5 ms·

I used to be a freedom advocate. But making money from ads is making me think of ways to protect that income source. I should start looking at alternative sourc

• angersock 13y ago
  Well, at least you're honest about it. :\
• ronaldx 13y ago
  Do better. I'm serious. Do better so that you don't have to make money from ads.
  • diminoten 13y ago
    If I'm a writer, I measure how well I do by the number of people who read my work, or more specifically, by the number of people who draw meaning from my work. If I can't be compensated for giving people new insight, then I can't do it exclusively, which means I'll do it less. If I do it less, I'll be less skilled at it, which means I won't contribute to the collective knowledge as much as I potentially could if I didn't have to, for example, grow my own food. By putting ads in my writings, I'm able to write more, and get better. I can do better only if I get paid to do it. So when you say, "Do better", you're saying, "make money from what you write", which on the web means, "put advertisements on your writings".
    • ronaldx 13y ago
      No, you're very badly mistaken. Are you a shill for an advertising company, by the way? Deciding to put ads on your work means you are primarily making money by serving people ads, not from what you create. You are now probably writing stories like "1 Weird Trick To Get People To Read This Blog..." - populist work that fulfils your essential need for pageviews. This is not content of the type you claim, whereby people think or draw meaning from the work. That aspirational type of work normally has a small audience - at first - that wouldn't satisfy your need for advertising revenue: you can't make ends meet by depending just on that during your lifetime. The beast of advertising only takes talent and creativity away from human society.
      • diminoten 13y ago
        Nate Silver wouldn't have a job without advertisement. Neither would Glenn Greenwald, Walter Cronchite, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings. TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and M.A.S.H. would not exist without ads. Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Peyton Manning, Michael Phelps, Michael Jordan, Michael Tyson, Tiger Woods, and Larry Byrd would not have done the things they did without ads - no one would have paid them to. Ads pay for people who are good at what they do to do what they're good at what they do as a means to pay for the other things they have to do. You couldn't possibly be more wrong about advertisements - without ads, there would be no US as you know it today.
        • eevilspock 13y ago
          People made similar arguments for slavery. What I'm trying to say is your argument for ads is full of logical fallacies. Without ads, the US would be a better place.
          • diminoten 13y ago
            Ads are not slavery, Walter Cronkite has no such evil on his consciousness.
  • anoncow 13y ago
    Thanks. I recently removed all ads from all but one of my websites (and got a job). The one is to study trends. Concentrating on learning for now. Also: 1. not hating on sites that run on ad money, which is a very valid business model. 2. You can detect and choose to not show content, if you detect adblock(should work for casual users). 3. Do something that reddit does - "Thank you for not using Adblock" banners or something that game-debate.com does - "Pics of kittens asking you to add them to Adblock's whitelist" 4. You can use adblock-friendly ads
    • ronaldx 13y ago
      Well done for experimenting and good luck :) I especially like #2 - Blocking ads is the only reasonable way for me to say "You don't have permission to show me ads". Let's say it's part of my Terms & Conditions for displaying content on my browser. If a site owner doesn't agree to my terms, they don't have to show me the content either. If we can't agree, then there's no problem.
    • eevilspock 13y ago
      In our society many of us subconsciously or sometimes consciously turn down the volume of our own conscience, because we'd rather not come face to face with our hypocrisy, our complicity with banal and not so banal evil [1], because we don't want to give up the benefits. In the Internet tech community, its ultimate manifestation is how we pretend advertising is not evil, while deep down know it is [2]. [1] The Banality of Systemic Evil, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality.. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality.... [2] No free lunch, no free web, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624666
      • anoncow 13y ago
        >Advertising simply shifts the cost of the "fee lunch" to the price of the advertised products. In other words we still end up paying. It may even shift costs regressively, toward lower incomes and the less educated, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off. From the second link. However, >Without more data, we can't know.
• CamperBob2 13y ago
  Cool story, bro. A regular Flowers for Algernon.
  • anoncow 13y ago
    Haha. I admit, I went a bit over the top with the piracy and stealing bit. Given that a large part of the blogging/pageviews based crowd is very pro-freedom, I doubt things will change. But you can't be very sure. Sadly, money is very important. You go from "I'll do what I like. Money is secondary" to "Money, money, money" very quickly. That and corporations owning content farms running on clicks.