If you don't like roads with billboard, use the backroads instead!
This a poor argument, no HN crowdthink required.
This a poor argument, no HN crowdthink required.
Ads pay for websites.
So yes, your misunderstanding aside, billboard ads do pay for roads in a clearly understood way.
The point is this, ads directly fund websites. Without ads those websites do not exist.
Bill boards do not directly fund highways, our taxes do, and those are collected 99.9999999999% from not bill boards.
Anyway the entire idea is flawed.
If ads pay for websites, then how is that so? Ah, by manipulating the user into buying stuff they don't need.
Ads are showing relevant items people want/need.
Who are you to tell others what they need?
There is no manipulation, that is such a weird POV. It is awareness, are you so easily convinced you buy everything from every ad you see?
I dont love ads but they pay for a lot of sites i love.
I don't want to be aware of which company has the biggest advertising budget.
If I want to be aware of products, it is because of their quality.
Anyway, I don't want to be distracted while working, so implement a different payment method for your website or accept that adblockers exist.
I have no problem with ad blockers.
Distracted while working? What work do you do that requires reading websites with ads?
Ads are basically everywhere.
Fox news manipulates... ads sell.
Sell not manipulation
The dictionary says that to manipulate is to 'control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.' If you want to tack on 'when they're not selling products" for your personal use, be my guest, but then 'advertising isn't manipulation' is tautologous. And you really should have brought up that you have a special, secret definition when you told someone point blank that advertising wasn't it.
I'm the guy who tells everyone about uBlock Origin. Seriously, they love the ad-free web.
But, if you want to support the websites you use you should think about what you are doing. What is frustrating here is the lack of respect for people who create a lot of the web you use, and then you don't pay them. Ads are a way to fund websites, not all of them, but a lot.
The problem with ads is that people don't want to pay with their attention and personal data.
Another problem with ads is that website owners can not directly set a price, and they cannot set the price above a certain threshold where ads simply don't work anymore. It doesn't scale.
Website owners def can set prices. It is super easy.
You gotta be kidding me.
My attention is mine. It is part of me, a part of my mind, my consciousness. There is not a single person on this earth that is entitled to it. It is not a currency they can pay their bills with. It is not something that they have any assumed right to.
So it's funny to see you talk about respect. Advertising's inherent property is its complete lack of respect for me, my choices and my attention. They don't ask if I want to see this crap, they just show it to me. They insert their noise into my mind without my consent. I block them and they double down on it by finding ways to get past my blocker. And to you this mind rape is okay just because it funds your site?
Attention is not something you actively control, its a very complex issue between your subconscious and conscious. That is a much bigger discussion.
I got nothing against you or anyone else getting paid. I'm complaining about the general lack of respect. People act as if they own my attention and can sell it off to the highest bidder. Blockers are merely self defense against these hostile websites.
> Attention is not something you actively control
It's still mine and nobody has any business selling it off for money. If they try, I'll stop them.
Why dont you build a better model then replace it?
A lot of jobs depend on ads, dont shit all over people :)
I do not know if you are serious or sarcastic. Assuming serious, that was feasible 30 years ago. Now trying to build anything competitively different gets you bought out or deplatformed. Neither Brin nor Zuckerberg would stand a chance if they started today.
> A lot of jobs depend on ads, dont shit all over people
A lot of jobs depend on mass calling people at dinnertime with spam donation requests. That is not the reason not to challenge this business model.
I dont hear you challenging a business model. I hear you calling to tear down a system that you do not understand with naive statements.
Would you have protected those jobs instead?
I don't think celebrating the destruction of that institution makes me an extremist...
Where is wasted time? Do you find yourself mesmerized by ads and find yourself staring at them for hours :)?
Since 20,000 people seeing a 30s unskippable ad in Youtube amounts to 167 man hours used, maybe I should have said "hundreds of man hours wasted for a few measly dollars?".
And, life is not a quest toward perfect efficiency. Are you a human or machine? Having fun and enjoying life are not something to be scared of.
You sound like you have your day scheduled down to the minute?
A good reason to block ads. I don't enjoy ads.
Don't worry about the few people who use ad blockers, just be ready to follow new ad practices when they come.
In fact, If I find a website useful, and it doesn't push aggressive/tracking ads, I purposefully whitelist it. Complaining about people blocking ads on your website might not encourage them to whitelist it, though. Your best advocate is your own work.
In our modern world of user generated content and incredible hardware, any nerd could host even the most popular sites as a relatively cheap hobby. The only thing making them non-trivial is... all of the infrastructure for the ads, spying, and control. That and image/video hosting, which could be done through something like ipfs if it were integrated into browsers.
Hosting a forum that gets the traffic Reddit does at higher availability than Reddit does (Reddit returns error pages all the time) is absolutely trivial on modern hardware (except for images/videos, as I said). I've known several people that have unmetered connections/servers in datacenters as a hobby.
The entire history of every text post/comment ever on that site could fit on 2-3 SSDs now. The traffic is nothing. It doesn't take a lot to host a site that can fit on one computer with plenty of room to spare.
Sites relying primarily on user generated content really shouln't have a business side of things. Its just grift.