151–160 of 314 posts
Any time a site asks me to disable tracking protection, it has the curious effect of reinforcing my desire to leave it enabled - that site has made it clear that they are intentionally and unapologetically violating my privacy for a quick buck.
the problem with this line of thinking is that newspaper people need to actually make a buck. Or else there are no newspapers.
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Agree. I hope someone comes up with a “Netflix for online content”. I’m not going to subscribe to a dozen news sites individually and I also don’t want to make a purchase decision, even if tiny, every time I visit a site. For me a bundle of the top 10-15 high-quality news sites, perhaps letting me choose from different packages at different price points, and allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read…
The Germans kind of have that (formerly called GEZ) and people complain about that, too! It pays for the wrong content! And the private news sites hate it, too! It’s an unfair advantage! I don’t think it will make a difference if a private company collects the cash, but who knows?
The problem here is that STIM is a private company handing taxes and payout. It is commonly argued that they are paying the wrong artists and has no real track on what is popular. The industry can easily game the system by making their own music popular (formerly pushing it out to all radio stations, not sure what they do now).
Micro transactions might just end up with a botfarm in china clicking articles to generate income for the newspapers. Or even more clickbaity headlines to click. A lot of problems to solve and no solution in sight yet?
Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…
It is actually voluntary to use these sites. I would understand your argument if it was illegal to use ad blocker. But it is not. Ad model works for publishers just fine, it is fully up to them what to show on their site to people with ad blockers. (edited: english grammar)
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Maybe the newspapers entire value is tied to a fraction of the staff and they wonder why we are all collectively disinterested in funding their worthless printing presses, managers, secretaries, and buildings?
Maybe so, but this discussion usually conflates four sentiments: 1. I do/don't think the content is worth the subscription. 2. I do/don't think advertising should be used to support the business. 3. I have issues with the privacy implications of advertising. 4. I don't want to pay but I also don't want to deal with ads. Though maybe you're expressing a fifth? "I don't see why they need to spend this much money to mak…
I cannot afford to support dozens of publications which still might not include all the content I want to read because article foo is from yet a different publication.
Guessing ahead of time seems both broken and expensive compared to grazing one a continuous stream of interesting data supported by ads consumed by people too stupid to install adblocking.
In theory modest advertising could probably easily pay for the people that actually produce the content, In theory micropayments might work too.
In reality they insist on wasting most of the money they earn and deploying intrusive ads and bullying to try to make me subscribe so they can keep wasting money.
My choices are to either give them a big middle finger or surrender my computer to their nonsense and prop up their poorly thought out business model.
As adblockers become increasingly prevalent and decreasing numbers pay for subscriptions this will obviously be increasingly difficult for content creators but solving their problems isn't my problem.
Since I only control my computer I will just keep doing whats best for me.
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> There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data. I think it's a little bit of both. Internet commoditized newspapers and unbundled them, allowing us to peruse individual articles wi…
Every time I help a customer with anything I ask if they want free help with adblocker install. This helps them and also our internet bandwidth in the long run. Personally I can't stand all attention grabbing moving things so have been using all sorts of adblockers since they first showed up. Before then I played around with custom css in netscape and blocking in the hosts file, running a local webserver for faster b…
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I agree that news outlets serve an important function. That's exactly why it is especially disheartening to see them turn into organs of surveillance capitalism. Regardless, if you attempt to extort me with a choice between privacy or an uninformed populace, I'll happily share my view on where exactly you can stick that and spin. There are decent media outlets doing good work out there who can report and respect thei…
Has reading national news or keeping up with politics ever benefit you in a real life scenario? If so, in what way? Also, what do you think of Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'?
I think Chomsky is fairly correct, but a bit blinkered.
Your turn: How to you think Manufacturing Consent applies to message boards like this? Does that tell you anything about human behaviour, whether or not mediated by institutional imperative?
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I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. So subscribe to your local newspaper. One of my subscriptions is $25/6 months of Sunday delivery and you get free unlimited online access. That's $4.16/month — below your stated budget. If more people put their money where their mouths are, then we could break the media of their third-party ad serving addiction.
I do get one print newspaper at home. But I want to consume a wide variety of news sources, and a wide variety of news sources want me to consume their news, so I don't think there is anything wrong with demanding that I pay per article from any source.
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Are we really blocking ads or are we really blocking malware? Calling our privacy tools adblockers is a misnomer don't you think for any site can simple put ad in a div and not get it blocked.
That's not how things happened. First they came with the blink tag. Then they added animated GIFs everywhere. They came with the pop-up. Then they put the pop-up under the main window. Ad-blockers' first usage was to make the Web readable. Then years later privacy concerns took over.
At this point, basic self-respect demands I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered.