That’s kind of half the picture though. Adblocking and piracy are not done in a vacuum. You typically block ads in response to the unethical practice of hostile design and the abuse of human psychology to be conditioned positively to something through exposure rather than just making a good product. Piracy is often in response to unethical business practices as well.
If none of those unethical forces existed, you can be sure there would be a lot less pirates and adblockers. But in our current world piracy and adblocking are often straight up ethical in relative terms.
Adblockers are a pain in the ass for many reasons. Small websites can’t realistically fund themselves with other sources, big players like newspapers end up putting paywalls limit access to quality journalism or selling themselves to billionaires who can run them at a loss in exchange of influence on the reporting. You end up with billionaires controlling all media and no way for small shops to compete with them.
YouTube premium: YouTube ads are fucking annoying, adblocking on TVs is unreliable at best, impossible at worst, I want to support the people who create the content I enjoy and the price for a whole family, for a whole month… is one third of the price of going to the movies once.
Arguing against adblocker and for YouTube premium is the most center of the bell curve IQ meme take I’ve ever heard.
I use adblockers and pirate stuff, but I don’t try to fool myself into thinking that it’s an ethically sound thing to do.
That’s kind of half the picture though. Adblocking and piracy are not done in a vacuum. You typically block ads in response to the unethical practice of hostile design and the abuse of human psychology to be conditioned positively to something through exposure rather than just making a good product. Piracy is often in response to unethical business practices as well.
If none of those unethical forces existed, you can be sure there would be a lot less pirates and adblockers. But in our current world piracy and adblocking are often straight up ethical in relative terms.
Adblockers are a pain in the ass for many reasons. Small websites can’t realistically fund themselves with other sources, big players like newspapers end up putting paywalls limit access to quality journalism or selling themselves to billionaires who can run them at a loss in exchange of influence on the reporting. You end up with billionaires controlling all media and no way for small shops to compete with them.
YouTube premium: YouTube ads are fucking annoying, adblocking on TVs is unreliable at best, impossible at worst, I want to support the people who create the content I enjoy and the price for a whole family, for a whole month… is one third of the price of going to the movies once.