Basically, he's what many of us aspire to be.
What I can't understand is the quite sudden change of heart 2 days after launching the product. I don't think people here are questioning whether developers are willing to forego their own financial gain for their moral ease (the very existence of the FSF makes it clear that there is a willingness). It's simply a very sudden turn for someone who previously demonstrated no such compunction.
For people who have done things the rest of the world said could not be done, this is the only feedback mechanism that makes sense. (Shrug)
This is likely why people like Steve Jobs have such negative reputations: They learned what their limits were by hitting a metaphorical wall, because it was the only realistic way to learn their actual limits. If you are very intelligent or competent, it will be your routine experience that you can do a great many things that people around you claim "cannot be done." After a while, you just stop listening to the counsel of the great masses of people who try to tell you to not try, who try to tell you that you will regret it.
It is a general observation about the behavior of very accomplished people. Presumably, someone who has fuck you money that he earned himself (as others here on HN are saying he has) falls in that category.
On Sept 16th, a few dozen beta testers may have been using Peace and giving Marco feedback. On Sept 18, Peace is the top ranked app in the app store, displacing MineCraft. MineCraft! Estimates are in the 12000-15000 downloads on the first day[1]. You look in your iTunes connect account and realize you on the path to make $100K on an app that, rightly or wrongly, could impact other people's livelihoods. I can understand how that makes you consider the morality in ways you hadn't before.
Marco isn't against ads. He's said as much, and he runs ads himself. He's against oppressive, annoying, UX destroying ads. He wants to encourage tasteful ads. But within a day he himself had to write a story about how his own app would block ads from The Deck[2], which he has said is the type of advertising he finds tasteful and acceptable. Peace wouldn't effect change if it also impacted 'good' ads, and Marco said in that post he didn't want to be the arbitrator of what is a good and bad ad. At that point it was only a question of when he would pull it.
I take him at his word.
[1] http://www.techinsider.io/marco-arment-just-pulled-peace-fro...
[2] http://www.marco.org/2015/09/17/why-peace-blocks-deck-ads
Because someone giving me 100k for an app which wrote, to use it for the exact purpose I made it for is certainly /the/ reason I would change my mind about making it...
> and subject me to a torrent of unpleasantness. But that’ll end soon enough, and that’s better than how I’d feel if I kept going.
What he doesn't say is that he is obviously already getting what amounts to a "torrent of unpleasantness", from people which are more like colleagues than customers. Of course, no one wants to admit to kowtowing, so there is no mention of it, but as we can see, he cares about this sort of thing, so it was obviously a significant factor.
Except its not the exact purpose he made it. The author believes in tasteful ads - Peace blocks everything.
Absolutely agreed. All else aside, I don't really believe someone goes through the trouble of building, launching and promoting an iOS application on the app store (with all its hurdles) with the thought, "Gee, I really hope it doesn't get too popular!"
I'm not Marco (nor have I ever talked to him) and I'm not trying to put myself into his head space. Moreover, I absolutely despise a conspiracy theory. I'm simply saying that the explanation he gave, true or not, does not make sense to me so I personally choose not to believe it. If I were Marco and reading my comment, my response would be, "Good for you; I honestly couldn't care less what you think."
The world is full of stories of people who attempt something and then get upset or disheartened or unhappy when it comes to pass. Why does everyone have to assume something nefarious here?
Publishers won’t solve this problem: they cannot consistently enforce
standards of decency and security on the ad networks that they embed in
their sites. Just as browsers added pop-up blockers to protect us from that
abusive annoyance, new browser-level countermeasures are needed to protect
us from today’s web abuses.
And we shouldn’t feel guilty about this. The “implied contract” theory that
we’ve agreed to view ads in exchange for free content is void because we
can’t review the terms first — as soon as we follow a link, our browsers
load, execute, transfer, and track everything embedded by the publisher. Our
data, battery life, time, and privacy are taken by a blank check with no
recourse. It’s like ordering from a restaurant menu with no prices, then
being forced to pay whatever the restaurant demands at the end of the meal. [1]
Continuing to visit while blocking ads is no different than downloading movies or apps for free because you can. It's fine when a handful of people do it; just like music sharing wasn't a huge problem until Napster. When every ios user starts totally blocking ads, it's not longer ignorable. There's no human right to read the nytimes.
I still believe that ad blockers are necessary today, and I still think
Ghostery is the best one, but I’ve learned over the last few crazy days that
I don’t feel good making one and being the arbiter of what’s blocked. [1]
Note ad blocking also disabled ads on marco.org and daringfireball.net, though; I'm sure that was unrelated to his decision.
ps -- he hasn't refunded his users. He's indicated how they can get a refund which isn't the same thing at all. Sincere regret might be easier to believe if he got rid of the tens of thousands of dollars he earned from this.
Let's face it, AdBlock on the Web only benefit closed network like Facebook, which also has plenty of PII. If the Web dies as as an Ad platform (because of AdBlockers), guess where the advertisers can go?
Start a trend. Start that trend. Be that person. Not just the person who had a hit iOS app. Be the person who eliminates hunger by setting a simple, obvious, example. Does that feel good? Also keep our app.
In the past, being famous usually required a lot of effort and (usually) money. Many people that could have been famous but didn't spend the time/money to make it happen were often discovered by the larger public only after their death. The end game of this property are things like the modern manufactured artist, where fame is achieved because that was the business plan.
An important consequence of this "traditional" type of fame is that someone who wants to leave and get their old life back can generally stop participating. Without the time/money investment the public moves on. "Traditional" fame is a job you can walk away from.
This changed with the internet, where people can become famous by accident. A tweet or blog post can suddenly get millions of views, or something you made can suddenly become the thing that everybody is trying to get a copy of. It's obvious that this is a well-known concept because we have entire industries working to try to make their product "go viral".
This "unexpected" type of fame has a serious problem: it's permanent. It is hard or impossible to simply "walk away' from something when that would mean walking away from your normal life.
When the tsunami of unexpected fame suddenly happens to someone, it is perfectly rational for someone to try to escape the situation before it becomes permanent. The only problem is it may be too late. Also, we're not helping: the fact that this thread on HN even exists is only making this product (and the drama surrounding it) even more famous.
For a better discussion of this problem, I highly recommend watching "This is Phil Fish" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w ).
edit: I should add a very mild language warning with that video. (a few quoted f-bombs that are understandable in context)
Of course, someone else will be there instead, but I can see the desire not to be the person who causes an abrupt shift in how content monetisation happens on mobile.
To be honest, I was surprised when he released it; from his podcast my impression was that was in the "pro Adblock, but cautious" camp. He was possibly a bit naive about how big it'd get.
Again, I think the best answer is simply the one he gave:
>"Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate"
He didn't anticipate it. In other words, he learned something about himself.
Hopefully that happens all the time to all of us, and hopefully we have the courage to do what we consider the most conscionable thing, even if we know it will may unpopular.
It looks like he just felt uncomfortable making money off of his friends' and colleagues' loss. Makes sense, really, even if some posters can't seem to fathom giving up money to sleep soundly at night.
This is like kicking kittens and then announcing to the world that you're going to stop kicking kittens. Then why kick kittens in the first place?
No one made Marco create an ad blocking app. No one demanded his coordination with Ghostery. No one demanded that he announce it with great fanfare on his site. Moralizing about him stopping it ignores that it was just a few short days ago that he started it.
And now he deserves accolades for stopping it? This is an incredible discussion. Countless other people with the ability and the means, who actually had convictions about this topic, didn't create ad blockers (much less for personal reward). Others still, who have convictions that favor ad blockers, did and stand by their moral compass. Either groups are in a far better position than Arment's "have it both ways" perspective.
Sure. That having been said, people do things all the time without realizing how it's going to make them feel. Marco made an ad blocker, turns out it made him feel bad, so he's going to stop doing it. Fair enough.
I'm not trying to suggest Marco is some Saint here. Like you said, he created this problem for himself in the first place. I just can't believe how unwilling HN's readership is to believe that there isn't some ulterior motivation behind him pulling the app.
Not really, because now all those who bought "Peace" in good faith feel bad. We trusted this guy to deliver a good product and then it disappears under us. Grrrrr..
Also, he himself clearly says that he doesn’t think blocking ads is somehow undoubtedly immoral (like kicking kittens) or something. He makes a much more subtle argument, basically saying it’s a complex issue and he doesn’t feel confident in his ability to make the right decisions looking forward in his stewardship of what would probably have been one of the most popular ad blockers on the platform.
He just doesn’t want to make those decisions. He feels uncomfortable making them. That’s it. I think that’s a very sensible argument for pulling the app, especially if you expected this app to be not very popular in the first place.
The anticipation about adblockers on iOS has been fervent and growing for a while now. Marco went and setup an agreement with one of the larger purveyors of block lists, then utilizing that to all advantages to corner the market. I find it highly dubious that he didn't think it would be lucrative.
The ramifications and gray area of adblocking are not new. They are not unknown. This has been a discussion for literally years. As with others, it seems obvious that there is something else that motivated this sudden change of perception, and personally I would wager that very shortly we'll see Ghostery skip the middle man and release their own blocker, probably with some financial considerations.
My post above is completely accurate. The moral grandstanding is an embarrassment, and it's worse how well this noise works on HN.
Anytime you sell a product in a competitive market, you do this. Those ad companies are happy to steal costumers' attention from other companies.
You could potentially argue that the intended viewer of those ads is now capturing that value, however real world examples of paywalls and various other business models suggest that general web users don't value not being shown ads as much as advertisers value showing them ads.
Ad-blockers don't set their users' money on fire. Of course someone will make that money.
Or maybe it creates value by allowing me to spend my money on things I care about, rather than bandwidth for video ads?
Or maybe it creates value by speeding up the web for me, giving me the one precious and non-reneable resource: Time?
Or maybe it create value for me by giving me privacy? I value that.
Ad blockers are simply moving value around. If people didn’t think it created value, they wouldn’t have paid for it.
That's basically the position a lot of us hope to see ourselves in.
Why bother with all of the political mess (much of it from "the internet" I'm sure) when you could just apply your effort elsewhere and avoid a ton of physical and emotional stress? Focusing on Overcast sounds just fine.
There's nothing in the entire post to believe or not to believe, it's all extremely evasive. It pretty much screams "something happened I don't want to or can't talk about".
Doesn't he? He always seemed like a guy wanting to go into controversy to me.
Not of John McAffee levels of course, but still far more vocal and controversial than most tech bloggers, especially when they're not professional bloggers in the first place (this site is just his outlet, not his core business like for Gruber or others).
for example because Ghostery is owned by Evidon, a company that collects and provides data to advertising companies https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10240483&goto=item%3Fi...
that's at least suspicious...
This is the issue- Him having 'fuck you' money makes no difference to me. Plenty of rich people do things with a hidden agenda. Personally I feel like the reason he gave seems far fetched and much less likely then another causation point. So, with Occam's razor in mind I default to my viewpoint that this was likely a issue induced by Ghostery.
For what its worth, I also feel like the Flappy Bird guy had a alternative reason to pull his app as well. I wont get into that here though.
Perhaps an understandable (though not very charitable) reaction if you cannot see yourself having the same viewpoint. But I think the existence of other people who believe they would have the same viewpoint means you should view it as less far fetched, or not far fetched at all. You might discount some of this as people incorrectly believing they'd take a view that they presently view as "more moral" without actually understanding how they'd behave.
I've had the opportunity to work on some tech that was similar to adblocking, and, without moralizing, I found it highly stressful and quickly chose to work on something else. I encourage you to read my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240713
So he went all in on something that was already hugely controversial (for weeks regarding iOS, and for years on other platforms). That adblockers would be controversial was blatantly obvious to any of this Earth, and should not be a surprise to anyone.
The world didn't need Marco to get in the ad blocking business. Yet he did in a big way, with a big partnership, and put a big amount of his namespace and reputation behind it.
People infer motives because the notion that this all came as some big surprise rings hollow.
But his explanation makes sense to me. I would not want to work on an adblocker, even for loads of money. I don't want to spend my days working out how to undo somebody else's work, knowing they will then try to undo mine, no matter how much I dislike their work. It would be stressful and I would be miserable. Maybe someday it would pay off by helping us get toward a world I'd prefer, but if not, or until then, it would just feel like I was wasting my own energy and someone else is wasting theirs, when we could both be building cool new things instead of fighting each other.