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Wait, I'm really confused. They took this quote: "A big part of the web is paid by ads. Lots of websites rely on (non-invasive) ads to sustain themselves and pr

Wait, I'm really confused. They took this quote: "A big part of the web is paid by ads. Lots of websites rely on (non-invasive) ads to sustain themselves and provide content to anyone for free." and literally only addressed the "non-invasive" part. 1. Obviously other people out there don't agree that all advertising is "invasive", and their assertion otherwise is nothing but semantics. 2. More importantly, the core part of the statement is that "A big part of the web is paid by ads." and they seem to have completely ignored this fundamental issue. But instead they just transition from painting advertising as some malicious evil into various ad blockers. So what is the solution they are proposing? Most of the internet is paid for by ads. Are people going to switch to a paid version of Facebook? Twitter? Is everyone expected to get Youtube Red? And are we only supposed to look at the few news sources that we can justify the subscription cost for? All they are advocating is to just piggy-back off of the people that are willing (or unaware of the alternatives) to deal with ads while blocking it for yourself. This is not a solution, this is just taking advantage of a technical loophole in advertising in order to make your own experience better. How exactly do they envision an Internet without advertising?

GavinMcG 10y ago
> their assertion otherwise is nothing but semantics Given that what counts as "invasive" is a semantic question, I'm not what you're trying to say here. You seem to be using this as a dismissal, without any justification. They didn't ignore the fact that the web is paid for by ads. They stated that they expect other models would come about, and that in any case, ads aren't an acceptable price to pay.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  >They stated that they expect other models would come about, and that in any case, ads aren't an acceptable price to pay Totally reasonable. But the fact that they don't seem capable of even beginning to suggest alternatives makes what they are saying completely useless. It would be like saying "we need to solve global warming, so we need to end all coal mining and oil drilling". Ok... but you can't just do that. You have to have alternatives and a plan to transition a society utterly dependent on fossil fuels onto something else. We do have some answers to those questions, and any useful attempt to address climate change will go over that. This is just saying "turn off the pumps, and it will work itself out" without even attempting to explain what is supposed to come next. It is pure whining, not anything more.
  - GavinMcG 10y ago
    Or, it's saying "turn off the pumps, and if it doesn't work itself out, that'll be okay."
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  And I was using this as a dismissal because the only part of the statement that they actually addressed was the unimportant semantic part. Not the core issue that was being raised. The quote would be just as valid without the parenthetical "(non-invasive)" and if it wasn't there, how would they respond? What they did is sort of like correcting a grammar mistake that their interlocutor made, but ignoring the actual argument. It is a sham deflection, not a response. Their argument holds no water until the issue is addressed.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    I interpret the parenthetical as meaning the feedback they received sometimes contained the "non invasive" precision and other times it didn't and they're addressing both at once. So my guess they would respond the same and you already their response. To be brutally honest it is your point that I don't understand. What is the core issue being raised that wasn't addressed and why would it matter so much that it invalidate the whole thing.
  - GavinMcG 10y ago
    I disagree. The entire point of the post is that it challenges a background assumption that most people don't even realize they're making. You might find the question of business models to be more of interest, but if the feedback they need to respond to shows a lack of awareness that an invasion is even taking place, they need to establish that fact before anything else about the issue could be fruitfully discussed!
jonahrd 10y ago
The way the author addresses number 2 is by claiming that businesses need to focus on a different way of earning money than just clicks and page views. It's a sort of view that the web is already too inflated with unrealistic expectations of what's valuable, and I somewhat agree. Maybe when you start a company, focus on how to make a product instead of how to gather attention.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  >businesses need to focus on a different way of earning money than just clicks and page views. This is a complete non-answer. Where is Facebook supposed to get its revenue stream? It is monstrously expensive to maintain. >Maybe when you start a company, focus on how to make a product instead of how to gather attention. What kind of condescending crap is this? Getting attention is literally how they make money. It is their product. What product are they supposed to be focusing on to make money if not advertising?
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    Facebook or any other website for that matter are supposed to get any revenue, the web was thought and designed to be non commercial. It is monstrously expensive by design, a deliberate choice as it chose to be a central intermediary point between as much people as possible to sell ads to make money. "your failed business model is not my problem". Make the service based on p2p and the monstrously expensive maintenance bill is gone (along with the opportunity of being an intermediary and making piles of money with ads out of it) Facebook makes no product, user provided data is their product and they sell it to advertisers. You got it right: facebook would disappear with advertising and exists only for the sole purpose of advertising.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    > [Facebook] is monstrously expensive to maintain. It would be interesting to find out how much of this operational cost and complexity could be removed if they didn't depend on collecting as much data about users as possible for the purpose of targeted ads.
interpol_p 10y ago
Isn't non-invasive advertising just non-functional advertising? As soon as advertising is noticed it has distracted from the content. The solution they seem to propose is: block ads and see what happens. I don't think one must propose a specific solution in order to advocate ad-blocking. Regarding piggy-backing they seem to be trying to spread the word to everyone to do the same as they do. I think they want to see advertising go away, and piggy-backing off people who are unaware of ad-blocking is not going to lead to that end result. Personally I block ads and have no solution or alternative for them. I even dislike billboards and physical ads in my town. They make the place ugly.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  >Regarding piggy-backing they seem to be trying to spread the word to everyone to do the same as they do. I think they want to see advertising go away, and piggy-backing off people who are unaware of ad-blocking is not going to lead to that end result. So how do they expect the Internet to exist afterwards?
  - interpol_p 10y ago
    They don't know. They just don't want ads to exist on whatever the Internet looks like in the future. I believe that if you eliminated ads the Internet would be better for it. Advertising is just so backwards and nonsensical. It is analogous to screaming for attention in an overcrowded market. To think that our future Internet is stuck with this is a depressing thought. Personally I'm okay with the following forms of advertising and would like to see them more widely adopted: Podcast-style ads: getting the narrators and writers of a podcast to promote your product in an amusing way consistent with the theme of their show and in a way the user can skip if desired. (Same applies to YouTube video creators advertising within their show.) Affiliate links: sites like The Wirecutter doing all the research and leg-work on a product category to find the best. Then making money through affiliate links to those products. Small ads that have been vetted by the writer of the article / website are okay too. If I enjoy reading an author's content, and that author has personally approved a product ad on their site because they like it or think it would be good for their readers, then I'm okay with that. Basically, any advertising that is explicitly acknowledged and approved of by the content creators is okay with me. It means they know what their readers will see, they know whether the products are good, and if they start recommending shitty products then they are putting their own reputation on the line.
imagist 10y ago
I think a good alternative to ad driven sites like Facebook and Twitter would be to not have those sites. The parts of the Internet which are paid for by ads have a net negative impact on humanity.
bigbugbag 10y ago
1. Obviously some people don't agree with fact or scientific truth, to each his/her opinion but it seems to me advertising is invasive by definition. 2. "your failed business model is not my problem" seems right. Could it be that most of the web is using an ad based revenue model because the guys who sell ads also happen to run the most popular web services at no monetary cost for the user and it's hard making a revenue while competing with gratis. The expected solution to this conundrums would be to stop doing the internet wrong (centralizing everything) and start doing right (p2p, self-hosting, federated). The day may come when we have an affordable appliance you just plug in your network which will allow this.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > Obviously some people don't agree with fact or scientific truth, to each his/her opinion but it seems to me advertising is invasive by definition. I would have liked your comment more if you wouldn't passive-agressively dismissed the people who disagree with you as anti-science and anti-fact. For a sufficiently rigorous definition of "invasive", I (like you) find it pretty obvious that ads are invasive by nature, but the disagreement is whether or not the invasive nature of ads is a bad thing. (I'm torn on this, but it doesn't matter. I have plenty of other reasons to dislike ads.)
krapp 10y ago
The thing is, advertisers need the web - it's rendered nearly all prior advertising and media paradigms obsolete, or at the very least, less cost effective. But the web doesn't need advertising. So the solution is simple - businesses advertising online that fail to convince users to opt in to paying for their content somehow will lose revenue and die. The free market at work. >Are people going to switch to a paid version of Facebook? Twitter? Maybe, maybe not. The web will survive without both, however. But I suspect that enough people would be willing to pay for Facebook, at least, to make it viable. Not viable at its current scale, perhaps, but something is better than nothing. >Is everyone expected to get Youtube Red? I honestly believe the answer is yes, eventually, everyone will be expected to get Youtube Red, because paid, licensed content makes more sense for Google than the morass of illegal and non revenue generating fare that is currently the bulk of Youtube content. >And are we only supposed to look at the few news sources that we can justify the subscription cost for? That actually sounds like a good idea, given the quality of most news sources. They should have to work harder to earn their bread.
cam_l 10y ago
"A big part of the web is paid by ads." But is it the good part?

GavinMcG 10y ago

> their assertion otherwise is nothing but semantics Given that what counts as "invasive" is a semantic question, I'm not what you're trying to say here. You seem to be using this as a dismissal, without any justification. They didn't ignore the fact that the web is paid for by ads. They stated that they expect other models would come about, and that in any case, ads aren't an acceptable price to pay.

BookmarkSaver 10y ago
>They stated that they expect other models would come about, and that in any case, ads aren't an acceptable price to pay Totally reasonable. But the fact that they don't seem capable of even beginning to suggest alternatives makes what they are saying completely useless. It would be like saying "we need to solve global warming, so we need to end all coal mining and oil drilling". Ok... but you can't just do that. You have to have alternatives and a plan to transition a society utterly dependent on fossil fuels onto something else. We do have some answers to those questions, and any useful attempt to address climate change will go over that. This is just saying "turn off the pumps, and it will work itself out" without even attempting to explain what is supposed to come next. It is pure whining, not anything more.
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  Or, it's saying "turn off the pumps, and if it doesn't work itself out, that'll be okay."
BookmarkSaver 10y ago
And I was using this as a dismissal because the only part of the statement that they actually addressed was the unimportant semantic part. Not the core issue that was being raised. The quote would be just as valid without the parenthetical "(non-invasive)" and if it wasn't there, how would they respond? What they did is sort of like correcting a grammar mistake that their interlocutor made, but ignoring the actual argument. It is a sham deflection, not a response. Their argument holds no water until the issue is addressed.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  I interpret the parenthetical as meaning the feedback they received sometimes contained the "non invasive" precision and other times it didn't and they're addressing both at once. So my guess they would respond the same and you already their response. To be brutally honest it is your point that I don't understand. What is the core issue being raised that wasn't addressed and why would it matter so much that it invalidate the whole thing.
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  I disagree. The entire point of the post is that it challenges a background assumption that most people don't even realize they're making. You might find the question of business models to be more of interest, but if the feedback they need to respond to shows a lack of awareness that an invasion is even taking place, they need to establish that fact before anything else about the issue could be fruitfully discussed!

jonahrd 10y ago

The way the author addresses number 2 is by claiming that businesses need to focus on a different way of earning money than just clicks and page views. It's a sort of view that the web is already too inflated with unrealistic expectations of what's valuable, and I somewhat agree. Maybe when you start a company, focus on how to make a product instead of how to gather attention.

BookmarkSaver 10y ago
>businesses need to focus on a different way of earning money than just clicks and page views. This is a complete non-answer. Where is Facebook supposed to get its revenue stream? It is monstrously expensive to maintain. >Maybe when you start a company, focus on how to make a product instead of how to gather attention. What kind of condescending crap is this? Getting attention is literally how they make money. It is their product. What product are they supposed to be focusing on to make money if not advertising?
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Facebook or any other website for that matter are supposed to get any revenue, the web was thought and designed to be non commercial. It is monstrously expensive by design, a deliberate choice as it chose to be a central intermediary point between as much people as possible to sell ads to make money. "your failed business model is not my problem". Make the service based on p2p and the monstrously expensive maintenance bill is gone (along with the opportunity of being an intermediary and making piles of money with ads out of it) Facebook makes no product, user provided data is their product and they sell it to advertisers. You got it right: facebook would disappear with advertising and exists only for the sole purpose of advertising.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > [Facebook] is monstrously expensive to maintain. It would be interesting to find out how much of this operational cost and complexity could be removed if they didn't depend on collecting as much data about users as possible for the purpose of targeted ads.

interpol_p 10y ago

Isn't non-invasive advertising just non-functional advertising? As soon as advertising is noticed it has distracted from the content. The solution they seem to propose is: block ads and see what happens. I don't think one must propose a specific solution in order to advocate ad-blocking. Regarding piggy-backing they seem to be trying to spread the word to everyone to do the same as they do. I think they want to see advertising go away, and piggy-backing off people who are unaware of ad-blocking is not going to lead to that end result. Personally I block ads and have no solution or alternative for them. I even dislike billboards and physical ads in my town. They make the place ugly.

BookmarkSaver 10y ago
>Regarding piggy-backing they seem to be trying to spread the word to everyone to do the same as they do. I think they want to see advertising go away, and piggy-backing off people who are unaware of ad-blocking is not going to lead to that end result. So how do they expect the Internet to exist afterwards?
- interpol_p 10y ago
  They don't know. They just don't want ads to exist on whatever the Internet looks like in the future. I believe that if you eliminated ads the Internet would be better for it. Advertising is just so backwards and nonsensical. It is analogous to screaming for attention in an overcrowded market. To think that our future Internet is stuck with this is a depressing thought. Personally I'm okay with the following forms of advertising and would like to see them more widely adopted: Podcast-style ads: getting the narrators and writers of a podcast to promote your product in an amusing way consistent with the theme of their show and in a way the user can skip if desired. (Same applies to YouTube video creators advertising within their show.) Affiliate links: sites like The Wirecutter doing all the research and leg-work on a product category to find the best. Then making money through affiliate links to those products. Small ads that have been vetted by the writer of the article / website are okay too. If I enjoy reading an author's content, and that author has personally approved a product ad on their site because they like it or think it would be good for their readers, then I'm okay with that. Basically, any advertising that is explicitly acknowledged and approved of by the content creators is okay with me. It means they know what their readers will see, they know whether the products are good, and if they start recommending shitty products then they are putting their own reputation on the line.

imagist 10y ago

I think a good alternative to ad driven sites like Facebook and Twitter would be to not have those sites. The parts of the Internet which are paid for by ads have a net negative impact on humanity.

bigbugbag 10y ago

1. Obviously some people don't agree with fact or scientific truth, to each his/her opinion but it seems to me advertising is invasive by definition. 2. "your failed business model is not my problem" seems right. Could it be that most of the web is using an ad based revenue model because the guys who sell ads also happen to run the most popular web services at no monetary cost for the user and it's hard making a revenue while competing with gratis. The expected solution to this conundrums would be to stop doing the internet wrong (centralizing everything) and start doing right (p2p, self-hosting, federated). The day may come when we have an affordable appliance you just plug in your network which will allow this.

majewsky 10y ago
> Obviously some people don't agree with fact or scientific truth, to each his/her opinion but it seems to me advertising is invasive by definition. I would have liked your comment more if you wouldn't passive-agressively dismissed the people who disagree with you as anti-science and anti-fact. For a sufficiently rigorous definition of "invasive", I (like you) find it pretty obvious that ads are invasive by nature, but the disagreement is whether or not the invasive nature of ads is a bad thing. (I'm torn on this, but it doesn't matter. I have plenty of other reasons to dislike ads.)

krapp 10y ago

The thing is, advertisers need the web - it's rendered nearly all prior advertising and media paradigms obsolete, or at the very least, less cost effective. But the web doesn't need advertising. So the solution is simple - businesses advertising online that fail to convince users to opt in to paying for their content somehow will lose revenue and die. The free market at work. >Are people going to switch to a paid version of Facebook? Twitter? Maybe, maybe not. The web will survive without both, however. But I suspect that enough people would be willing to pay for Facebook, at least, to make it viable. Not viable at its current scale, perhaps, but something is better than nothing. >Is everyone expected to get Youtube Red? I honestly believe the answer is yes, eventually, everyone will be expected to get Youtube Red, because paid, licensed content makes more sense for Google than the morass of illegal and non revenue generating fare that is currently the bulk of Youtube content. >And are we only supposed to look at the few news sources that we can justify the subscription cost for? That actually sounds like a good idea, given the quality of most news sources. They should have to work harder to earn their bread.

cam_l 10y ago

"A big part of the web is paid by ads." But is it the good part?