Comment on Why is the internet overflowing with rubbish ads – and what can we do about it?
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Ads = revenue that keep sites and services running. What can you do about it? Pay.
How about becoming literally disabled and pushed away from the one area i was deemed proficient in?
Seriously, if the internet is going to be like this, might as well pull the plug.
I have been investing in running my own services and programming my own life essential tools anyway. One I will always be computer nerd but one of these years i am just going offline, trow my phone away and glue my mailbox shut.
I’m not talking about “someone must make profits” that’s disingenuous. What I’m saying is that services that you consume for free cost money to run. Someone somewhere has to provide if nothing else the computer/server, and electricity to run it the fediverse runs on donations and ads literally the sync app I’m using runs on ads, paid tier, etc. because it costs time and money to upkeep.
Your personal problems with tech in general and your disability don’t have anything to do with that. People are talking on the tech community about how Google is taking out competing front ends for YouTube and what this means for an ad free experience, and while I agree that Google is obviously the bad guy for being the mutli-trillion dollar company it is, I also recognize that they have always been an ad company and the thing about Google is that before it existed as a free to use service we relied really heavily on an open web that was pretty empty by comparison and very disjoined. Finding things was a problem. Web rings may give people nostalgia for a “better time”, but they weren’t efficient ways to find information.
I can understand being angry but paying for the things you use is the one way to create alternatives to these services that are literally taking advantage of their users for profit as you put it. Lots of web services that are big “gotta make money” companies started out offering us free or inexpensive alternatives to the companies that were overcharging us and gouging us.
The fact that they’ve got too big is an issue with capitalism not the concept that people shouldn’t have to pay for the things they use.
The Internet is full of ads because ads pay bills and keep the lights on.
As with any devil’s bargain, one must evaluate whether it’s really worth it or not.
If all advertising on the Web disappeared tomorrow, would some valuable content be lost because the people putting it up are not willing to fund their site out of pocket? Certainly yes.
Would even more worthless garbage be lost? I think that’s also a “yes”.
I’m willing to accept a smaller Web with some losses in order to get rid of obnoxious advertising. So are many others. You appear to disagree, as is your right. In any case, it would take a major legislative movement and/or cultural change to cram the genie back into the bottle at this point, so the argument is most likely moot.
Yeah but the web has been this way since the mid 90’s. It’s been funded by ads the way that things that came before it were. Broadcast television is a good example. People switched to cable because of less ads and more channels with the expectation that there would be better content. That didn’t last. Then we had tivo and DVRs and so many other products to get around ads. But the root of the problem is that people won’t buy things they don’t know about, won’t use services they don’t know about, will have a hard time looking for goods and services that they do want without some form of advertisement. Word of mouth is advertisment too when you get right down to it. The ads were often less intrusive but became more so over time because it’s such a hotly contested area that pretty much every company small and large is throwing money at.
What’s worthless garbage to some may be useful in a pinch to others. The point is that combating ads means taking away a source of revenue not just for ad aggregators and ad companies but for business full stop. I hate billboards. I’d be perfectly happy to never see a billboard again in my life. That being said, they have been effective ads for a long time, and have been used for good purposes occasionally (missing persons, unsolved crimes etc come to mind).
I’m not saying ads aren’t more often than not intrusive, annoying, or lost on me. I actually do find them intrusive, run a pihole and a private DNS etc. But I also recognize that really laws to curtain what ads can do is a major problem, and that services have bills to pay.
Side note:
This meme is from a year ago:
I am not faulting you for this, your preferente is yours but it strikes me that sync is made for a demographic that would not be as much aware of open source philosophy.
In context of this what your saying makes more sense, I still very much disagree but i see better from what angle your perspective is coming.
I’m not sure what you’re expecting me to do with this. I wasn’t using sync as an example of a foss Lemmy app exactly. I was pointing out that sync doesn’t have that many users and its developer offers a free tier but to give the service that people want it has to be developed and maintained which costs time and time is money.
I wasn’t claiming it as a foss app. I was pointing out that lists of Lemmy users use apps like it (if not that particular one).
I run some of those services that people use. 24/7 I have been doing so for years.
That does costs a lot of time and energy, i ask nothing In return.
Right now on lemmy, you are using a free service running on someones computer, there are no ads nor subscriptions to support it. If it would then i would be spinning up my own instance quicker then bender can imagine his own themapark.
The alternative isn’t just possible, but the default way people have gotten things done since prehistoric times. Do things because we want to, share resources, providing for others. Lift everyone else up and you too will rise.
What i see when i observe services that complain about not being able to sustain without some form of financing is a lack of motivation and passion. To me they are a red flag that they are disfunctioneel by nature. I lose completely faith in there.
Of course i do understand that being unwilling to compromise morality under treat of poverty is an exception rather then rule.
But honestly how people do this shit and Not want to kill themselves in shame is actually weird to me.
Lemmy only survives today because people donate, which I did talk about in my subsequent comments which is exactly my point. It’s not ad supported now (most instances aren’t at any rate) but there are absolutely ad supported fediverse services, and if it gets bigger, it likely will run ada because more users means more content, more bandwidth, more electricity etc. The alternative is possible small scale, when you don’t have billions of users per day. There’s a threshold where the number of users far exceed a what even a group of people can put into a project like Lemmy without needing additional funding.
So either the majority of Lemmy users pays to use the service through subs or donations, or this won’t last either.
grue@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Or let all the commercial site go out of business and fucking die, so that the labor-of-love websites that dominated the net in the '90s can return to prominence. And nothing of value would be lost.
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Anyone who wasn’t around then can’t really know what they missed.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That sounds wonderful. But I’ve been using the web a long time. I remember the time you’re talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people’s eyes.
We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.
Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.
Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you’re looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it’s gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn’t seem to even know they’re not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.
I don’t honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.
grue@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In general, you’re not wrong in your summary of how the Web developed. The problem is, though, that you seem to be assuming that since the Web did develop that way, that it had to develop that way. I disagree with that: I think other possibilities existed and might have been viable or even dominant if the dice of fate/random chance had happened to land differently. (And I think that they would’ve been much more likely to be viable or even dominant if some of the regulatory environment had been different, e.g. if residential ISPs hadn’t been allowed to get away with things like drastically asymmetric connections and prohibiting users from running servers. More enforcement of accessibility and standards compliance, instead of tolerating companies deliberately abusing things like Flash and Javascript to unduly restrict users, would’ve also gone a long way.)
That was not only totally optional, but also arguably considered harmful. HTML was intended to leave presentation up to the client to a certain extent, by design. Megalomaniacal marketers and graphic designers demanding to have pixel-perfect control and doing a bunch of dirty hacks (e.g. abusing
<table>for page layout instead of tabular data) to achieve it were fundamentally Doing It Wrong.Or they implement a distributed architecture that offloads the bandwidth and storage costs to users directly, a la Bittorrent, IPFS, Freenet, etc.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No, I’m not wrong. I’m telling you that there is a threshold beyond which a service cannot support the number of users it has without additional funding and that ads right now provide that additional funding, and always have. And now that we’ve gotten to this point with billions of online users using services daily, we’re to the point where in order to provide a service to that many people bills must be paid and to do that one of two things needs to happen. Ad aggregation, or subscription.
The only reason most of the fediverse survives as it stands now is that it has a small userbase or daily users. When it grows too big to sustain in that regard (given that most of its users now do not actually donate to it), it will die or move to a model that pays the bills. That doesn’t have to be ads. But it absolutely could be, in the same way that it could be subscription service.
Grayjay is an example of a competing service that is subscription based. So was floatplane. Both of these service compete with YouTube. Both of them cost money to run. Each of the examples I have been given that don’t run on ads or subs can be supported currently by the user base because the user base is small and people are providing what it needs out of a labor of love because it doesn’t cause them a hardship to do so. That will not remain the case as the user base grows.