C:\PROGRAM

[anotherusername]

@dhromed said:

@anotherusername said:

people in the advertising business are honest people who deserve compensation for their work

 

Not those people, dimwit. The website owners who create content and put ads on their site.

Yes, people in the advertising business who profit by putting ads on websites.

[too_many_usernames]

@anotherusername said:

people in the advertising business are honest people who deserve compensation for their work

 

It's much more straightforward to get paid first, then do work. This avoids the whole mentality of "Hey I chipped this rock on another rock. PAY ME FOR IT I DESERVE TO BE PAID FOR MY WORK!" nonsense.  It's also more honest, because usually you can only take the up-front payment and run (or do crap work) a very few times before people stop fronting you money.

Put much more simply: not all work deserves compensation.

[dhromed]

@too_many_usernames said:

not all work deserves compensation.

 

And not all compensation deserves work.

[boomzilla]

@too_many_usernames said:

It's much more straightforward to get paid first, then do work.

Does this happen anywhere? Even hit men (according to Hollywood) only get paid half up front.

@too_many_usernames said:

This avoids the whole mentality of "Hey I chipped this rock on another rock. PAY ME FOR IT I DESERVE TO BE PAID FOR MY WORK!" nonsense.  It's also more honest, because usually you can only take the up-front payment and run (or do crap work) a very few times before people stop fronting you money.

Put much more simply: not all work deserves compensation.

I'm not sure what you're arguing for or against here. Are you really talking about an agreement for payment for a certain amount of work? Do advertisers do that or not?

[blakeyrat]

@flabdablet said:

Some days you tell me that my blocking ads is depriving content creators of an income stream. Other days you tell me that my blocking ads is making content creators more valuable to advertisers. Which is it? You can't convincingly argue both sides of a flat contradiction.

First of all, I don't see how that's a contradiction. Secondly, yes. That is exactly the problem. Didn't I just get through explaining exactly that thing?

Look: you gotta figure out what your goal is.

• Is your goal to encourage good advertising and discourage bad advertising? Then ad blocking is completely counter-productive.
• Is your goal to "punish" bad site owners and leave good site owners alone? Then ad blocking is ok, but the default settings of AdBlock make that impossible.
• Is your goal to simply block all ads everywhere, ever, no matter how much you enjoy the otherwise free content? Congratulations: AdBlock is made for you. You're also human garbage and I hope you die.

[blakeyrat]

@anondrifice said:

I don't know about Adblock, but Adblock Plus is entirely blacklist based, and that blacklist is empty by default. (It even has a non-empty default whitelist for "non-intrusive ads", which is the first thing I remove.)

If the blacklist is empty by default, why would it need to ship with a whitelist pre-configured? WTF. In any case, last time I installed AdBlock Plus, while it was "technically" a blank slate, literally the first thing it did was tell you to install some pre-made block everything blacklist.

There's also the issue that AdBlock Plus blocks *based on the wrong domain*. So you have two domains here: 1) the domain the site is at "bobscontent.com", 2) the domain the ad is being served from "adsrus.com". ABP *only* looks at the latter domain by default. So if you block a huge advertising network, you block it regardless of what site that network is operating on. (Incidentally, that's also what the people blocking with Hosts file entries are doing.)

Why is this a problem? Oh right: I just explained it yesterday. It's the nuclear option. It punishes every site using that ad network, regardless of how "bad" their ads are in the user's view. A site can be using DoubleClick and completely saturated in awful noisy animated ads. A site can be using DoubleClick and have one small text-based ad at the bottom of the page. You can't tell ABP to show ads on the second site but hide them on the first*.

So anybody whose goal is to "punish" the sites with bad ads but encourage the sites with good ads, you shouldn't be using ABP. You'd also "punish" the bad sites a million times more effectively by simply not giving them the hit in the first place.

*) Note to pedantic dickweeds: ok fine, you probably can through some convoluted text-based configuration file only the geekiest nerd in history can understand can actually instruct ABP to do this. The problem is ABP doesn't do it by default, it uses the nuclear option by default.

[blakeyrat]

@KillaCoda said:

@The_Assimilator said:

Can we maybe, just maybe, agree that both sides have valid points? Here's my two Zimbabwean cents:

• the existence, and increase in use, of ad blocking software points to a fundamental flaw in the current web advertising strategy
• given the above, the reliance of websites on ads as a primary revenue stream is also fundamentally flawed

Don't know what the solution is, but there's definitely a deeper problem that neither side is addressing.

Agree with 1, disagree with 2. I love the amount of free content I can get, just by viewing some ads. I'd much rather that, then pay.

Do we think that every web user will start paying to use every site and view every piece of content, ad free?

Right. The big problem here is that due to ad-blocking human turds, the people who do like the status quo soon won't get the option to continue it. I don't block ads, but I have to see those shitty paywall pages just the same because some other encrusted dingle of a person did.

Merely one of the ways that using an ad blocker makes the web worse for everybody.

[blakeyrat]

@dhromed said:

@boomzilla said:

I have no clue what Patreon is, but I went to their about page and their, "How it works" section is a fucking video, so now I'm against it, whatever it is.

Subscription service for content creators.

Literally nobody who's ever set up a Patreon campaign and started advertising (oh noes! THOSE MONSTERS!) it has ever spent a millisecond explaining what Patreon is first or how it works. They literally can't even conceive of a world in which not every human being born has an instinctual knowledge of the function of Patreon. I swear to God, signing up for that site gives you a brain virus, it's the only explanation.

I've seen it on like 8-9 webcomic sites. It's always, "I've got a Patreon now!" and nothing else. Everybody's left wondering, "a what? What is that? Do I care?" It's the brain virus.

Seriously, watch for it. It's amazing.

[PJH]

@blakeyrat said:

@anondrifice said:

I don't know about Adblock, but Adblock Plus is entirely blacklist based, and that blacklist is empty by default. (It even has a non-empty default whitelist for "non-intrusive ads", which is the first thing I remove.)

If the blacklist is empty by default, why would it need to ship with a whitelist pre-configured?

To override any of the pre-compiled blacklists, should you actually chose to select them.

[Buttembly_Coder]

@blakeyrat said:

I have to see those shitty paywall pages just the same because some other encrusted dingle of a person did.

So we can add

• Inconveniencing and annoying blakeyrat

to the list of reasons to use an adblocker.

[julmu]

@anondrifice said:

I don't know about Adblock, but Adblock Plus is entirely blacklist based, and that blacklist is empty by default. (It even has a non-empty default whitelist for "non-intrusive ads", which is the first thing I remove.)

You are wrong. I installed Adblock Plus on Firefox and Chrome right now and the default blacklist was in both cases EasyList (https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt).

It blocks a lot of generic keywords like "&ad_url=" and "&banner_id=" so it's likely to block a lot of non-intrusive ads that aren't whitelisted.

[too_many_usernames]

@blakeyrat said:

I don't block ads, but I have to see those shitty paywall pages just the same because some other encrusted dingle of a person did.

 

So you'd rather that the aggregate population that pays for goods and services that fund ads fund your personal (website) viewing pleasures, instead of having to directly pay for things you want to see?  Or reverse it - do you really want to be paying for my web-viewing habits when you buy a box of cereal or a tube of toothpaste?

I'd actually much rather have to directly pay for things I want than essentially force the faceless masses to pay for my interests. Or, if you think the general availability of websites is good for the common man, fund them with some kind of tax scheme (as we do (poorly) for roads, schools, etc.).

[error]

@julmu said:

@anondrifice said:

I don't know about Adblock, but Adblock Plus is entirely blacklist based, and that blacklist is empty by default. (It even has a non-empty default whitelist for "non-intrusive ads", which is the first thing I remove.)

You are wrong. I installed Adblock Plus on Firefox and Chrome right now and the default blacklist was in both cases EasyList (https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt).

It blocks a lot of generic keywords like "&ad_url=" and "&banner_id=" so it's likely to block a lot of non-intrusive ads that aren't whitelisted.

If you don't want those freeloaders viewing your content, I've seen a rare few sites that have their actual content URLs trip the default blacklist (whether deliberately or accidentally I couldn't say).

(Those same sites had really annoying modal dialog type ads on every page and like 3 or 4 popunders.)

[flabdablet]

@blakeyrat said:

Is your goal to simply block all ads everywhere, ever, no matter how much you enjoy the otherwise free content?

Yes.@blakeyrat said:

Congratulations: AdBlock is made for you.

I know. Wonderful, isn't it?@blakeyrat said:

You're also human garbage

Pleasing to see my assessment of your industry's typical attitude toward its customers' customers so emphatically validated.@blakeyrat said:

and I hope you die.

All of us will do that; yes, even the sainted Kurzweil. And it makes me very happy to know that the last thought that passes through my dying brain will most likely not be some puerile advertising jingle.

Advertisers can fuck off. Don't want you, don't need you, don't have to have you. And don't get delusions of grandeur, either; you're not epically evil, merely tedious, unnecessary and easily avoidable.

Content creators: take a tip from Louis CK. If your content is good and you make it easy for people to buy it from you, we will. You don't need to pay these fifth-rate parasites to shill your stuff for you, because let's face it, they all suck at it. Pass on the savings you get from avoiding the advertising vig to your customers instead, and let us recommend you because we want to. We're way more convincing and we work cheap.

[blakeyrat]

@too_many_usernames said:

So you'd rather that the aggregate population that pays for goods and services that fund ads fund your personal (website) viewing pleasures, instead of having to directly pay for things you want to see?

Huh? How does your thing follow from my thing?

@too_many_usernames said:

I'd actually much rather have to directly pay for things I want than essentially force the faceless masses to pay for my interests.

Where does this "pay for my interests" thing come from? WTF man. Stop listening to the shoulder angels.

But: until we have a payment system that works for micropayments, at which point I might reconsider my stance, yes, I prefer the status quo to paywalls. If that's what you're looking for.

@too_many_usernames said:

Or, if you think the general availability of websites is good for the common man, fund them with some kind of tax scheme (as we do (poorly) for roads, schools, etc.).

Oh fuck, another European.

[too_many_usernames]

@blakeyrat said:

Huh? How does your thing follow from my thing?

 

You apparently get mad when you see a paywall instead of an advertisement-funded site.  Ads are funded by "the general population" through their general purchasing habits. Or is there some other mysterious source of funds for ads? The Illuminati perhaps?

@blakeyrat said:

Oh fuck, another European.

Verily, an astonishing capacity for detecting sarcasm and/or hyperbole.

 

[boomzilla]

@too_many_usernames said:

@blakeyrat said:

I don't block ads, but I have to see those shitty paywall pages just the same because some other encrusted dingle of a person did.

So you'd rather that the aggregate population that pays for goods and services that fund ads fund your personal (website) viewing pleasures, instead of having to directly pay for things you want to see?  Or reverse it - do you really want to be paying for my web-viewing habits when you buy a box of cereal or a tube of toothpaste?

I'd actually much rather have to directly pay for things I want than essentially force the faceless masses to pay for my interests. Or, if you think the general availability of websites is good for the common man, fund them with some kind of tax scheme (as we do (poorly) for roads, schools, etc.).

I'm paying the provider of the ad directly by looking at the ad. He pays the site owner directly. We can all agree that annoying ads are annoying, but why does a third party make you so uncomfortable here? You are either a terrible person or just bad at thinking through consequences or a troll for saying we should tax people and then start deciding how to parcel out that money to web pages.

[boomzilla]

@too_many_usernames said:

Ads are funded by "the general population" through their general purchasing habits. Or is there some other mysterious source of funds for ads? The Illuminati perhaps?

Ads are funded by the advertisers who purchase them. Those funds could be coming from the purchaser's customers, donations, inherited wealth, tax receipts, borrowed funds or stolen from orphans. Except for the taxes, theft and maybe the inheritance, it's all voluntary transactions. Saying "the general population" makes it sound more like taxes or some other coercion. You haven't given any sort of an argument as to why this is a bad thing.

[blakeyrat]

@flabdablet said:

Pleasing to see my assessment of your industry's typical attitude toward its customers' customers so emphatically validated.

"My" industry? What do you think my industry is, exactly? Or phrased slightly differently: WHAT THE HOLY SHIT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU CRAZY FREAK!!!

@flabdablet said:

If your content is good and you make it easy for people to buy it from you, we will.

But, Louis CK's site is nothing but marketing. Therefore, he should fuck off, don't want you, don't need you, etc. Right? According to your own logic literally one paragraph ago? I mean, marketing is all that website is. It's not even pretending to have informative news or anything. It has giant "Buy Now" links over every image.

This website is the good example? The website where every image has a giant "Buy Now" link? ... do you ... do you maybe wanna spend a few minutes and think about this and come back?

@flabdablet said:

Pass on the savings you get from avoiding the advertising vig to your customers instead, and let us recommend you because we want to. We're way more convincing and we work cheap.

The "vig"? What is the "vig"?

Ok so you and other random idiots are good at spreading word-of-mouth. Let's take that assumption as a given, even though it's obviously idiotic.

So you find a webcomic you love. You spread word of mouth. How does the webcomic author make money? By hosting ads. So you spread word of mouth to all your freeloading asshole friends, and they all go to his site and they all love the webcomic and they all hit refresh 50 times a day to see the newest one and, oh hey guess what, you just fucking bankrupted your favorite webcomic author you gigantic asshole.

[blakeyrat]

@too_many_usernames said:

Ads are funded by "the general population" through their general purchasing habits.

By that logic, everything is funded by "the general population." HEY GUYZ GUESS WHAT!? TURNS OUT I OWN THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE!!!

[DrakeSmith]

@blakeyrat said:

@too_many_usernames said:

Ads are funded by "the general population" through their general purchasing habits.

By that logic, everything is funded by "the general population." HEY GUYZ GUESS WHAT!? TURNS OUT I OWN THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE!!!

Didn't you hear Obama's speech several months ago? No one builds anything on their own.

[too_many_usernames]

@blakeyrat said:

By that logic, everything is funded by "the general population."

Knowing when to use reductio ad absurdum: priceless, or merely funded by advertising?

[dhromed]

@blakeyrat said:

I've seen it on like 8-9 webcomic sites. It's always, "I've got a Patreon now!" and nothing else. Everybody's left wondering, "a what? What is that? Do I care?" It's the brain virus.

 

I've never even been to the patreon site. Maybe I am telepathic. Maybe I just have more context. I dunno.

[dhromed]

@DrakeSmith said:

Didn't you hear Obama's speech several months ago? No one builds anything on their own.

 

Although that's trivially true, it's not pertinent to this matter.

[flabdablet]

@blakeyrat said:

"My" industry? What do you think my industry is, exactly?

Last I heard, you were working in web analytics. If you've since moved on to something unrelated to helping advertisers lie to their customers about how wonderfully well their advertising works, well done you.

@blakeyrat said:

This website is the good example? The website where every image has a giant "Buy Now" link?

Yep. That's Louis's own site, which I can search for and visit when I want to find out how to pay Louis directly for making things I enjoy. I have no objection to buying things. Having a "Buy Now" button on something I might want to buy is only sensible. Note in particular that you will not find Louis plastering his "Buy Now" buttons at random over every other site and then whining because no fucker will click on them. This is because Louis is one of the good guys, and does behave as if he understands exactly how self-flagellatingly futile the advertising industry is.

@blakeyrat said:

It's not even pretending to have informative news or anything.

Oh right. Must have been my shoulder aliens that led me to think otherwise.

@blakeyrat said:

The "vig"? What is the "vig"?

The vig is the cut that the advertisers skim off the price of everything their customers sell. If you buy from a supplier who advertises widely, you're paying more than you need to, specifically in order to fund advertising designed to distract you as effectively and often as possible.

@blakeyrat said:

How does the webcomic author make money?

From me? By offering me the opportunity to pay for downloaded archives, T shirt and coffee mug prints and whatnot or to make a straight-up donation.

Tell you what: my ADSL service has recently had its monthly download cap removed, and I now run a Beaglebone Black on my LAN that's active 24/7. So give me a list of web comics you like, and I'll set up a bot that pulls ads from doubleclick.net to /dev/null at random intervals with your guys' sites as referers. Doubleclick pays your comic authors an increased cut, your authors aren't paying for bandwidth I'm not using up from them, nobody has to look at any stupid advertising; everybody wins. Happy now?

[blakeyrat]

@flabdablet said:

Last I heard, you were working in web analytics.

Even if I did work in web analytics, what does that have to do with advertising?

@flabdablet said:

Yep. That's Louis's own site, which I can search for and visit when I want to find out how to pay Louis directly for making things I enjoy.

Right, and yet he's marketing on it so... you're just a gigantic hypocrite? One with no self-awareness?

@flabdablet said:

The vig is the cut that the advertisers skim off the price of everything their customers sell.

"Vig" is a word used by approximately nobody.

@flabdablet said:

If you buy from a supplier who advertises widely, you're paying more than you need to, specifically in order to fund advertising designed to distract you as effectively and often as possible.

Except volume makes products cheaper, so if the advertising builds volume than the product will go down in price.

@flabdablet said:

From me? By offering me the opportunity to pay for downloaded archives, T shirt and coffee mug prints and whatnot or to make a straight-up donation.

Right; but he's NOT offering you that. He just has ads. His method of payment is you view his ads. But you block those indiscriminately, so you're screwing him.

@flabdablet said:

So give me a list of web comics you like, and I'll set up a bot that pulls ads from doubleclick.net to /dev/null at random intervals with your guys' sites as referers.

Hey if you wanna find other suckers to help you with this, it turns out that's called "fraud". Using that "fraud" keyword might get you some more Google hits.

[boomzilla]

@blakeyrat said:

@flabdablet said:

The vig is the cut that the advertisers skim off the price of everything their customers sell.

"Vig" is a word used by approximately nobody.

No, it's a common enough word in its domain, which is populated by loan sharks and bookies. This is just his typical leftist attempt at redefining language and trying to make us think bad thoughts about things that aren't bad.

[flabdablet]

@blakeyrat said:

and yet he's marketing on it so... you're just a gigantic hypocrite?

No, just somebody who understands the distinction between an online storefront and indiscriminate online advertising. And before you start trying to defend some idiot claim about modern targeting methods meaning that advertising is no longer indiscriminate, let me just say to that: bullshit. If an advertiser for product X actually understood how to target advertising to me, then I'd see Product X advertising only on Product X's own site, and it would be served from Product X's cdn, not from doubleclick's. Which is how Louis's site works. Which is why it looks exactly the same to me whether I visit it with adblocking turned on or off.

@blakeyrat said:

Hey if you wanna find other suckers to help you with this, it turns out that's called "fraud".

Committed by whom, against whom? If I'm not proposing to charge a fee to run this hypothetical bot (and I'm not), then who could I possibly be defrauding? If no content creator has ever asked me to do this on their behalf, then who could they possibly be defrauding? My bot, designed to access advertising at a rate plausibly similar to what I'd be doing myself if I weren't just blocking it all, would not even add any statistically significant noise to Doubleclick's already-meaningless view and/or click numbers, so who is actually getting wronged at all in this scenario - morally, let alone legally?

[error]

@blakeyrat said:

Except volume makes products cheaper, so if the advertising builds volume than the product will go down in price.

This seems a bit faulty. The purpose of advertising is to increase demand (which raises prices) for a product or service. It does nothing to increase supply (an independent variable which would lower prices or at least counterbalance with demand). A customer might get lower prices by buying in volume (bulk discount), but generally you are not marketing to consumers to get them to buy large orders, you're trying to get more of them individually to buy your product or service at full price.

[rootkit]

Oh my fucking ass licking brain farting god. Where is Adblock (Avoidance of Deranged Bullshit from Loads of Overly Cachexic Killcows) if you need it?

[blakeyrat]

@flabdablet said:

If an advertiser for product X actually understood how to target advertising to me, then I'd see Product X advertising only on Product X's own site, and it would be served from Product X's cdn, not from doubleclick's.

So you are ok with advertising, as long as it's first-party advertising? I'm getting confused as to what your stance actually is, here. (Bonus confusion: if you see something from a CDN like Amazon or Akamai's, how do you know which company pays for the hosting?)

@flabdablet said:

Committed by whom, against whom?

You, against the ad network.

@flabdablet said:

If I'm not proposing to charge a fee to run this hypothetical bot (and I'm not), then who could I possibly be defrauding?

The ad network.

@flabdablet said:

If no content creator has ever asked me to do this on their behalf, then who could they possibly be defrauding?

The ad network.

@flabdablet said:

My bot, designed to access advertising at a rate plausibly similar to what I'd be doing myself if I weren't just blocking it all, would not even add any statistically significant noise to Doubleclick's already-meaningless view and/or click numbers, so who is actually getting wronged at all in this scenario - morally, let alone legally?

If I take something from your house without permission, something you didn't happen to need and would have given me anyway if I had asked, that's still theft. Even if I throw it away and don't profit from it.

NOTE TO IDIOT PEDANTIC DICKWEEDS: no, I'm not saying defrauding an ad network is theft. That was just an example used to illustrate a point. It is fraud, however.

[flabdablet]

@boomzilla said:

typical leftist attempt at redefining language

And that's a "typically leftist" technique because after all the words "bludger" and "welfare queen" have never in the history of the human race been used by any right-winger to describe any recipient of any disability pension, and nor have the words "freeloader" and "human garbage" ever been applied to a person with a simple preference for surfing ad-free.

@boomzilla said:

and trying to make us think bad thoughts about things that aren't bad

because even a man with an intellect as flexible and adaptable as yours - one not only fully capable of empathizing with those outside his own tribe, but scrupulous about displaying tolerance for other people's opinions, and quick to condemn the lack of such tolerance - could not possibly credit the idea that another person might wish to express an honestly held opinion that the work of the advertising industry as every bit as morally bankrupt as that of any loan shark. No, any such view could only be the delusional product of a thought process incapable of grasping the subtleties of social interaction and/or economics. Because after all, advertising is a kind of Free Enterprise, and Free Enterprise is good by definition. It's not like it's the Government (boo!) whacking the mandatory extra five percent onto the price of every single object offered for sale. That would be a Bad Thing; maybe even a (wail, gnash teeth, rend garments) Market Distortion (o noes)!

[mott555]

What is the world coming to when I agree with flab and disagree with morbs or blakey? I feel so dirty.

@morbiuswilters said:

Second, I want you to think about what you just said. You seem to be under the impression that blocking people who are stealing my bandwidth is going to hurt my bottom line. Honestly, it makes me wonder if you understand business at all. "You don't want me to loiter in the parking lot of the 7/11 and never, ever, not once buy anything? Fine, enjoy going out of business!!!"

No, it's more like I go to 7/11 to get a tank of gas and a Mountain Dew but to get to the building I have to push my way past a bunch of aggressive salesmen in the parking lot who try to physically hold me down and force-feed me old VHS tapes of their products I've never heard of and don't want to buy. And then I go in and pay and later find out I actually went to the wrong building and paid the wrong dude because some scammer put a fake 7/11 right in front of the real 7/11. Now I've been scammed out of my money and I'm getting thrown in prison for theft because we don't dare hurt the salaries of those honest hard-working aggressive salesmen and honest hard-working scammers who prey on people in the 7/11 parking lot.

I block ads because ads are annoying, they make me NOT want to buy stuff, they crash my browser often, I'm ALWAYS having to help my non-technical friends remove viruses from their PCs because they clicked the fake "Download" button and not the real one, or loaded their system down with eleventy-billion different web search toolbars because the first Google result is actually a bad ad and not what they searched for DESPITE what's in the name, and in reality I'm saving the ad providers a few cents because they're not paying to show me ads for something I'm not going to buy anyway.

I'm okay with non-intrusive advertising, but I've seen maybe two advertisements in my entire life I would consider non-intrusive.

[anondrifice]

@blakeyrat said:

In any case, last time I installed AdBlock Plus, while it was "technically" a blank slate, literally the first thing it did was tell you to install some pre-made block everything blacklist.

Yes, and when it asked me whether I wanted to subscribe to a filter list, I said "no". Done. But even if you agree to use someone else's filter list, that's still blacklist based. Isn't that what you wanted?

@blakeyrat said:

There's also the issue that AdBlock Plus blocks *based on the wrong domain*.

*) Note to pedantic dickweeds: ok fine, you probably can through some convoluted text-based configuration file only the geekiest nerd in history can understand can actually instruct ABP to do this. The problem is ABP doesn't do it by default, it uses the nuclear option by default.

Sure, you can do that. Or you can check the "Restrict to domain" box in the filter creation dialog.

[Buttembly_Coder]

@blakeyrat said:

NOTE TO IDIOT PEDANTIC DICKWEEDS: no, I'm not saying defrauding an ad network is theft. That was just an example used to illustrate a point. It is fraud, however.

Defrauding an ad network would mean making a false claim to them, and profiting from it. This would be, say, promising to show their ad on a site you host, then not showing it, after receiving payment. If you're just trying to pretend you have a moral stance, then you've shown how desperate you are to make your idiotic point, and may now leave argument. If you honestly believe that's how fraud works, then it's good to know that your knowledge is sufficiently false, and that can be safely ignored in future discussion.

"Blocking" web ads often simply means not making requests to fetch the ads. If this were fraud, then everyone with cable tv would be guilty for every single tv commercial they didn't watch.

[mott555]

@Buttembly Coder said:

@blakeyrat said:

NOTE TO IDIOT PEDANTIC DICKWEEDS: no, I'm not saying defrauding an ad network is theft. That was just an example used to illustrate a point. It is fraud, however.

Defrauding an ad network would mean making a false claim to them, and profiting from it. This would be, say, promising to show their ad on a site you host, then not showing it, after receiving payment. If you're just trying to pretend you have a moral stance, then you've shown how desperate you are to make your idiotic point, and may now leave argument. If you honestly believe that's how fraud works, then it's good to know that your knowledge is sufficiently false, and that can be safely ignored in future discussion.

"Blocking" web ads often simply means not making requests to fetch the ads. If this were fraud, then everyone with cable tv would be guilty for every single tv commercial they didn't watch.

Dude, are you trying to live off ad revenue from Community Server or something?

 

[boomzilla]

@flabdablet said:

@boomzilla said:

typical leftist attempt at redefining language

And that's a "typically leftist" technique because after all the words "bludger" and "welfare queen" have never in the history of the human race been used by any right-winger to describe any recipient of any disability pension, and nor have the words "freeloader" and "human garbage" ever been applied to a person with a simple preference for surfing ad-free. I don't even know WTF a "bludger" is.

"Welfare queen" applies to people committing welfare fraud, most famously, Linda Taylor (who was white, BTW). Freeloader seems appropriate, and I kinda sorta feel guilty about doing that sometimes, as in other situations where I find myself freeloading. Blakeyrat calling you "human garbage" is just him being his typical hyperbolic self.

You consistently promulgate leftism around here, and this goes hand in hand with that, from what I can see. You can whine about it, but that doesn't make it what it isn't.

@flabdablet said:

...could not possibly credit the idea that another person might wish to express an honestly held opinion that the work of the advertising industry as every bit as morally bankrupt as that of any loan shark.

You've made that assertion, but haven't done much more than that. Let's hear your justification. I predict that it'll be bunk, but I'm willing to hear you out.

@flabdablet said:

No, any such view could only be the delusional product of a thought process incapable of grasping the subtleties of social interaction and/or economics. Because after all, advertising is a kind of Free Enterprise, and Free Enterprise is good by definition.

Sure, people voluntarily making transactions seems good. Definitely better, on the whole, than forcing people to do things with the threat of violence. At any rate, I think it sensible to be more skeptical of the guys advocating the violence than the people asking permission to trade.

@flabdablet said:

It's not like it's the Government (boo!) whacking the mandatory extra five percent onto the price of every single object offered for sale. That would be a Bad Thing; maybe even a (wail, gnash teeth, rend garments) Market Distortion (o noes)!

Are you saying it isn't? I think taxes are a necessary evil, and therefore should be minimized. If the people collecting that are wasting / skimming / whatever (say) 20% of it, why shouldn't I be pissed off that they're extorting the rest of us for their gain?

So, to summarize your post:

• Welfare fraud is good and we shouldn't criticize the poor souls who do it at the expense of the rest of us
• Paying for stuff isn't cool when it's inconvenient
• Unsupported opinions should be accepted at face value
• We shouldn't trust people to interact with each other freely
• Worrying about taxes is paranoid

[Captain_Oblivious]

@morbiuswilters said:

I mean, really, it's demented.

You know what else it's like? People who don't tip. (TRIGGER WARNING: This video may be preceded by, followed by, or interrupted by ads. An ad might even appear near the bottom of the player WHILE THE VIDEO IS PLAYING. Those suffering from advertising PTSD should not click this link.)

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

You don't have a right to my eyeballs. Somebody ruined ads. Maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was. But I'm not going to waste my time with distractions like loud, annoying ads. Or blacklisting out loud annoying ads. I'm just going to install AdBlock and never worry about it again. There. Problem solved. If your business model depends on causing me problems I can solve myself, you're kind of screwed.

[Buttembly_Coder]

@mott555 said:

@Buttembly Coder said:

@blakeyrat said:

NOTE TO IDIOT PEDANTIC DICKWEEDS: no, I'm not saying defrauding an ad network is theft. That was just an example used to illustrate a point. It is fraud, however.

Defrauding an ad network would mean making a false claim to them, and profiting from it. This would be, say, promising to show their ad on a site you host, then not showing it, after receiving payment. If you're just trying to pretend you have a moral stance, then you've shown how desperate you are to make your idiotic point, and may now leave argument. If you honestly believe that's how fraud works, then it's good to know that your knowledge is sufficiently false, and that can be safely ignored in future discussion.

"Blocking" web ads often simply means not making requests to fetch the ads. If this were fraud, then everyone with cable tv would be guilty for every single tv commercial they didn't watch.

Dude, are you trying to live off ad revenue from Community Server or something?

 

I'm trying, but they keep mailing my checks to somebody named "' or 1=1;--"

[flabdablet]

@blakeyrat said:

So you are ok with advertising, as long as it's first-party advertising? I'm getting confused as to what your stance actually is, here.

Simply painting the words LOUIS'S SHOP on the front of Louis's shop is site identification, not advertising. Advertising is where you use attention-grabbing methods to draw attention to your product or service that it would not otherwise get, and you deploy those methods in places whose only connection to your product or service is that you suspect potential customers might go there. Site identification is fine. Even site identification that co-opts the methods of advertising is more often amusing than not, because when you go there, you do so knowing what you're up for. Advertising, on the other hand, is intrusive and distracting and gets inserted into places it has no business being inserted and is just plain flat out rude. I despise it.

@blakeyrat said:

@flabdablet said:

Committed by whom, against whom?

You, against the ad network.

If you follow the money, the effect of many thousands of instances of my hypothetical bot could be to make the ad publishing network commit fraud against its ad purchasers (which is arguably an ad publishing network's entire existing business model anyway, but let's argue about that some other time). The effect of the proposed single instance, on the other hand, would be to drive as much advertising traffic down my ADSL connection as would be normal for a user with no ad blocker. From a network traffic analysis point of view, the bot's activity would be indistinguishable from that of a person who has SEEN THE LIGHT and COME TO JESUS and RENOUNCED THE DEADLY SIN of ad blocking. So again: against which party's interests, exactly, would I be acting by implementing this scheme?

[flabdablet]

@boomzilla said:

So, to summarize your post:

• Welfare fraud is good and we shouldn't criticize the poor souls who do it at the expense of the rest of us
• Paying for stuff isn't cool when it's inconvenient
• Unsupported opinions should be accepted at face value
• We shouldn't trust people to interact with each other freely
• Worrying about taxes is paranoid

I withdraw my assertion that you are a person of flexible intellect capable of tolerating opinions from outside his own tribe.

[boomzilla]

@flabdablet said:

And he says I argue in bad faith. Heh.

No, I say you don't argue. You contradict. What was unfair about my summary? It was supported by your post and my response. And then you make claims about bad faith. Sure I insulted you and your intellect, but you didn't have to make it so easy.

[HardwareGeek]

@Buttembly Coder said:

@blakeyrat said:

NOTE TO IDIOT PEDANTIC DICKWEEDS: no, I'm not saying defrauding an ad network is theft. That was just an example used to illustrate a point. It is fraud, however.

[Repeated '/utility/PoweredByCS_personal.gif' omitted]

Defrauding an ad network would mean making a false claim to them, and profiting from it. This would be, say, promising to show their ad on a site you host, then not showing it, after receiving payment. If you're just trying to pretend you have a moral stance, then you've shown how desperate you are to make your idiotic point, and may now leave argument. If you honestly believe that's how fraud works, then it's good to know that your knowledge is sufficiently false, and that can be safely ignored in future discussion.

"Blocking" web ads often simply means not making requests to fetch the ads. If this were fraud, then everyone with cable tv would be guilty for every single tv commercial they didn't watch.

Flabdablet's proposed bot would be fraud. He, himself, would not be profiting from the scheme, but someone else would be fraudulently profiting from his action:@flabdablet said:

Doubleclick pays your comic authors an increased cut, your authors aren't paying for bandwidth I'm not using up from them, nobody has to look at any stupid advertising; everybody wins. Happy now?

Not everybody wins. Doubleclick pays comic authors for advertising they did not actually display. Look, I hate advertising as much as flabdablet (I find it very disturbing to be agreeing with him), and I would love for Doubleclick and all their brethren to go bankrupt, but if someone did this it would be out-and-out fraud — probably on too small a scale for Doubleclick to bother prosecuting, or even notice — but still fraud.

[Buttembly_Coder]

@boomzilla said:

@flabdablet said:

And he says I argue in bad faith. Heh.

No, I say you don't argue. You contradict. What was unfair about my summary? It was supported by your post and my response. And then you make claims about bad faith. Sure I insulted you and your intellect, but you didn't have to make it so easy.

@boomzilla said:

@flabdablet said:

@boomzilla said:

typical leftist attempt at redefining language

And that's a "typically leftist" technique because after all the words "bludger" and "welfare queen" have never in the history of the human race been used by any right-winger to describe any recipient of any disability pension, and nor have the words "freeloader" and "human garbage" ever been applied to a person with a simple preference for surfing ad-free. I don't even know WTF a "bludger" is.

"Welfare queen" applies to people committing welfare fraud, most famously, Linda Taylor (who was white, BTW). Freeloader seems appropriate, and I kinda sorta feel guilty about doing that sometimes, as in other situations where I find myself freeloading. Blakeyrat calling you "human garbage" is just him being his typical hyperbolic self.

@boomzilla said:

So, to summarize your post:

• Welfare fraud is good and we shouldn't criticize the poor souls who do it at the expense of the rest of us

You're claiming that because he points out "welfare queen" as a traditionally right-wing term, that he believes welfare fraud is good. You don't seem to know what words mean.

[Buttembly_Coder]

@HardwareGeek said:

Flabdablet's proposed bot would be fraud. He, himself, would not be profiting from the scheme, but someone else would be fraudulently profiting from his action

I wasn't referring to the proposed bot, but to blakey's claim that ad blocking is fraud in general.

[boomzilla]

@Buttembly Coder said:

You're claiming that because he points out "welfare queen" as a traditionally right-wing term, that he believes welfare fraud is good. You don't seem to know what words mean.

I think you're missing the previous context. I said he was using a derogatory word to unfairly give something a negative connotation. He countered with welfare queen, which refers to fraudsters. At the very least, he's saying there's nothing wrong with fraud. I think my interpretation of words was right on here. In any case, his best defense was a tu quoque, which doesn't make his bullshit use of "vig" any better, it just makes leftists look like they stand out in the dirbag olympics a little less. But he actually did the opposite, so...

[Buttembly_Coder]

@boomzilla said:

I think you're missing the previous context.

And I think you can't (read as "don't") read.

@boomzilla said:

I said he was using a derogatory word to unfairly give something a negative connotation.

You did not say that, actually, but that's irrelevant. You were previously saying he was trying to give words negative connotations (there is a difference, and you'll learn about it in eighth grade), which you believed was because he was a lefty. He pointed out that was not specific to lefties, by using an example of a term given a negative connotation by righties.

@boomzilla said:

At the very least, he's saying there's nothing wrong with fraud.

That logical leap is what he is reffering to when saying you argue in bad faith. You assume others are as dumb as you, and that their logic is as flawed as yours.

@boomzilla said:

I think my interpretation of words was right on here.

And I think you should consider going to google for definitions more often.

@boomzilla said:

…it just makes leftists look like they stand out in the dirtbag olympics a little less. But he actually did the opposite, so...

The HMTL for an ellipsis is "…", use it for bonus points.

[Snooder]

@blakeyrat said:

NOTE TO IDIOT PEDANTIC DICKWEEDS: no, I'm not saying defrauding an ad network is theft. That was just an example used to illustrate a point. It is fraud, however.

Wait, we're talking about ad block right? That thing that hides the ads?

Let's take your theory to it's logical conclusion. So, if you listen to the radio and change channels when ads come on, you are defrauding the ad network. If you drive down the highway and avoid looking at highways signs, you are defrauding the billboard company.

Look, I get it. It's kinda of a dick move to enjoy free content without even trying to pay for it. But it's not *fraud*. It's just a minor failure of etiquette and social nicety.

See, the thing about it is that nobody owes anyone a living. If you want to get paid for something, you have to either collect the money up front, or get a promise to be paid for it later on. What is happening with advertising is that the advertiser pays the content provider but never got an actual promise from the consumer to view the ads. Everyone is just kinda relying on an implicit social compact that consumers have to view ads in order for the content provider to ultimately get paid.

The problem though is that the consumer never actually promised anything. He didn't promise to view the ads. He just got told "here's your free stuff" and the advertisers relied on the laws of the universe to insure that even if he wanted to avoid the ad, he still had to view it in order to avoid it.

And yeah, that business model breaks down when people start using adBlock. No shit. That just means that the consumers really don't want to see ads.They may have a social obligation to keep the status quo going, but they have zero legal or contractual responsibility to do so. And if enough consumers reject the "implicit" social obligation, it quickly ceases to be one, and it becomes incumbent on the content creators to find a new way to get someone to pay for their shit.

Yes, it sucks that creative people who don't understand business won't be getting a convenient paycheck from advertisers. Too bad for them, but that's not my problem as a consumer.

[HardwareGeek]

@Buttembly Coder said:

@HardwareGeek said:

Flabdablet's proposed bot would be fraud. He, himself, would not be profiting from the scheme, but someone else would be fraudulently profiting from his action

I wasn't referring to the proposed bot, but to blakey's claim that ad blocking is fraud in general.

Oh, yeah, that's bollocks.

BTW, AdBlock Plus's default configuration is to allow unobtrusive, text-only ads. I'm ok with this; I've learned to completely ignore anything that is not the main text of whatever I'm surfing, as long as it's not moving or flashing or garishly colored or such.

[error]

@Buttembly Coder said:

The HMTL for an ellipsis is "…", use it for bonus points.

I use AltGR+; in my HMTLs.