Troy's perspective seems to be lacking in several levels. The first thing is the nature of advertising. Advertising is an attack on the client to convince him to believe and ultimately to act in ways that could not be contrived through honest communication. It is an attempt to manipulate.
Even his very benign banner represents an attempt to manipulate. A company buying such a banner wants an author to speak as he wouldn't naturally to give a degree of attention to the sponsors content that he wouldn't naturally inspiring us to give an unnatural degree of regard to the sponsor by implying that he does by plastering it on the top of his website.
He expresses that blocking this attempt at manipulation is "unjust". Hi Troy as soon as your content leaves your website and runs on my computer there is no moral dimension to how I choose to display or not display elements.
In the larger context he believes that the larger struggle is to find a way to fund creators through acceptable manipulation that merely tries to hack your brain but doesn't hack your computer or take up your whole screen.
Maybe when there are a billion people out there blogging and the infrastructure to reach hundreds of thousands costs $20 per month nobody is going to pay you to blog.
Most of the intellectual property out there isn't scarce and you are going to have to convince at least some of your readers that they ought to take the affirmative step of paying you to create because they value your work. If you can't you'll have to pay the $20 a month yourself and create in your spare time.
Acceptable manipulation isn't an avenue I'm interested in supporting.
Incidentally the pi-hole is an interesting but pretty bad solution. It is just technical enough to discourage 90% of people from ever trying it, worthless outside your home network, and requires even those interested to actually pull out their credit card and wait for shipping. This is enough to convince another 99% not to do it. If the website doesn't work with this dns based blocking OR you want to show ads to support that site this is in theory possible but only if you log in to another machine and edit its list over ssh?
Whereas ublock origin can be installed by anyone in seconds for free, works everywhere, and can be selectively disabled on a particular site in 2 clicks. This is why almost nobody uses a home dns server but adblock extensions are becoming prevalent.
Troy also tries to throw shade at extensions by suggesting that any particular extension could be bought by malware authors. This is a legit threat model we should all think more about but it applies to all software including the developers of pi-hole.
"The last temptation is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason." -- T S Eliot
Troy doesn't want us to avoid extensions so we don't get compromised he wants us not to run adblock extensions because they block his source of revenue.
Even his very benign banner represents an attempt to manipulate. A company buying such a banner wants an author to speak as he wouldn't naturally to give a degree of attention to the sponsors content that he wouldn't naturally inspiring us to give an unnatural degree of regard to the sponsor by implying that he does by plastering it on the top of his website.
He expresses that blocking this attempt at manipulation is "unjust". Hi Troy as soon as your content leaves your website and runs on my computer there is no moral dimension to how I choose to display or not display elements.
In the larger context he believes that the larger struggle is to find a way to fund creators through acceptable manipulation that merely tries to hack your brain but doesn't hack your computer or take up your whole screen.
Maybe when there are a billion people out there blogging and the infrastructure to reach hundreds of thousands costs $20 per month nobody is going to pay you to blog.
Most of the intellectual property out there isn't scarce and you are going to have to convince at least some of your readers that they ought to take the affirmative step of paying you to create because they value your work. If you can't you'll have to pay the $20 a month yourself and create in your spare time.
Acceptable manipulation isn't an avenue I'm interested in supporting.
Incidentally the pi-hole is an interesting but pretty bad solution. It is just technical enough to discourage 90% of people from ever trying it, worthless outside your home network, and requires even those interested to actually pull out their credit card and wait for shipping. This is enough to convince another 99% not to do it. If the website doesn't work with this dns based blocking OR you want to show ads to support that site this is in theory possible but only if you log in to another machine and edit its list over ssh?
Whereas ublock origin can be installed by anyone in seconds for free, works everywhere, and can be selectively disabled on a particular site in 2 clicks. This is why almost nobody uses a home dns server but adblock extensions are becoming prevalent.
Troy also tries to throw shade at extensions by suggesting that any particular extension could be bought by malware authors. This is a legit threat model we should all think more about but it applies to all software including the developers of pi-hole.
"The last temptation is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason." -- T S Eliot
Troy doesn't want us to avoid extensions so we don't get compromised he wants us not to run adblock extensions because they block his source of revenue.