may get meaningful content and journalism again.
This is not true at all.
>Ad blocking users won't reduce the entire ad revenue that is flowing through the system.
Yes, they do. There is a reason why sites try and bypass adblockers. It's not because they are evil and want people to have a worse user experience. It's because they can earn money by actually showing them ads.
I think it's unlikely that no person who uses an ad blocker wouldn't occasionally click an ad and buy something. But what's the percentage? Is it something small, like 5%, or more like 25%? The grandparent's point about all of this being dehumanizing really resonated with me. At what percentage does it become justified to dehumanize people for revenue?
My opinion is that advertising is emotional manipulation, and is by its very nature unethical. No, that doesn't mean that no one ever has benefited from buying a product that they wouldn't have known about without advertising, but my belief is that the overwhelming majority of ads serve the purpose of causing people to buy things that a) they would have bought anyway (so the ad just wasted their time), or b) they would have gotten along without just fine (so the ad manipulated them into spending money they didn't need to spend).
I ad block at several levels on my laptop and network. I will never, ever click on an ad and buy something. My situation may not be universal among ad-blocking users, but I doubt I'm part of a small minority either.
They already have thousands of toys, and I have multiple printers that fulfill my needs, but the ads keep encouraging me. Maybe I will charge my credit card to get this very well engineered 3D printer part. Maybe the kids do need more toys.
Of course they can make money off of showing me ads. Advertising is where you take the best minds in the world and waste their skill on the most nefarious and toxic type of manipulation that exists. One time my 300 pound fat ass almost spent $60 on edible cookie dough because of a Facebook ad. I pulled the page up a dozen times and almost clicked “buy” a few times.
My mind is constantly assaulted by nonsense. I hate advertisements as much as I hate the people who ignore the “no solicitors - oxygen” sign the children’s hospital gave us, and knock on my door anyway.
[0]:https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-m...
Look - you can attempt to send me any content you'd like. You absolutely (as in utterly, morally, ethically) have zero claim to force me to receive it.
I have autonomy. I can choose what to view, and what not to view.
If you don't want me to get your content without paying for it - ask me to pay for it before sending it to me. EASY FUCKING PEASY.
If you've asked me to pay and I go download it somewhere else: fine, call me a pirate.
If you haven't asked me to pay and you're sending me a firehose of unrelated bullshit every time I attempt to interact with your service - expect me to filter that bullshit out.
This idea though is totally wrong, and is some serious post-hoc BS after over a decade of this internet advertising business model becoming comfortable. Linus's business is GIVING AWAY content and hoping that advertisers (his real customers) will want to agree to pay him according to his terms. You can say things about TOS and EULA and how that is totally a legally and morally binding or whatever but that's moving the goalposts now that folks have found a way to exploit audiences for money after years of GIVING AWAY content for free.
I don't have to read each advertising flyer that comes with my pizza, even if the pizza store decides to give me 100 advertising flyers in exchange for making the pizza free, and no amount of EULAs will make it so. It's my computer, I can throw out the garbage you give me if I want.
Make me the customer again, ask me to pay.
What he's really saying is: My customers are these advertisers, and it would be really nice if those pesky users I'm trying to sell would stop doing absolute bullshit like "insisting they have bodily autonomy" and "curating the content they view".