4 ms·

Your personal pages don't need millions of dollars just to survive like Mozilla does

madez 9y ago
So, they are not part of the web or are they? A lot of pages on the web work by providing porn. Is porn the business model of the web? This is just ridiculous. There are many projects that need money to survive and don't sell their users. Mozillas need for money does not excuse in the slightest their choices, or is machiavellianism all the sudden accepted? I mean, your comment says that if you need millions to sustain your sites you are free to act shadey. Sorry, but no, that wouldn't make it okay. In the case of Mozilla it would just show their hypocritical inconsistency.
- owaislone 9y ago
  Yes, it is accepted. What is so wrong about advertising? Why is it bad that someone making a product wants to market it? There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem is how the ad-tech industry deals with advertising. There is no regard for privacy and no control for the consumers. It's become a shady practice because of lack of privacy, transparency and lack of regard for the end user. Mozilla is clearly saying these things are important to them and will be central to their mission so what's the problem here? It's not like they'll inject ads from Google or Facebook. Instead of dissing at their attempts to make themselves self-sustainable, we should be supporting them by giving them a chance. May be they'll do ads right, may be they'll fail but one thing I'm sure of is that if they fail to make it work without compromising the user, they'll just give it up. Mozilla is our biggest if not the only hope of an open and healthy web. I don't mind supporting them by seeing a couple of ads every now and then as long as I'm in control and they respect my privacy.
  - msla 9y ago
    > What is so wrong about advertising? It inherently shades into malware. First, all advertising platforms are malware distribution platforms, because the people who run ad platforms have every incentive to push through all the ads submitted to them and negative incentive to stop the ones which are malware. Nobody in the ad industry wants people to talk about this, but as long as the malware authors are using them to distribute malware, they can't pretend it never happens and they shouldn't be allowed to ignore people who say it does. Second, advertising requires data to be effective, which leads to tracking, which is, itself, a form of malware.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    Advertising is psychological warfare. It aims to change and shape the future behaviour of its targets by feeding them specifically-designed messages.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    I have no idea what sources you consider trustworthy so I won't blindly link them, but search "your brain on ads" and you'll get lots of results talking about how ad exposure affects people. But you don't necessarily need the brain scans to see that advertising preys on human psychology and emotional weakness, because of how effective those kinds of ads are. If advertising was just "Here's my product. Here's what it can do. Here's why you might want it." I don't think we would have gotten to where we are now -- where advertising is basically just a mix of exposure therapy and negging.
- danso 9y ago
  How many of those porn pages have no advertising?
- 51Cards 9y ago
  Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!" For a couple hundred years the newspaper functioned as the prime media distribution system and generated revenue off of advertisements. Now that we've shifted that over to electronic means I find it almost humourous how advertising and partnering is suddenly considered evil. Like staff and servers are magically free because journalists and printing presses must have been in the 1920's. Like it or not, unless you're charging a subscription, the only viable model for the Internet at scale so far is finding someone who will pay to piggy-back on your service.
  - Teckla 9y ago
    Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!" Because newspaper ads didn't track us, didn't bounce and shake, and didn't execute malware on our computers.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? Because newspaper ads weren't audio-video presentations that jumped over the text you were trying to read and prevented you from reading it, among numerous other differences between modern web ads and classic print ads.

So, they are not part of the web or are they? A lot of pages on the web work by providing porn. Is porn the business model of the web? This is just ridiculous. There are many projects that need money to survive and don't sell their users. Mozillas need for money does not excuse in the slightest their choices, or is machiavellianism all the sudden accepted? I mean, your comment says that if you need millions to sustain your sites you are free to act shadey. Sorry, but no, that wouldn't make it okay. In the case of Mozilla it would just show their hypocritical inconsistency.

owaislone 9y ago
Yes, it is accepted. What is so wrong about advertising? Why is it bad that someone making a product wants to market it? There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem is how the ad-tech industry deals with advertising. There is no regard for privacy and no control for the consumers. It's become a shady practice because of lack of privacy, transparency and lack of regard for the end user. Mozilla is clearly saying these things are important to them and will be central to their mission so what's the problem here? It's not like they'll inject ads from Google or Facebook. Instead of dissing at their attempts to make themselves self-sustainable, we should be supporting them by giving them a chance. May be they'll do ads right, may be they'll fail but one thing I'm sure of is that if they fail to make it work without compromising the user, they'll just give it up. Mozilla is our biggest if not the only hope of an open and healthy web. I don't mind supporting them by seeing a couple of ads every now and then as long as I'm in control and they respect my privacy.
- msla 9y ago
  > What is so wrong about advertising? It inherently shades into malware. First, all advertising platforms are malware distribution platforms, because the people who run ad platforms have every incentive to push through all the ads submitted to them and negative incentive to stop the ones which are malware. Nobody in the ad industry wants people to talk about this, but as long as the malware authors are using them to distribute malware, they can't pretend it never happens and they shouldn't be allowed to ignore people who say it does. Second, advertising requires data to be effective, which leads to tracking, which is, itself, a form of malware.
- dingaling 9y ago
  Advertising is psychological warfare. It aims to change and shape the future behaviour of its targets by feeding them specifically-designed messages.
- Spivak 9y ago
  I have no idea what sources you consider trustworthy so I won't blindly link them, but search "your brain on ads" and you'll get lots of results talking about how ad exposure affects people. But you don't necessarily need the brain scans to see that advertising preys on human psychology and emotional weakness, because of how effective those kinds of ads are. If advertising was just "Here's my product. Here's what it can do. Here's why you might want it." I don't think we would have gotten to where we are now -- where advertising is basically just a mix of exposure therapy and negging.
danso 9y ago
How many of those porn pages have no advertising?
51Cards 9y ago
Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!" For a couple hundred years the newspaper functioned as the prime media distribution system and generated revenue off of advertisements. Now that we've shifted that over to electronic means I find it almost humourous how advertising and partnering is suddenly considered evil. Like staff and servers are magically free because journalists and printing presses must have been in the 1920's. Like it or not, unless you're charging a subscription, the only viable model for the Internet at scale so far is finding someone who will pay to piggy-back on your service.
- Teckla 9y ago
  Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!" Because newspaper ads didn't track us, didn't bounce and shake, and didn't execute malware on our computers.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? Because newspaper ads weren't audio-video presentations that jumped over the text you were trying to read and prevented you from reading it, among numerous other differences between modern web ads and classic print ads.