6 ms·

Counterpoint: How much innovation has been incentivized due to so many internet services being free while being subsidized by ads. It's definitely a nuisance,

Counterpoint: How much innovation has been incentivized due to so many internet services being free while being subsidized by ads. It's definitely a nuisance, and left unchecked can become a Black Mirror or Maniac-esque nightmare. But in it's current format it still feels like a worthwhile exchange.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
I don’t know. It would be difficult to quantify. But, personally, I don’t think, for example, the web has improved much in the Web 2.0 era. It might be worse.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think so too. MySpace and Friendster already connected people and since the first version I don't think Gmail has improved much. Most current changes seem to be more about making products more addictive but not necessarily more useful.
esotericn 8y ago
It's very hard to unpick this. The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation. The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.
- PJDK 8y ago
  Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. I'm rather glad I could skype my brother in Japan even when I couldn't afford international call rates. And so on...
  - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
    >Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior
    - PJDK 8y ago
      Something worth remembering whenever these discussions come up, is that for a large number of people, including me at the time, that is too much money to spare.
      - esotericn 8y ago
        Well, consider that in that case, the fact that advertising enabled you to view the site is a fluke that will probably be extinguished eventually. If you have literally zero money, even to spend on activities with high expected future return, your value to an advertiser is zero, and eventually they'll figure out how to not waste resources on you. The correct answer to poverty is not 'make the world a bit shittier for everyone and hope it balances out'. (As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > (As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.) A lot of the best content on the Internet is hosted by its own creators, paid out of their own pocket, out of willingness to share the knowledge.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- wild_preference 8y ago
  Nonsense is a strong word. I run a collaborative writing forum for mostly a pre-teen and teen demographic. It's the ilk of what got me into writing as a young one. They don't have money to spend, but ads keep the forum alive. It would be extreme to say my forum has nothing to offer these youngsters, or that my lone banner-ad eclipses any good my forum may be doing. As ads die, we're just going to continue witnessing the centralization of the internet which surely isn't all that great, either.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    If advertising didn't exist, you just wouldn't run the forum at all? It's hard for me to get a sense of scale here, I wouldn't have thought that this sort of thing would require more than a token level of resources.
    - wild_preference 8y ago
      Well, the forum costs $250-300+/month. Ads on the same forum used to give me $3,000/mo back in the day which bought me time to enrich the forum. Now they only cover $200/mo at best, so I'm left paying $100+/mo out of pocket. It's not just server costs, but database costs and ancillary services like S3 hosting/bandwidth, $20/mo to CloudFlare, and more. And, most of all, the amount of my own time that I expend to run it all. Not to mention the constant anxiety of "is it still online" I always have in the back of my head. Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent. Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box. I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.
- deanCommie 8y ago
  GOOGLE!?

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago

I don’t know. It would be difficult to quantify. But, personally, I don’t think, for example, the web has improved much in the Web 2.0 era. It might be worse.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I think so too. MySpace and Friendster already connected people and since the first version I don't think Gmail has improved much. Most current changes seem to be more about making products more addictive but not necessarily more useful.

esotericn 8y ago

It's very hard to unpick this. The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation. The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.

PJDK 8y ago
Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. I'm rather glad I could skype my brother in Japan even when I couldn't afford international call rates. And so on...
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  >Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior
  - PJDK 8y ago
    Something worth remembering whenever these discussions come up, is that for a large number of people, including me at the time, that is too much money to spare.
    - esotericn 8y ago
      Well, consider that in that case, the fact that advertising enabled you to view the site is a fluke that will probably be extinguished eventually. If you have literally zero money, even to spend on activities with high expected future return, your value to an advertiser is zero, and eventually they'll figure out how to not waste resources on you. The correct answer to poverty is not 'make the world a bit shittier for everyone and hope it balances out'. (As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > (As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.) A lot of the best content on the Internet is hosted by its own creators, paid out of their own pocket, out of willingness to share the knowledge.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
wild_preference 8y ago
Nonsense is a strong word. I run a collaborative writing forum for mostly a pre-teen and teen demographic. It's the ilk of what got me into writing as a young one. They don't have money to spend, but ads keep the forum alive. It would be extreme to say my forum has nothing to offer these youngsters, or that my lone banner-ad eclipses any good my forum may be doing. As ads die, we're just going to continue witnessing the centralization of the internet which surely isn't all that great, either.
- esotericn 8y ago
  If advertising didn't exist, you just wouldn't run the forum at all? It's hard for me to get a sense of scale here, I wouldn't have thought that this sort of thing would require more than a token level of resources.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    Well, the forum costs $250-300+/month. Ads on the same forum used to give me $3,000/mo back in the day which bought me time to enrich the forum. Now they only cover $200/mo at best, so I'm left paying $100+/mo out of pocket. It's not just server costs, but database costs and ancillary services like S3 hosting/bandwidth, $20/mo to CloudFlare, and more. And, most of all, the amount of my own time that I expend to run it all. Not to mention the constant anxiety of "is it still online" I always have in the back of my head. Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent. Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box. I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.
deanCommie 8y ago
GOOGLE!?