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Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
by gchamonlive 9mo ago
Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
- recursive 9mo agoWhy? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.
- gchamonlive 9mo agoHow can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.
- forgetfreeman 9mo agoWhat part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?
- gchamonlive 9mo agoBut the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?
- recursive 9mo agoIt used to be.
- forgetfreeman 9mo agoIt really isn't. It was so much more than that but a couple decades of "innovation" and here we are.
- fsflover 8mo agohttps://wiby.me https://wiby.me
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 9mo agoHonestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.
- forgetfreeman 9mo agoYou know there's individuals who will unironically defend any dark pattern one cares to point to so your take here is pretty unsurprising. I feel like this is getting excited over finding a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 8mo agoI meant it more as marveling at the people who get excited at the undigested corn kernel and then make artwork about it, though not to knock participation in this zeitgeist. There really is something fascinating about seeing people congregate over something that excites them, regardless of the curmudgeons who denigrate it. Doubly so if I don't understand it. It doesn't have to be your cup of tea but calling it "a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd" is unduly hostile.
- forgetfreeman 8mo agoThe only thing more predictable than the credulous defense of harmful technologies is the wildly fallacious "old man sneering at clouds". If there is hostility there's generally a good reason for it. Refusing to engage with that is an indication of arrested emotional development or maybe a massive ideological blind spot. It certainly doesn't herald open-mindedness.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 8mo agoThis seems like a record for number of projections per sentence. You do not have any reason to think I've (1) "arrested emotional development" nor (2) an "ideological blind spot"; (3) my "defense of harmful technologies" was not even presented, let alone (4) does it have anything to do with old men shaking their fists at clouds; and you do not have any reason to say I've (5) not been open-minded. The only thing I said is that there have been some happenings to be entertained by, that is not exclusive to other feelings about them. I can think whoever set up MJ Rathbun has been irresponsible while also laughing at the dumb thing their irresponsible decisions caused. These feelings are not mutually exclusive and hostility towards the ones I expressed because you made assumptions about other feelings I must have is an indication of arrested emotional development and certainly doesn't herald open-mindedness. Obviously (this is from my perspective, let's remember our emotional development and open-mindedness), you must fear these things in some manner and you are projecting said fears onto my statements in these comments.
- SecretDreams 9mo agoGood things get tainted over time. The internet was a good thing. Today, not so much. It's probably a net negative for most youth in terms of cognitive development. Aka a drag on the future of humanity. Maybe it could be good again, but not on the path it's on.
- Hikikomori 9mo agoSounds good to me.
- tokyobreakfast 9mo agoHTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.
- MBCook 9mo agoThere’s nothing wrong with macro payments either. Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoSubscription fatigue will quickly limit that. Yes, people used to subscribe to magazines but usually just a few. And by the way, those magazines were full of ads too.
- presentation 9mo agoHalf of the people on this site think that subscriptions are evil too, though.
- bigfudge 8mo agoNormally that’s for software and it’s borne of irritation with enshittification and rent extraction from software that was previously free from that. SAAS is a risk if you invest time and energy in developing expertise in it. Lots of us have been burned many times in this way, and for me it’s one of the primary reasons I prefer open source software, beyond any purist gnu type arguments or anticapitlist sentiment.
- rgblambda 8mo agoThe Economist (ironically a subscription based publication) reported that subscriptions for news media results in greater political polarisation. When the news outlets says something subscribers don't like, they run the risk of losing those subscribers. This incentivises appealing to a specific set of political beliefs and coddling the customer.
- ahallock 9mo agoBanning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king
- coldtea 9mo agoHave we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right? Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.
- lobf 9mo agoI work in ads... :-/
- gchamonlive 9mo agoWhat do you do? Honest question
- lobf 9mo agoI work on the production end. I’m a producer and production manager for live-action ads.
- forgetfreeman 9mo agoWork in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.
- rogerrogerr 9mo agoAre you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.
- coldtea 9mo agoIf it can only be funded via ads, it shouldn't be funded and is not essential to exist.
- gpm 9mo agoI don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.
- gchamonlive 9mo agoFor Google, they figured out it's ads... So is it ok?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 9mo agoOstensibly not, if it is outlawed.
- andsoitis 9mo agoBut under what principle would you allow advertising, in general, online? That seems like an arbitrary penalty. What harm is being prevented by banning advertising, in general?
- Eisenstein 8mo agoAll human laws are arbitrary in the sense that they have no natural precedents. We made them up because they make society better when we have them. Sometimes they end up not doing that so we change them as needed. In this case, a lot of people think society would be improved if we created this one.
- Scarblac 8mo agoAllowing advertising quickly makes everything about getting more eyeballs and therefore more income from advertising. Users aren't the customer, they are the product. That directly leads to all these addictive dark patterns.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 8mo ago> What harm is being prevented by banning advertising, in general? The harms of addictive design in internet social media. Regardless, my point was just to answer the question, "is it okay as a business model?" Ostensibly, if advertising online were banned, a business model centered around selling online advertisement attention would not be ok.
- lich_king 9mo agoI think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selling access to it. The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.
- plagiarist 9mo agoThe internet was absolutely better without that. I arrived after the original Eternal September, but there have been more and more until now everyone is perpetually online 24/7. Now fucking everything about the world is a hustle to monetize every possible nook and cranny around content. There isn't even content anymore, it's nearly all AI slop as a substrate to grow ads on. I am nostalgic for the era when I found "punch the monkey" irritating. People used to make websites as a labor of love.
- justinclift 8mo ago> All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses ... That goodwill seems to be in short supply since... hmmm the mid 2000's (rough guess). And goodwill like that seems to be honestly not even understood by the generation(s)* since then. * Saying "generations" (plural) there because we've had quite a few people go through their formative years during this time and not just a single clearly defined generation.
- fsflover 8mo agoThat's exactly because the goodwill competes with billions of profits.
- gchamonlive 8mo agoYou can't compare 2000s social media to what it's become today. It's orders of magnitude larger today both in terms of volume of data and cultural impact. That's no revisionism. Infrastructure always costed money, but it was relatively inexpensive to develop a social network back then. Instagram had a team of 12 if I'm not mistaken before being bought. So it was easier back then to justify what was pocket change to corporations. The potential payoff was incredible. But eventually the money printing machine needs to start printing money.
- goosejuice 9mo agoPaying for content works just fine
- ulrikrasmussen 9mo agoThere should be no viable alternative to the free-because-your-attention-is-the-product business model because that is the core problem
- kerkeslager 8mo agoIt's called paying for goods and services. You know, basic capitalism. I think one thing to understand about advertising is that it fundamentally breaks the way capitalists say capitalism works. If you really want capitalism to be about competition to create the best quality at the lowest cost, then you can't have advertising. Advertising inherently drives up cost because it costs, and it allows lower-quality, higher-ost products to outcompete higher-quality, lower-cost products if they are better advertised. And before some advertiser comes along and says, "But how will we find out about goods and services!?" Search engines. Independent reviewers. Word out mouth. Experts. These are solved problems. And more to the point, advertising is literally the worst way to find out about goods and services. Mostly, advertising is simply lies, and when it's telling the truth it's not telling you the whole truth. If you're concerned about people being able to find out about goods and services with any accuracy, then you should be against advertising. Ads aren't information, they're misinformation which prevents consumers from making accurately informed decisions.
- Scarblac 8mo agoUsers can pay for services they use. If that's not viable enough, so be it.
- skeptic_ai 8mo agoWhy not make Gov level. So any tax you pay goes to a company to maintain a social media etc. But in reality is going to crap too as how you select the “right” company? If the company is owned by Gov then it will probably be worst than now. Then it will be back to communism