[oakfr]

The thing is: you paid for your bedroom ceiling, your bathroom and your car. You also paid for your computer & screen, but you did not pay for the content you're watching on it.

I am entirely with you on not wishing any ads at all, anywhere. I just think that it's not realistic to remove ads entirely on the open web today.

This should not be an excuse for the way ads are being run today. It is fundamentally broken. Incentives and attributions should be changed.

[ACow_Adonis]

There's a couple of issues with this line of thinking, but I'd also just observe that this split is technically an additional tangent. My point up above was that of course people understand why people don't like advertising, and that most people don't like advertising themselves. It's not some unknown or alien thing on which to feign ignorance. Indeed it borders on universal human experience. Like the old quip about "everyone understands atheism, I just believe in one less god than you", practically everyone understands an inherent distaste for advertising, some just want less advertising than others and some actively want to produce and push it on others while not having it forced upon themselves. After we've established that, now we get into if or when it's ok or justified.

Firstly, I'd urge everyone to deny the initial premise. The right or desire to be free of or avoid advertising has nothing inherently to do with the act of paying money or being able to amass or claim property rights over things. That's not why i hate junk mail. That's not why I don't want to be proselytised to. That's not why i shouldn't have to view propoganda. Of course, the addition of private property rights issues is one more barrier that advertising would have to overcome in order to be deemed acceptable, but on the contrary, i think a better premise is to start with WHY or WHEN advertising should be allowed, given that it is almost universally loathed or objected to. I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are subjected to advertising because they haven't payed for things or own things or content. That's dystopian.

At the very least, I think people should have the ability to say no, and for that desire to be respected and not interferred with. I think there's good grounds for advertising, or at least many types of advertising, to not be allowed in many public areas or via many public resources. I have no problems with companies or organisations not delivering material or allowing access to general consumer goods as a consequence of saying no to advertising, but that's different to users saying "no i don't want ads and I don't want to be tracked" and having the companies go "but I'm gonna do it anyway and you shouldn't be ad blocking".

Finally, I always come back to what the web is, or at least what it was, in that I deny the underlying unspoken premise that the web is there to run business models or pay money for content to be put on it. If businesses can make it on the web, good for them. But if they can't, the web is more important than business.

To be clear, the internet and web and content came first, then the businesses arrived and co-opted it for their purposes. Now the narrative is trying to be rewritten so that you can't possibly let people consume material on the web for free without people paying for it via advertising.

So let me be clear: I pay for my computer. I pay for the bandwidth of my ISP. This allows me access to a public network of computers where I can make requests to other computers on the network to send me information. People can also pay to put content up on that network to be requested by others, but no one forces them to do so, AND, no one forces them to answer my computer's request for content. When i use an ad-blocker, the main activity is for me to determine client-side that there are certain computers I don't want to talk to, and certain content I don't want to see. In an ideal world I wouldn't be tracked also, but that's just an additional abuse or manipulation of the system.

Several years after this whole system had been operating just fine, companies arrived and started trying to make money, and today we have a feigned victim-complex retcon narrative about how people not paying for content should view ads.

On the contrary, if companies do not want me viewing their content: don't put it up on a public open network that's publicly searchable, publicly addressable, and that responds to my requests for that content. Put it behind a paywall, put it behind authorisation, put it on your own intranet or network.

Keep the open web as the web. Keep it open. Keep it in good faith and respect user's explicit preferences. The hosting computer decides what content it wants to make available and who it wants to talk to. And my computer decides who it wants to talk to and what content it wants to see.

And in an ideal world, advertising should be delegated to the bare minimum of places because the starting assumption should be that most users, rationally, justifiably, and understandably, don't want it.