> Given your attitude, may I assume that you do that sort of thing all the time? > You do you ... Good luck with that. You're gonna need it.

Frankly, I find this kind of tone unpleasant. Direct it at someone else. I'm pretty sure I've made no similar statements at you.

> Should I, sight unseen, prance over to the site without protecting myself from potential malware?

No, absolutely not. I think protecting yourself from malware is fine (though I do not think all ad tracking is "malware" even if it sucks).

> That being sites that scrape stack overflow/exchange sites and publish the work of others along with their ads. Those folks should be especially rewarded, yes?

Nope, I think those sites are primarily (if not solely) stealing content produced elsewhere and provide zero actual added value, and I think they should be illegal and sued to oblivion. And I think that's still in line with "people should get paid for their work" because the actual work was the original content creation.

> I expect you'll disagree and that's fine.

I don't disagree with having a defensive posture. I'd say I disagree with having a defensive posture and still wanting to get the content (which is not your stance since you've stated you're fine with a website detecting ad blocker and not showing you content).

Mostly, though, I just don't think we're "forced" to do any of this. We just don't like that the actual solution is to not get content we don't want to pay for in some way. In fact, maybe where we disagree the most is that I don't think you should get the option to decide "midway" through loading a page whether or not you want the content, because what actually happens in reality is: you get what you want, the website doesn't. I don't think that's being an "honest, decent human being" as a user.

On the flip side of all of this, and maybe repeating myself from an earlier comment, I think a website should be liable for all the content (ads, JS, etc) that ends up on your screen when loading a page, even if it's served by a third party, because the website is the one to introduced that third party.

My apologies. I misunderstood your position.

I was under the (apparently incorrect) assumption that you believe folks should either watch ads, pay for the content with cash money or stay away from any site that one is unwilling to do so. Further, I got the sense (incorrectly) you were in support of not using defensive tools, as that would deprive the website owner of revenue -- especially upon first arriving at the site -- even if the content of the site was unknown prior to visiting.

If I seemed less than positive in my reply to you, it was due to the (apparent) misconceptions I listed above. My mistake.

Again, apologies and thank you for clarifying and setting me straight.

Unless I continue to misunderstand (and I hope not), I think we're pretty much in violent agreement here:

1. Content creators deserve to be paid for their work;

2. in support of (1), website owners have property rights which empowers them to require (or not) viewing of ads, paying of fees (whether those be subscriptions or single item sales) and/or other business models;

3. Sadly, ad networks (and many shady websites as well) aren't very good at blocking and/or want to distribute malware and abusive content to be run client side, requiring (or at least strongly incentivizing) end users to use ad/script blockers to protect themselves against those malicious actors;

4. End users also have property rights which empowers them to decide for themselves what code is permitted to execute on their (client-side) systems, and to restrict the access of downloaded code to limit data exfiltration.

Edit: I'd add that unless and until both the website owner and the client accessing the website can come to a "meeting of minds" there can be no contract, implicit or otherwise -- especially if there has been no previous interaction between those parties.