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this is probably a quite unpopular opinion but i think piracy might be more ethical than ad blocking. or rather, the incentives that the latter creates are kind of awful
piracy is more or less a victimless crime insofar as it doesn't directly cause a cost to exist, only for a source of income not to. this is not the case for, say, using a streaming service while blocking all the ads. the streaming service does incur a (marginal) cost in that case
at sufficient scale it can start to become a serious problem for such a service, and the impact of it becomes felt by innocent users who don't block ads, who now see more aggressive ads, so more of them start blocking, vicious cycle
this is to say that torrenting a car is not theft but streaming a car with adblock might be
i am not really interested in moralising about it, more just, uh, pointing out you should find ways to financially incentivise the outcomes you want, not the ones you don't? shrug
personally i do not care for the fate of, say, spotify, because nothing of value would be lost if they filed for bankruptcy (everything they have is just a copy from a distributor's catalogue), but youtube for example is a digital library of alexandria and i fear the day it burns
@hikari I have taken to using yt-dlp to archive my favorite videos for this reason
@craigbro i would encourage everyone to do so!
@hikari you have reinvented linus “tech tips” sebastian’s hot take on adblock from first principles, here
(people got really mad at him over it but that’s mostly because that man somehow does not know how to speak without either script or turning everything he says into a nuclear take)
@hikari there is a simple solution to get out of that cycle and its called stop relying on advertisement for getting your money
@hikari If the ads were static ads and not active malware, maybe.
Self-defense is always fully ethical though. As long as adtech exists, ad blocking is 100% self defense, no ethics question about it.
@hikari Said differently, piracy may be a victimless crime, but the only "victim" when you block ads is someone who was already victimizing you, far worse, by puting the adtech ads there to begin with.
And someone facing just retaliation for harm they're committing, from the party they're harming, is not a victim.