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> And now you're saying that not only should the site operators make their content freely available and accept that some visitors will circumvent possibly the o

> And now you're saying that not only should the site operators make their content freely available and accept that some visitors will circumvent possibly the only way they have of generating revenue, those operators should also be actively responsible for vetting any third party content they incorporate within their site in case the third party is hostile No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's unethical to have ads with malware on your site. I didn't propose a way not to have malware on your site. The way you propose, by vetting ads, has been used successfully, but it's not a particularly imaginative solution. What about donations, freemium, PWYW, subscriptions, grants? Or what about giving your work away for free and using that reputation to get jobs? > Making Joe Blogger responsible if some massive service's CDN version of jQuery got hacked doesn't seem like a good way to encourage Joe Blogger to spend their time sharing their writing with the rest of the world. It's utterly ridiculous to claim this is about Joe Blogger. Joe Blogger is quite often happy to do his blogging as a labor of love and let blogspot/livejournal/whatever reap all the ad revenue. And small-time bloggers who do make money are frequently more sensitive to their readers' complaints and explore alternatives to big add networks that serve ads. The problem is big content providers who are under shareholder pressure to produce growth each quarter, so they try to squeeze out every bit of ad revenue with no concern for users. They're also too risk averse to try alternative monetization strategies to ads. It is well within the capability of those players to provide ads without malware, but they don't because it doesn't hurt their bottom line enough. Serving up malware to your users and readers is unethical. I'm all for supporting content providers; I donate to NPR and to artists on Patreon frequently. But if you can't run your business ethically, then you should shut down your business. If you really think serving up malware to finance content is okay, then why don't you propose that content creators just hack some small percentage of their users and sell the data online? The effect on users is the same, but it cuts out the middlemen so it's more efficient.

Silhouette 10y ago
The way you propose, by vetting ads, has been used successfully For businesses running large enough sites to operate their own scheme, sure. Facebook ads are pretty safe, for example. Unfortunately, this isn't a realistic option for smaller sites, and neither are any of the other things you mentioned in most cases. Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. That's why ad-funded web sites are still so common! I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere useful. You're objecting to a behaviour that is widely useful -- incorporating content served by third parties as part of a site -- on the basis that site operators with little if any revenue aren't operating to an impossibly high standard of safety checking at their own expense to prevent a small risk of third party malware being served by their site without their knowledge or consent. Furthermore, you have offered no plausible better alternatives for most of those site operators. In a world complying with your rules, most of the modern web doesn't exist, because no-one would "ethically" be allowed to contribute to it without falling short of your standards.
- devishard 10y ago
  > Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. 1. Most businesses fail, period. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove they failed because they doesn't have ads. 2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers. > In a world complying with your rules, most of the modern web doesn't exist, because no-one would "ethically" be allowed to contribute to it without falling short of your standards. This is true, but I'm not sure why you see this as a bad thing. Most of the modern web is noise that makes it harder to find signals I care about. Sites that get their money from me are more likely to give me content I want than sites that get their money from ads and malware.
  - Silhouette 10y ago
    1. Most businesses fail, period. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove they failed because they doesn't have ads. Well, if a business used to make enough revenue to turn a profit through ads, and then you take that revenue away and it fails, it seems likely that the failure was caused by the loss of ads combined with the lack of any alternative revenue stream(s) to replace them. Occam's razor and all that. 2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers. From direct personal experience, getting a site to the point where someone is willing to pay real money for access -- even if you have lots of original content that gets very favourable comments and a lot of interest -- is hard. If you're running a huge brand whose site people really do visit often -- a good quality news site, say, or perhaps a service like Netflix or Spotify -- then sure, someone might consider it worth paying a few dollars a month to subscribe. If you're running a smaller niche site that someone might find very useful but only visit occasionally, unfortunately it is a different game entirely. Just to be absolutely clear, so you don't think I'm ignoring any of your alternatives: Donations: Known to generate negligible revenue in most cases. Freemium: Possible in some cases, but only if there is something useful to upsell to. PWYW: See Donations. Subscriptions: Possible in some cases, but only if the site is big enough and/or updated often enough to attract regular visitors. Grant: From where, exactly? Sites that get their money from me are more likely to give me content I want than sites that get their money from ads and malware. Really? I find sites that show up for the search terms I'm using and hold my attention for more than 5 seconds when I click through are often very useful. However, I'm not going to subscribe to every one of the 150+ sites that my browser history tells me I visited today while researching something, or even the 10-20 of them that actually did have very useful information. Nor am I realistically going to go through the hassle of making a card payment or using some donation service I've never heard of and don't necessarily trust just to give each site some fraction of a dollar, even if I considered the material they'd given me on that occasion to be worth it. I would happily donate to such sites if an immediate and non-intrusive method for handling the micropayments existed, but sadly we haven't solved that problem yet. Until we do, I don't begrudge sites that are ad-funded, nor do I think they owe me anything if they block me because I then block those ads. So as I wrote before, I don't think this discussion is going anywhere useful. You still haven't suggested any viable alternatives for many sites that are currently ad-funded, and you still seem to think all the responsibility for safety on the Internet belongs to the only people actually contributing anything in your scenario, i.e., the people running the sites.

Silhouette 10y ago

The way you propose, by vetting ads, has been used successfully For businesses running large enough sites to operate their own scheme, sure. Facebook ads are pretty safe, for example. Unfortunately, this isn't a realistic option for smaller sites, and neither are any of the other things you mentioned in most cases. Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. That's why ad-funded web sites are still so common! I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere useful. You're objecting to a behaviour that is widely useful -- incorporating content served by third parties as part of a site -- on the basis that site operators with little if any revenue aren't operating to an impossibly high standard of safety checking at their own expense to prevent a small risk of third party malware being served by their site without their knowledge or consent. Furthermore, you have offered no plausible better alternatives for most of those site operators. In a world complying with your rules, most of the modern web doesn't exist, because no-one would "ethically" be allowed to contribute to it without falling short of your standards.

devishard 10y ago
> Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. 1. Most businesses fail, period. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove they failed because they doesn't have ads. 2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers. > In a world complying with your rules, most of the modern web doesn't exist, because no-one would "ethically" be allowed to contribute to it without falling short of your standards. This is true, but I'm not sure why you see this as a bad thing. Most of the modern web is noise that makes it harder to find signals I care about. Sites that get their money from me are more likely to give me content I want than sites that get their money from ads and malware.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  1. Most businesses fail, period. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove they failed because they doesn't have ads. Well, if a business used to make enough revenue to turn a profit through ads, and then you take that revenue away and it fails, it seems likely that the failure was caused by the loss of ads combined with the lack of any alternative revenue stream(s) to replace them. Occam's razor and all that. 2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers. From direct personal experience, getting a site to the point where someone is willing to pay real money for access -- even if you have lots of original content that gets very favourable comments and a lot of interest -- is hard. If you're running a huge brand whose site people really do visit often -- a good quality news site, say, or perhaps a service like Netflix or Spotify -- then sure, someone might consider it worth paying a few dollars a month to subscribe. If you're running a smaller niche site that someone might find very useful but only visit occasionally, unfortunately it is a different game entirely. Just to be absolutely clear, so you don't think I'm ignoring any of your alternatives: Donations: Known to generate negligible revenue in most cases. Freemium: Possible in some cases, but only if there is something useful to upsell to. PWYW: See Donations. Subscriptions: Possible in some cases, but only if the site is big enough and/or updated often enough to attract regular visitors. Grant: From where, exactly? Sites that get their money from me are more likely to give me content I want than sites that get their money from ads and malware. Really? I find sites that show up for the search terms I'm using and hold my attention for more than 5 seconds when I click through are often very useful. However, I'm not going to subscribe to every one of the 150+ sites that my browser history tells me I visited today while researching something, or even the 10-20 of them that actually did have very useful information. Nor am I realistically going to go through the hassle of making a card payment or using some donation service I've never heard of and don't necessarily trust just to give each site some fraction of a dollar, even if I considered the material they'd given me on that occasion to be worth it. I would happily donate to such sites if an immediate and non-intrusive method for handling the micropayments existed, but sadly we haven't solved that problem yet. Until we do, I don't begrudge sites that are ad-funded, nor do I think they owe me anything if they block me because I then block those ads. So as I wrote before, I don't think this discussion is going anywhere useful. You still haven't suggested any viable alternatives for many sites that are currently ad-funded, and you still seem to think all the responsibility for safety on the Internet belongs to the only people actually contributing anything in your scenario, i.e., the people running the sites.