I won’t turn off adblocker for anything. It’s gotten to the point where I have disabled videos and such on my home computer. They don’t play without express permission from me, because too often some ad in some corner will start playing, with sound, or you go to a news website and the video starts playing automatically!
Suck it, advertisers. What I can’t live without on the Internet, I pay for. Everything else I just don’t give a shit about. Can’t go on your website without turning off adblocker? I guess I will never go on your website again.
Toward the end of a TNT/TBS movie, the content to ad ratio is 1:1. We do have adblock options here, however. In my case, it’s the TIVO skip function. Heck, for some shows, they have a new feature that skips entire ad blocks with a single press of a button.
Perhaps this is just nostalgia but ads from old radio & TV programs were entertaining. Listen to Jack Benny radio programs when the characters would occasionally make fun of the sponsor.
There’s no way I’m turning off my adblocker. Ads are both irritating enough that they destroy any enjoyment I would get from a site, but far too dangerous to my computer.
I always notice how in discussions like this, companies lecture consumers on our “responsibility” to do something that profits them, but feel zero responsibility themselves. I don’t take lectures on moral responsibility that are delivered by people who feel none of their own very seriously.
That analogy would only work if the pastries were made by someone other than her, and often made in unsanitary conditions or poisoned.
That’s the problem with trying to compare online advertising to most older types of advertising; the older versions were not actively destructive or dangerous. I always hated magazine ads, but at least they didn’t print them in poison ink.
The closest equivalent I can think of to malware ridden online advertisements would be the WWII practice of providing free cigarettes to soldiers to get them hooked.
No a *reductio *is where you point out that an absurd conclusion necessarily follows, should the premise be true.
Your post was a classic SS: re-read it. It’s all “what if” this and “what if” that, as if reasonable T&C’s shouldn’t be upheld because T&C’s might be unreasonable. How about T&C’s that don’t stipulate “that visitors to the site are obligated to click on one ad from each page they visit” and *don’t *stipulate that the visitor must click through and buy something" and *do *say that blind people can use a text only browser?
I would say “Good things come to those who wait” but I suppose that would imply my response is going to be good, and I’m not in a position to judge that.
Back when I studied a bit of criminology, I interviewed a few cons on parole. I was interested in how they viewed what they had done. What they said fit what the textbooks told me they would say:
what I did didn’t actually hurt anybody or cost anything
the person I hurt/ripped off was a bad person so they were fair game
I didn’t take much/hit them that hard
Compare that to your list. Of course you’ll say “yes but in my case I really didn’t cost anyone anything” and “the ads really are malware” etc. You know what Mandy Rice-Davies famously said, don’t you?
Firstly, it’s not just “my opinion”; you’ve admitted that **Mangetout ** is correct that views count towards revenue. And you haven’t rebutted in any way my *argument * (not opinion) that if it wasn’t hurting their revenue they wouldn’t piss off their visitors by blocking people who use an adblocker.
Secondly, as usual, it always starts out with “my actions don’t actually make any difference” but that is always just a justification. Once you scratch the surface, what is underneath (as you have demonstrated) is the real position; namely that you don’t give a shit if it does cost revenue. You could have just said that in the first place and saved yourself the trouble.
People who argue from your position in similar ethical scenarios always choose their phrasing carefully: “I owe nothing to the content provider” and “I am not in the business of worrying about the content provider’s business model”.
Such great euphemisms for “I want their content but see no obligation to provide any quid pro quo”. Sure, you owe nothing to the content providers and are not obliged to worry about their business. But the same is true in reverse. And yet if you read through this thread, there is palpable irritation at not being permitted to obtain a business’s stock in trade without paying. Content providers owe you nothing.
I remain somewhat sceptical. Several of the articles to which you link are based on press releases from firms selling security products, and if the figures from the article reporting on academic findings are correct I should be hit at least once a week. I’m careless in my browsing habits and don’t run anything special by way of anti malware. Yet I’m not hit at all.
So what? “Palpable irritation” is not the same as believing that content providers have some obligation to you. Of course everyone likes free stuff, and is irritated if that free stuff goes away.
It’s entirely the right of content providers to employ anti-ad-blocking techniques (short of distributing malware). And it’s my right to use more advanced ad-blockers or otherwise (short of anything that resembles “hacking”).
I deny that there’s an ethical component to the discussion at all. The Internet is a public space. Unlike subscriptions and other mechanisms, there is no contract between provider and consumer when it comes to advertising. Just like TV ads and billboards and magazines and everything else, the providers make an effort to capture my eyeballs and I make an effort to avert my vision. There is nothing more to it than that.
Did you change your mind between writing the second and third quoted sentences? Because a paragraph outlining what people’s rights are (in just, like, *your *opinion, man) sounds a hellava lot like something with an “ethical component” to me.
Is it? Oh. That sounds nice. though I must admit while I hear a lot of people say this I don’t really know what it means in this context.
Google’s home page seems public so I guess maybe you’re right. But then my bank account details are on the internet but you need a password etc to access it so I guess maybe you’re wrong. It’s almost like the internet is lots of things and simplistic, handwaving, quasi-mystical descriptions aren’t particularly useful.
Maybe. Maybe not. Have a read of this article on the subject. It sounds as if it would be at least possible for a website to have T&C’s that - if relatively prominently displayed - could be found legally binding on a “browsewrap* basis”. And those T&C’s could state that you will not use an adblocker, I guess.
*Is “-wrap” standard terminology now? I don’t remember it from law school. Anyhoo, I’m off to go buy some lunch by PINwrapping a deal with my local sushi place, then I’ll be back in the office to signwrap some contracts.
The point of the parenthetical bits is to delineate what we’re talking about. Distributing malware is certainly unethical, but not really at the core of the discussion. Ad blockers and anti-ad-blocking systems are neither ethical nor unethical.
You know full well that we aren’t talking about private banking pages here. The thread is about unprotected web sites that send you whatever data you ask for, and hope that among those requests are advertisements that you will look at.
For the record, I am also not talking about FTP, Usenet, DNS, NTP, or Gopher.
When a site actually goes that route and brings the case to court, I suppose we’ll find out.
While “clickwrap” contracts are semi-enforceable, one condition of them is that they must not be “porous”; that is, there must be no alternative way of getting past it.
A website could of course use a mechanism that could not be easily bypassed. But we already know they are unwilling to do this. Many subscription sites will happily bypass their subscription lock if the source is Google or another search engine. Go directly to a link and you only see the first paragraph–click through from Google and you see the whole article.
If sites are willing to drop their entire subscription model just to please search engines, then they will certainly be willing to drop a T&C page. No one wants to read a bunch of legalese just to access a news article. Hence, the protection is porous and unenforceable.
Erm, well, the takeaway is that people try to justify their actions, but we already knew that. I don’t see what additional information your comment provides.
I’m not a criminal. No law enforcement agency can come after for blocking ads. No content provider can sue me for blocking ads (they could try, but they wouldn’t win).
Criminals do stuff that cultures everywhere have traditionally agreed is wrong. They steal physical objects, break into buildings, murder people, etc. Same as in ancient Rome or China as it is today. The Internet is relatively new technology. So to say, “You’re talking like criminal justifying himself,” just won’t work. You’ve got to argue why the thing itself is wrong.
I’m not totally against what you’re saying, mind you. That’s why I said I ought to subscribe to Slate.com, since I use their content so much. But what I said is also true: adblocking on every single site online is a different ethical situation.
Granted that malware is out there, even on major websites, I don’t think you can fault people for using an ad blocker as default protection for surfing. I don’t think there’s any argument against that. But I think an argument can be made on a site by site basis for turning it off, subscribing, etc.
No, it isn’t a Slippery Slope argument because I am not asserting that any of the example cases will lead to any of the other cases. I am merely trying to determine what would be your cutoff point regarding what is and is not reasonable.
Suppose two people can’t agree on what represents reportable theft - one of them may test the other by providing a spectrum of different examples; 1: pocketing a pack of sugar at McDonalds; 2: pocketing a handful of sugar packets; 3: collecting someone else’s food and walking away; 4: picking up a chair and walking out with it, etc. It would be a slippery slope argument if anyone was asserting that 1 leads to 2 leads to 3 leads to 4, but it is NOT a slippery slope argument if someone merely says “which of these trigger your definition of ‘wrong’?”
I don’t really understand what you are saying here. You said that people had certain rights in relation to this issue, then that ethics were not a component. Which is it? In any event this is a pointless side note since your assertion of what is and is not ethical means jack shit to me.
My point is that the internet is a lot of different things and sweeping statements about it are never correct. The internet is not a public space. It is not a private space. It is a communication system over which private, public, commercial and non-commercial activities occur. Just as we may not be “talking about private banking pages”, we may not be talking about web pages that will freely send you whatever you ask for, without imposing conditions upon that.
Sorry I don’t recall your background. What is your qualification to make this statement, bearing in mind you offer no cite and I gave you a cite to the effect that you are wrong and that in at least some cases browse- and click-wrap agreements have been held enforceable despite porosity?
Sorry I have snipped your post to its bare essentials. Your post under reply as I understood it set out your views on how you decide if something is ethical. I am saying I am sceptical as to your ability to make relevant objective judgements because as you say “people try to justify their actions”.
Does adblocking damage content providers? The answer would appear to be yes. Are content providers unworthy people who risk spreading malware? I think the risk is exaggerated and I think the allegations of unworthiness reek of an attempt to find justification; there is no way on this earth the content providers want to be the source of malware, and the same must be true of the ad providers themselves whose reputation with the content providers must get trashed every time malware gets into the system. The malware providers are quite simply criminals and I assume they lie and cheat and deceive everyone all along the way. The quite exaggerated animosity from people in this thread shown towards the content providers as a consequence of malware infiltration has more than a hint of “protesteth too much”. It’s mighty convenient to one’s conscience to be able to kid yourself that your victim is a complete asshole.
Well if that’s what you meant then so be it. But I posited that a site could have terms that made use of the site with an adblocker petty fraud, and you said:
Now maybe I’m reading this wrong somehow but it seems to me that what you were implying was that such terms could not be reasonable and binding. And you then went on to set out a series of “what ifs” to try to make your point good; I’m not sure what the point of setting out the “what ifs” was if they were merely other possibilities before which a line could be drawn.
*A clickthrough agreement with an electronic signature should … have the following characteristics:
Non-porous – there are no alternative ways that the users can reach the destination. For example, if the account is initially set up manually with a Company representative on the phone with the user, the mandatory process may become porous if the vendor can sign onto the website without going through the mandatory consent process.*
Your cite actually says the opposite of what you’re claiming. Among other instances:
On the other hand, if a service provider places the notice out of sight, such that a user must scroll down in order to see but not in order to use the service, courts will likely find such an arrangement does not show meaningful assent on the part of the user.
If it is possible to get to the site in a way which either bypasses the T&C, or where the T&Cs are hidden away in some dark corner, they are likely to be unenforceable.
Of course there is still the open question of whether the terms themselves could be considered valid. It is non-obvious that “no ad-blockers” is an enforceable condition.
The point was that we don’t seem to agree on what level of expectation of behaviour the publisher can impose on the reader. I already think that trying to make it a legal* requirement to display ads is an unreasonable imposition (so I don’t even feel the need to posit a slippery slope). Apparently you don’t, so the purpose was to explore a range of other unreasonable impositions that (in my mind, were sort-of-analogous, although more severe), to try to find what principle it is that we are actually disagreeing on.
*I have no particular problem with sites that make it a technical requirement to display the ads (i.e. by withholding content if ads are blocked)
Personally, I don’t see blocking ads online as being fundamentally different from muting the ads on TV, wandering off to make a coffee/visit the loo during TV ad breaks, or simply flipping past the ads in a magazine/newspaper.
IMO the “contract” is between the advertiser and the content provider - in exchange for displaying our advertisment, we will give you a sum of money. If people aren’t looking at those ads, then too bad. They say 50% of all advertising is wasted - looks like you know which 50% that spend was in now.
I’ve been around long enough to remember when there weren’t any ads on the internet, and when ads did show up they weren’t fundamentally any different to newspaper or magazine ads - static displays, very basic tracking (x number of people saw the ad) and things seemed to work pretty well.
I would suggest one solution is to go back to that - for some small/mid-size operation to pledge “We’re only going to show static ads, we promise not to track you or harvest your data” and follow through on it. And for advertisers to say “We don’t need to know every single thing about the people who see our ads. If 100,000 people visit your site a day, that’s 100,000 eyeballs on our ad. That works for us.”
I’ve often wanted the option NOT to start videos on news sites. I might want to listen to music while reading news, or to load multiple news pages.
CBS has heard my complaints and provided me that option! You activate the feature by turning on Ad-Block. (This seems like lazy programming by CBS’s webmasters – what if I want to turn off the videos but do want the ads?)
It’s a good idea, but I wouldn’t trust the advertising industry to do something so meekly ethical, even out of enlightened self-interest, when pure and unbridled competitive self-interest has faster bucks attached.
I don’t understand this model at all. What is the benefit to the website of having auto-play news videos? Is clicking a “play” button really keeping the users who want that content from getting it?
Metacritic has shifted to having movie trailers auto-play when you read their reviews and I find it immensely obnoxious.
The benefit to the website is that they can go back to their advertisers and tell them X number of people “watched” their videos (while searching frantically for the mute button.) They say that last bit just in their heads. Then they get paid for “serving” the ad to however many people.
Allow me to recommend that you install a NoScript or NoFlash extension. That way videos only play if you tell it to. You can whitelist whole sites if you want. If you open a Youtube page, you probably want to see a Youtube video. But it won’t autoplay if it’s embedded on a different site.
Look - it’s very simple. If content creators want to force people to pay to see their content, then they can put it behind a paywall. Problem solved! No computers compromised!
They won’t do that of course. What they really want is to post their dumb manifestos on a community bulletin board and then stand there, glaring and muttering at us, until we put some money in their tin. And if we don’t tip them, they’ll have a leper sneak up behind us and give us a wet willie. Hell, they’ll probably do that anyway. The leper likes it and he pays more than we do.
Fuck the guy with the tin. Fuck his “content”. And fuck the leper, too.
