(no subject)

[nolly]

Plus account + a good adblocker >= Basic account

Stop whining.

Comments

[jbriggs.livejournal.com]

LOL!

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

which is against the TOS.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I assume you refer to Article XII in the TOS? Please point me to a legal definition of "obscure from general view" that includes "hiding from one user on one computer".

[brooksmoses]

Indeed; I was about to make that point. But, on reviewing things, I don't think it is against the TOS (though note that this is not legal advice, consult your lawyer if you care, et cetera!), and this does change a bit about how I feel about things.

The relevant section is from http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos.bml, section XII: "You understand and agree that some or all of the Service may include advertisements and that these advertisements are necessary for LiveJournal to provide the Service. You also understand and agree that you will not obscure any advertisements from general view via HTML/CSS or any other means. By using the Service, you agree that LiveJournal has the right to run such advertisements with or without prior notice, and without recompense to you or any other user."

The critical statement there is "from general view". I would interpret that to mean "from view by the general public" -- in other words, it prohibits me from using Clever HTML Tricks on my Plus-account style to make it appear to be ad-free for anyone who looks at it. I would not interpret it to be referring to using an ad-blocker that only affects my own personal view of the site.

I also think that's a pretty reasonable condition, if they mean it the way I interpret it.

(Meanwhile, if I were feeling pedantic, I would have strong objections to being required to agree that the ads are necessary -- for any definition of necessary that I think appropriate, I certainly do not agree! -- but I only believe in being pedantic where it's either enjoyable or useful.)

[brooksmoses]

Actually, this provision, if the commonly-held interpretation that pleonastic refers to is correct (and I don't think it is; see my comment below), is pretty unique to LJ. So it would merely be "a huge majority of users are in violation of the LJ TOS". Most sites out there don't have such a provision.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Between the two of us, we need to repost this on Friday... ;)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I was going to wait til then, but I was in the mood to do it now :)

[kishiriadgr.livejournal.com]

I don't even notice the ads, frankly. Even if I did, I wouldn't mind; I'm the type who clicks her ads on gmail.

[ravenevermore.livejournal.com]

well said.

[strigine.livejournal.com]

(I don't have issue with the removal of basic accounts on its own. What I don't care for is the way it was not communicated. And that is what I have seen most people talking about, not the "OMG ads".)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I've seen a great deal of whining about both. I don't mean all unhappiness about the way it was handled is whining, but that I have seen people whining about it. I've also seen a great deal of whining about how terrible it is that you can't use LJ for free without ads anymore and that is a Violation Of All LJ Stood For and the One True Path and We Must Fleeeee. Seriously.

[howeird]

Nope, the TOS only applies to an account holder's content on the account holder's site. Saying popup blocking on a browser is against the TOS is like saying using net nanny or some other adult content blocker on your kid's PC is a violation of LJ's TOS.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

it's not "pretty unique" to LJ. it's in more and more common use. myspace uses it, several newspaper sites do. i'll bet more and more sites will use it, as adblocking will slice more and more into revenues of sites that use ad sponsorship as their business model. in fact i pretty much see lawsuits on the horizon; won't be long now. remember what happened when people developed hardware so you could skip commercials on TV?

i don't think it'll GET very far, but they're setting it up so they can theoretically hammer you.

and according to anil dash it's not a "huge majority", it's a small minority, which is why he stated they weren't gonna go after them. now, that was 6A, not SUP. who knows with SUP.

[brooksmoses]

Ok, point taken on the "pretty unique". It's the first place I had seen it, but I apparently needed the reminder that not only is the plural of anecdote not data, the singular most definitely is not.

adblocking is against the TOS

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i'm referring to XVI.17:

You agree to NOT use the Service to:

Employ tactics to prevent the full and complete display of advertisements on LiveJournal pages. These include, but are not limited to, making journal style changes, customizations, or overrides that effectively block or substantially impair the display of advertisements on a Plus account's Content or other pages within the Service.

there's no "general view" in here. they directly refer to changing a plus account's style, but there's also a "but are not limited to". and i've read anil dash's comments about adblocking last year; he clearly thought it was against the TOS. now, SUP is the new emperor, and who knows what they'll do, but one thing is for sure: there won't be LESS advertising on LJ, and SUP gives even less of a shit about what LJ's users think of ads.

they're unlikely to hunt anyone down for it at this point. but i think it goes a little far to call those of us who actually read the TOS carefully "whiners".

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

see my reply to nolly above.

[kat-chan.livejournal.com]

I remember when everything on the internet was free. Only it wasn't, because someone (the university) was paying for it, and I was just a free-rider. But there was much less content on the internet then. And the internet was spelled with a lower-case "i". And there wasn't any such thing as the World Wide Web, and irc was pretty fucking new and different. The way you knew a friend was online was by fingering their account, and the way you communicated with them was by opening a talk session.

Things have gotten bigger, better, more user-friendly. These things cost money. I was under no illusions that would be free-forever. Eventually there needs to be cash coming in to pay for improvements and upgrades. And as soon as the ".com" domains began to outnumber the ".edu", ".net" and ".gov" domains, it was only a matter of time.

Naive whining isn't going to make the internet what it was in 1989 once again. And I don't want the 1989 internet. I like the 2008 internet.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[brooksmoses]

Hmm, okay. That's really a rather poorly-written section; the last half of the entries in it seem to be appropriate for a header of "You agree not to" rather than just "You agree to not use the Service to". Using an ad-blocker is, in a strict interpretation, not using "the Service" to block the display of ads; in context, I don't know whether I think that was their intention or not. However, I would consider it noteworthy that, while ad-blockers are vastly more common than LJ style overrides to block ads, they only mention the latter as an example.

I'll grant that it's possible to interpret that as intended to prevent ad-blockers, in any case.

[filmbuff.livejournal.com]

Agreed!

That's down-right metaquotable right there.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Given that not a single one of the posts I'm referring to has mentioned the TOS or given any indication that the poster has even considered the Plus + AdBlock option, I stand by my characterization of said post as whining. Personally, I have a paid account, and have had one for years, but I use two forms of adblocking as much for malware avoidance as ad avoidance.

I find it very difficult to believe that the broad interpretation of the TOS would stand up in court, given that ads can be blocked at so many levels, some of which may be outside the user's control or even awareness, but I am neither a lawyer nor a judge (only the niece of two lawyers and the granddaughter of a Federal judge), and this particular type of clause has not, to my knowledge, been challenged yet.

I knew a few Russians in college, including my roommate, and getting around the rules seemed to be something of a cultural institution. What that means with regard to the enforcement of the TOS here, I don't know.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Feel free to metaquote it if you like; i'd love to see it spread.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

who gives a flying fuck about court? is anyone going to court when they get their LJ account suspended?

if legal aspects of adblocking are what you're interested in, a little googling is always useful. but it seems you're just into your own holier than thou spiel -- which IMO is more whiny than what you're complaining about.

i'm outta here.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i suspect it's poorly written on purpose (poorly as in so very open as to what can constitute violations), because i am beyond only suspecting incompetence (based on, as previously mentioned, the things anil dash said last year).

i'm not yelling "conspiracy", "oppression", or "KGB", and i don't actually think SUP owes us anything -- but i think capitalism has sucked up LJ wholesale. and since i don't think they're gonna make a financial success out of it over here (because i believe LJ's heydays are over, since there is now serious competition for the demographic, and there is no such thing as unlimited growth anyway), i believe we'll get hammered with more and more advertising, and when that fails, we'll lose plus and existing basic accounts altogether. they won't look towards us to make them profitable, they'll look towards eastern markets who haven't been spoiled by "students just playing around". did you read nossik's interview in russian? he has no respect for us as customers.

but hey, that's just me guessing.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*snicker*. heck, i only know about this because of kooky danny carlton who actually blocked firefox users from his site, which then hit the NYT and CNET, and i was reminded how badly some prior attempts at TV ad blocking had fared.

myspace seems quite strident about it.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[nolly.livejournal.com]

is anyone going to court when they get their LJ account suspended?

As far as I know, no one has yet, but I'm sure someone out there would be willing to, if they felt the suspension was unjust and other methods of resolution failed.

Regardless, you're the one who brought the ROS into it, and the TOS is only relevant if it's a legally binding contract. As far as I know, the court system is the only entity that can make that decision.

[filmbuff.livejournal.com]

Done.

[jeran.livejournal.com]

I've taken to a simple solution to ads that doesn't require a blocker: add a declaration in my nameserver's named.conf file that makes me an authoritative server for that domain, with the zonefile making anything in that domain resolve to the IP of my blackhole server (runs a webserver on 80 and 443 that returns nothing but 404 Not Found). Ad networks that use IP addresses get their own custom firewall entry doing the same redirection at the IP-packet level. Only works for ads that use their own domain or IP netblock, but that's a large fraction of them. No browser mods needed.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[kat-chan.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, no one has yet, but I'm sure someone out there would be willing to, if they felt the suspension was unjust and other methods of resolution failed.

Considering all of the talk about class-action suits after the Strikethrough and such, I'm very sure that there are people who would be willing to take it to court, too.

I love how people think that a site that ends in ".com" is in any way obligated to eschew profit and just let people play on their servers under a complete lack of rules or structure. Again, this isn't 1989, it is 2008. Usage of the internet is a few thousand times what it was in 1995, when things really started to take off with the internet as a commercial entity. And that was significantly larger than it had been in 1989 when we were downloading text files with Monty Python scripts using gopher on Unix terminals.

Basically, if you use a service that ends in ".com" rather than ".edu" or ".org", expect to have to pay for it. Either in monetary terms, or in terms of having to look at ads. And if there are tools out there to block/remove the ads, use them. I've never seen anyone turfed for not allowing ads on their accounts. For doing something (potentially) illegal, such as posting content that could be considered kiddie porn, sure. For spamming or otherwise harassing others (also illegal outside of the internet context), sure. But for saying "I don't want to be advertised to"? Nope.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

All your reply to nolly above does is make it clear that you can't read or interpret basics such as a TOS for shit.

[kuromitsu.livejournal.com]

So much word. It kind of baffles me how people can't understand this, that they still cling to the idea of "free service' as if it was their right, as if LJ didn't need money to support itself.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I consider IP-level blocking a form of adblocking; it's one of the levels I was referring to here (http://nolly.livejournal.com/201893.html?thread=1126309#t1126309). I use both AdBlock in my browser and PeerGuardian externally (which blocks adserver IPs as well as Big Brother and other malware).

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Love the icon, but please refrain from personal insults in my journal.

[jeran.livejournal.com]

I think it's part of expectations. .com sites have given things away for free (in the name of building market share) for so long that it's become the norm. Now these businesses are trying to go against what they themselves have established as the status quo, and it's not a surprise that people don't take well to that. A smart business starts out the way it intends to continue. If it's going to need to charge money, it should start out charging money. Maybe a small amount, but I remember studies that validated this: customers are less bothered by a price increase in a service they're used to paying for than by a service they've gotten for free for a long time starting to charge money.

And there's another aspect. I see it in fandoms with regard to art and artists. It used to be there were professional artists in fandoms, people who made their money doing and selling art to fans. There weren't many because it was a fair amount of work having to go to conventions, publish in 'zines, do all the marketing needed to get fans to know your art existed, but because there were (relatively speaking) so few artists fans could get at they could make decent money at it. With the Internet and the Web, though, it's almost trivial for anyone to get word of their existence out to a fandom. And suddenly you saw a ton of amateur artists show up, people who were doing this as a hobby and didn't care whether they made a living off it or not. Some of them are really bad, some are really really good, but none of them treat their art like a business. And suddenly the old professionals (eg. Steve Martin) are getting drowned in a flood of competition that doesn't care whether they make a living at this or not. The same with a lot of Internet businesses: their competition are amateurs who're doing the same thing because they want to and who're happy if they get enough to cover the bandwidth and hosting costs.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[jeran.livejournal.com]

I think one of the problems 6A and now SUP have is that they look at those nice juicy consumer demographics on their site and see that advertisers are chomping at the bit to get at those demographics. But then they look closer at the people behind those demographics and go "Eeeew. We don't want any part of that!". But the consumers they want to sell to the advertisers, and that the advertisers want to buy, are those people. 6A and SUP want desperately to separate the nice clean "consumer" part from the messy, icky "people" part, and are puzzled at why they can't.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Oh, hell, I thought I was still in metaquotes. Sorry.

There's some chick over there who is blatantly making up lies to "support" her stance. It's amusing.

Re: adblocking is against the TOS

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I don't see that as saying you can't block ads on your browser, that says you can't do anything to your journal that would prevent others from seeing the ads.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

If they don't reinstate free accounts, I can almost guarantee it'll become a huge majority.

[trema-slo.livejournal.com]

Ha ha!