Hacker News Reader

Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

On one hand you are using their resources by engaging with theor community and I guess you had to agree their term of services. They aren't really binding by law, i.e. They can not force you to watch ads, but they can refuse to provide the service to you.

On the other hand ads are a mess, between popups, popunder, autostarting video and recently the damned ad that redirect the full web page on mobile sites.

The solution here is not using ad supported services instead of acting as a self entitled asshole, but one would still need adblocks to protect themselves from when visiting random pages.

View on HN

> they can refuse to provide the service to you

I will gladly accept that. Then I'll either pay them or not, depending on whether I find the community valuable enough. This is fair.

The only reason I didn't disable AdBlock for that site and explicitly decided to keep it is because of the way they asked for it. Had they said, "Dear visitor, we see you're using an ad blocker; please consider disabling it, because we really need the ad revenue to support the community", I'd even happily start clicking on the ads for them.

If you publish something and expect a compensation for it, say it up-front, and either restrict access to those who follow your chosen compensation route or stop whining. Publishing something on the Internet with open access is giving a gift to people. Giving something away and then guilt-tripping people into compensating you is antisocial behaviour, and if you ever tried to pull it off face to face, you'd be shunned by the community you're in.

I'd even happily start clicking on the ads for them.

Be careful with this. It can get the site accused of click fraud, based on previous things I've read on HN.

I didn't mean that much ad clicking, only that I'd click an ad on purpose every now and then. But thanks for the reminder, I'll keep it in mind.

"if you ever tried to pull it off face to face, you'd be shunned by the community you're in."

This actually happened where I live! We have pedestrian mall where buskers can get a permit to perform. Most of them are quite pleasant, and I've paid a few. (Some are truly awful, but that's life.)

But one time there was a guy who was "giving away" CDs of his work. If you took one, he'd harass you until you either paid him some money or gave the CD back. There was a big sign that said they were free and he would shout at people about "Hey, I've got free CDs here!" He would even chase down people who took one while walking by! I'm pretty sure he was kicked out because I haven't seen him since then. But everyone who fell into his trap agreed it was a scam and that it was a crappy thing to do.

Exactly. People are fine with paying, as long as the distinction between an unconditional gift and a business transaction is being kept.

In downtown SF there are a couple scam monks who pull exactly this with bead bracelets. They are very aggressive even if one tries to give the bracelet back.

They do that with blank cds in chicago all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com