Comment by georgefrowny
20 hours ago
There's a difference between putting information easily online for your customers or even people in general (eg as a hobby), and working in concert with scraping for greater visibility via search, and giving that work away, or at a cost, to companies who at best don't care and possibly may be competition, see themselves as replacing you or otherwise adversarial.
The line is "I technically and able to do this" and "I am engaging with a system in good faith".
Public parks are just there and I can technically drive up and dump rubbish there and if they didn't want me to they should have installed a gate and sold tickets.
Many scrapers these days are sort of equivalent in that analogy to people starting entire fleets of waste disposal vehicles that all drive to parks to unload, putting strain on park operations and making the parks a less tenable service in general.
> The line is "I technically and able to do this" and "I am engaging with a system in good faith".
This is where the line should be, always. But in practice this criterion is applied very selectively here on HN and elsewhere.
After all: What is ad blocking, other than direct subversion of the site owner's clear intention to make money from the viewer's attention?
Applying your criterion here gives a very simple conclusion: If you don't want to watch the ads, don't visit the site.
Right?
I see downvotes, but no counterarguments.
Does anyone have a counterargument?
I think the counterargument is that a while ago ads became super annoying. They move, they grow in size, they feature nsfw things, they have weird js that annoys you when you try to leave. Perhaps some of this has toned down in recent years, but the damage is done. The ads are not good actors. It’s not as black and white as subverting or not subverting the will of the site owner.