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The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently. Maybe it's time to not

The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently. Maybe it's time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games. But we're the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is. Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There's a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it's a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can't remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO'd that I can't find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that's just not possible?

phpisthebest 4y ago
The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren't a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There's no reason PayPal can't support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before. Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick's paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1]. tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users/customers don't actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model. The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn't because it's being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it's just the least-worst option we've compromised on. [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs.pdf https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...
  - freedomben 4y ago
    > The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Indeed. I wonder if something like Brave's idea of just creating a pot of money per month, and then paying that out is workable. As a user I'd love to throw $10 into my pot and not have to worry about cost exceeding that and not having to see ads. The network effect is a beast though. You need participation before you can get participation.
    - efreak 4y ago
      Flattr?
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      That's explored in section 5.1 of the Szabo paper. tl;dr: you basically have to cap how much the sites can charge to avoid the pot getting drained by a bad actor, but that just creates an incentive for every site to charge the maximum - why wouldn't they? There's no human deciding after all. So then you're basically deferring to, and trusting, a central actor to set the price for all this content. Then premium content makers have to demand a higher price to make the economics work, which in turn, means everyone sets their prices to the new upper tier. That has its own serious implications, and comes with much of the same hazard as Google has today, IMO. By eliminating the agency in making that purchasing decision you eliminate much of the benefit of a market for content.
      - tjoff 4y ago
        Why would it have to be all or nothing. Maybe I can spend an extra literal 2 seconds for content I adore and spend an hour on, than on something I barely skim.
      - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
        So you need to give the site a reason not to charge the maximum. Suppose the user can choose their monthly fee, but so can the site. Anyone paying $5/month can use any of the cheapest sites. Some sites require you to be paying $50/month. The sites that require a higher monthly fee get paid more per user, but they also lose out on any money at all from users paying less than that (because they don't have access). Mass market sites will choose low rates and make it up on volume. Specialized sites with premium content can choose higher rates and still get paid with a smaller number of users. But the user is still not getting nickle and dimed, because if you're paying $50/month, you get all the $50/month tier content.
- ComodoHacker 4y ago
  If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with 'viable micropayments' is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.
- kamel3d 4y ago
  is not that what Brave browser was trying to solve?
  - minsc_and_boo 4y ago
    They were but it was done through trying to push their own crypto on everyone. Realistically for adoption there just needed to be a micropayment using existing currencies.
- sfmike 4y ago
  The fact there is none is because humans are inherently heuristic and ads are the non invasive answer to being around and letting business models happen as any manual micro payments just wouldn't happen. What's our closest buy me a cup of coffee? And that's niche and really only adopted by those who have thought about this problem.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    Wikipedia for example gets generous donations from all kinds of people. So paying freely for beneficial services is also known in non nerd circles. Micropayments would really help, spread that to smaller projects/sites, that cannot afford to also build a foundation structure.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I disagree. Ads are fine as long as they're actually just passive ads. Sometimes they even show me things I want to buy! It's the surveillance and general impunity around responsibility with people's data that is problematic.
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  Google tried this already, where you could pay $0.02 or something to not see ads on websites. Instead, they would show cat pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor IIRC the problem was is that their network wasn't universal. While it works on some ads on some websites, there were still non-Google ads that it didn't work on.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- autoexec 4y ago
  > The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. A better candidate for "biggest injustice" would probably be the RIAA/MPA and the copyright laws they paid for and continue to abuse for profit and control. It sounds like that was even what actually finally made this torrent site more trouble than it was worth (assuming that's why his site was null-routed by the host). It threatens every single user, no matter if they deal in copyrighted material or make money doing so or not. The industry continues to push and push for more power and control over what we're allowed to see and hear. They already have the power to force ISPs to kick people offline and never provide service for them again over nothing but unproven accusations that never see a courtroom. They want the ability to force ISPs to block any website at any time within minutes - again because of unproven claims. They already have this ability in several countries around the globe, and until recently all of their attempts to enforce this in the US have failed. (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-orders-every-us-isp-to-block-entire-websites-accused-of-enabling-piracy/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-ord...) but while they haven't been fully successful in the US yet, they keep trying. They want the semi-anonymous access to the internet we have via VPNs and TOR eliminated They want to eliminate or restrict any devices, technologies, components, and services that might facilitate the circumvention of DRM or allow the copying of content including things like youtube-dl, debuggers, and decompilers along with any site offering them or even just instruction on how to bypass DRM. They want to force website operators to automatically filter uploads and remove content at their request. They want to make streaming copyrighted material (like a song or video game) a felony punishable with imprisonment and they want some acts of piracy to carry life imprisonment as well as harsh criminal penalties for "attempted copyright infringement" They want increased use of wiretaps and police resources for piracy investigations. They've argued that ISPs offering faster internet speeds makes them liable for severe penalties under copyright law since it encourages pirates to use their service to commit infringements. They have spent millions every year on lobbying. They have judges and lawmakers in their pocket. They've had their lawyers installed throughout the US justice department and they chip away every year at our freedom. There's basically no push back against them from anyone other than ISPs which have been losing in courts badly, and a handful of people on the internet who are even aware all of this has been going on and escalating.
- eek2121 4y ago
  Well no. Micropayments imply you pay authors. Adsense and other platforms do not require that. Apples and oranges, fyi. Micropayments are suffering because most folks aren't willing to pay for content. Paywalls have shown that depending on the few is a viable strategy. You say that an ad supported web needs to die, but I will point out that such a move would even kill Wikipedia, as they rely on their ad-driven donations to keep them alive.
johnnymorgan 4y ago
I love your moxie Zach. Brave is in this space and it is changing but will take a long time. The centralization, and I'd argue way over centralized, of the web has hurt innovation in the advertisement and marketing space. People like yourself are going to make this happen by push innovation, it may just be as user but it counts
KMnO4 4y ago
I block ads on all platforms, so I’m immediately out. I imagine most people on HN are the same.
branon 4y ago
Tell everyone you know about Firefox, uBlock Origin, and SponsorBlock. Get them to install and use it. Work an IT job? Push ad blockers out to any customers who don't outright refuse 'em. If everybody blocks the ads, advertisers will run them elsewhere and we'll get the Internet back. We might see some collateral damage, like ads embedded into works themselves, but this is easy enough to remedy with SponsorBlock and its ilk.
saurik 4y ago
> I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games. I mean, many of the people on this website are the people who work for and enable these very companies in their injustice. The first step is to accept that, if you work for one of these companies, you are the injustice. "But I only work there, I don't make decisions!" people will claim; yet, at the end of the day, they are not only directly enabling these injustices but are very directly benefiting from them! We need to stop talking about these big tech companies as if they are abstract all-powerful gods acting from afar... somewhere, there is a software developer--with a human name--who built this automatic ban system. At the very least, if you have any friends who work for these companies, and if they aren't actively working from within to make something better--or like... don't have some pretty epic sob story about how they can't get another job and really really need the money for some reason (I'm going to leave this exact line up to the reader, as it is frankly negligible: the vast majority of the people who work at these big tech companies are not hurting for the money and are often part of a whole host of other problems in localized inequality)--it should be made clear to them that you are not OK with their moral tradeoffs.
- Name_Chawps 4y ago
  Focusing on personal responsibility instead of legislation is a dead end.
  - ndr 4y ago
    Why? More regulation almost always ends up helping the big players. Are you suggesting removing any regulations?
    - seanp2k2 4y ago
      We've all seen how responsibly companies act in less-regulated markets, and the FTC is already pretty damn toothless.
    - Name_Chawps 4y ago
      If legislation helps the big players so much, why do they spend so much lobbying against certain legislation? Why do big time CEOs complain about regulation so much, if it's such a boon?
niyikiza 4y ago
There are many "viable" options to advertising with AdSense!
throwaway14356 4y ago
for laughs i tried to recruit people to make a FOSS banner rotator (or actually multiple formats of it) I imagined it funny to plaster website with advertisements pointing at actually good and free things. I made some banners but this takes time and using names and logos without permission makes it hard to make funny things however noble the effort. Thankfully no one was interested, more like the opposite. The FOSS community is full of people who passionately hate promotion. If they see it on the horizon they explode in rage. Meanwhile I cant find things I know must exist and no one knows what I've made. There has to be an answer to the riddle but it takes better men than me.
seanp2k2 4y ago
The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind, like never before in history have we had this much info about consumers, and yet Hulu chooses to run pharma ads for us all day for conditions that no one we know of have. That, combined with all the ridiculous mobile ads plus complicated cookie BS on the mobile web make it almost unreadable even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device. I don't mind paying for content, but publishers still find ways to punish anyone trying to get any kind of a deal, e.g. Apple News+ subscriptions don't work to log in to actual sites, so you can ONLY read most of those via the Apple News app which of course doesn't allow commenting, and doesn't integrate with my feed reader or browser in a way that lets me actually view articles I come across on those publications via other means, so I must find the name + publication of an article, switch to Apple News, try to browse to find that, and usually by that point I just stop caring and go do something else. Another workaround for places like Rolling Stone is to just switch to private browsing and use the however many "free" article views per month...again as someone who technically does pay for access to this content via Apple News+. I feel like I'm slowly arriving at the conclusion that any in-app browsers should be considered harmful on mobile due to the integration and UX headaches they pose. What's so bad about opening the system browser instead of your app's awful skin on top of mobile Safari, with a window that takes up most of the screen but doesn't have all the features of the normal system browser and might close at any point for $reasons.... Is this really the best we can do in 2023, after investing trillions in ad tech over the decades?
- mertd 4y ago
  > The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind, > even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device. Please don't take this as snark but these two statements are not uncorrelated. You're basically saying, "don't send targeted ads" and you're getting what you asked for.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  I've put out some feelers for an alternate ad network that I think could do some good, and one of the first traps I ran into is that incentives are not there for the ad network to show us relevant ads. They only care about what the advertiser is willing to pay - Hulu probably COULD show you ads relevant to your life, but the irrelevant pharmaceutical ads pay them more. I don't know how we get around this. My idea involved an adblocker that tries to let through ads that align with the consumer's long-term goals, with the consumer having the ability to update their preferences in real time, but that's pretty close to facebook's ad model and that's still crap.
lakomen 4y ago
Adsense had become an abomination. I have 400GB of content that made over 300k € . After the main domain went offline, now 3 years later I'm putting it back up, they denied everything validation of the new domain. They became fat and lazy. They need competition or to be broken apart.
zackmorris 4y ago
Patreon was the word I was looking for :-) So many thoughtful replies, thank you all! After reading them, it sounds like we currently lack a way of paying into an internet commons where funds get distributed to the sites we visit most. Something like a water utility, where its very existence is priceless, but we don't have to think about it each time we turn on the tap, because the unit price of rinsing dishes is almost too cheap to meter. Cryptocurrency has potential to power something like that, but concerns around privacy and having too much money pulled from bank accounts have not been entirely addressed yet. To flip this on its head, some suggested that we're only looking at internet ads from the supply side. Looking at the demand side might show that people want to actively pay to support websites they enjoy. Especially if that suppresses ads where it's implemented. But there's currently no mainstream way to donate perhaps $5-30 per month to provide a kind of internet universal basic income with zero fees. Off the top of my head, one of the most popular recipients might be something like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to lobby against dystopian legislation from the RIAA/MPAA, for example. The first legislation to target might be to ban bans and enforce transparency, so that all customers have a guaranteed right to dispute any ban and be restored within say 2 weeks, or be refunded any proceeds from before their account was suspended. Which might get ad companies to do their jobs and stop fraud internally, as well as cultivate competitors who advertize a lower ban rate. Some good starting points: Patreon ACH FedNow Faster Payments SEPA NPP Cash App Google Contributor Brave Rewards Zcash's shielded pool Flattr Kindle Unlimited Youtube Premium Venmo PayPal

phpisthebest 4y ago

The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.

arcticbull 4y ago
The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren't a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There's no reason PayPal can't support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before. Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick's paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1]. tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users/customers don't actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model. The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn't because it's being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it's just the least-worst option we've compromised on. [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs.pdf https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...
- freedomben 4y ago
  > The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Indeed. I wonder if something like Brave's idea of just creating a pot of money per month, and then paying that out is workable. As a user I'd love to throw $10 into my pot and not have to worry about cost exceeding that and not having to see ads. The network effect is a beast though. You need participation before you can get participation.
  - efreak 4y ago
    Flattr?
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    That's explored in section 5.1 of the Szabo paper. tl;dr: you basically have to cap how much the sites can charge to avoid the pot getting drained by a bad actor, but that just creates an incentive for every site to charge the maximum - why wouldn't they? There's no human deciding after all. So then you're basically deferring to, and trusting, a central actor to set the price for all this content. Then premium content makers have to demand a higher price to make the economics work, which in turn, means everyone sets their prices to the new upper tier. That has its own serious implications, and comes with much of the same hazard as Google has today, IMO. By eliminating the agency in making that purchasing decision you eliminate much of the benefit of a market for content.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      Why would it have to be all or nothing. Maybe I can spend an extra literal 2 seconds for content I adore and spend an hour on, than on something I barely skim.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      So you need to give the site a reason not to charge the maximum. Suppose the user can choose their monthly fee, but so can the site. Anyone paying $5/month can use any of the cheapest sites. Some sites require you to be paying $50/month. The sites that require a higher monthly fee get paid more per user, but they also lose out on any money at all from users paying less than that (because they don't have access). Mass market sites will choose low rates and make it up on volume. Specialized sites with premium content can choose higher rates and still get paid with a smaller number of users. But the user is still not getting nickle and dimed, because if you're paying $50/month, you get all the $50/month tier content.
ComodoHacker 4y ago
If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with 'viable micropayments' is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.
kamel3d 4y ago
is not that what Brave browser was trying to solve?
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  They were but it was done through trying to push their own crypto on everyone. Realistically for adoption there just needed to be a micropayment using existing currencies.
sfmike 4y ago
The fact there is none is because humans are inherently heuristic and ads are the non invasive answer to being around and letting business models happen as any manual micro payments just wouldn't happen. What's our closest buy me a cup of coffee? And that's niche and really only adopted by those who have thought about this problem.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  Wikipedia for example gets generous donations from all kinds of people. So paying freely for beneficial services is also known in non nerd circles. Micropayments would really help, spread that to smaller projects/sites, that cannot afford to also build a foundation structure.
nerdponx 4y ago
I disagree. Ads are fine as long as they're actually just passive ads. Sometimes they even show me things I want to buy! It's the surveillance and general impunity around responsibility with people's data that is problematic.
minsc_and_boo 4y ago
Google tried this already, where you could pay $0.02 or something to not see ads on websites. Instead, they would show cat pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor IIRC the problem was is that their network wasn't universal. While it works on some ads on some websites, there were still non-Google ads that it didn't work on.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
autoexec 4y ago
> The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. A better candidate for "biggest injustice" would probably be the RIAA/MPA and the copyright laws they paid for and continue to abuse for profit and control. It sounds like that was even what actually finally made this torrent site more trouble than it was worth (assuming that's why his site was null-routed by the host). It threatens every single user, no matter if they deal in copyrighted material or make money doing so or not. The industry continues to push and push for more power and control over what we're allowed to see and hear. They already have the power to force ISPs to kick people offline and never provide service for them again over nothing but unproven accusations that never see a courtroom. They want the ability to force ISPs to block any website at any time within minutes - again because of unproven claims. They already have this ability in several countries around the globe, and until recently all of their attempts to enforce this in the US have failed. (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-orders-every-us-isp-to-block-entire-websites-accused-of-enabling-piracy/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-ord...) but while they haven't been fully successful in the US yet, they keep trying. They want the semi-anonymous access to the internet we have via VPNs and TOR eliminated They want to eliminate or restrict any devices, technologies, components, and services that might facilitate the circumvention of DRM or allow the copying of content including things like youtube-dl, debuggers, and decompilers along with any site offering them or even just instruction on how to bypass DRM. They want to force website operators to automatically filter uploads and remove content at their request. They want to make streaming copyrighted material (like a song or video game) a felony punishable with imprisonment and they want some acts of piracy to carry life imprisonment as well as harsh criminal penalties for "attempted copyright infringement" They want increased use of wiretaps and police resources for piracy investigations. They've argued that ISPs offering faster internet speeds makes them liable for severe penalties under copyright law since it encourages pirates to use their service to commit infringements. They have spent millions every year on lobbying. They have judges and lawmakers in their pocket. They've had their lawyers installed throughout the US justice department and they chip away every year at our freedom. There's basically no push back against them from anyone other than ISPs which have been losing in courts badly, and a handful of people on the internet who are even aware all of this has been going on and escalating.
eek2121 4y ago
Well no. Micropayments imply you pay authors. Adsense and other platforms do not require that. Apples and oranges, fyi. Micropayments are suffering because most folks aren't willing to pay for content. Paywalls have shown that depending on the few is a viable strategy. You say that an ad supported web needs to die, but I will point out that such a move would even kill Wikipedia, as they rely on their ad-driven donations to keep them alive.

johnnymorgan 4y ago

I love your moxie Zach. Brave is in this space and it is changing but will take a long time. The centralization, and I'd argue way over centralized, of the web has hurt innovation in the advertisement and marketing space. People like yourself are going to make this happen by push innovation, it may just be as user but it counts

KMnO4 4y ago

I block ads on all platforms, so I’m immediately out. I imagine most people on HN are the same.

branon 4y ago

Tell everyone you know about Firefox, uBlock Origin, and SponsorBlock. Get them to install and use it. Work an IT job? Push ad blockers out to any customers who don't outright refuse 'em. If everybody blocks the ads, advertisers will run them elsewhere and we'll get the Internet back. We might see some collateral damage, like ads embedded into works themselves, but this is easy enough to remedy with SponsorBlock and its ilk.

saurik 4y ago

> I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games. I mean, many of the people on this website are the people who work for and enable these very companies in their injustice. The first step is to accept that, if you work for one of these companies, you are the injustice. "But I only work there, I don't make decisions!" people will claim; yet, at the end of the day, they are not only directly enabling these injustices but are very directly benefiting from them! We need to stop talking about these big tech companies as if they are abstract all-powerful gods acting from afar... somewhere, there is a software developer--with a human name--who built this automatic ban system. At the very least, if you have any friends who work for these companies, and if they aren't actively working from within to make something better--or like... don't have some pretty epic sob story about how they can't get another job and really really need the money for some reason (I'm going to leave this exact line up to the reader, as it is frankly negligible: the vast majority of the people who work at these big tech companies are not hurting for the money and are often part of a whole host of other problems in localized inequality)--it should be made clear to them that you are not OK with their moral tradeoffs.

Name_Chawps 4y ago
Focusing on personal responsibility instead of legislation is a dead end.
- ndr 4y ago
  Why? More regulation almost always ends up helping the big players. Are you suggesting removing any regulations?
  - seanp2k2 4y ago
    We've all seen how responsibly companies act in less-regulated markets, and the FTC is already pretty damn toothless.
  - Name_Chawps 4y ago
    If legislation helps the big players so much, why do they spend so much lobbying against certain legislation? Why do big time CEOs complain about regulation so much, if it's such a boon?

niyikiza 4y ago

There are many "viable" options to advertising with AdSense!

throwaway14356 4y ago

for laughs i tried to recruit people to make a FOSS banner rotator (or actually multiple formats of it) I imagined it funny to plaster website with advertisements pointing at actually good and free things. I made some banners but this takes time and using names and logos without permission makes it hard to make funny things however noble the effort. Thankfully no one was interested, more like the opposite. The FOSS community is full of people who passionately hate promotion. If they see it on the horizon they explode in rage. Meanwhile I cant find things I know must exist and no one knows what I've made. There has to be an answer to the riddle but it takes better men than me.

seanp2k2 4y ago

The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind, like never before in history have we had this much info about consumers, and yet Hulu chooses to run pharma ads for us all day for conditions that no one we know of have. That, combined with all the ridiculous mobile ads plus complicated cookie BS on the mobile web make it almost unreadable even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device. I don't mind paying for content, but publishers still find ways to punish anyone trying to get any kind of a deal, e.g. Apple News+ subscriptions don't work to log in to actual sites, so you can ONLY read most of those via the Apple News app which of course doesn't allow commenting, and doesn't integrate with my feed reader or browser in a way that lets me actually view articles I come across on those publications via other means, so I must find the name + publication of an article, switch to Apple News, try to browse to find that, and usually by that point I just stop caring and go do something else. Another workaround for places like Rolling Stone is to just switch to private browsing and use the however many "free" article views per month...again as someone who technically does pay for access to this content via Apple News+. I feel like I'm slowly arriving at the conclusion that any in-app browsers should be considered harmful on mobile due to the integration and UX headaches they pose. What's so bad about opening the system browser instead of your app's awful skin on top of mobile Safari, with a window that takes up most of the screen but doesn't have all the features of the normal system browser and might close at any point for $reasons.... Is this really the best we can do in 2023, after investing trillions in ad tech over the decades?

mertd 4y ago
> The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind, > even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device. Please don't take this as snark but these two statements are not uncorrelated. You're basically saying, "don't send targeted ads" and you're getting what you asked for.
SuoDuanDao 4y ago
I've put out some feelers for an alternate ad network that I think could do some good, and one of the first traps I ran into is that incentives are not there for the ad network to show us relevant ads. They only care about what the advertiser is willing to pay - Hulu probably COULD show you ads relevant to your life, but the irrelevant pharmaceutical ads pay them more. I don't know how we get around this. My idea involved an adblocker that tries to let through ads that align with the consumer's long-term goals, with the consumer having the ability to update their preferences in real time, but that's pretty close to facebook's ad model and that's still crap.

lakomen 4y ago

Adsense had become an abomination. I have 400GB of content that made over 300k € . After the main domain went offline, now 3 years later I'm putting it back up, they denied everything validation of the new domain. They became fat and lazy. They need competition or to be broken apart.

zackmorris 4y ago

Patreon was the word I was looking for :-) So many thoughtful replies, thank you all! After reading them, it sounds like we currently lack a way of paying into an internet commons where funds get distributed to the sites we visit most. Something like a water utility, where its very existence is priceless, but we don't have to think about it each time we turn on the tap, because the unit price of rinsing dishes is almost too cheap to meter. Cryptocurrency has potential to power something like that, but concerns around privacy and having too much money pulled from bank accounts have not been entirely addressed yet. To flip this on its head, some suggested that we're only looking at internet ads from the supply side. Looking at the demand side might show that people want to actively pay to support websites they enjoy. Especially if that suppresses ads where it's implemented. But there's currently no mainstream way to donate perhaps $5-30 per month to provide a kind of internet universal basic income with zero fees. Off the top of my head, one of the most popular recipients might be something like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to lobby against dystopian legislation from the RIAA/MPAA, for example. The first legislation to target might be to ban bans and enforce transparency, so that all customers have a guaranteed right to dispute any ban and be restored within say 2 weeks, or be refunded any proceeds from before their account was suspended. Which might get ad companies to do their jobs and stop fraud internally, as well as cultivate competitors who advertize a lower ban rate. Some good starting points: Patreon ACH FedNow Faster Payments SEPA NPP Cash App Google Contributor Brave Rewards Zcash's shielded pool Flattr Kindle Unlimited Youtube Premium Venmo PayPal