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The web's original sin

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Re: The web's original sin

#21

Post by thaumasiotes »

creshal wrote: post #3
Finnucane wrote: post #2

"The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does." I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad. The reason I use adblockers on my browsers has less to do with jus not wanting to see ads but the fact that ad servers cause terrible site performance--the responsiveness of…

> I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad. Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™ (supposedly, I wasn't too impr…

> Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™

A 3DS comes with at least 6 different (convenient!) buttons and a thumbstick. This affects the quality of the games. Not just the existing games, but the games that potentially could exist. The phones, with their one available input, lend themselves to games where you can only do one thing (or at least, where at any given moment you can only do one thing), like endless runners (jump), angry birds (shoot), or farmville (harvest). You can divide the screen into areas that respond to touch differently, but then you run into the problem that people's fingers are enormous compared to a phone screen.

Re: The web's original sin

#22

Post by FussyZeus »

Supply and demand rule everything. Right now there is simply an insane amount of supply when it comes to news, blogs, and the written word in general and so it is made worthless. When a site demands a subscription or puts up an adblocker wall, I can simply put the title into Google and find an extremely similar story elsewhere. As a consumer, if you want me to look at your site, you need to make the case for ME to want to do that.

I honestly have no problems viewing ads (they're annoying, sure, but so are children and I can be around them just fine) but the advertisers have completely fucked this relationship by going further and further. More monitoring, more tracking, more privacy invasions, downloading megabytes of Javascript and then there's the malware too for an extra level of screw you.

If it's static image content, fine. No HTML ads, no Javascript ads, no epilepsy triggering gif ads, none of that garbage because this is MY computer, not YOUR billboard. Deal with it.

Re: The web's original sin

#23

Post by cousin_it »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #8

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo. P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. To…

You can do this now by running dosbox on your phone. A cursory search shows that somebody's selling "dosbox turbo" on google play for $2.50. I tend to think the impoverished nature of phone games is related to the available controls. You see a lot of phone/tablet games that amount to "wait for something to become clickable, and then click on it". Maybe we need to provide an input method beyond "fat-finger your screen…

I agree that touch is a lousy input method, because it's imprecise and you can't see what you're touching. But phones have other input methods, like the accelerometer. Even early iPhones had a ball rolling game that you could play by tilting the phone. With a modern phone, a controller, and something like Google Cardboard, you could make a decent VR FPS game. And by making imaginative use of the camera and microphone (both movable), you could probably do even more.

Re: The web's original sin

#24

Post by Diamons »

I don't understand. This article claims users feel entitled to free content on the internet and then goes into a rant about pricing and ad blockers while doing nothing to address the glaring fact that he himself thinks he's entitled to make money off of content.

The internet is for the people. It is a free and open service for anyone to use. The only one entitled is the content creator who feels that they have a right to make money for what they produce. Simply no. The internet is for people, not for businesses.

Re: The web's original sin

#25

Post by true_religion »

Diamons wrote: post #24

I don't understand. This article claims users feel entitled to free content on the internet and then goes into a rant about pricing and ad blockers while doing nothing to address the glaring fact that he himself thinks he's entitled to make money off of content. The internet is for the people. It is a free and open service for anyone to use. The only one entitled is the content creator who feels that they have a righ…

I'm not sure why you are implying that "for the people", means excluding organized groups of people, especially profit focused groups.

Re: The web's original sin

#26

Post by bunkerbewohner »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #8

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo. P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. To…

You and me, both! I've been waiting so long that in the mean time I have started developing my mobile, civ-like game on https://nationsonline.net. But I'm not a professional game developer, and we're only two programmers, no artists. I'd much rather a big game developer with artists, game designers and the capacities to finish it in a reasonable time frame would create such a game. Civ Revolution was a big disappointment for me, unfortunately.

Re: The web's original sin

#27

Post by oldmanjay »

kefka wrote: post #9
jeffehobbs wrote: post #4

I've said this for years. If there had just been a payment layer built into the web browser spec, we'd be in different world. A monetizable world. It's still not too late.

"To read this content, please pay $0.01" Yeah. That wouldn't at all be abused.

You say that like the ad-supported model is abuse free, or like people would not adapt and develop mechanisms to avoid the abuse.

Re: The web's original sin

#28

Post by mikeash »

liotier wrote: post #12

When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug. Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.

That seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on, enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing.

Take a look at the original web site:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

That's clearly a non-interactive (aside from navigation) one-to-many system. What is that if not "content"?

Re: The web's original sin

#29

Post by adrianN »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #8

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo. P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. To…

Battle for Wesnoth runs on phones iirc.

Re: The web's original sin

#30

Post by cousin_it »

Without ads, people would still put up tons of free content. Not just for the love of humanity, but also because receiving attention is a kind of power. People crave to influence what others think. As long as you have that, you can always rationalize away the lack of money.
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