4 ms·
I 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
by gpm 8mo ago
I 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 8mo agoFor Google, they figured out it's ads... So is it ok?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 8mo agoOstensibly not, if it is outlawed.
- andsoitis 8mo 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.
- gpm 8mo agoTheft of attention. Your attention shouldn't be the website you visits to sell.
- duskdozer 8mo agoEndless, near inescapable psychological manipulation. It has crept up slowly, and some of us have been feeling the negative effects longer than others, but it is so so so much worse than it was even 10 years ago.
- fooker 8mo agoThat works great when everyone has resources to pay for things online. In practice, this cuts of 80% of the worlds population.
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoOh you mean we can reverse the eternal September? Sign me up! Gatekeeping is good, actually! The “let people enjoy things” crowd is responsibility for facilitating the mass enshittification of everything. Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.
- fooker 8mo agoWhy are you commenting here instead of a website that gatekeeps commenters?
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago"You criticize society, yet you participate in it". I have and do pay for website access. That doesn't mean much if the current model flocks to no paid services.
- WarmWash 8mo agoPlease, continue that "etc"... Its been 30 years and no one has been able to continue that "etc".
- gpm 8mo agoOf course they have. Off the top of my head examples include: Grants in the form of tax dollars (e.g. arxiv). To benefit the authors reputation (e.g. numerous scientists, developers, etc personal sites. zacklabe.com as a useful example). As a hobby (I think aiarena.net falls into this category). To collect data for research purposes (e.g. the original chatgpt release, and early recaptcha)...
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoWhat could possible go wrong with the government funding media? It’s not like they would take away funding for media that they don’t agree with.
- Eisenstein 8mo agoWhy would a government elected in a democracy be less trustworthy than a few private individuals? Do heads of large corporations not have an interest in controlling information?
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoWhy are you acting like this is something hypothetical? The Trump administration just cut funding for both NPR and PBS because they are “too woke” The same government who threatened to take ABC broadcast license because Kimmel made a joke about a dead podcaster
- gpm 8mo agoYou're making the counter argument. Government funded media may be cut or controlled in times of (wannabe) dictators, but the same applies to privately funded media (see Kimmel, Colbert, CBS, Washington Post, etc)
- Matticus_Rex 8mo agoI think we have rights to do lots of things that banning this business model would violate.
- gpm 8mo agoI assume you're primarily referring to freedom of expression? I take the view that it doesn't include the freedom to pay people to carry a particular message so long as the restriction on paying is neutral as to the content of the message, but I can certainly respect the view that it does. My comment about not having a right to business models is in some ways more general. Regardless of whether this business model is protected for some other reason, business models in general aren't, and it's a common flawed argument that they are.
- kerkeslager 8mo agoReally? Name one. Note, neither one of us is a corporation, so "we" doesn't refer to corporations.
- nkmnz 8mo agoTell this your local sports club that needs a new set of shirts.
- kerkeslager 8mo agoI support government funding for things that keep the population exercising. It literally saves taxpayers money by driving down healthcare costs.
- bigfudge 8mo agoNobody is talking about banning ads on sports shirts.
- juliangmp 8mo agoWe should be talking about that
- nkmnz 8mo agoSo what about sports shirts with ads shown on youtube streams?
- bigfudge 8mo agoBut that doesn’t make the streams more or less addictive, or directly pay the platform which has control of that. So it’s basically irrelevant
- nkmnz 8mo agoSo you really think ads during a video make them more addictive?
- bigfudge 8mo agoNo. The point here is that Google is not paid for the ads, so are not incentivised to make the service more addictive. This seems obvious: it’s not the ads we have a problem with per se—- it’s the distortion of they attention economy they entail. Clearly any scheme will not be perfect but these sort of objections either seem to misunderstand the core issue, or to be willfully confusing by raising irrelevant details.