<story><title>Chrome, 10 Years Later</title><url>https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2022/12/chrome.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xg15</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;People seem to think it&amp;#x27;s the browser&amp;#x27;s job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what&amp;#x27;s happening, people start talking about how it&amp;#x27;s their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: &amp;quot;I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway&amp;quot;.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What if &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that&amp;#x27;s a winning strategy for them?&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t just use that business&amp;quot; idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It&amp;#x27;s only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cheating&amp;quot;, such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rakoo</author><text>The quote also perpetuates the free market myth: every actor is on an equal foot, has infinite amounts of time and energy to consider options, the alternatives exist and&amp;#x2F;or are essentially free to build, and money is not a problem. That&amp;#x27;s never been true. Somehow, there is no environment, no society at large, no inequality. I understand how someone living in the richest country working for the richest company could fool themselves into believing it, but it&amp;#x27;s incredibly shortsighted.&lt;p&gt;The society we live in demands that you earn money, if you don&amp;#x27;t want to die. The only thing that you have in a high enough amount is time, so if you use time to do anything, at some point it must earn money or you die. In the digital world there is no scarcity, so the old model of physical stuff you sell for $X a piece doesn&amp;#x27;t work. There are no systems to guarantee a life to everyone, everyone has to fight for themselves. If you want to produce content, content that is not necessary to live, you necessarily enter non a competition for attention, for money, against everyone else. If people justifiably can&amp;#x27;t give you money, you must resort to the only way that gives you a survival fee: shove crap in the eyes of the reader. Give them not what they want, but what others want. Influence their decisions.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a shitty system. The analogy is interesting because if there&amp;#x27;s a single vendor that holds what you need to survive, and they price it at an outrageously high price just for their profit, is it acceptable ? Is it OK, as a society, to say no to this practice ?</text></comment>
<story><title>Chrome, 10 Years Later</title><url>https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2022/12/chrome.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xg15</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;People seem to think it&amp;#x27;s the browser&amp;#x27;s job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what&amp;#x27;s happening, people start talking about how it&amp;#x27;s their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: &amp;quot;I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway&amp;quot;.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What if &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that&amp;#x27;s a winning strategy for them?&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t just use that business&amp;quot; idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It&amp;#x27;s only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cheating&amp;quot;, such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yakubin</author><text>I find the entire analogy dubious. When I see a link, I don’t know what sort of ads or JS is on the page it leads to. By blocking ads I am not renegotiating any transactions, because I never entered any transaction. If anything, it seems the author of the post thinks it’s okay for website owners to unilaterally dictate the terms of transaction and force visitors into them.&lt;p&gt;When I buy a banana, I see the price beforehand. With ads on websites it’s more as if upon me taking the banana, the banana seller gained the right to search my pockets and take anything they fancy.</text></comment>