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Comment by pixelmonkey | Hacker News Reader

Most websites with extended articles have links for "Printer-Friendly" pages. Am I violating a moral code by reading the articles in that form?

How about when I walk away from my TV when commercials come on? That's what I usually do, when I'm actually watching TV, which is relatively rare.

I also never bother reading ads in the newspaper. Sometimes, I fold the newspaper such that I don't have to look at the ad, and can focus on the content.

Are you seriously arguing that just because a service chooses to show ads, I'm not entitled to actively ignore those ads?

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I guess the closest you could come to a real "argument" in what I'm saying is: if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us.

More intrusive? Could you cite examples?

There is a business model that would afford the sites that are valuable to users to continue being operational: charging people. If ads can be circumvented, as we know they can, and your site relies on ads, maybe you should charge people outright for your content. If you can't make money by charging people, who cares if your site goes down but you?

The value of a site cannot be determined by the operator of it. Only the users determine the value.

Yes, easily. If browsers all had a big button for stripping ads and rendering pages in a "reader-friendly" style, all the major content sites would break all their stories into 10-page flows with timed interstitial ads.

> if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us.

So it's an arms race! If I take self-defense classes and install security systems, I invite muggers and robbers to develop more clever ways to monetize me! Yes, I'm speaking hyperbole here. But not really. I do find myself using the word "assault" in my mind when seizure-inducing computer graphics come at me.

Likewise, by turning our heads away from our TVs during the ads, we "invite" the advertisers and stations to develop more intrusive ways of grabbing our attention. I think it was the early '90s when I started noticing ads being played at a louder volume. And in the past couple years, one of the stations here in NYC has taken to showing a bright flash between each ad, between each news preview. For the first couple minutes I happened to be facing away from the flashes, I seriously wondered whether a thunder storm was brewing. But no, it was my TV yelling, "Look at me! Look at me! Eyeballs! Eyeballs!"

Thankfully, the browser vendors are not going to indulge you in this "arms race" fallacy, because most people don't want to antagonize the content providers.

Mmm, you're the one who brought the word 'intrusive' into the discussion. I happen to be agreeing with you about increasing intrusiveness.

I don't think "arms race" is a fallacy. Instead of advertising, think security for a moment. We all know browser venders are in a perpetual race against phishers and botnets and so on. So when Firefox came along, it billed itself as being "safer" than MSIE. Now think of pop-up ads. The browser vendors do indulge us in an anti-intrusive advertising race when the browsers block pop-up windows by default. My personal techniques against intrusion just happen to be a few steps ahead of Aunt Sally Sue's.

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