Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

We need ublock origin EVERYWHERE.

I actually wrote this before on reddit, before I eventually left reddit due to the censorship. KDE changed a lot and Nate asked for donations via a daemon. I pointed out that we now need to undo pester-ads added by KDE developers. Lo and behold, I was cancelled on #kde reddit. I still think we need something like ublock origin but for EVERYTHING, not just the browser. ublock origin is great for browsers, but there is a lot more that should be filtered away; take bad UI choices made by upstream, not even an ad. Some software allows fine-tuning, where the user can customize the project a bit (firefox UI for instance, you can modify it). We need this on the whole operating system level, not just the browser. That way, as a convenient side effect, Laravel could no longer abuse users like that.

I live an ad-free life (well, digital life ... in reallife I still get pointless ads shown). I think every human being should have the option to not have to see ANY ads. The more the industry complains about it, the more I censor away such ad-monsters.

I agree that there's a strong need for ad blockers nowadays. I also use uBlock Origin on all my browsers. But I'm not sure if a world that is completely devoid of advertising would... work. Advertising (in some form) is a necessary evil, I think.

Any business needs customers to make revenue and, well, exist. So any business needs to have some way to make themselves known to potential customers.

In the case of Laravel, they offer an open source framework completely for free, and pay for the development man hours through their commercial offerings, e.g. Laravel Cloud. That commercial offering is not bad: they offer a very smooth way to deploy your Laravel project. In order for the offering to make any revenue, potential customers need to know that it exists, at least. They're still free to choose whether they want to use that commercial offering, or if they want to deploy their project on their own.

Previously, making sure people knew Laravel Cloud existed was done through the Laravel home page. But nowadays more and more people "consume" a framework's documentation through their AI tooling, and they no longer visit the home page.

In a comment [0], which is conveniently being left out of both TFA and most comments on HN, the maintainer even explains that the addition was not meant as a literal advertisement, but as a way to make sure new users of the framework at least _know_ that they can deploy their application on Laravel Cloud. And they are even actively asking for suggestions on how to rephrase the addition so that the AI Tooling does not see it as "you MUST use Laravel Cloud" gospel.

[0]: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758#issuecomment-42589...

I also block ads everywhere I can, but I have to admit that an open source project such as KDE showing once a year a simple text notification asking their users to consider making a donation has nothing to do with a commercial ads in my opinion.

> I actually wrote this before on reddit, before I eventually left reddit due to the censorship.

If you're the same shevy-xyz I've seen in programming subs many years ago, you weren't censored. You were outright unpleasant and condescending to people...

I'm using KDE as my daily driver and haven't noticed any ads so far. Where can I find these pester-ads?

The notification only exists since Plasma 6.2 (august 2024) [1]. Maybe some Linux distribution disable it?

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i...

Ah, thanks for the link.

While I don't remember seeing the notification, I think a yearly (!) system notification doesn't exactly qualify as pestering.

I guess they mean this https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...

Great. Let's remove all ads and end up all and any form of subdized work. Now, tell me how much you will be contributing to KDE?

Every time tech invents something amazing, the enshittification follows shortly thereafter.

I agree with you about the KDE ads. I also complained about it on Reddit and was downvoted for it. There are way more appropriate ways to communicate this information that isn't a desktop notification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com