Forum Moderators: phranque
Do you think it is unethical or immoral to block a certain faction of your visitors, either by IP blocking (which may affect many "innocent" visitors--not just the ones you wish to block), or by designing sites that are specifically not accessable to visitors using certain browsers or platforms?
I'm not talking about whether you think it's a good idea (because I think that in a lot of cases we'd agree that it's really stupid, or somewhat inconsiderate), but would you go so far as to say it is unethical and wrong?
In a nutshell, if you are an individual webmaster creating original content, what do you think is your moral obligation to your site visitors? We're not just talking about what would be nice to do, or more considerate—what are you morally obligated to provide for them?
I agree with the above poster. It's your website. You do what you want to do. I honestly never though twice about it - especially when I clicked on a link that then asked me for a user name / password
-Corey
I don't see that as "unethical". I don't see making things hard for spammers/the undesirable on my sites as "unethical" either.
To expand on the question: Do you feel that you are offering a "public service" with your website, and if so, what do you owe your viewers? Morally speaking, that is?
There are certain things that I think we all can agree are immoral (placing scripts on the site that install spyware, false advertising, deceitful claims, features on your site that have a likelihood of crashing a certain portion of browsers or otherwise messing up their computers, etc.) but other than that, what are you obligated to offer your site visitors? Or are you morally obligated to offer anything, since they are free to not visit your site if they don't like it?
we just can't see the stocking mask and guns of those trying to get into our sites to steal something.
It's my site, it's my bandwith, and it's my right to share my content with who(m?) ever I want to and to restrict access to those I don't want to play with!
Just my jaundiced opinion after spending hours, just today, tracking down and documenting ebay sellers that have fleeced my content and images.
To further refine the question: Is it immoral (I'm not talking about "impolite" or perhaps "silly," "stupid," etc.), but is it immoral to deny access to your site to, for instance, all IE users ("Netscape only"). Or, to have a site that is only accessable to Windows or Mac users (or Linux users) and nobody else?
Immoral or not?
(I vote not immoral, for the same reasons offered by others above. Maybe not nice, but not immoral. The only exception would be for a site offering one-of-a-kind incredibly vital information, like life-or-death stuff. Otherwise, not immoral.)
Never had any complaint, and I really don't care because this feature is just to entertain the user, not to make a lot of money.
Maybe when the world switches to Firefox I will try to find a more general solution.
The only thing one should consider at this point however is if the exclusion causes a hit to the bottom line (assuming that your site is selling commodities of some sort, for instance). Otherwise, the only consideration to me would be what excluding a particular browser could improve for the rest of my users.
I certainly don't think it immoral or unethical. And it's by no means illegal.
It seems to me to be a simple concept--the Internet has plenty of room for everyone, and we all can present our sites however we want--or not. We aren't harming people that much by possibly denying them something that they never would have had access to in the first place (had we not made our page and paid for hosting).
Now, obviously, as webmasters we usually want to provide our visitors with as friendly a viewing experience as possible, and we want as many visitors as we can get. Sometimes, it's probably bad business sense (as some here have mentioned) to block visitors. But that isn't the same as immoral.
Another tangental debate/discussion I've seen (and participated in) is the idea that the content that webmasters offer doesn't really totally belong to us, not really anyway, and therefore it is immoral to try to restrict access or withhold it from some viewers. (A variation on the "Information wants to be free!" chant.)
Yet another issue that has been discussed here and elsewhere is the concept that webmasters (if they got irate enough) blocking visitors who block their (webmaster's) advertising. Now, I think there are some real perils to doing this--because I think it would alienate many visitors. However, is it immoral? Once again, I can't see how. Ill-advised, perhaps. Cranky and grumpy, perhaps. But immoral? Not seeing it.
Have any of the rest of you encountered such arguments before (withholding access/blocking visitors as immoral), and do you believe that this mindset will become more mainstream, or is it just a crackpot fringe point of view? In my experience, it's borderline crackpot, but there are a lot of people who believe that "withholding or restricting access to content/information" (doesn't matter if it's unique content that you the webmaster are wholly responsible for) is wrong--so who knows what public viewpoints will be in the future?
In the US, and if you're promulgating a site for a gov't entity of some sort (all the way down to the tiny town site I run - a whole 40 people live here year 'round), you WILL run into that sort of situation. And depending, you WILL be required to provide access to everyone - no matter how difficult that makes it for you. And then you run into the "handicapped access" stuff too....
But that's just here. Don't know about the rest of the world.
But for us here, the individual webmasters, to be held to that standard (or even something close to it)? Bizarre. Yet I get the impression that while many people wouldn't go so far as to expect total accessiblity (a la govt. site), they do believe that webmasters should morally owe specific things to visitors. Like, no deliberate blocking of visitors (whether it be because of browser or platform choice, using ad-blocking software, or whatever). Is this a trend that will continue? Beats me.
And yes, you WILL get the occasional idiot who says "you have a site that I wanted to look at, but I use *insert stupid browser/software of choice here* and I couldn't access your site. So YOU need FIX IT!" Which is crap, bunk, slime, whalecrap on the bottom of the ocean....
As far as purely personal sites go, YOU OWE NO ONE IN THIS WORLD ANYTHING. If you're trying to make a living off sites, you owe everyone who may buy what you're selling the ability to access. If you have a gov't site, and you do NOT provide access, you're screwed. If you have people from various idiot states (heh - I'm NOT GOING THERE!) accessing your site, you MAY be screwed, depending on how broke their state gov't is this year, and how much it thinks it can get out of you.... balanced against how much they have to pay legals to get it....
Jaundiced viewpoint? Yup. I live in the west of the US....
My opinion? My website, my rules. Don't like them? Move on...
I suspect that anyone who feels I have a moral obligation to them, as a site owner/operator ("webmaster" doesn't feel like the right term here), probably also feels no guilt downloading the latest pop-star-of-the-moment's album via P2P, since the record labels are stinkin' rich anyway.
What about the other side of the coin? What do my visitors owe me, if anything?
I'll happily ban, and do actively bad, "lots" of visitors. Just because you're building the "next, greatest search engine," do I have an obligation to let you harvest my site to build your index? To scrape my site so you can download it to your PDA? To "let you in the door," even though I don't ship my product to your part of the world?
There is nothing immoral, unethical or illegal about deciding who is or isn't welcome into our private fiefdoms. My house, my rules. Don't like them? Move on...
That's sums it up. I had a website and I did that to a few people who kept posting stupid comments. Warned them one, twice and then blocked their IP completely. The browser hang waiting to load..
By the way, I'm currently in the Midwestern US, but thanks to the Internet, we all can interact with anyone, anywhere . . .
I think (though I am not sure) that these attitudes come from, in part, the "Information wants to be free!" crowd. (Which often means, "Information (read=music or software) should be free to me!") Oh, I won't say that's always the viewpoint, of course.
It's a very frustrating debate or conversation to have, let me tell you. To be told that webmasters are "greedy" or "immoral" when they flatly state, "My site, my rules. What I create does not belong to you, and I owe you nothing."
> Another tangental debate/discussion I've seen (and participated in) is the idea that the content that webmasters offer doesn't really totally belong to us, not really anyway, and therefore it is immoral to try to restrict access or withhold it from some viewers.
(Italics yosemite's, emphasis mine.)
The short, sweet rebuttal to that is: Copyright law says otherwise.
Anyone who would argue that it's immoral for me to limit access to something that most courts around the world would agree is legally mine to a select group of individuals (even if that group numbers in the millions) shouldn't mind if I walk off with their computer for a few days.
;-)
I've had that argument/discussion more times than I care to admit. You really don't want to know what some people think. I suspect it would make your blood pressure rise. Or maybe you already know, and your blood pressure is already spiking! ;-)
I've encountered people who think that you are "hoarding" your intellectual property if you restrict access/publication of it, or if you don't publish it at all. They think that you shouldn't have the respect of having your work left unpublished, if in fact you don't want it published. If someone can get access to it, it's fair game, and everyone should be allowed to see it. Pretty unusual point of view, I must say.
But now I'm steering this conversation more towards copyright, and oh boy. Probably don't want to do that. (I have gone down that road before and I am burned out.) Suffice it to say that there is a lot of teeth-gnashing and debate to be had about copyright, and it's a debate that comes up more and more often these days. But some people carry it way too far.
I suspect I know who that crowd is, but don't want to miss any one.
One is a pretty big "general topics" message board with a left-leaning political tilt. (I don't know if the political leanings of this board are relevant, though.) The subject has come up with regularity (I don't think I've ever started the topic). There's lot of back and forth about intellectual property and not everyone is so extreme, but apparently a few people are pretty extreme in that they think that nobody should really "own" their intellectual property. Some think that maybe a person should have copyright for a decade or two, but after that, it's in public domain. Others think that everything (even unpublished works) should be allowed to be shared immediately, as long as no profit is made off of the work. Obviously, there are a lot of varying viewpoints.
It's not too hard to find examples of people espousing this attitude on the internet. Go to a political message board and start the topic. Depending on political slant (and type of people there) you'll probably soon see what I mean. You'll also find a few interesting things by Googling keyphrases like 'copyright is wrong' or "copyright is immoral' and so forth.
Recently, I also witnessed (and participated in) a more specific debate on a Macintosh message board (about the "immorality" of blocking IPs) which also strayed towards copyright.
Apparently there are a lot of people who are feeling that copyright holders are greedy for "hoarding" our work, and that morally we are wrong. I think the attitude initially got started because of lengthy copyright extensions (I think Sonny Bono was responsible for that), and because large corporations (like Disney) have pushed to get their copyright extended for seemingly forever. While there can be discussion about these more extreme examples of extended copyright, some people now have developed a general intolerant and unsympathetic attitude towards all holders of intellectual property (including individuals like us).
I think I suspect the crowd that you're talking about too. Does the keyword "file" and "sharing" mean anything? I think these groups all overlap.
And don't even get me started on the debates I've seen about hotlinking. Even that—if you ask some people—is morally acceptable. Yow!
Amazing.
Do you think this attitude is getting worse lately (like the last 5-10 years), or have there always been a certain percentage of people who thought this way?
I confess I haven't noticed it until the last few years. But then again, 5 years ago I was living under a rock, and didn't frequent political message boards. ;-)
Along with stalkers, this is making creating anything almost more trouble than it's worth....
I know that some of the attitude is stemming from the digital age ("Information wants to be free!") and often—but not always—comes from people who do not create. (But there is a faction of creative types who also feel this way, for varying reasons.)
The most extreme position I've seen is the claim that unpublished (unpublished!) works should have no protection from being "shared." That really gets me. The work is unpublished, the creator does not consent to its publication (perhaps is strenulously against it being published), and yet some people believe that morally, it should be shared anyway? Amazing.
I don't worry overmuch about it. There's enough ELSE to worry about, y'know?
