It’s hard to find anybody to agree with the logic, and certainly the only people that appear to be writing about it have done so to heap ridicule and scorn, but (apparently) the same person to bring us WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com has now introduced WhyDiggIsBlocked.com.
The new beef is the same as the old beef: Ad-blocking software is tantamount to theft and social media sites violate the robots.txt “law.”
Huh? Right. Last I heard the legislature had not addressed robots.txt, but it’s possible I missed it. Bygones and on with it. Though it’s unclear which sites are participating, if any, social media users may encounter a notice that they’ve been blocked. Some of the reasoning is as follows:
“The users of sites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit and StumbleUpon openly endorse Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites, and are well known for providing no value to the sites they visit. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads, Digg users who don’t click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying for it and website owners deserve a method to block this unauthorized bandwith theft.
“Since social media sites do not allow website owners a method for excluding content and do not obey robots.txt law, abiding webmasters are forced to block all users from social media sites.”
I suppose also if one were to visit “abiding” webmasters’ sites without Ad Block Plus and chose to ignore them they would also be guilty of “theft.” Does that also apply if I go to the bathroom or kitchen during TV commercials? It would seem so.
But this article can’t be closed without a third opinion, and why not just quote one of the original opponents of WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com, the webmaster behind WhyIsFirefoxedBlocked.com:
“Why is firefox blocked?
“Because some douche wants to infect your computer with popups, search bars and endless ads, the same kind of douche that made you get Firefox in the first place because of horrific popups, search bars and endless ads.”
For a detailed explanation of why the logic of blocking social media sites is flawed, give Muhammad Saleem a visit.
