6 ms·

I can't wait for the big actors to leave room for a more decentralized network where power is dilluted across many smaller actors with saner business strategies

by jraph 7y ago

I can't wait for the big actors to leave room for a more decentralized network where power is dilluted across many smaller actors with saner business strategies / founding schemes. Please keep blocking ads, we don't need this pervasive power-hungry privacy-unfriendly manipulation. We need it to vanish. Emails can already be provided by small companies, ISPs and non profits, and would actually work even better without the big actors... because we would have to make it work, no choice! No more outlook.com deciding that your mail will end up in your recipients' spam folder because they think you are too small for them to give a shit about you... everybody would be small. I want chat, video calls and thought sharing with social circles to work the same way. We don't need one Facebook to rule all the social concerns of the whole human species (the part that uses internet anyway) as it sees fit. I would not worry too much for such services. It will work. Same for YouTube. I run a PeerTube instance on a cheap VPS for a small association. Granted, we don't have a lot of traffic, but if we had, the peer to peer feature would help, right? :-) As for newspapers... I don't have a definitive answer that would be privacy-friendly, sadly. Nor for search engines (including for videos in a more decentralized world....).

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
I worry that adblocking ultimately hurts only the little sites. Google and Facebook have first party ads which could be made significantly more tricky to block. Or Google could use Chrome’s dominance to slowly switch over to a variation of Encrypted Media Extensions, which is impossible to interfere with.
- Larrikin 7y ago
  Google already does the latter on mobile. Every single one of their apps defaults to forcing a Chrome tab open instead of your preferred browser. Chrome on mobile doesn't offer extensions like Firefox does. I only recently discovered there is an option to turn off this behavior but its only a matter of time until they remove that option.
  - nsomaru 7y ago
    Is this documented anywhere? Was trying to help a friend on android but I couldn’t find the setting
  - nelblu 7y ago
    I am not sure whether that is true. I don't have Chrome on my android and firefox is my default browser. So all apps load firefox in app Page when they are navigating to an outside url.
    - Larrikin 7y ago
      Most apps respect your preferences. The tab action to keep you in the app will typically give you a tab of your default web browser if your preferred browser has implemented it. Gmail and Google search specifically open a powered by chrome tab when you click on links unless you look around deep in the settings to turn off this user hostile feature.
- eitland 7y ago
  Small sites can put in the effort to make deals with individual advertisers and bake it right into the page. Usually when I or others bring this up someone says: but then you are leaving behind the value of serving customized ads for each user. To to which I counter: - ads baked into the page would probably slip by my ad blocker, and more importantly, as long as they are relevant and not annoying I'd probably not even care to try to get rid of them. There exist a subset of ads that are absolutely ok with me and I'd be happy to leave them visible to support smaller sites, and another subset of ads that I just don't care strongly about. - I strongly believe that the value of customized ads has been overhyped. And with that I mean to the ad buyer, not to Google: I've only seen relevant ads from Google once or twice a year for the last 10 years or so. - there should be a value in knowing that your ads don't end up next to a "hit the monkey scam" or next to another dubious ad. A good seller or sales organization can make this obvious to ad buyers. - for a number of sites I would not only be OK with but also happy to pay for individual news items (think smaller newspapers from Nowhere that gets linked in social media etc), as long as they don't insist on selling me a subscription instead of access to this single page.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > Small sites can put in the effort to make deals with individual advertisers and bake it right into the page. Say I run a blog, by myself or maybe with one other person. Even putting aside questions of my own limited time, are big companies going to deal with me? Is it practical for them to deal with me and a thousand other, individual small blogs?
    - wpietri 7y ago
      If you run a blog now, how much money do you realistically expect to make? I have a site that gets about 30k pageviews per month; I threw ads on it just to see what would happen. It makes something like $12/month. Even at minimum wage here, after hosting costs I could afford to spend approximately zero time on it. So I think for small sites, the answer is effectively the same with algorithmic ads or directly sold ads: you won't make enough to matter either way.
fsflover 7y ago
>> Nor for search engines https://yacy.net https://yacy.net
- rezgi 7y ago
  I didn't look too deep, but the demo peer isn't convincing. It took 10 seconds to complete the search, and yilded 0 results when startpage has several pages of results.
  - fsflover 7y ago
    This is an extremely small network currenrly. Needs much more peers for a reliable search across the whole web.

by jraph 7y ago

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

I worry that adblocking ultimately hurts only the little sites. Google and Facebook have first party ads which could be made significantly more tricky to block. Or Google could use Chrome’s dominance to slowly switch over to a variation of Encrypted Media Extensions, which is impossible to interfere with.

Larrikin 7y ago
Google already does the latter on mobile. Every single one of their apps defaults to forcing a Chrome tab open instead of your preferred browser. Chrome on mobile doesn't offer extensions like Firefox does. I only recently discovered there is an option to turn off this behavior but its only a matter of time until they remove that option.
- nsomaru 7y ago
  Is this documented anywhere? Was trying to help a friend on android but I couldn’t find the setting
- nelblu 7y ago
  I am not sure whether that is true. I don't have Chrome on my android and firefox is my default browser. So all apps load firefox in app Page when they are navigating to an outside url.
  - Larrikin 7y ago
    Most apps respect your preferences. The tab action to keep you in the app will typically give you a tab of your default web browser if your preferred browser has implemented it. Gmail and Google search specifically open a powered by chrome tab when you click on links unless you look around deep in the settings to turn off this user hostile feature.
eitland 7y ago
Small sites can put in the effort to make deals with individual advertisers and bake it right into the page. Usually when I or others bring this up someone says: but then you are leaving behind the value of serving customized ads for each user. To to which I counter: - ads baked into the page would probably slip by my ad blocker, and more importantly, as long as they are relevant and not annoying I'd probably not even care to try to get rid of them. There exist a subset of ads that are absolutely ok with me and I'd be happy to leave them visible to support smaller sites, and another subset of ads that I just don't care strongly about. - I strongly believe that the value of customized ads has been overhyped. And with that I mean to the ad buyer, not to Google: I've only seen relevant ads from Google once or twice a year for the last 10 years or so. - there should be a value in knowing that your ads don't end up next to a "hit the monkey scam" or next to another dubious ad. A good seller or sales organization can make this obvious to ad buyers. - for a number of sites I would not only be OK with but also happy to pay for individual news items (think smaller newspapers from Nowhere that gets linked in social media etc), as long as they don't insist on selling me a subscription instead of access to this single page.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Small sites can put in the effort to make deals with individual advertisers and bake it right into the page. Say I run a blog, by myself or maybe with one other person. Even putting aside questions of my own limited time, are big companies going to deal with me? Is it practical for them to deal with me and a thousand other, individual small blogs?
  - wpietri 7y ago
    If you run a blog now, how much money do you realistically expect to make? I have a site that gets about 30k pageviews per month; I threw ads on it just to see what would happen. It makes something like $12/month. Even at minimum wage here, after hosting costs I could afford to spend approximately zero time on it. So I think for small sites, the answer is effectively the same with algorithmic ads or directly sold ads: you won't make enough to matter either way.

fsflover 7y ago

>> Nor for search engines https://yacy.net https://yacy.net

rezgi 7y ago
I didn't look too deep, but the demo peer isn't convincing. It took 10 seconds to complete the search, and yilded 0 results when startpage has several pages of results.
- fsflover 7y ago
  This is an extremely small network currenrly. Needs much more peers for a reliable search across the whole web.