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> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up valuable screen space and bandwidth for

> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up valuable screen space and bandwidth for something that nobody wants to see. They often manipulate and misinform. They have even been the source of security vulnerabilities many times in the past. While I share the loathing of modern Ads as a service or whatever the technical name for giving Google/Ad Choices a blank check to serve whatever they want on a piece of your web real estate, I think you can certainly put up a banner or something responsibly. If I run a web dev blog and I put a banner for my VPS that has a my referral code, or I come to an agreement with said VPS to show an ad for guaranteed credit or I just sell the space directly to XYZ company that is relevant to my users I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users. If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, I would be OK with that as long as it's done tastefully and responsibly.

surfsvammel 5y ago
I believe what they are saying is that money is not the goal, the goal is the spread chess, and having ads does not contribute to that goal. That’s it. I find it quiet strange, that we are living in a world where ads are so ubiquitous that a site is explaining why they don’t have ads, rather than webpages that use ads explain why they do.
DorianSinDeep 5y ago
While its good that you're willing to compromise in a reasonable manner, I don't think it has particular relevance to the point that advertisements in any form are most likely to be about something you won't go looking for yourself. There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves.
- aaronbrethorst 5y ago
  This is a nice, albeit reductive hypothesis. Literally the last thing I did before posting this comment was email a link to a Facebook in-app ad’s advertised product to myself because I wanted to look at it in more detail tomorrow. I wasn’t looking for the product it was advertising, but I see how it could be extremely useful for me if it works.
  - foerbert 5y ago
    The post qualified that position with an exceptionally mild "most likely." A single counterexample is hardly a reason to criticize it as reductive. Unless you do this with the majority of the ads you see, and you believe this is a common experience for most people?
- DivisionSol 5y ago
  Some advertisements are malicious attacks on your attention to build brand recognition and entice you to buy things you don't need. However, I think advertising in itself isn't inherently evil. If a chess website served non-tracking, static (no-JS) banner ads about relevant products (maybe, specifically, chess products?) to offset costs, I don't see anything wrong with it. Of course the question is: "what is a relevant product to advertise next to chess?" Would... other board game advertisements be acceptable?
  - komali2 5y ago
    Sure but they wouldn't do that, as it doesn't seem to be something that would further their stated goal: > to promote and encourage the teaching and practice of the game of chess and its variants".
    - lame-robot-hoax 5y ago
      I’d argue ads for chess sets actually would do exactly that.
      - tovej 5y ago
        Chess books, maybe. Chess sets? I'm sure most people playing chess on lichess are aware of chess sets and could get a hold of one without an ad.
      - mpol 5y ago
        And in the case of chess books, an advertorial is quite different from a good review. I very much enjoy reading a good review on a chess book, with all the good things and bad things. With an advertorial the language is quite different and it is very hard to get informed well about what you really get when you buy the book. With honest critique, I very much enjoy reading about the bad parts, and if they are not bad for me, or just a nuance, it might be a really good book for me. Only an honest review can give me that. So no, an advertorial for a book does not do anything for me.
  - why_Mr_Anderson 5y ago
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  This is basically saying that "build it and they will come" works, but we know that's a fallacy.
  - op03 5y ago
    Wikipedia, Linux, Blender, Firefox are all what?
    - Lvl999Noob 5y ago
      This might be survivorship bias talking. I do not have any examples with me but I am quite sure, there are a lot more projects that ended up dead.
      - op03 5y ago
        They are not Ad based models proving non ad based models exist and work especially in the domain of free rider/collective action problems.
      - paxys 5y ago
        Most projects end up dead, ad supported or not. I don't think that's an argument one way or another.
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      I would call them the exceptions that prove the rule.
      - auggierose 5y ago
        Kind of like special relativity is an exception to Newtonian mechanics? It's good to know the rules, but you shouldn't live your life by them.
      - fnord123 5y ago
        That's not what that means. It means a sign saying "no blue cars" is the exception proving the rule that non-blue cars are allowed.
- curun1r 5y ago
  I could see an argument that ads for specific, chess-related products like Chessable courses would be welcome on Lichess, perhaps even as an opt-in so users can choose to support the site. I know Chessable is constantly introducing new courses and I don't always remember to check regularly. A banner that tells me of a new course I'm interested in would solve that. For me, at least, but I doubt I'm the only one. I wish more sites would do ads without using ad networks. Communities like the chess world are small enough that all the providers know each other and could probably work together in a way that benefits everyone, including users.
  - heroku 5y ago
    Chessable is a poorly executed idea, with an awful user experience.
- maccard 5y ago
  > There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves Really? I'd love to hear more about this.
  - ZWoz 5y ago
    I am not sure, what parent thought and I don't have examples without any spending to advertisement, but there is very "low profile", almost no ads categories. 1) Big business-to-business manufacturers. I haven't ever seen ads for compal or asml. I am sure they are presented in trade shows and contact directly to potential customers. 2) Small data recovery shops. I know few those, one don't advertise at all, one uses only google ads (and only few keywords, not big budget).
    - maccard 5y ago
      The parent's claim is: > There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves. and that's in response to someone suggesting low profile/almost-no-ads. I completely agree about the low-profile/almost-no-ad approach (in the tech world having a community that evangalises for you is an advertisers wet dream, for example!), and I think that's what a lot of people in this thread are calling for. On a chess website, have ads for chess books/chess boards/novice-to-grandmaster streams, that sort of stuff, rather than shoving an ad for an Amazon mattress at the bottom of a blog post on Continuous Integration!
    - shard 5y ago
      No-ad-spend companies are hard to come up with, some possibilities are everyday necessities with very few competitors like salt (but I think they advertise a little), or utility monopolies (I don't think my local water company or garbage collection company advertises, but I haven't checked. Maybe they advertise to the government offices that select the companies to use?). Pre-internet days, it would be easier to be sure some businesses don't advertise (neighborhood convenience stores or laundromats, for example, that get enough foot traffic to not bother advertising), but with the ease of throwing up a website nowadays (which should count as advertising), this can no longer be assumed.
csbartus 5y ago
> If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, Why more? If donations are enough why ads? "Advertising is the way we grant power to the machine" - said Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872). I'm thinking a lot about the nature of advertising. I guess, after all, it sells excess, stuff which shouldn't exist. It propels low quality, overproduction, unlimited and unnecessary growth. The pain-points of this current era. Just take a look at our / tech / programming sector. We are well done without ads. I've never seen a Clojure or a CSS ad in my life, nor Atom, nor Linux. Nor Gmail, nor TakeShape, nor Vercel and the list is endless. Yet still using them and happy with them. And they are happy with me. No ads work. In change, this market requires educated participants, not just blind consumers.
- jhrmnn 5y ago
  The reason I’ve felt a strong distaste for ads since being a teenager is that ultimately they rob me of, or try to mess with, my free choice
  - blowski 5y ago
    Almost all human interaction is in some way trying to persuade you to choose something that you might otherwise not. When I ask my wife "Shall we play a board game?" I'm in some way doing the same thing. That's not evil. Advertising is not inherently evil. When it becomes evil is when it intentionally tries to deceive us, capture and processe insane amounts of information about us, and influence the display of information for its own ends. If I did that to my wife, it wouldn't be OK.
    - MauranKilom 5y ago
      Right, but the game theory there is pretty obvious: The better an ad is at "hacking" your mind and exploiting human characteristics, the more money it makes. Which naturally leads to this insane spiral of increasingly manipulative and insidious ads. If your single purpose in life was to play board games with your wife, you would probably also observe these tendencies in your questions.
zimbatm 5y ago
Ads are an attack on our attention. When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention to this website, because I believe it will offer something of interest to me. Obviously things don't come for free, somebody has to pay for it, but the issue is that as a user, I didn't agree to getting my attention diverted. The trade isn't done upfront and by the time I see the ad, it's already too late. There is also a collective argument to me made about humanity browsing like headless chickens and not being able to focus on important things because of all these distractions.
- dash2 5y ago
  Use the back button and don't go there again. Website owners need to make a living, they have a right to try to do so the way they see best, and not all consumers share your preferences.
  - ratww 5y ago
    Using the back button is not enough. Even using your method, the website will transmit information about me to several ad networks without my consent about retargeting, about which sites I'm visiting, which sites I visited before (via referrer header) and will fingerprint me. Even with their (mostly non-compliant) GDPR cookie banners, information is still transmitted. As far as I'm concerned, no website owner has ever given me a choice of "just using the back button". Only ad-blocking is enough to stop this from happening.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      Your browser is the entity transmitting information to ad networks, your browser is obeying instructions from the website instead of obeying your instructions.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        Which happens because you run non-free JS code: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
executesorder66 5y ago
If they did that I'd immediately switch to something else. Nothing pisses me off more that spam. And all ads are spam. If I wanted something, I'd look for it. If you have to tell me about it first, then it's spam. Don't waste people's time/bandwidth/attention with things they didn't even want in the first place. And the counterpoint that "but they might not have known about x product in the first place" is useless. Because if they wanted/needed something like x they would have just googled "something that can do x" and found x.com or whatever to discover it. To reiterate, the fact that they weren't looking for it in the first place means that they didn't want it. See also this[0] guy that did extensive tests and found that "tasteful and responsible" banner ads pissed people off enough to negatively affect traffic to his website. [0]https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads
indigochill 5y ago
From the outside, I like what ReadTheDocs does with Ethical Ads. Because ReadTheDocs's scope is largely limited to technical users, they can deliver "targeted marketing" where they're delivering ads based on the content of their pages rather than user tracking. Also the ads I remember seeing didn't feature attention-grabbing images, just a solid background, the advertiser's logo, and some text about what they're selling. It meshed a lot better with the page content than most ads do.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Why are you even offering a compromise when they aren't interested? There's plenty of ways for an organization like Lichess to raise funds, the ones that don't claim your attention or fuck your privacy over. Even sponsored links to e.g. chess books as mentioned elsewhere 'leak' data, they contain a referral link, linking that user's visit of the website to (e.g.) their Amazon account. Plus it would be a pittance compared to what Amazon makes off it. IF they need money they can open up a fundraiser or donation channel.
9387367 5y ago
You are missing the point. Lichess is creating a very strong competitive advantage by positioning their platform as ad free. Want to put this to a test? Imagine if you were to create a competitor and you also wanted to run ads, now imagine you will be competing with an extremely successful project that people love that doesn’t run ads so you will never be able to offer a better experience to their users. Lichess is unbeatable.
- giords 5y ago
  You're pretty much describing chess.com
  - Scarblac 5y ago
    And chess.com has more money to spend, so they can have things like paid grandmasters streaming, video courses, offical tournaments with large prizes. It's not all ad based, they also have a subscription model that opens more features. It's good that both exist. I spend 99% of my online chess playing time on Lichess but there are also lots of people for who it is the other way around.
    - greedo 5y ago
      You do realize that the world champion regularly plays on lichess, right? As do a huge number of GMs?
      - nicky0 5y ago
        I think the point was that Chess.com is financially supporting lots of streamers (including titled players).
      - Scarblac 5y ago
        Yes but they don't pay GMs to produce content.
  - srg0 5y ago
    chess.com was founded in 2007. lichess started in 2010. So chess.com was already an established player. The point is that creating a new chess site today would require to be better than lichess. If we look where Magnus Carlsen investment goes, they are all paid services (Play Magnus/chess24/chessable). He doesn't event try to compete with chess.com/lichess.
motiejus 5y ago
Lwn.net does this right: the ads are non-intrusive, and are designed for the audience. Most frequently - hosting or datacenter space.
Larok00 5y ago
To me it seems like not starting down that path is the only surefire way of drawing a distinction between what is acceptable and what isn't. Also from a user's perspective, I would undoubtedly choose the one without ads of the two alternatives if they were competing.
latexr 5y ago
From the text you quoted: > There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. From your response: > I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users. The former puts users first; the latter puts them last. There’s a chasm between “what do they want” and “what will they bear”.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  I can't tell you how much I love this comment. Thank you. :-)
- bogwog 5y ago
  It's always so strange to see people who try to rationalize ads. They're either being dishonest about their own opinions about ads because they're guilty of serving them, or they're so far detached from reality that they genuinely don't see how much people hate ads, and just how bad they are for consumers. Maybe it's the Facebooks/Googles of the world who are responsible for creating a generation of developers that see ads as the only feasible business model? If you have an ad-supported service, and you remove ads for a day, *100%* of your users will love you for it. That should tell you something!
matheusmoreira 5y ago
People go to your web development blog because they want to read about web development. They didn't go there for VPS advertisements. Make a specific page for that so that anyone who wants to know what hosting services you recommend will seek it out and visit it. Anything else means you're selling your reader's attention to the highest bidder. You're deliberately adding noise to your website and reducing its usability. Also it immediately introduces conflict of intetest: you're associated with the company you're advertising so any positive opinions you might have about their products ought to be taken with several grains of salt.

surfsvammel 5y ago

I believe what they are saying is that money is not the goal, the goal is the spread chess, and having ads does not contribute to that goal. That’s it. I find it quiet strange, that we are living in a world where ads are so ubiquitous that a site is explaining why they don’t have ads, rather than webpages that use ads explain why they do.

DorianSinDeep 5y ago

While its good that you're willing to compromise in a reasonable manner, I don't think it has particular relevance to the point that advertisements in any form are most likely to be about something you won't go looking for yourself. There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves.

aaronbrethorst 5y ago
This is a nice, albeit reductive hypothesis. Literally the last thing I did before posting this comment was email a link to a Facebook in-app ad’s advertised product to myself because I wanted to look at it in more detail tomorrow. I wasn’t looking for the product it was advertising, but I see how it could be extremely useful for me if it works.
- foerbert 5y ago
  The post qualified that position with an exceptionally mild "most likely." A single counterexample is hardly a reason to criticize it as reductive. Unless you do this with the majority of the ads you see, and you believe this is a common experience for most people?
DivisionSol 5y ago
Some advertisements are malicious attacks on your attention to build brand recognition and entice you to buy things you don't need. However, I think advertising in itself isn't inherently evil. If a chess website served non-tracking, static (no-JS) banner ads about relevant products (maybe, specifically, chess products?) to offset costs, I don't see anything wrong with it. Of course the question is: "what is a relevant product to advertise next to chess?" Would... other board game advertisements be acceptable?
- komali2 5y ago
  Sure but they wouldn't do that, as it doesn't seem to be something that would further their stated goal: > to promote and encourage the teaching and practice of the game of chess and its variants".
  - lame-robot-hoax 5y ago
    I’d argue ads for chess sets actually would do exactly that.
    - tovej 5y ago
      Chess books, maybe. Chess sets? I'm sure most people playing chess on lichess are aware of chess sets and could get a hold of one without an ad.
    - mpol 5y ago
      And in the case of chess books, an advertorial is quite different from a good review. I very much enjoy reading a good review on a chess book, with all the good things and bad things. With an advertorial the language is quite different and it is very hard to get informed well about what you really get when you buy the book. With honest critique, I very much enjoy reading about the bad parts, and if they are not bad for me, or just a nuance, it might be a really good book for me. Only an honest review can give me that. So no, an advertorial for a book does not do anything for me.
- why_Mr_Anderson 5y ago
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
This is basically saying that "build it and they will come" works, but we know that's a fallacy.
- op03 5y ago
  Wikipedia, Linux, Blender, Firefox are all what?
  - Lvl999Noob 5y ago
    This might be survivorship bias talking. I do not have any examples with me but I am quite sure, there are a lot more projects that ended up dead.
    - op03 5y ago
      They are not Ad based models proving non ad based models exist and work especially in the domain of free rider/collective action problems.
    - paxys 5y ago
      Most projects end up dead, ad supported or not. I don't think that's an argument one way or another.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I would call them the exceptions that prove the rule.
    - auggierose 5y ago
      Kind of like special relativity is an exception to Newtonian mechanics? It's good to know the rules, but you shouldn't live your life by them.
    - fnord123 5y ago
      That's not what that means. It means a sign saying "no blue cars" is the exception proving the rule that non-blue cars are allowed.
curun1r 5y ago
I could see an argument that ads for specific, chess-related products like Chessable courses would be welcome on Lichess, perhaps even as an opt-in so users can choose to support the site. I know Chessable is constantly introducing new courses and I don't always remember to check regularly. A banner that tells me of a new course I'm interested in would solve that. For me, at least, but I doubt I'm the only one. I wish more sites would do ads without using ad networks. Communities like the chess world are small enough that all the providers know each other and could probably work together in a way that benefits everyone, including users.
- heroku 5y ago
  Chessable is a poorly executed idea, with an awful user experience.
maccard 5y ago
> There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves Really? I'd love to hear more about this.
- ZWoz 5y ago
  I am not sure, what parent thought and I don't have examples without any spending to advertisement, but there is very "low profile", almost no ads categories. 1) Big business-to-business manufacturers. I haven't ever seen ads for compal or asml. I am sure they are presented in trade shows and contact directly to potential customers. 2) Small data recovery shops. I know few those, one don't advertise at all, one uses only google ads (and only few keywords, not big budget).
  - maccard 5y ago
    The parent's claim is: > There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves. and that's in response to someone suggesting low profile/almost-no-ads. I completely agree about the low-profile/almost-no-ad approach (in the tech world having a community that evangalises for you is an advertisers wet dream, for example!), and I think that's what a lot of people in this thread are calling for. On a chess website, have ads for chess books/chess boards/novice-to-grandmaster streams, that sort of stuff, rather than shoving an ad for an Amazon mattress at the bottom of a blog post on Continuous Integration!
  - shard 5y ago
    No-ad-spend companies are hard to come up with, some possibilities are everyday necessities with very few competitors like salt (but I think they advertise a little), or utility monopolies (I don't think my local water company or garbage collection company advertises, but I haven't checked. Maybe they advertise to the government offices that select the companies to use?). Pre-internet days, it would be easier to be sure some businesses don't advertise (neighborhood convenience stores or laundromats, for example, that get enough foot traffic to not bother advertising), but with the ease of throwing up a website nowadays (which should count as advertising), this can no longer be assumed.

csbartus 5y ago

> If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, Why more? If donations are enough why ads? "Advertising is the way we grant power to the machine" - said Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872). I'm thinking a lot about the nature of advertising. I guess, after all, it sells excess, stuff which shouldn't exist. It propels low quality, overproduction, unlimited and unnecessary growth. The pain-points of this current era. Just take a look at our / tech / programming sector. We are well done without ads. I've never seen a Clojure or a CSS ad in my life, nor Atom, nor Linux. Nor Gmail, nor TakeShape, nor Vercel and the list is endless. Yet still using them and happy with them. And they are happy with me. No ads work. In change, this market requires educated participants, not just blind consumers.

jhrmnn 5y ago
The reason I’ve felt a strong distaste for ads since being a teenager is that ultimately they rob me of, or try to mess with, my free choice
- blowski 5y ago
  Almost all human interaction is in some way trying to persuade you to choose something that you might otherwise not. When I ask my wife "Shall we play a board game?" I'm in some way doing the same thing. That's not evil. Advertising is not inherently evil. When it becomes evil is when it intentionally tries to deceive us, capture and processe insane amounts of information about us, and influence the display of information for its own ends. If I did that to my wife, it wouldn't be OK.
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    Right, but the game theory there is pretty obvious: The better an ad is at "hacking" your mind and exploiting human characteristics, the more money it makes. Which naturally leads to this insane spiral of increasingly manipulative and insidious ads. If your single purpose in life was to play board games with your wife, you would probably also observe these tendencies in your questions.

zimbatm 5y ago

Ads are an attack on our attention. When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention to this website, because I believe it will offer something of interest to me. Obviously things don't come for free, somebody has to pay for it, but the issue is that as a user, I didn't agree to getting my attention diverted. The trade isn't done upfront and by the time I see the ad, it's already too late. There is also a collective argument to me made about humanity browsing like headless chickens and not being able to focus on important things because of all these distractions.

dash2 5y ago
Use the back button and don't go there again. Website owners need to make a living, they have a right to try to do so the way they see best, and not all consumers share your preferences.
- ratww 5y ago
  Using the back button is not enough. Even using your method, the website will transmit information about me to several ad networks without my consent about retargeting, about which sites I'm visiting, which sites I visited before (via referrer header) and will fingerprint me. Even with their (mostly non-compliant) GDPR cookie banners, information is still transmitted. As far as I'm concerned, no website owner has ever given me a choice of "just using the back button". Only ad-blocking is enough to stop this from happening.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Your browser is the entity transmitting information to ad networks, your browser is obeying instructions from the website instead of obeying your instructions.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      Which happens because you run non-free JS code: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

executesorder66 5y ago

If they did that I'd immediately switch to something else. Nothing pisses me off more that spam. And all ads are spam. If I wanted something, I'd look for it. If you have to tell me about it first, then it's spam. Don't waste people's time/bandwidth/attention with things they didn't even want in the first place. And the counterpoint that "but they might not have known about x product in the first place" is useless. Because if they wanted/needed something like x they would have just googled "something that can do x" and found x.com or whatever to discover it. To reiterate, the fact that they weren't looking for it in the first place means that they didn't want it. See also this[0] guy that did extensive tests and found that "tasteful and responsible" banner ads pissed people off enough to negatively affect traffic to his website. [0]https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads

indigochill 5y ago

From the outside, I like what ReadTheDocs does with Ethical Ads. Because ReadTheDocs's scope is largely limited to technical users, they can deliver "targeted marketing" where they're delivering ads based on the content of their pages rather than user tracking. Also the ads I remember seeing didn't feature attention-grabbing images, just a solid background, the advertiser's logo, and some text about what they're selling. It meshed a lot better with the page content than most ads do.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Why are you even offering a compromise when they aren't interested? There's plenty of ways for an organization like Lichess to raise funds, the ones that don't claim your attention or fuck your privacy over. Even sponsored links to e.g. chess books as mentioned elsewhere 'leak' data, they contain a referral link, linking that user's visit of the website to (e.g.) their Amazon account. Plus it would be a pittance compared to what Amazon makes off it. IF they need money they can open up a fundraiser or donation channel.

9387367 5y ago

You are missing the point. Lichess is creating a very strong competitive advantage by positioning their platform as ad free. Want to put this to a test? Imagine if you were to create a competitor and you also wanted to run ads, now imagine you will be competing with an extremely successful project that people love that doesn’t run ads so you will never be able to offer a better experience to their users. Lichess is unbeatable.

giords 5y ago
You're pretty much describing chess.com
- Scarblac 5y ago
  And chess.com has more money to spend, so they can have things like paid grandmasters streaming, video courses, offical tournaments with large prizes. It's not all ad based, they also have a subscription model that opens more features. It's good that both exist. I spend 99% of my online chess playing time on Lichess but there are also lots of people for who it is the other way around.
  - greedo 5y ago
    You do realize that the world champion regularly plays on lichess, right? As do a huge number of GMs?
    - nicky0 5y ago
      I think the point was that Chess.com is financially supporting lots of streamers (including titled players).
    - Scarblac 5y ago
      Yes but they don't pay GMs to produce content.
- srg0 5y ago
  chess.com was founded in 2007. lichess started in 2010. So chess.com was already an established player. The point is that creating a new chess site today would require to be better than lichess. If we look where Magnus Carlsen investment goes, they are all paid services (Play Magnus/chess24/chessable). He doesn't event try to compete with chess.com/lichess.

motiejus 5y ago

Lwn.net does this right: the ads are non-intrusive, and are designed for the audience. Most frequently - hosting or datacenter space.

Larok00 5y ago

To me it seems like not starting down that path is the only surefire way of drawing a distinction between what is acceptable and what isn't. Also from a user's perspective, I would undoubtedly choose the one without ads of the two alternatives if they were competing.

latexr 5y ago

From the text you quoted: > There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. From your response: > I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users. The former puts users first; the latter puts them last. There’s a chasm between “what do they want” and “what will they bear”.

yesenadam 5y ago
I can't tell you how much I love this comment. Thank you. :-)
bogwog 5y ago
It's always so strange to see people who try to rationalize ads. They're either being dishonest about their own opinions about ads because they're guilty of serving them, or they're so far detached from reality that they genuinely don't see how much people hate ads, and just how bad they are for consumers. Maybe it's the Facebooks/Googles of the world who are responsible for creating a generation of developers that see ads as the only feasible business model? If you have an ad-supported service, and you remove ads for a day, *100%* of your users will love you for it. That should tell you something!

matheusmoreira 5y ago

People go to your web development blog because they want to read about web development. They didn't go there for VPS advertisements. Make a specific page for that so that anyone who wants to know what hosting services you recommend will seek it out and visit it. Anything else means you're selling your reader's attention to the highest bidder. You're deliberately adding noise to your website and reducing its usability. Also it immediately introduces conflict of intetest: you're associated with the company you're advertising so any positive opinions you might have about their products ought to be taken with several grains of salt.