Today my stomach turns when the internet communicates with me (ads, messages, pretend news). The original idea is lost. Newbies never get a glimps of what I saw, back in the day. I wonder if it's lost forever.
I blame Google. They solved big data. Made it queryable. And then implemented a business idea very far from "not evil".
Edit: spelling
I get it, I was there, I remember how it felt to see the internet in the first blush of its commercial blooming. Also, I can be pretty biased against where we are today, but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.
Yes, the world was both worse and better than today. I agree. Today is different. Compared to 1995, not worse or better. That's depressing because as a planet, back in 1995, we really needed to improve, as a species.
I don't know how to make an influence in world politics other than to create a business built upon my values. That's what I'm looking for right now. A technical leader. I have given up on politics.
That technical leader is not Google. I personaly share none of the ideas behind ad networks. I like how they solved big data back in the day. And since they have great people they started to solve other problems as well, like mail. And maps. That's not evil.
Sucking the air out of the browser market the same way they did with the web search industry and then standardizing an ad-blocking mechanism is not just evil, it's vicious.
Edit: This and my previous posts are very toxic towards Google. I shall try to be more positive. Maybe they really are doing good for the world. I mean, how will we have selfdriving googlecars if we don't have ads?
Before ad-driven internet business, remember what we had? I do very well. It was called non-profitable business. Are we that plain and narrow-minded that we therefore cannot have non-ad driven business on the web today?
The information you leak when you use ad-driven services, that's the product. I know of tons and tons of other type of products that could be driving an internet business where the product was something else entirely. But I don't see them around so much. Most buy in to the Google ad circus.
You might want to go back to plain-text message boards but the world has moved on and there is an immense amount of commerce and utility conducted over the internet. If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for is successful because of advertising in some form.
Everything is manipulation, that is the action of the world against your thoughts and wishes. Have you never recommended anything to your friends? That's advertising, whether you like it or not, so I don't see what's unethical about it specifically. There are certainly dishonest campaigns and we have some (but do need more) regulation around that, however people do have free will and the final choice, regardless of the ads they see.
It's not advertising, because you don't profit from it. Advertising is fundamentally dishonest, because I (as the viewer) cannot know if you're recommending a product because it's good, or because you get paid for it. On the other hand, recommendations are more likely to be honest, because the person making them doesn't profit from making them (and in fact stands to loose something, if the recommendation turns out to be bad).
Not sure about this value. For instance, Wikipedia, the 5th website in Alexa rank, does not use advertising. Besides, there is an argument to be said that if advertising really became unsustainable, then the services who would disappear would not necessarily be the ones that we miss most.
The idea that "creating content costs money so the reader must pay for it" is simplistic. Many people put quality content on the Web because they enjoy doing so, and don't ask for payment, they even pay for hosting out of their own pockets. That's how it started, and it hasn't disappeared, just became less visible when for-profit content arrived.
> If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for [...]
This statement is far too general to be accurate. I have a job, but I don't work for a company; I doubt that my university significantly relies on ads to be successful.
All of them manageable and skippable through various means. For instance I know/knew many people who would record TV to video, just so they could skip past the ads.
The difference is that this new medium puts the receiver in control, not the transmitter. And that means people will gravitate towards what they consider the best experience, the experience with no ads.
If that doesn't work for whatever publisher or site-owner, they'll have to ask for direct payments, and the market will get to decide which web-sites the internet eventually ends up with.
That's only speciously correct in the sense that the technology had to be there before the economy could use it. Online advertisements and email spam predate HTML by quite a bit, and ad-funded sites (c.f. Yahoo) were some of the very first successful businesses to be built on the platform.
A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads.
B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site.
C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
I think that's a pretty rosy description of things. Advertisements are an effective way to influence peoples' choices. Sometimes good products get advertised, sure; and sometimes when you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you get lucky and land in a pile of snow.
> B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site. > > C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
Absolutely! I don't think many reasonable people would object to anything here. I personally don't block ads on most of the sites I enjoy, and I have to problem with websites paywall-ing me if I use adblock.
B - yup, and bye
C - yup
"Content" of any type is just not worth much anymore. It's plentiful and cheap. What's worth something is eyeballs.
As the price of content, of all sorts, approaches zero, the work is taken over by amateurs. Old timers have seen an amateur web and are absolutely not afraid of its coming back.
This is exceedingly rare and anyone at a major company will tell you that marketing and sales is usually more important for success than the actual product and it's qualities.
But where things get murky is when the primary value of a site is the content generated by its users. Why should I look at ads when I'm going to the effort of creating the content?
And I'm paying for that too with my ISP charges. Why should I pay for the data usage incurred by viewing an ad?
True, except for the various ways that advertising is typically unethical in manipulative design, the unjust and problematic imbalance of power between platform owners and the communities who use the platforms, the fact that ads are usually tied to privacy-invading tracking… besides those sorts of things, nothing's wrong.
> You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit
This rhetoric needs to die. You are free to not go to the grocery store and buy food, unless of course you want food besides that you can grow on your own as a subsistence farmer. I suppose the fact that grocers operate at scale with very organized corporate models in order to consolidate their economic power while consumers are divided into being individual shoppers is totally irrelevant to the market factors here‽
If the supply side were divided into individual programmers etc. while consumers were all organized into powerful consumers' unions with near-monopsony, it would then be equally ridiculous and insulting to say "hey, you individual programmer — if you don't want to make the specific product the consumers' union wants to use, you don't have to; you are free to choose what you make".
Say I know that I want a new refrigerator. Is it in my interest to see carefully crafted ads promoting whichever products have the highest ad budget? No, I want to see objective information in order to choose the best product. And that's just one of the most benign examples, whereas ads often promote things nobody needs at all.
You think cartoon characters connected with sugary cereals are giving kids useful information about the food‽
Well, they're free to try. It's not completely trivial. (The resulting cat-and-mouse game would probably be won by publishers in principle, but an unbeatable solution would require significant changes in ad distribution.)