Ads are an unwanted local infection that brings malware and brainwash people. Blocking ads is the sane behavior, not piracy at all.
Unless you're giving food and shelter to every Jehovah's Witness that comes to your home, then you're the insane one.
if you're arguing this, it's probably already vanishingly rare for you to be clicking on ads or looking anything more than a glance at them. and on my work device, where i didn't install adblockers as an experiment, i don't recall ever seeing ads that ship malware, and i commit quite a bit of tomfoolwery on my work device.
if by malware you mean how viewing ads slows down your machine, that what people say of Denuvo.
(not sure what you meant by the jehovah's witnesses part. are they actually starving?)
don't recall ever seeing ads that ship malware
How old are you?
i commit quite a bit of tomfoolwery on my work device
That might be because your work device is protected by policies and applications installed by syssec team.
Imagine them getting teleported back to the days of Limewire's mp3.exes, pop-up ads, pop-under ads, audio ads, moving ads, activex bullshit, drive-by malware not even needing interaction, and...
BonziBuddy too, can't forget that. It's so cute, it can't be malicious! I'm going to install it on all my office computers, what's the harm?
curiously, the only time i've ever gotten infected (besides wannacry) was through a torrent
i don’t recall ever seeing ads that ship malware
It's a very good business and it exists.
that what people say of Denuvo.
It's good, because Denuvo and every DRM framework is malware too.
(not sure what you meant by the jehovah’s witnesses part. are they actually starving?)
Since when is starving a requirement to accept harassment from every company out there? On my own computer nonetheless. It's basic protection. I don't install viruses because you ask for it.
You don't have to click an ad for it to be a security threat.
It is possible to abuse the mechanics of a web browser to send a fullscreen ad that resists typical means of app closing, scaring a normal user into clicking to install something malicious.
The weakest link is always the user, and advertisements are literally meant to target users. Exactly how hard do you think it is for an ad network to target the kinds of people most likely to get scared and just click the [Fix] button that downloads the malware?
Your average user gets infected and they take a computer to a repair shop to get it fixed, which costs money.
If the ad network would accept liability for damages caused by malware ads their ad networks delivered to people, I could be more sympathetic to the position that blocking ads is unfair to the content creaters paid by ad views. But if I'm financially responsible for fixing damage caused by ads, then I reserve the right to block them.
Full stop.
these are as rare as non-tracking ads, and my approaches of<1. i don't use my web browser much on mobile (that distance probably fries my eyes anyways) 2. i use µBO and whitelist sites on my normal computer>probably help me avoid that anyways
The deal is between the person paying for the ad and the person displaying the ad.
I wasn't ever involved in the deal, I owe them nothing.
Yep. I don't recall signing any contract...
I think this is the only reply that hits the mark. Most of the others are mentioning malware, the morals of adverts or how obnoxious they are. To steal implies to take without payment, but the payment is not from the viewer, it is from the advertiser,who is paying.
I'd argue that blocking is more similar to taking a restroom break when a commercial is shown on the TV. No reasonable person would say that that's stealing.
thing is with ads you can block, the advertiser is not paying if the ad is blocked.
i agree that taking a restroom break while an ad is showing is not piracy. that's not blocking the ad, though.
I'll try to argue about something I know little about. Don't advertisers pay for ads served? Don't many ad blockers work by hiding the ad from view, like making it's size 0x0? On my older devices, I can see the ad show up, then disappear. Doesn't that then imply that the advertiser must pay for the ad eve though it does not show on my device?
Going down the rabbit hole, doesn't that then also imply that people using assistive technologies like a screen reader for the visually impaired are actually stealing content?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/95614/do-ad-impressions-count-if-the-user-is-using-an-adblocker summarizes Google Ads's documentation at https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/141811?hl=en (TL;DR: pay depends on whether a script/request attached to the ad element is performed).
It's true that different adblockers do different things, but the most popular ones do block the requests too. One of the most popular arguments for adblocking is performance and bandwidth. If we only hid the ad from view without doing that, we would not get the performance and bandwidth savings that adblock brings. So, µBO blocks the requests.
You can confirm yourself whether the request is blocked by searching "ad" (or "doubleclick" specifically for DoubleClick Ads, which are the majority of Google Ads) in your browser DevTools's "Network" tab. Compare when the adblocker is off vs. on; for me with µBO the majority of requests aren't even attempted and disappear when their entire element is ad-blocked, and in these cases the pay script doesn't load either. The screenshot above only shows some requests that were attempted and blocked.
Going down the rabbit hole, doesn't that then also imply that people using assistive technologies like a screen reader for the visually impaired are actually stealing content?
No, screen readers would still read ads. Just having the screenreader move to the next element is the same as scrolling past the ad. The difference is that if the advertiser doesn't give alt-text, the content can become nonsensical. But the advertiser still pays.
You can approximately check an ad's text for a screenreader with Firefox DevTools's "Inspect accessibility properties" feature.
Excellent write up!
thank you!
What about services where you pay but still get ads? Netflix? Cable?
In UK people pay for TV if they have one. In Germany people pay for TV, Radio even if they dont have one. Does it stop ads? Nope! Except you can't block them on radio wave level unfortunately. At least on the web you can.
Edit: forgot dont
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
Ads flooding a page with garbage making it more difficult to read is absolutely a service problem. As is having to pay a subscription fee to a news outlet you may only check once a month.
Offer me a service where I pay per article read, a similar price to the ad revenue per article, and we can talk.
Downvoted cause I agree. Adblock is based and so is piracy.
The fact you have more comments than up votes means this is a legit unpopular opinion, Good job 👍
Working to avoid the excesses of surveillance capitalism isn't piracy, it's self-defense.
isn’t piracy, it’s self-defense
It can be both. What's wrong with a little piracy in self-defense?
Time is our most precious resource and advertisers are here to waste it. I have no qualms telling them to fuck off.
Hmm... People in your comments either conflate ads with telemetry (you can have tracker free ads) or they don't understand that there is value in ads equal to at least a fraction of sold content. Maybe they're triggered by the term piracy, which admittedly is a strong term, but honestly your core argument is correct.
I'm pro-piracy, though, and certainly take pride in picking and choosing who or what I put value in. It's more obvious with paying a patreon or buying a product you already pirated, but allowing ads to play (or at least giving a video view though to trigger the counter, liking and subscribing, etc) is also a form of support. And yes, you can do so without completely violating privacy although they're certainly making that harder lately...
to be fair, the most popular ad platforms like google ads use trackers, so it is something to consider. but i do agree that this kind of lumping is bad since this thinking hurts ethical ad platforms too.
There's no such thing as ethical advertising.
I believe that advertising without trackers is ethical.
It isn't in any way piracy. I am under no obligation to pay attention to ads.
not paying attention to ads is very different from blocking the ads
Is throwing away unopened junk mail stealing from the post office? Its the exact same thing
post office gets paid either way, website doesn't. you're describing looking away from the website's ads while your ad-blocker's off.
Post office only gets paid because some portion of people do open them; they would make much more money if everyone did.
If everyone throws away junk mail there's no money, if everyone blocks ads there's no money. It's the same system but with better attribution for impressions.
the analogue there would be clicking on the ad. google ads, probably the most popular single platform, has two kinds of ad payment: per-click and per-impression. by just receiving it and throwing it away you get rid of the former, but by blocking ads you get rid of both. (there's also the fact that most people do not block ads, while most people do throw away junk mail)
and if everyone throws away junk mail, there's still money, because the post office got paid to deliver it. same goes for not blocking ads but not looking at them.
It does not have anything to do with sea so it's not piracy, nor is it copying without license. You aren't in a contract with people that show you ads, there is no legal requirement to do it. I don't care about their commercial interests but care a whole lot about my time and interests, I feel no obligation to do it, nor care if some ad-supported thing will stop existing. Like fuck them lol.
i value social contracts over law, and especially for small websites, when their advertising is unintrusive i think i should help them survive and keep running. a ton of major things i use like great independent news sources and some hosters of pirated content use ads while i don't have a membership.
by analogy, maybe piracy doesn't reduce indie devs' revenues that much as it provides word-of-mouth. but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay for them.
Understandable position and truly unpopular. My opinion is - ads are the raison d'être of surveillance capitalism of today and they often exploit our psyche in a ways that border on mind control, so minimizing my exposure to them doesn't break social contract, and most people don't block ads not because they think that it harms someone but because they don't know that it's possible.
most people don't block ads not because they think that it harms someone but because they don't know that it's possible.
I agree.
OP ran out of cheeks to bury their nose in.
i also like to smell armpits
When I ride my ad-subventioned subway and I look away from the ads, am I free riding the sub?
no, and neither is looking away from internet ads. blocking on the other hand stops the ad company from paying
Is it any different from when we used to record our shows and fast-forward through the ads?
My family always used to mute ads on the TV when I was growing up.
I guess that's piracy too, eh?
If you are in the UK I think you need a license to do that.
to watch BBC, not mute ads, no?
There is no law that says "you have to load the ads that are being served when you access a website" (yet).
It goes against the wishes of the content provider, but not against any rule they can legally enforce.
It also doesn't even touch on copyright law.
Therefore, it's not piracy.
Your argument does not follow. You are saying it's not illegal therefore it's not piracy. But most piracy, in most countries, is not illegal, so what does legality have to do with it?
I can download a copyrighted movie right now and I'm not breaking any laws. Which obviously is pirating the movie. Which is not illegal (if I don't share it further).
According to Wikipedia piracy is "downloading content without permission". You yourself said it is against the wishes of the content provider (which you are morally correct to ignore), so it fits the definition.
What am I missing?
We disagree on what "piracy" means.
But that's OK, the word makes absolutely no sense in this context anyway, and is just propaganda to make sharing sound like a violent crime.
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