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You know, if all the websites that are the most flagrantly abusive and dependent on ad-support (the Buzzfeeds, Crackeds, HuffingtonPosts, etc) disappeared tomor

by 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.)
- douche 11y ago
  I've never been unduly bothered by ads directly on Google's properties. Text search ads are almost quaint today.
- wpietri 11y ago
  GMail is already a product people can and do pay for. That would surely be fine. Google is in a different category for me as far as ads go. When people are actively searching for something, offering them things they are searching for is working with their interests. Most advertising, though, is distraction from whatever the user is up to, so it's working against their interests. YouTube might have a problem. People might, god forbid, actually have to pay to host stuff. I suspect we'd survive.

by douche 11y ago

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.)
douche 11y ago
I've never been unduly bothered by ads directly on Google's properties. Text search ads are almost quaint today.
wpietri 11y ago
GMail is already a product people can and do pay for. That would surely be fine. Google is in a different category for me as far as ads go. When people are actively searching for something, offering them things they are searching for is working with their interests. Most advertising, though, is distraction from whatever the user is up to, so it's working against their interests. YouTube might have a problem. People might, god forbid, actually have to pay to host stuff. I suspect we'd survive.