While consuming the content, you’re avoiding paying some content its price, because you protest how the content guards its commercial interests. Thus, ahoy!
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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.
Ad blocking does not go far enough.
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I don’t HATE hate ads. When watching Twitch, sure I get an ad every 15 minutes I think. But the fact that there is technology for ANYONE in the world to see someone’s computer screen in almost real time, have a chat room, and (almost) for free (well, for $0. I pay with my time watching ads)
But seeing the SAME AD, EVERY TIME, makes it annoying. I don’t know why Twitch thinks I will watch FNAF 2, but seeing the ad 10 times will not convince me to watch it.
Change it up. Make me go “oh, what’s this ad about” not “oh NOT THIS AGAIN”. That is a gaurenteed walk away for a water break.
Time is our most precious resource and advertisers are here to waste it. I have no qualms telling them to fuck off.
i do block ads because they waste my time. that’s still piracy, and there’s a bajillion ethical reasons to commit piracy
Arr, batten down the hatches and hoist ye sails, matey. It’s time for some pirating!
If the content needs ads to pay for it did it really have any value at all to begin with? If I can’t access content ad-free (with an ad blocker) I’ll just give up and find something better.
Even as a web developer I’ll pay to host my content. Should it become too costly then I’ll need to monetize it as a business or ask for donations but I’d never stoop so low as to start spying on my users and selling their browsing habits; fuck that. And I’ll never start trying to brainwash them into buying some shit that’s probably unnecessary and bad for the environment anyway.
I’m so tired of being expected to give up my privacy even for paid services. I can’t use my VPN? Then get fucked, I’ll find someone better to business with.
i don’t like the idea of excluding people who don’t have the means to pay from service (“monetize it as a business”), and when i was young i had to avoid paid services. many online creations that got popular like wavetro’s animations and modrinth simply couldn’t keep up with costs by just donations.
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.
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
Not to me.
but to the website’s wallet
If they didn’t track me and spy on me I wouldn’t have a problem. But they track me and spy on me so they have to go. That isn’t piracy. Its not getting ripped off. When there are no definitive laws or rules then I can’t break them.
If one of the pirate parties succeeded in implementing platform, I’d still call the act piracy there.
Okay. Its clear you have a vested interest in it being wrong. Its not and its not illegal.
by “the act” I meant things that are more popularly understood as piracy. even if torrenting cracked Assassin’s Creed was legalized, I’d still call torrenting cracked video games piracy.
Or give them access to my network or my compute.
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
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When I see an ad, I make note of the product and tell at least two people at random how that product gave my uncle cancer or burned down his house killing his entire family. Imagine a movement where every single person took ads and used them to create anti ads. Make company’s think before they steal our time and data. They will likely send some legal goons for you but this is the Chicago way
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 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.
That makes the piracy a lot more ethical and probably something I support.
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…
(you can have tracker free ads)
In theory, yes. But in practice? It’s quite rare these days.
(Honestly, I don’t even see why they want to track users so much. Is it really that effective? You could just have targeted ads based on the content of the web page you’re on, rather than based on the identity of the user. That should still target your ads pretty well, and without infringing on anyone’s privacy in the slightest. Plus, you don’t need the overhead of maintaining a giant database of every potential customer in the world.)
Yeah, and there really are much better ways to support creators.
And for real, since my family tends to share accounts and I keep my stuff relatively secret, tracking never gets it right. Hell half the time they just give me Spanish ads. I don’t speak Spanish.
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.
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The fact you have more comments than up votes means this is a legit unpopular opinion, Good job 👍
Agreed. Though I don’t think these people should be downvoting an opinion here simply because it’s unpopular. Either that’s my unpopular opinion, or there’s some other reason they’re downvoting.
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.
Sorry, this isn’t an unpopular opinion.
i’d say the other comments disagree
Everyone is agreeing with the pot that blocking ads is ok. That makes the post “popular”.
This isn’t /c/popularopinion.
Does look like everyone disagrees that it’s piracy ngl. Seems to have struck a nerve, but good post imo
Actually this is an unpopular opinion or your circle is so different from the average that you are almost aliens, I have yet to meet someone that would sincerely say that they think that not watching ads is breaking social contract.
OP stated that it’s ok to block ads even though it’s piracy. That’s not an unpopular opinion.
His statement reads as “blocking ads is piracy …” , it’s factually not true, not that “it’s moral to block ads even though it’s piracy”. Which still isn’t true but can be accepted as not an unpopular opinion.
We were never asked what kind of internet we wanted. Not now and not in the 90s.
