Comment on Why is the internet overflowing with rubbish ads – and what can we do about it?
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 day agoI’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.
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).
The meme does not confuse Sync with Foss apps, it points out that Foss is the rule here rather then an exception and Sync stands out among the others like a sore thumb.
So its a very bad example to how things are run here.
Now a good argument against this meme i have seen is that you shouldn’t compare a Foss app with a non Foss app, oranges vs apples. But personalty i think all software should be Foss by principle (and many seem to agree here), so I am comparing software that is build using an ethical model vs software that is not.
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.
I have nothing against having the option to donate, which has worked for many projects.
The idea you are sketching, it is a possible reality but that is the bad future to me.
There’s a threshold where the number of users makes it impossible for your service to still have any real sense of identity or intend and it ought to be broken up in smaller parts. Some of the larger instances have already passed that threshold in my opinion.
You did mention the solution, “The alternative is possible small scale” The good future is where every family has their own private instance and every business and service has their own public one, interconnected trough the fediverse.
Keep things small, manageable, and responsible.
I also agree its likely this won’t last, not with so many predators waiting to grab a piece. Web3 is not here yet, as much as meta threads want to believe we are it.
That doesn’t sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can’t generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn’t get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?
Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren’t coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1’s and 0’s.
Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You’ve given me an outline of an idea you have but it’s all broad strokes and no details.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 day ago
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.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.