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Vivaldi co-founder: Advertisers 'stole the internet from us'

306 points by redbell 4y ago

331c8c71 4y ago
Funny in light of the fact they have chosen "Vivaldi" as a name for their company and the product. Why not "Stephenson"?
favaq 4y ago
No, content creators gave the internet to advertisers because they needed something to eat.
- ppetty 4y ago
  Well said … “ads keep the content free” so says the anti-ad-blocking modal on that site.
  - m_eiman 4y ago
    It wasn’t theirs to give, though.
- sseagull 4y ago
  I dunno. Lots of people contribute to the web without expectation of payment. Like you posting here. The urge to create and share is powerful. Look at all the people editing wikipedia, answering questions on SO and various forums, and even making videos without any real expectation of payback. Seems like the web would be just fine without the professional “content creator” class. (I actually feel like “content creator” is dehumanizing pejorative now.)
  - favaq 4y ago
    I choose to post here for free. Others choose to publish their content and have advertisers show ads for which they get paid. That's their prerogative. You have the option of not consuming the content of those who want to get paid or pirate it.
    - account42 4y ago
      Or I can choose to block ads everywhere and if someone has a problem with that they can stop providing their content for free - there will always be other entertainment to fill my time. Even without the tracking, ads are psychological manipulation inteded to make me worse off. I have zero sympathy for anyone who engages in that.
    - esperent 4y ago
      > You have the option of not consuming the content of those who want to get paid Not really. Suppose you go onto a platform like YouTube, where most people are not being paid and some are (through advertising). How would you choose to consume only the content of those not being paid? There's no way to do that except to avoid YouTube and all similar platforms entirely which is not a reasonable option for most people.
  - Kye 4y ago
    How many of those people can contribute for free because they get paid by something funded by ads? For example: I'm currently learning DaVinci Resolve. There's a lot of great videos, and they're all free. I expect a lot of these people got as good as they are working on at least a few advertising contracts, or on media that will run with ads interspersed.
  - 0dayz 4y ago
    While your point isn't exactly wrong I do think it's a bit of a oversimplification. Most editing of Wikipedia is done for personal reasons, including commercial (you get paid to write on Wikipedia) and with SO its most likely because information is cheap. In fact the points you raise is so trivial that we've had bots do it for us way before chatgpt. Compare this to artists, programmers and designers who only release things for free under strict circumstances (hobby, social gain, licensing requirements, etc.).
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  most ugc is uncompensated
AraceliHarker 4y ago
Even if Google AdSense forbids adult content in its terms and conditions, what can Google's algorithm do when that content comes through an ad network? Nothing at all. I've seen it many times: famous companies like BMW advertising next to porn. It's a strange world we live in.
- arbitrage 4y ago
  Google refusing to do anything is not the same as Google being unable to do anything.
JohnBooty 4y ago
I don't want to dunk on a single out-of-context quote, and I'm sure that Mr. Tetzchner fully understands what I'm about to type as he seems like a brilliant guy. But blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted. The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is because nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is. Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question. Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and "free?" Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such?
- abandonliberty 4y ago
  I'm curious whether advertising or paid usage has the higher potential profit. You can look at it as a mostly closed system. Users buy the products, ultimately paying for advertising. Alternatively, if VCs/failing companies pour money into advertising that fails, this money does not come from users. In this scenario, users get content for free and, combined with the above, the total potential profit of the system is greater with advertising than without. Advertising both alters what people buy and gets them to buy more. As a result, I suspect that even if users are willing to pay for content, the potential revenue in a system that uses advertising is greater. This makes it a rather intractable problem in an unregulated revenue-maximizing capitalist society, requiring both an attitude change from consumers along with regulation.
- tyingq 4y ago
  He does seem to be specifically ranting about the privacy invasion of deeply targeted advertising, rather than ads in general.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Very very true. But, I feel the answer is the same. Advertisers are spending money for ads and they of course want the best possible return for their money and this involves as much tracking and intelligence-gathering as is technically possible. If one is now creating an advertising-supported site, you are now at the whims of advertisers. There are alternatives, but I've never seen them scale. For example some independent blogs and other content creators have "hand picked" ads from selected partners. For example, DaringFireball.net runs one ad per week and he appears to work carefully with advertisers to select ads he feels comfortable running. But I've never seen this scaled up very far. (not that everything needs to be scaled up)
mg 4y ago
Hacker News is kind of ad based. Via the "Company X (YC YYYY) is hiring" posts. How does the community feel about this? Could this type of "native advertising" be a model for other websites too? On the one hand, it so much less annoying than a colorful, animated javascript banner loaded from a 3rd party server. On the other hand, I have the feeling these little lines of text get noticed more due to not being filtered by "banner blindness".
- dewey 4y ago
  That would mean that these posts are funding the site, which they are not as the site is a marketing tool of a big VC fund. Similar to companies offering free tools on their website to funnel people into their paid services.
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  I am ok with these ads. They don’t track you and they make sense in this context. I also don’t mind kiteboarding ads on a kiteboarding site. They are actually useful there. What I don’t like is ads that make no sense in the context of the site and are powered by massive data collection.
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
amusing to see this on a page completely plastered with advertisements
- layer8 4y ago
  It perfectly illustrates the issue?
Wolfenstein98k 4y ago
The moment anyone uses "us", which contains both you, and their political or financial interests, keep your distance. Same goes for any unspecified "they". Once someone says "they took [good thing] from us", be very very wary.
draw_down 4y ago
[dead]
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Advertising and marketing have ruined society, the internet is just one of a long string of casualties. Mail? We throw most of it out without reading it. Phones? We don't answer them. If you invent a new way for people to communicate advertisers will insert themselves and ruin it. But the big problem with them, and why Bill Hicks once told them to kill themselves, is that they prey on insecurities to create demand and manipulate people into giving them money. I assert that marketing is objectively a predatory industry with no positives for society and ludicrously huge negatives. I won't go so far as to say people who work in marketing should kill themselves, but I'd they'd all quit their jobs and try doing a job that actually benefits society for a change we'd all be a lot better off.
- okamiueru 4y ago
  Capitalism taken to it's natural conclusion, is ruining society (and the planet). The older I get, the more apparent and obvious this seems to me. I might be just getting disillusioned with what seems to be a worse planet for the next generation. It's easy to point the finger at what is wrong and provide no alternative. I'm not sure there is one, that is realistic. Though some things should perhaps help counter the negative sides: - Stronger regulation (it's almost never that company profits are in line with the common good, or preservation of nature or natural resources). To even the playing field, all must act within the regulated boundaries of what is sustainable. If you cannot, well... good riddance? - Much stronger focus on education. If we are being political for a second, just consider what US politics looks like to an outsider. The choice is between "well, maybe we should go in a direction of less shit. It's still largely shit, but, less" vs "More shit please! As long as it annoys the opposing 'team', fuck'em!". And the polls end up like around 50/50. Lack of education, and a Murdoc media seems to be the main culprit of this phenomenon. That, and to some, but much less extent, foreign influence (just imagine the field day opponents of the US are having when half the voting population end up wanting more shit). - Automation w/redistribution of wealth, likely only possible by force (like, if you are in the 0.01%, you can remove 99.9% of your accrued wealth and still live better than any king in human history). Anyways, maybe one day all of this becomes "common sense" rather than a political statement. If I were to make a bet, it would be that it becomes too little, too late, and we are in for a century of wars and dystopian famine. shrug
floppydiscen 4y ago
Just reading the title, my first thought was: The advertisers "paid for the internet" for us. Open and free is such a dissonant idea, since the internet costs money to keep running.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Not my downvote. Corrective upvote actually. >the internet costs money to keep running. In the 1990's what you paid to your ISP every month covered it, and included enough web space for everyone to have an average site of their own, which the ISP would serve to the world for you. Google had no ads because their motto was "Don't Be Evil".
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Speaking of being evil, even (especially?) Android is out of the question at this point : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (2015) > Under EU law, data-sharing with countries deemed to have lower privacy standards, including the US, are prohibited. When Android still has a Play Store and non-AOSP versions of it require access to Google services, not to mention that it's all likely to be backdoored for the benefit of the US intelligence agencies (which is the assumption this decision starts from), then effectively the Android Privacy Sandbox is unlikely to make Android legal again in the EU ?
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Oh, so that money that I pay to my ISP every month? I’m just hallucinating that? Give me a break. FB, Twitter, and the rest could go down and I would still be able to use the Internet. It would be more boring for about two weeks or so… then I would get used to it. Maybe go outside more. :)
TrackerFF 4y ago
I think that if the whole wide internet was based on subscription service, we'd got a awfully monopolistic situation. People only have a limited amount of money to spend on these things (entertainment, news, etc.) - and they want to get most bang for the buck. So while ads suck, at least they make smaller (and larger) websites viable. You can seamlessly surf around...if every single website had login, you'd probably stick to a LOT fewer websites.
- htag 4y ago
  From the consumer side, I think music subscriptions are doing it right. I understand we cannot copy and paste this plan onto other industries, but maybe there are some lessons here. * You only need one subscription to get access to all of your music content. Video is a mess with providers competing on content. * There are ad supported networks to view the content, if you do not want to pay. * They are generally regarded as affordable.
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    Unfortunately from the businesses point of view it doesn't work necessarily. Small creators make proportionally much less money than big creators, specially in platforms such as Spotify. Also platforms such as Spotify aren't even profitable (at least not yet) [0]. I would love to see a better internet, but I'm the first to admit I have no idea how to monetize it in less invasive ways that keep it accessible. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/spotify-beats-revenue-forecasts-ad-growth-slow-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/spotify-beats-revenue-for...
kebsup 4y ago
I'm surprised to not see a lot of one-time payment web apps. With my side project - https://gifmemes.io https://gifmemes.io (shameless plug), I've experimented with Google Adsense and in a month, it made on about 5 % of what I got from one-time watermark removal payments, so I've turned it off. I've thought about experimenting with subscription as well, but just found it too repulsive for that kind of project.
- ttjjtt 4y ago
  I cannot fathom why one time micro payments are not at least commonly found. I would have no problem paying my a newspaper or magazine say 20-50 cents for 24 hours of access. Id probably end up spending >€30 a month across several publications (if it could be done in one click). But monthly? Recurring subscription? No and no. So I pay nothing. And get mad about the dire content, ad tracking, and state of the internet.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  One-time payment for web apps doesn't work for 2 reasons (1) web apps have recurring costs (i.e. hosting, but also any updates are released for 'free' since it's really hard to pin a user on the specific version they 'bought'), (2) developers want recurring payments. there's less barrier to entry if you can sell your $1000 software for $50/mo instead.
linsomniac 4y ago
I had high hopes for Brave Browser and BAT as a way to be able to easily fund content, but it hasn't really panned out. The idea is browser integration of micropayments, with a button in the browser enabling you to pay for content via tips or recurring payments. It's a catch-22 for a lot of content, if they ask for a subscription it needs to be enough to be worth their while (payment processing costs, overhead), but also needs to cover typical use. There are so many sites that have ones-and-twos of content I'd use, but want a $10/mo subscription or $30-50/year. It's hard as a casual consumer to justify that. But they also have to cover the serious consumer who finds value in all their content. Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut?
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  The 402 response needs to be properly implemented. But, to do this expeditiously, we need people wanting to move away from advertising revenue for their content. I've consistently posted here about Aperture, Lightning Network's reverse proxy service that implements 402s via Lightning. With support from major browsers, this would provide a means for all different types of services and content providers to easily monetize their sites. https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
- gnz11 4y ago
  > Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut? The nut has been cracked, it doesn’t provide enough sustenance to survive off of.
  - linsomniac 4y ago
    How do I use it to pay for content I consume? I'm serious.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Flattr 2.0 has introduced an alternative that starts with a set monthly payment and splits it to all the (sub)websites you wish to fund. And compatible with all browsers taking extensions, and 2 years before Brave, but it still requires client-side tracking and monthly upload of aggregated data : https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html Also Francis Muguet (RIP) and Richard Stallman have been advocating for a taxpayer(ish) & government(ish) solution 14 years ago : https://www.stallman.org/mecenat/global-patronage.html https://www.stallman.org/mecenat/global-patronage.html
karaterobot 4y ago
Businesses sold a version of the internet to us, using advertising as a mechanism, and we eagerly bought it.
seanp2k2 4y ago
On targeting, is anyone else shocked at how, even with all this data on us, ads are still so awful and irrelevant? I probably get ads that I’m most interested in on Instagram, where I’ve actually purchased things based on seeing them in ads before, but Hulu ads in particular are absolute garbage. I constantly get ads for prescription drugs for diseases no one in our household has. Hulu ad tech also frequently plays the same exact irrelevant ad back-to-back, thinks it’s on an ad when it’s actually on content and so disables FF / RW controls, repeatedly restarts an ad block when trying to go to the beginning of content and will start the whole 3 minute ad block from the beginning unless it completely finishes, sometimes ads ARE able to be FF’d through, sometimes content just downscales to the lowest quality and won’t scale back up, etc etc. I just don’t understand how they’re such a huge platform and obviously advertisers are spending millions showing there, when the ad tech itself is such a steaming pile of hot garbage. If it was my business and they were doing this to my ads, I’d be very upset with them.
- ornornor 4y ago
  You should try nextdns, it might make both problems go away (if streaming on an appliance)
- luckylion 4y ago
  What's amazing to me is how terrible Amazon's ads, related products and upselling are. There's no adblocker there, they know exactly what you bought. Many / most are probably buying a significant amount of all products from them. And still their targeting is terrible. Why? Are they just incompetent? Is the tech just not good enough yet? Are they just not showing their true abilities to keep the population calm?
  - Regnore 4y ago
    My favourite example of this is when I get ads for something that I’ve just recently purchased and clearly no person would want more than one of. Just bought a waffle maker? Why not buy another identical one? Never know when you’re going to need a backup right?
ouid 4y ago
if everyone exercised their right to not render ads, this problem wouldnt exist...
freediver 4y ago
The view strikes as hypocritical as Vivaldi itself is funded by advertising. You can not pay for Vivaldi browser.
- quadsteel 4y ago
  https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
  - account42 4y ago
    > Partner deals So they let others do the dirty work. Still funded primarily by advertising in the end.
dghughes 4y ago
I'm OK with some regulated advertising. I'm not OK with ad companies wanting to know my life story. Ad companies claim if I don't give up to them every bit of my life what I do, say, eat, work,leisure, my location, etc. then I'm the problem?! I'm ruining the Internet! Companies will fail! Show me your damn ad and move on. I'm not looking for a relationship.
- asddubs 4y ago
  To me, an ad is someone trying to poison your brain trying to coerce you to act in someone elses best interest. So I will block ads no matter what. At least that's the simplified version. To backpedal on that a little bit/add nuance, I reject any form of advertisement that had more than, say, 2 people involved in it. I don't care if someone tries to advertise their lemonade stand or their personal art project, but as soon as people in suits get involved, I want nothing to do with it.
- akira2501 4y ago
  There's this presumption of a false dichotomy when it comes to advertising on the internet. That you can have no ads and content that you have to pay for, or you must let google spam a bunch of javascript programmatically into your browser for you. Having worked many years in traditional media, the amount of time this situation has lasted has really been surprising to me. You can make the best money selling advertisements directly. Even better, once you do so, you're no longer reliant on shady third parties to deliver your ads, and ad blockers generally aren't even able to block those ads. We just never got the kind of "content aggregators" who would do this middle man work. Collect content that you pay for, categorize it into publications based on reader interest, then sell direct advertisements over the top of that publication or set of publications. People like to think we're out of the "wild west" stage on the internet. We're just _barely_ starting to pull away from it.
pictur 4y ago
The internet used to be good because there were few people. it's bad right now because too many people are on the internet. I don't think changing internet ads will fix the internet.
guhcampos 4y ago
I tried to read the article but got blocked by a "please disable your ad blocker". No joke.
rchaud 4y ago
RE: playing Youtube audio on mobile browser tabs > That's typically a YouTube Premium feature, but with Vivaldi, you don't need to pay for it. It's up to you whether that's an ethical violation, but companies will understandably take issue with that and attempt to protect their revenue sources, and sometimes that may be through unfair means. Has there been a change to the ToS in Youtube with reference to this? Desktop Youtube has always had this, and it has worked on Firefox Android off and on. What is the ethical dilemma?
- account42 4y ago
  There is no ethical dilemma - websites have no right to know if you are actively looking at them in the first place.
college_physics 4y ago
The business model that Shoshana Zuboff termed surveillance capitalism did not just ruin the internet but undermined the future of the entire tech industry. Tech is far, far more than social or search. Most of it requires significant levels of trust between tech provider and tech consumer. It also requires that the tech consumer pays and therefore has some influence over the service, in a virtuous circle of demand and supply. Despite absurd claims that people just want "free stuff", people pay through their noses for 1) hardware, 2) software and 3) bandwidth - the entire stack that makes the internet (and therefore search and social) possible. The idea that they don't want to pay specifically for these "last mile" trinkets of search or social (that in reality have no option but to pay with private data) does not stand scrutiny. The adtech gambit was so lucrative and it managed to buy so many consciences that people have normalized it. Yet it is a disastrous model that does not scale to deliver the promise that we all feel is within reach. The simple fact is that for tech to flourish somebody must pull the plug on surveillance capitalism. The sooner the better. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff
thro1 4y ago
Part of the problem is advertising needs metrics which require JavaScript and makes The Web unusable.
- thro1 4y ago
  It's JavaScript that makes The Web unusable (with _few_ exceptions). And application and we know better what you want mindsets.
kernal 4y ago
How does Vivaldi make money? >Every time you search using one of the pre-installed search engines, you're helping us grow, one search at a time. Currently, we work with DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Startpage, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex and Neeva. The only exception is Google – we don't make money when you search with Google. So their money comes indirectly from search engines that make money from ads.
qudat 4y ago
I resonate with the sentiment and wrote a post about the smol movement https://bower.sh/what-is-the-smol-web https://bower.sh/what-is-the-smol-web

306 points by redbell 4y ago

Funny in light of the fact they have chosen "Vivaldi" as a name for their company and the product. Why not "Stephenson"?

favaq 4y ago

No, content creators gave the internet to advertisers because they needed something to eat.

ppetty 4y ago
Well said … “ads keep the content free” so says the anti-ad-blocking modal on that site.
- m_eiman 4y ago
  It wasn’t theirs to give, though.
sseagull 4y ago
I dunno. Lots of people contribute to the web without expectation of payment. Like you posting here. The urge to create and share is powerful. Look at all the people editing wikipedia, answering questions on SO and various forums, and even making videos without any real expectation of payback. Seems like the web would be just fine without the professional “content creator” class. (I actually feel like “content creator” is dehumanizing pejorative now.)
- favaq 4y ago
  I choose to post here for free. Others choose to publish their content and have advertisers show ads for which they get paid. That's their prerogative. You have the option of not consuming the content of those who want to get paid or pirate it.
  - account42 4y ago
    Or I can choose to block ads everywhere and if someone has a problem with that they can stop providing their content for free - there will always be other entertainment to fill my time. Even without the tracking, ads are psychological manipulation inteded to make me worse off. I have zero sympathy for anyone who engages in that.
  - esperent 4y ago
    > You have the option of not consuming the content of those who want to get paid Not really. Suppose you go onto a platform like YouTube, where most people are not being paid and some are (through advertising). How would you choose to consume only the content of those not being paid? There's no way to do that except to avoid YouTube and all similar platforms entirely which is not a reasonable option for most people.
- Kye 4y ago
  How many of those people can contribute for free because they get paid by something funded by ads? For example: I'm currently learning DaVinci Resolve. There's a lot of great videos, and they're all free. I expect a lot of these people got as good as they are working on at least a few advertising contracts, or on media that will run with ads interspersed.
- 0dayz 4y ago
  While your point isn't exactly wrong I do think it's a bit of a oversimplification. Most editing of Wikipedia is done for personal reasons, including commercial (you get paid to write on Wikipedia) and with SO its most likely because information is cheap. In fact the points you raise is so trivial that we've had bots do it for us way before chatgpt. Compare this to artists, programmers and designers who only release things for free under strict circumstances (hobby, social gain, licensing requirements, etc.).
wahnfrieden 4y ago
most ugc is uncompensated

AraceliHarker 4y ago

Even if Google AdSense forbids adult content in its terms and conditions, what can Google's algorithm do when that content comes through an ad network? Nothing at all. I've seen it many times: famous companies like BMW advertising next to porn. It's a strange world we live in.

arbitrage 4y ago
Google refusing to do anything is not the same as Google being unable to do anything.

JohnBooty 4y ago

I don't want to dunk on a single out-of-context quote, and I'm sure that Mr. Tetzchner fully understands what I'm about to type as he seems like a brilliant guy. But blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted. The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is because nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is. Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question. Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and "free?" Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such?

abandonliberty 4y ago
I'm curious whether advertising or paid usage has the higher potential profit. You can look at it as a mostly closed system. Users buy the products, ultimately paying for advertising. Alternatively, if VCs/failing companies pour money into advertising that fails, this money does not come from users. In this scenario, users get content for free and, combined with the above, the total potential profit of the system is greater with advertising than without. Advertising both alters what people buy and gets them to buy more. As a result, I suspect that even if users are willing to pay for content, the potential revenue in a system that uses advertising is greater. This makes it a rather intractable problem in an unregulated revenue-maximizing capitalist society, requiring both an attitude change from consumers along with regulation.
tyingq 4y ago
He does seem to be specifically ranting about the privacy invasion of deeply targeted advertising, rather than ads in general.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Very very true. But, I feel the answer is the same. Advertisers are spending money for ads and they of course want the best possible return for their money and this involves as much tracking and intelligence-gathering as is technically possible. If one is now creating an advertising-supported site, you are now at the whims of advertisers. There are alternatives, but I've never seen them scale. For example some independent blogs and other content creators have "hand picked" ads from selected partners. For example, DaringFireball.net runs one ad per week and he appears to work carefully with advertisers to select ads he feels comfortable running. But I've never seen this scaled up very far. (not that everything needs to be scaled up)

mg 4y ago

Hacker News is kind of ad based. Via the "Company X (YC YYYY) is hiring" posts. How does the community feel about this? Could this type of "native advertising" be a model for other websites too? On the one hand, it so much less annoying than a colorful, animated javascript banner loaded from a 3rd party server. On the other hand, I have the feeling these little lines of text get noticed more due to not being filtered by "banner blindness".

dewey 4y ago
That would mean that these posts are funding the site, which they are not as the site is a marketing tool of a big VC fund. Similar to companies offering free tools on their website to funnel people into their paid services.
rqtwteye 4y ago
I am ok with these ads. They don’t track you and they make sense in this context. I also don’t mind kiteboarding ads on a kiteboarding site. They are actually useful there. What I don’t like is ads that make no sense in the context of the site and are powered by massive data collection.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

amusing to see this on a page completely plastered with advertisements

layer8 4y ago
It perfectly illustrates the issue?

Wolfenstein98k 4y ago

The moment anyone uses "us", which contains both you, and their political or financial interests, keep your distance. Same goes for any unspecified "they". Once someone says "they took [good thing] from us", be very very wary.

draw_down 4y ago

[dead]

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Advertising and marketing have ruined society, the internet is just one of a long string of casualties. Mail? We throw most of it out without reading it. Phones? We don't answer them. If you invent a new way for people to communicate advertisers will insert themselves and ruin it. But the big problem with them, and why Bill Hicks once told them to kill themselves, is that they prey on insecurities to create demand and manipulate people into giving them money. I assert that marketing is objectively a predatory industry with no positives for society and ludicrously huge negatives. I won't go so far as to say people who work in marketing should kill themselves, but I'd they'd all quit their jobs and try doing a job that actually benefits society for a change we'd all be a lot better off.

okamiueru 4y ago
Capitalism taken to it's natural conclusion, is ruining society (and the planet). The older I get, the more apparent and obvious this seems to me. I might be just getting disillusioned with what seems to be a worse planet for the next generation. It's easy to point the finger at what is wrong and provide no alternative. I'm not sure there is one, that is realistic. Though some things should perhaps help counter the negative sides: - Stronger regulation (it's almost never that company profits are in line with the common good, or preservation of nature or natural resources). To even the playing field, all must act within the regulated boundaries of what is sustainable. If you cannot, well... good riddance? - Much stronger focus on education. If we are being political for a second, just consider what US politics looks like to an outsider. The choice is between "well, maybe we should go in a direction of less shit. It's still largely shit, but, less" vs "More shit please! As long as it annoys the opposing 'team', fuck'em!". And the polls end up like around 50/50. Lack of education, and a Murdoc media seems to be the main culprit of this phenomenon. That, and to some, but much less extent, foreign influence (just imagine the field day opponents of the US are having when half the voting population end up wanting more shit). - Automation w/redistribution of wealth, likely only possible by force (like, if you are in the 0.01%, you can remove 99.9% of your accrued wealth and still live better than any king in human history). Anyways, maybe one day all of this becomes "common sense" rather than a political statement. If I were to make a bet, it would be that it becomes too little, too late, and we are in for a century of wars and dystopian famine. shrug

floppydiscen 4y ago

Just reading the title, my first thought was: The advertisers "paid for the internet" for us. Open and free is such a dissonant idea, since the internet costs money to keep running.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
Not my downvote. Corrective upvote actually. >the internet costs money to keep running. In the 1990's what you paid to your ISP every month covered it, and included enough web space for everyone to have an average site of their own, which the ISP would serve to the world for you. Google had no ads because their motto was "Don't Be Evil".
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Speaking of being evil, even (especially?) Android is out of the question at this point : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (2015) > Under EU law, data-sharing with countries deemed to have lower privacy standards, including the US, are prohibited. When Android still has a Play Store and non-AOSP versions of it require access to Google services, not to mention that it's all likely to be backdoored for the benefit of the US intelligence agencies (which is the assumption this decision starts from), then effectively the Android Privacy Sandbox is unlikely to make Android legal again in the EU ?
avgcorrection 4y ago
Oh, so that money that I pay to my ISP every month? I’m just hallucinating that? Give me a break. FB, Twitter, and the rest could go down and I would still be able to use the Internet. It would be more boring for about two weeks or so… then I would get used to it. Maybe go outside more. :)

TrackerFF 4y ago

I think that if the whole wide internet was based on subscription service, we'd got a awfully monopolistic situation. People only have a limited amount of money to spend on these things (entertainment, news, etc.) - and they want to get most bang for the buck. So while ads suck, at least they make smaller (and larger) websites viable. You can seamlessly surf around...if every single website had login, you'd probably stick to a LOT fewer websites.

htag 4y ago
From the consumer side, I think music subscriptions are doing it right. I understand we cannot copy and paste this plan onto other industries, but maybe there are some lessons here. * You only need one subscription to get access to all of your music content. Video is a mess with providers competing on content. * There are ad supported networks to view the content, if you do not want to pay. * They are generally regarded as affordable.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  Unfortunately from the businesses point of view it doesn't work necessarily. Small creators make proportionally much less money than big creators, specially in platforms such as Spotify. Also platforms such as Spotify aren't even profitable (at least not yet) [0]. I would love to see a better internet, but I'm the first to admit I have no idea how to monetize it in less invasive ways that keep it accessible. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/spotify-beats-revenue-forecasts-ad-growth-slow-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/spotify-beats-revenue-for...

kebsup 4y ago

I'm surprised to not see a lot of one-time payment web apps. With my side project - https://gifmemes.io https://gifmemes.io (shameless plug), I've experimented with Google Adsense and in a month, it made on about 5 % of what I got from one-time watermark removal payments, so I've turned it off. I've thought about experimenting with subscription as well, but just found it too repulsive for that kind of project.

ttjjtt 4y ago
I cannot fathom why one time micro payments are not at least commonly found. I would have no problem paying my a newspaper or magazine say 20-50 cents for 24 hours of access. Id probably end up spending >€30 a month across several publications (if it could be done in one click). But monthly? Recurring subscription? No and no. So I pay nothing. And get mad about the dire content, ad tracking, and state of the internet.
8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
One-time payment for web apps doesn't work for 2 reasons (1) web apps have recurring costs (i.e. hosting, but also any updates are released for 'free' since it's really hard to pin a user on the specific version they 'bought'), (2) developers want recurring payments. there's less barrier to entry if you can sell your $1000 software for $50/mo instead.

linsomniac 4y ago

I had high hopes for Brave Browser and BAT as a way to be able to easily fund content, but it hasn't really panned out. The idea is browser integration of micropayments, with a button in the browser enabling you to pay for content via tips or recurring payments. It's a catch-22 for a lot of content, if they ask for a subscription it needs to be enough to be worth their while (payment processing costs, overhead), but also needs to cover typical use. There are so many sites that have ones-and-twos of content I'd use, but want a $10/mo subscription or $30-50/year. It's hard as a casual consumer to justify that. But they also have to cover the serious consumer who finds value in all their content. Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut?

kordlessagain 4y ago
The 402 response needs to be properly implemented. But, to do this expeditiously, we need people wanting to move away from advertising revenue for their content. I've consistently posted here about Aperture, Lightning Network's reverse proxy service that implements 402s via Lightning. With support from major browsers, this would provide a means for all different types of services and content providers to easily monetize their sites. https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
gnz11 4y ago
> Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut? The nut has been cracked, it doesn’t provide enough sustenance to survive off of.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  How do I use it to pay for content I consume? I'm serious.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Flattr 2.0 has introduced an alternative that starts with a set monthly payment and splits it to all the (sub)websites you wish to fund. And compatible with all browsers taking extensions, and 2 years before Brave, but it still requires client-side tracking and monthly upload of aggregated data : https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html Also Francis Muguet (RIP) and Richard Stallman have been advocating for a taxpayer(ish) & government(ish) solution 14 years ago : https://www.stallman.org/mecenat/global-patronage.html https://www.stallman.org/mecenat/global-patronage.html

karaterobot 4y ago

Businesses sold a version of the internet to us, using advertising as a mechanism, and we eagerly bought it.

seanp2k2 4y ago

On targeting, is anyone else shocked at how, even with all this data on us, ads are still so awful and irrelevant? I probably get ads that I’m most interested in on Instagram, where I’ve actually purchased things based on seeing them in ads before, but Hulu ads in particular are absolute garbage. I constantly get ads for prescription drugs for diseases no one in our household has. Hulu ad tech also frequently plays the same exact irrelevant ad back-to-back, thinks it’s on an ad when it’s actually on content and so disables FF / RW controls, repeatedly restarts an ad block when trying to go to the beginning of content and will start the whole 3 minute ad block from the beginning unless it completely finishes, sometimes ads ARE able to be FF’d through, sometimes content just downscales to the lowest quality and won’t scale back up, etc etc. I just don’t understand how they’re such a huge platform and obviously advertisers are spending millions showing there, when the ad tech itself is such a steaming pile of hot garbage. If it was my business and they were doing this to my ads, I’d be very upset with them.

ornornor 4y ago
You should try nextdns, it might make both problems go away (if streaming on an appliance)
luckylion 4y ago
What's amazing to me is how terrible Amazon's ads, related products and upselling are. There's no adblocker there, they know exactly what you bought. Many / most are probably buying a significant amount of all products from them. And still their targeting is terrible. Why? Are they just incompetent? Is the tech just not good enough yet? Are they just not showing their true abilities to keep the population calm?
- Regnore 4y ago
  My favourite example of this is when I get ads for something that I’ve just recently purchased and clearly no person would want more than one of. Just bought a waffle maker? Why not buy another identical one? Never know when you’re going to need a backup right?

ouid 4y ago

if everyone exercised their right to not render ads, this problem wouldnt exist...

freediver 4y ago

The view strikes as hypocritical as Vivaldi itself is funded by advertising. You can not pay for Vivaldi browser.

quadsteel 4y ago
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
- account42 4y ago
  > Partner deals So they let others do the dirty work. Still funded primarily by advertising in the end.

dghughes 4y ago

I'm OK with some regulated advertising. I'm not OK with ad companies wanting to know my life story. Ad companies claim if I don't give up to them every bit of my life what I do, say, eat, work,leisure, my location, etc. then I'm the problem?! I'm ruining the Internet! Companies will fail! Show me your damn ad and move on. I'm not looking for a relationship.

asddubs 4y ago
To me, an ad is someone trying to poison your brain trying to coerce you to act in someone elses best interest. So I will block ads no matter what. At least that's the simplified version. To backpedal on that a little bit/add nuance, I reject any form of advertisement that had more than, say, 2 people involved in it. I don't care if someone tries to advertise their lemonade stand or their personal art project, but as soon as people in suits get involved, I want nothing to do with it.
akira2501 4y ago
There's this presumption of a false dichotomy when it comes to advertising on the internet. That you can have no ads and content that you have to pay for, or you must let google spam a bunch of javascript programmatically into your browser for you. Having worked many years in traditional media, the amount of time this situation has lasted has really been surprising to me. You can make the best money selling advertisements directly. Even better, once you do so, you're no longer reliant on shady third parties to deliver your ads, and ad blockers generally aren't even able to block those ads. We just never got the kind of "content aggregators" who would do this middle man work. Collect content that you pay for, categorize it into publications based on reader interest, then sell direct advertisements over the top of that publication or set of publications. People like to think we're out of the "wild west" stage on the internet. We're just _barely_ starting to pull away from it.

pictur 4y ago

The internet used to be good because there were few people. it's bad right now because too many people are on the internet. I don't think changing internet ads will fix the internet.

guhcampos 4y ago

I tried to read the article but got blocked by a "please disable your ad blocker". No joke.

rchaud 4y ago

RE: playing Youtube audio on mobile browser tabs > That's typically a YouTube Premium feature, but with Vivaldi, you don't need to pay for it. It's up to you whether that's an ethical violation, but companies will understandably take issue with that and attempt to protect their revenue sources, and sometimes that may be through unfair means. Has there been a change to the ToS in Youtube with reference to this? Desktop Youtube has always had this, and it has worked on Firefox Android off and on. What is the ethical dilemma?

account42 4y ago
There is no ethical dilemma - websites have no right to know if you are actively looking at them in the first place.

college_physics 4y ago

The business model that Shoshana Zuboff termed surveillance capitalism did not just ruin the internet but undermined the future of the entire tech industry. Tech is far, far more than social or search. Most of it requires significant levels of trust between tech provider and tech consumer. It also requires that the tech consumer pays and therefore has some influence over the service, in a virtuous circle of demand and supply. Despite absurd claims that people just want "free stuff", people pay through their noses for 1) hardware, 2) software and 3) bandwidth - the entire stack that makes the internet (and therefore search and social) possible. The idea that they don't want to pay specifically for these "last mile" trinkets of search or social (that in reality have no option but to pay with private data) does not stand scrutiny. The adtech gambit was so lucrative and it managed to buy so many consciences that people have normalized it. Yet it is a disastrous model that does not scale to deliver the promise that we all feel is within reach. The simple fact is that for tech to flourish somebody must pull the plug on surveillance capitalism. The sooner the better. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff

thro1 4y ago

Part of the problem is advertising needs metrics which require JavaScript and makes The Web unusable.

thro1 4y ago
It's JavaScript that makes The Web unusable (with _few_ exceptions). And application and we know better what you want mindsets.

kernal 4y ago

How does Vivaldi make money? >Every time you search using one of the pre-installed search engines, you're helping us grow, one search at a time. Currently, we work with DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Startpage, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex and Neeva. The only exception is Google – we don't make money when you search with Google. So their money comes indirectly from search engines that make money from ads.

qudat 4y ago

I resonate with the sentiment and wrote a post about the smol movement https://bower.sh/what-is-the-smol-web https://bower.sh/what-is-the-smol-web