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I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell you - they don't care. They care only
by neya 7mo ago
I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell you - they don't care. They care only about revenue numbers. You can walk up to them, show them this article and even this HN thread and their first question will be "how does it affect our revenue?"
They don't see it as money made through ripping off users without their consent - they think they are entitled to that money. Anything that leads to less money in the name of usability, transparency and honesty is just met with a shrug.
To them, the author of the article and the rest of us are just rambling developers who don't understand how businesses work. And they are the gold standard (they think so) for business ethics. So tell me again, do you really think they will do "something" about that?
- sef6i2dhhj 7mo agoI have worked professionally with those 3 and I can tell you they do care, but they don't make the decisions at Future.
- plasticbugs 7mo agoI personally know two of the three people named, and trust me, they are going to be livid about this.
- albedoa 7mo ago> trust me, they are going to be livid about this. Just as soon as...what? How are two of the top three people named on the "Meet the team" page simultaneously oblivious to the half gig of ad downloads and on the verge of caring? Forgive us for not trusting you on this.
- carlosjobim 7mo agoYou're not any kind of "us". You are just a single person, like me and everybody else here. Of course they can be - and probably are - unknowing of some erroneous code in one of their thousands of articles.
- albedoa 7mo ago[flagged]
- rrgok 7mo agoHow is "them being livid" is gonna help revenue?
- parineum 7mo ago> I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell you - they don't care Prejudicial and cynical, nice.
- OptionX 7mo ago>"how does it affect our revenue?" Simple, you can serve a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads and I and others might turn off adblock to support the publication or you can do what you're doing, I'll keep it on and see no ads at all.
- pineaux 7mo agoNobody is turning off ad blockers.
- b345 7mo agoI do. I have turned off UBlock Origin at the learnopengl site as well others where the ads are unobtrusive enough to not block the view completely or require several actions on my part to view the contents. It also helps that the content is not "SEO optimised" bullcrap.
- Defletter 7mo agoYup, I keep mine enabled at all times. Anytime I've tried selectively disabling them, I get burnt with increasingly intrusive ads. I might be convinced to enable some kind of "ethical ads" filter that only permits ads are known to be unobtrusive and not track, but then you need to trust that whoever maintains that list wont succumb to incentives.
- nkrisc 7mo agoI will never disable mine. I think back to when malware was served from ads on nytimes.com. If you let your guard down, someone will mess up and let malware through. Adblockers are security.
- benterix 7mo agoWhile I agree with you in general, I am one of the very few people who do it for the small amount of sites I support. This is not a smart decision from the technical point of view but it's been fine so far.
- michelb 7mo ago
- Angostura 7mo agoHow would you like PC Gamer to pay their staff? Pop the whole thing behind a paywall? Yes it’s poorly designed and annoying, I don’t ses where you get ‘ripping off’ from. It makes you sound like a rambling developer who doesn’t understand how businesses wor
- neya 7mo agoI know for sure good businesses don't make their users download half a GB worth of data without the user's consent/knowledge (which is what the article states) in the name of "paying their staff". Ironically, they are not even a gaming company and the users aren't exactly downloading a gaming application that justifies the size of the data.
- Angostura 7mo agoAs I say, it’s very sloppy and could be improved. It probably hurts their readership metrics. ‘Don’t unnecessarily annoy your customers’ is a good maxim. But no-one is being ‘ripped off’.
- philipallstar 7mo agoI think it's just they have to make money to pay salaries and don't have any better ideas, or they don't have the power to implement them.
- mvdtnz 7mo agoI think this is extremely uncharitable and while there may be people this is true for, it is not at all the general case for people with job titles like "brand director" or "editor in chief". In fact I think it's obnoxious to tar specific named people with such a false generalization.