For the HN downvoters why is choosing not to consume the ad supported content so bad?
"It's a simple solution that works for everyone involved."
It's literally none of those things. It's not simple, it's not a solution, and it doesn't work for anyone involved.
Still I don't buy the argument that just because you don't want to pay for the content (by viewing ads) that you should still be able to consume it without ads. From a technical perspective I guess the client can do whatever it wants with the data returned but it's still not "right".
I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free. Pirating is one thing. You're getting something for free that the distributor expects you to pay for. You're going out of your way to get something for free that you know you have to pay for. My ad blocker doesn't get me into Netflix for free, nor does it get past the NYT's paywall. It doesn't do anything fundamentally different from hitting "Reading Mode" built into my iPhone. Hell, it doesn't do anything fundamentally different from the Chrome extension "Cloud to Butt". It doesn't get me for-pay content for free. It couldn't possibly be any further from pirating MP3s.
Instead, by serving their content upon request, the sites are implicitly agreeing to my terms. So, I'm not doing anything wrong by running an ad-blocker on my computer.
I think it would be great if someone codified this too. If servers can have Terms of Service, so can users. Wouldn't it be great if my browser could send a TOS to each site once before I accepted content from them? A simple notification of my terms, via a custom header sent from a browser extension would work today, but I don't feel that I need to do this since most servers happily give me their content.
If ad-blocking eventually forces 95% of "content providers" to shutdown, I don't really care. There's too much blogspam, too many pointless "me too" posts, and just too much crap out there for me to care. If the whole system implodes and goes away it really won't bother me much. The interesting content will be able to survive with subscriptions or pay-per-read or something.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people don't want to admit that most of the web is more a waste of time than anything, and given the option, nobody would pay for most it. Would I pay $x a month to read nautil.us or medium? Yes. Would I subscribe to some idiot who posts his two cents about an article and then links to medium? No.
I buy books and ebooks, pay for music, and pay to watch movies, I don't mind paying for interesting web content. But I'd be stupid to pay for it or not read it when I can easily, legally read it for free.
I kind of agree with this but yet so much content that I think is worthless still gets massive amounts of traffic. Like those stupid viral facebook lists that make you click through 30 pages, quizzes or whatever the linkbait flavor of the week is. Yet so many of my friends must find some value in them or they wouldn't keep sharing them.
I'd like to see the overlap between people who click through web ads with people who respond to or click through spam email.
Look, I'm not arguing that advertising is the only way to make money. In fact I think it's ultimately going to die or come to some form users and content producers can agree on. Especially with companies like Apple, and Google (who ironically makes a ton of money on ads) turning against ads. There are certain types of advertising that users do accept right now. Mostly things like "content marketing". Where a user reads some blog post or helpful tip which is really just a way to promote another service or product that the user pays for. Those even do well on HN. Then again HN is basically an advertisement in itself for Y Combinator startup news.
I do think the ability to make money helped the web grow and continue to grow. Advertising is and was a large part of that.
If you give away a physical product, with an implicit expectation that each recipient will take part in some other interaction that will give you a small amount of money, then that is an obvious flaw in the business model.
If you want to apply your analogy of theft, then you need to discuss password-protected web content where people pay for subscriptions. In that case, if someone hacks your site or steals another subscriber's password, then your analogy would hold.
I think you'll find that the overwhelming majority of websites have no such terms of use, so who are you to tell us how we should be accessing these sites?
But without it, how can you back up any kind of complaint about someone not displaying the ads? There never was any obligation. It's like yelling at someone who leaves their lounge to make a cup of tea during a TV ad break.
