That's an incredibly strange viewpoint. Would you get mad at me if we were watching TV and I muted it when a commercial break came on? Would you demand that I watch closely?
I dont think anyone is saying you need to watch closely or even look at the ads?? Somehow a lot of people have come to attack a straw man regarding control of your eyeballs/behavior. Dont look at the ads if you dont want.
The issue here is payment to the content creators. If you mute your tv, the actors/writers/producers/camerapersons/tv station employees/etc get paid. If you block ads on the internet, then the writers/journalists/photographers/sysadmins/etc dont get paid, even though they made you happy, or provided something you obviously valued. I mean, you spent your valuable time consuming it, it must be worth something.
So it's the automation itself that bothers you? If I kept uBlock origin installed but told it to block nothing by default and then went through and manually clicked block on every ad on a new page you'd be okay?
a while back I had an idea for an "auto-muter", which would look up audio fingerprints for commercials like shazam does for music. When it identifies a commercial, it emits the MUTE button from an IR transmitter for the prescribed duration of the commercial. Like a poor-mans TIVO. I never built it but all the pieces are already out there.
That's the thing I don't get. Automating an action does not in any way take a previously moral action and make it immoral. That's not how ethics and morals work.
I get that you _feel_ differently about it, and that's totally ok, but the idea that you feel the need to suggest that those feelings are "right" for others baffles me.
