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Comment by AdmiralGinge | Hacker News Reader

I'm cautiously optimistic about this, even if it is self-interested. Ads are very much a necessary evil rather than something desirable in society I think, and providing developers with an alternative business model isn't a bad thing.

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> Ads are very much a necessary evil

Apple isn't blocking ads per se. They're reducing effectiveness of ads that don't respect user's privacy. The other kind of ads (e.g. sponsored videos, privacy friendly ads, etc) could still work.

I don't think ads that don't respect user's privacy are a necessary evil.

There's a bit of a spectrum between intrusive adverts and just malware, at some point we're going to need a definitive way to draw the line I think.

> privacy friendly ads

Out of curiosity, can you give examples of privacy friendly ads that indie devs can use?

There was a great article in Wired recently about NPO’s efforts in the space. Unfortunately it’s not available as a service and is only an internal platform but there is definitely a model ripe for working on there.

https://www.wired.com/story/can-killing-cookies-save-journal...

Killing non-privacy-friendly ads is a great way to open up that market.

If you’re talking about indie game developers, the way to go is to sponsor popular Twitch streamers and YouTube producers. If you know who these content creators are, you know a great deal about the tastes of their audience without having any identifying information from the audience itself.

If you write a game that the streamer/producer really enjoys, they might even continue to play your game after the sponsorship ends. This is the dream scenario because it’s free advertising that can sustain your game long term. These content creators can also provide a lot of valuable feedback because they tend to become experts at your game over a long period of time.

I'm actually ok with corporate self-interest if it benefits the consumers and their privacy.

I mean Google (the ad company) spent a lot of R&D money into making browsers and the internet faster. For me it means the internet is faster, for them they get more ad impressions and goodwill. Win-win, although they ballsed up the goodwill part.

They spent alot of money to make Javascript faster, so they could push apps from being local to being dumb terminals. Probably to ensure espionage and making the users reliant on big corp?

An average web site isn’t any faster than it was 10 or 20 years ago (unless you still had a modem back then).

Overall the Web is in much worse place, with decentralized hyperdocuments replaced with centralized application server model. FB and Google turned internet into AOL.

> Ads are very much a necessary evil rather than something desirable in society I think

You think advertising is 'evil'?

How far do you take that? For example does a listing in a local newspaper advertising a law cutting service count as evil? Is any form of telling people that you off a product or service really an act of evil?

Listing in a local newspaper in a section devoted to listings of such things is perfectly fine and desireable. Placing your ad anywhere where users do not explicitly go to look for such information that the ad offers is evil, yes.

>You think advertising is 'evil'?

Maybe they do, but using the idiom “necessary evil” doesn’t make it certain that they do. Probably nearly nothing colloquially described as a “necessary evil” is actually “evil”. It can be only a pain or an annoyance, but required.

>[…] the use of the term "evil" in the phrase does not necessarily indicate that the thing being characterized as a "necessary evil" is something that is generally considered an "evil" in the sense of being immoral or the enemy of the good.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_evil

I'm using the common idiom, I don't think it's actually evil but in my opinion it's definitely a fundamentally negative practice that is unfortunately required to be used in the process of doing something otherwise positive. Servers and programmers aren't free, and if what you're doing is positive then you're still socially net positive despite the negative impact of advertising.

I'm not saying that all advertising is bad either, it's the specific case of B2C online advertising that compromises privacy and massively reduces the signal:noise ratio of the platform you're using. Sales and marketing aren't inherently bad in themselves, obviously.

Letting people know your product exists is fine. State of the art advertising, that is, propaganda aimed at maximizing sales, seems to have forgotten about ethics. I'd argue that advertising as a practice today is more evil than neutral or good.

" providing developers with an alternative business model isn't a bad thing."

There isn't really an alternative here. People won't pay for apps.

Also - ads not 'evil' - or rather, it's what people generally chose over paying 50 cents a month, and it's absolutely a choice on our (ie consumer) part.

The problem ironically has to do with relevance. People don't mind relevant ads, but in order to have relevant ads, networks need a lot of personal information. Ugly paradox.

And yes, spammy web pages/apps full of terrible, spammy ads - this is really of no benefit to anyone.

It would be nice if they worked towards fixing that.

I don’t think ads are a necessary evil at all. Facebook and Google came along and ruined the market for paid services. Prior to that the market was healthy and operated just fine.

If we undo the damage caused by FB and Google we can go back to a healthy market where people pay for things with money instead of their privacy.

Microsoft put Netscape and the concept of paying for a browser out of business long before FB and Google

Hotmail started the war on people paying for email clients long before gmail

MS certainly got the ball rolling with their anticompetitive behavior. But it was not until Facebook and Google created their spyware empires that it became essentially impossible to create paid content on the internet. Now the entire internet economy is broken.

> essentially impossible to create paid content on the internet

Really? I see far more paywalls now than I did 5-10y ago

I don't recall much paid content per-se from 2000, when Yahoo ruled the roost. Now I have multiple subscription services which exist only because of the internet

>I'm cautiously optimistic about this, even if it is self-interested.

I'd say that I'm cautiously optimistic about this, especially if it's self-interested. They're less likely to change their mind later if they actually benefit from it vs. empty posturing.

See Google's "Do No Evil" for a counter-example.

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