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It’s a slippery slope. The first packages with ads just printed a single line of text. Then others started adding more lines, more aggressive colors, and now yo
by mikl 7y ago
It’s a slippery slope. The first packages with ads just printed a single line of text. Then others started adding more lines, more aggressive colors, and now you have npm ads painting a half a screenful of empty lines with their ad in the middle. Once can imagine an arms race of ever worse ads.
And considering that it’s not unusual to be installing hundreds of npm packages for a single project, the ads would soon render the logging output unusable, giving rise to an arms race between npm ads and npm ad-blockers.
So npm basically had to nip this in the bud, before it makes the ecosystem unusable through the tragedy of the commons.
- bipolar_lisper 7y agothey didn't limit ads. they banned them altogether. it's a charitable thought, but doesn't hold up.
- mikl 7y agoThat was the correct thing to do. Considering how many npm packages the average project consumes, having even a single line of advertising for each would make npm a pain in the ass to use, and people would be looking for ways to block the ads.
- gerogerke 7y agoClearly, you didn't read the article from the original author. Ads were deduplicated, so only a single ad was shown, even if 500 deps used the funding dependency.
- mikl 7y agoThat’s a big _if_. Until now, each package with ads have rolled their own, and since there’s probably more money to be had that way, there’s no reason that would not continue.