181–190 of 315 posts
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Governments do this on a massive scale with lotteries. I agree it's very dodgy ethically.
Governments have a monopoly. In this case, new services will take all his customers. It's very different.
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>I'm not against funding people, I'm against funding ad agencies and their tracking and their other maladies. Such as trojaned ad networks, silly amounts of javascript and data, etc.... This is an extremely simplistic view of the world. You can go on thinking that you're really only sticking it to coca-cola or walmart, but the truth of the matter is that 50% of digital ads (At least on facebook) are SMBs. They're sta…
Well there's a simplistic view of the world if I ever saw one. It is not, for many people, the advertisers that are the problem, but the ad networks. It's the ad networks that cookie and track. It's the ad networks that load the website with horribly slow loading external JS. It's the ad networks that want to track, profile and retarget us to death. It's the ad networks that use any means possible to get that view. F…
I hate this supposition that everyone should bend over backwards to allow people who make money in a certain way continue making money in that way. Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else? Annoying advertisements are, in practice, the result of people failing to be creative in monetization. Ars Technica, for instance, has done a great job of integrating ads in…
Your example about Ars Technica is perfect. They do it great and in a very tasteful way. I applaud them. The issue lies in that all the people who do it bad, The Verge, etc ruin it for Ars Technica. Why? Because the ads on The Verge are so atrocious they install adblockers. Now these adblockers are all in whitelist mode from the start. Nobody cares to turn it into blacklist mode and require users to manually enable i…
Lots of people here trying to infer motives. Why not just believe what he says? He's a guy who has enough money, wants to do what he loves, and doesn't enjoy controversy. He's hacker enough to want to muck about with how to make a blocker, but it's not his joy. Basically, he's what many of us aspire to be.
I don't want to infer motives because I don't know. I will say that I am among those who doesn't really believe this is simply a morality tale. There are several folks here, like yourself, who are basically saying, "yeah, I can understand the mentality of not wanting to do and ad-blocker because of the moral grey area" I can understand that as well. What I can't understand is the quite sudden change of heart 2 days a…
On Sept 16th, a few dozen beta testers may have been using Peace and giving Marco feedback. On Sept 18, Peace is the top ranked app in the app store, displacing MineCraft. MineCraft! Estimates are in the 12000-15000 downloads on the first day[1]. You look in your iTunes connect account and realize you on the path to make $100K on an app that, rightly or wrongly, could impact other people's livelihoods. I can understand how that makes you consider the morality in ways you hadn't before.
Marco isn't against ads. He's said as much, and he runs ads himself. He's against oppressive, annoying, UX destroying ads. He wants to encourage tasteful ads. But within a day he himself had to write a story about how his own app would block ads from The Deck[2], which he has said is the type of advertising he finds tasteful and acceptable. Peace wouldn't effect change if it also impacted 'good' ads, and Marco said in that post he didn't want to be the arbitrator of what is a good and bad ad. At that point it was only a question of when he would pull it.
I take him at his word.
[1] http://www.techinsider.io/marco-arment-just-pulled-peace-fro...
[2] http://www.marco.org/2015/09/17/why-peace-blocks-deck-ads
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Why exactly do you think that's a dispositive argument? Poll the public about their appetite for paywalls and you'll get an even more vigorous response --- paywalls are reviled by normal people. And yet logically, if you think ad-supported content isn't a good model, you should support paywalls. They're transparent and up-front and don't require cross-site tracking. Really, this is pretty simple: people just want it…
Paywalls are inconvenient, and in some cases arguably inappropriate. It's annoying to follow a link to a paywall. Complaining about that != "reviled." But none of that is as intrusive as modern ad tech. Ads dug their own grave, slowly, gradually, and are now shocked to find people are shoveling dirt in on top of them. Moreover, ad blockers are a proportionate response to Web bugs, trackers, and ad tech in general. E-…
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> Fair enough Not really, because now all those who bought "Peace" in good faith feel bad. We trusted this guy to deliver a good product and then it disappears under us. Grrrrr..
You can get a refund for your purchase at the link he provided. No harm, no foul.
Let's say I don't care about a refund but I want to continue using it, albeit unsupported. The developer says, "It’ll keep working for a long time if you already have it, but with no updates."... but this is what I am not so sure about. I looked at my iTunes backups and didn't see Peace. It's also not in the list of my updated apps in iTunes, presumably because it got pulled from the store. Suggestion to the develope…
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We're talking about extremely low marginal cost. More like a free glass of water or free use of the restroom than a free pair of jeans.
Marginal cost? free glass of water? No. Writing articles cost time and money. They are not free.
I didn't say "no cost", I said "marginal cost".
Installing a sink, making cups, etc. also has a relatively high upfront cost (probably more than writing a Buzzfeed article even). The point is that once the article is written and given to the first person, it costs nearly nothing to give it to next person.
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He expected to make a tiny ad-blocker nobody cared about, and then keep tinkering with it. Instead, he captured the majority of the market—at which point he realized that his ad-blocker is not nearly "nice" enough (in the ABP "whitelist sites that display non-intrusive ads" sense of nice) to make sense as the one the majority of iOS users use, and he has no idea how to do the work required to get it there (I.e. build…
He announced it on his highly trafficked blog and Twitter account. He carries pretty significant weight within a large circle of folks likely to install such an app. This isn't his breast feeding timer app we are talking about.
Instead, he likely expected it to be another Instapaper: an app existing amicably along with a few other similar offerings, one of which is an entire company (Pocket), and one of which is Apple's own service (Reading List).