5 ms·

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, t

by Kenji 11y ago

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things like a little tile with the coca cola writing). (EDIT: Okay, news.ycombinator.com also does it well with its inline job ads. See, I didn't even think of it as an ad, that's how nicely it's embedded.) The problem is that people used to use the internet to exchange files and information that was then locally stored on each PC. Now, you go to youtube, listen to a song, and 20 minutes later you download the entire video again if you listen to it (if you closed the tab inbetween). That stuff adds up and of course everyone is reluctant to pay that bill. The solution is going back to a decentralized download-culture like it was in the 90's. Storage space is incredibly cheap. Nobody has to pay that bill of transferring the same things over and over and over again.

zobzu 11y ago
Im not sure why people defend ads. They fear the free web would be in danger? It already isn't free if it has ads. In the end if the ads is distracting you from the content its a bad ad, and given the choice you don't want to see it. Thus the only acceptable ads, are things like product placement. You know its an ad but it doesnt cut the flow.
- staunch 11y ago
  > Im not sure why people defend ads. Nearly all the current voices in media rely on advertising for their existence. Nearly all of the most influential organizations are extremely biased.
  - zobzu 11y ago
    im not sure if they rely on it i think its just part of the money that comes in. Totally weird but sometimes I wonder if enforcing by law that you can't get more than x% profit margins else you redistribute to the govt would actually fix the whole capitalism/corporate issue. Of course this means the govt has to be controlled better - but thats an easier target than "all corporations"
- douche 11y ago
  You know, if all the websites that are the most flagrantly abusive and dependent on ad-support (the Buzzfeeds, Crackeds, HuffingtonPosts, etc) disappeared tomorrow, how much have we really lost? I can survive without another shitty slide-show of the 17 Most Ridiculous Cats Twerking, or another news article that is a summary of a summary of a Reuters, machine-learned bot-written summary of a press release about an abstract of a scientific study. Most interesting content is created for personal blogs and Wordpress and even Tumblr, by amateurs and people that are writing because they like doing it. Or it's on the pay-walled dead-tree publisher websites, like NY Times, the Atlantic, MIT Review, WSJ, etc.
  - cbhl 11y ago
    You would also lose Google, GMail, and YouTube.
    - teddyh 11y ago
      You say it like it’s a bad thing.
      - krapp 11y ago
        Youtube alone hosts a vast amount of content - everything from archival footage to MIT lectures to people's cat videos, and all of it more or less free. Just because you personally dislike Google doesn't mean the world is better off without the services it provides.
        teddyh 11y ago
        I’d prefer the Internet Archive and the many non-profit and/or academic sites which still exist to host that content. People’s own cat videos they should host themselves.
        krapp 11y ago
        That's fine, but it's reasonable that not everyone who wants to put videos online necessarily also wants to pay for the space, bandwidth and maintenance of their own server. And I don't know whether or not the Internet Archive has the budget or infrastructure to really replace Youtube at scale without resorting to monetizing the videos themselves. I agree with you in principle, because if people hosted their own content they would have more direct control over it, and decentralizing the web is usually a good thing. But in practical terms the result of that would probably be the removal of a great deal of video content from the web, or moving most of it to whatever next best option is after Youtube (probably Vimeo.)
acdha 11y ago
So … in your idealized 90s web, how does a reporter pay their mortgage? Storage space was never the expensive part even back then – it's always been the skilled humans who create things.
- Kenji 11y ago
  Back then there weren't so many worthless garbage news sites. So the reporter most likely worked for a real newspaper that printed and sold the thing.
  - jsnell 11y ago
    Those "real" newspapers only existed due to the "creepy" ads that you hate. IIRC we're talking like a third of the revenue coming from ads a decade ago. There are few newspapers in the world that would be economically viable with just subscription revenue, now or then. If advertising dies as business model, it won't be just the Buzzfeeds of the world that go with it. Of course nobody can force you to watch ads. But the people you're hurting by doing that are in fact the same people making the content you're actually viewing. Your glee about killing just the low quality content providers by blocking ads isn't justified.
  - acdha 11y ago
    As jsnell pointed out, newspapers sold tons of ads – and the reason we had so much more resource-intensive journalism back then was because you bought the entire newspaper and so the classified ads, car dealers, etc. were subsidizing the Podunk Herald-Clarion's international reporters. Further, your description of the past is either limited to a few months in 1994 or needs to include the tons of small “portal” sites which were plastered with ads and ran only content from AP and Reuters or, more likely, lower-tier networks but produced no original content except for advertorial sponsored content. The click-bait headline might have taken awhile to reach its modern form but it was invented shortly after the invention of advertising.
- arbitrage 11y ago
  That's not our problem. It's the reporter's. We are not responsible for helping businesses prop up their failing revenue streams.
petercooper 11y ago
"For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears." My company makes most of its money off of advertising, I am broadly a fan of advertising (done well) myself, and yet.. I agree with your feeling at a core, technical level. I currently don't see how it's defensible to argue that a piece of software MUST render a certain stream of data in a certain way. This is not about copyright, redistribution (we're not transforming then rebroadcasting), or ethics (to me). This is simply about having code on a machine transform an incoming stream to a visual representation, and while common standards and protocols (e.g. JPEG, HTML, CSS, HTTP) determine how to do that to get towards a desired result, I think any individual's code or computer should be free to render data as it sees fit even if that rendering is not what the creator intended. Dictating how people or machines must intrepret things is a bad idea, IMHO. Provide the source data in whatever way you want, by all means, but the end user/device must interpret them as they will.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nattaylor 11y ago
  I like choice too, but a good design can go a long way: the frontpage of a newspaper for example. It dictates that the really big headlines were the most important, the medium headlines were somewhat important and the stuff on the side was interesting but didn't warrant a full article... and people liked this.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
>For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears What a silly statement. Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio? You are visiting a site that gives you content for free in return for viewing their ads. If you don't like that contract then don't visit the site and limit your browsing to sites that adhere to your personal contract.
- acheron 11y ago
  "Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio?" Yes? Or are you saying I shouldn't be allowed to change the station during a commercial?
  - krapp 11y ago
    Viewership in tv and radio isn't measured directly, but indirectly through polls and surveys. You're counted as part of the set of potential viewers based on your age, location and whether or not you have a Nielsen box (or whatever they use nowadays.) TV stations don't actually know that you decided to turn the channel, and they don't really care, since that time has already been paid for. When you can very accurately determine how many people have seen a web ad and you know how many people haven't, that more directly affects how much value can be extracted from that advertising. In terms of the actual effect on revenue, blocking a web ad would seem to have more impact than ignoring a tv or radio ad.
    - mziel 11y ago
      I would argue that it has exactly the same impact. Your argument is a bit of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" nature. Unless the advertisers want to publicly (!) admit that they wish they could block TV content from people muting/changing the channel/walking out to make tea during commercials.
  - greenyoda 11y ago
    In addition, you can also mute the volume and/or walk out of the room during a TV commercial, and it's perfectly legal to record a TV show and fast-forward over the commercials.

by Kenji 11y ago

zobzu 11y ago

Im not sure why people defend ads. They fear the free web would be in danger? It already isn't free if it has ads. In the end if the ads is distracting you from the content its a bad ad, and given the choice you don't want to see it. Thus the only acceptable ads, are things like product placement. You know its an ad but it doesnt cut the flow.

staunch 11y ago
> Im not sure why people defend ads. Nearly all the current voices in media rely on advertising for their existence. Nearly all of the most influential organizations are extremely biased.
- zobzu 11y ago
  im not sure if they rely on it i think its just part of the money that comes in. Totally weird but sometimes I wonder if enforcing by law that you can't get more than x% profit margins else you redistribute to the govt would actually fix the whole capitalism/corporate issue. Of course this means the govt has to be controlled better - but thats an easier target than "all corporations"
douche 11y ago
You know, if all the websites that are the most flagrantly abusive and dependent on ad-support (the Buzzfeeds, Crackeds, HuffingtonPosts, etc) disappeared tomorrow, how much have we really lost? I can survive without another shitty slide-show of the 17 Most Ridiculous Cats Twerking, or another news article that is a summary of a summary of a Reuters, machine-learned bot-written summary of a press release about an abstract of a scientific study. Most interesting content is created for personal blogs and Wordpress and even Tumblr, by amateurs and people that are writing because they like doing it. Or it's on the pay-walled dead-tree publisher websites, like NY Times, the Atlantic, MIT Review, WSJ, etc.
- cbhl 11y ago
  You would also lose Google, GMail, and YouTube.
  - teddyh 11y ago
    You say it like it’s a bad thing.
    - krapp 11y ago
      Youtube alone hosts a vast amount of content - everything from archival footage to MIT lectures to people's cat videos, and all of it more or less free. Just because you personally dislike Google doesn't mean the world is better off without the services it provides.
      - teddyh 11y ago
        I’d prefer the Internet Archive and the many non-profit and/or academic sites which still exist to host that content. People’s own cat videos they should host themselves.
        krapp 11y ago
        That's fine, but it's reasonable that not everyone who wants to put videos online necessarily also wants to pay for the space, bandwidth and maintenance of their own server. And I don't know whether or not the Internet Archive has the budget or infrastructure to really replace Youtube at scale without resorting to monetizing the videos themselves. I agree with you in principle, because if people hosted their own content they would have more direct control over it, and decentralizing the web is usually a good thing. But in practical terms the result of that would probably be the removal of a great deal of video content from the web, or moving most of it to whatever next best option is after Youtube (probably Vimeo.)

acdha 11y ago

So … in your idealized 90s web, how does a reporter pay their mortgage? Storage space was never the expensive part even back then – it's always been the skilled humans who create things.

Kenji 11y ago
Back then there weren't so many worthless garbage news sites. So the reporter most likely worked for a real newspaper that printed and sold the thing.
- jsnell 11y ago
  Those "real" newspapers only existed due to the "creepy" ads that you hate. IIRC we're talking like a third of the revenue coming from ads a decade ago. There are few newspapers in the world that would be economically viable with just subscription revenue, now or then. If advertising dies as business model, it won't be just the Buzzfeeds of the world that go with it. Of course nobody can force you to watch ads. But the people you're hurting by doing that are in fact the same people making the content you're actually viewing. Your glee about killing just the low quality content providers by blocking ads isn't justified.
- acdha 11y ago
  As jsnell pointed out, newspapers sold tons of ads – and the reason we had so much more resource-intensive journalism back then was because you bought the entire newspaper and so the classified ads, car dealers, etc. were subsidizing the Podunk Herald-Clarion's international reporters. Further, your description of the past is either limited to a few months in 1994 or needs to include the tons of small “portal” sites which were plastered with ads and ran only content from AP and Reuters or, more likely, lower-tier networks but produced no original content except for advertorial sponsored content. The click-bait headline might have taken awhile to reach its modern form but it was invented shortly after the invention of advertising.
arbitrage 11y ago
That's not our problem. It's the reporter's. We are not responsible for helping businesses prop up their failing revenue streams.

petercooper 11y ago

"For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears." My company makes most of its money off of advertising, I am broadly a fan of advertising (done well) myself, and yet.. I agree with your feeling at a core, technical level. I currently don't see how it's defensible to argue that a piece of software MUST render a certain stream of data in a certain way. This is not about copyright, redistribution (we're not transforming then rebroadcasting), or ethics (to me). This is simply about having code on a machine transform an incoming stream to a visual representation, and while common standards and protocols (e.g. JPEG, HTML, CSS, HTTP) determine how to do that to get towards a desired result, I think any individual's code or computer should be free to render data as it sees fit even if that rendering is not what the creator intended. Dictating how people or machines must intrepret things is a bad idea, IMHO. Provide the source data in whatever way you want, by all means, but the end user/device must interpret them as they will.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nattaylor 11y ago
I like choice too, but a good design can go a long way: the frontpage of a newspaper for example. It dictates that the really big headlines were the most important, the medium headlines were somewhat important and the stuff on the side was interesting but didn't warrant a full article... and people liked this.

bitmapbrother 11y ago

>For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears What a silly statement. Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio? You are visiting a site that gives you content for free in return for viewing their ads. If you don't like that contract then don't visit the site and limit your browsing to sites that adhere to your personal contract.

acheron 11y ago
"Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio?" Yes? Or are you saying I shouldn't be allowed to change the station during a commercial?
- krapp 11y ago
  Viewership in tv and radio isn't measured directly, but indirectly through polls and surveys. You're counted as part of the set of potential viewers based on your age, location and whether or not you have a Nielsen box (or whatever they use nowadays.) TV stations don't actually know that you decided to turn the channel, and they don't really care, since that time has already been paid for. When you can very accurately determine how many people have seen a web ad and you know how many people haven't, that more directly affects how much value can be extracted from that advertising. In terms of the actual effect on revenue, blocking a web ad would seem to have more impact than ignoring a tv or radio ad.
  - mziel 11y ago
    I would argue that it has exactly the same impact. Your argument is a bit of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" nature. Unless the advertisers want to publicly (!) admit that they wish they could block TV content from people muting/changing the channel/walking out to make tea during commercials.
- greenyoda 11y ago
  In addition, you can also mute the volume and/or walk out of the room during a TV commercial, and it's perfectly legal to record a TV show and fast-forward over the commercials.