Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why don't you accept donations?

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 193 posts

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#101

Post by omginternets »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #57
snarf21 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a similar thing with a few past employers after I've moved on. "Hey, can you explain this code to the new person?". In some cases, I'd be glad to do a 1 hour call or whatever. They frequently ask me to submit a bill for my time and I always refuse. I don't want to turn into some kind of staff augmentation and be at their beck and call "because they are paying". Way better to think of it as a gift and I get…

sounds more like you are uncomfortable billing your market value, like most of us - you should charge at least a day’s worth of your old (or current) salary for one hour of this kind of on-demand work. If they don’t want to pay, that’s great, it means it really wasn’t that important after all…

I think this has more to do with the fact that not everything has to be a market all the time.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#102

Post by msravi »

binwiederhier wrote: post #67
approxim8ion wrote: post #3

I can't think of too many pieces of software that have improved my life as significantly as uBlock Origin in the last decade. It's been an absolute godsend.

I have never used an ad blocker and have resisted installing it many times. My thinking always was: I'd rather have a web with ads than a web in which I have to pay for content and sign up to 800 different websites with 800 different accounts. A website that I've frequented a lot, the German news website spiegel.de, has converted to pay only mostly, and i now can't use it anymore. I am not saying that's the fault of…

Nothing prevents a website from putting up ads relevant to its content, or ads that are generic enough that don't require tracking of their userbase's age/gender/marital status/what they had for lunch.

But if websites insist on doing this under the illusion that they can monetize their userbase to the last penny, then it's only fair for its users not to allow it and force the website into being more explicit about the monetization - via a paywall.

> has converted to pay only mostly, and i now can't use it anymore

You could, but you're not willing to pay for it. Fair enough. But a significant number of their userbase is now telling them that they're not ready to pay using their personal info. That's good feedback that their users have provided using an adblocker.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#103

Post by kingofclams »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #89
skinnymuch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption is that most are not ripping the ads out of the magazine without seeing them at all. The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it. You can make all sorts of loose statements like this then draw the line where you feel it’s wrong. It will still be arbitrary. To continue stretching examples. Developers chose to release software as is. Through some comb…

> The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it. Nobody ever signed any social contract. You can't even navigate to the page's actual terms of service without being subjected to ads and surveillance capitalism. As if anyone even reads those terms to begin with. Their invalid assumptions are their problem. Nobody else needs to worry about this. It's their business mo…

This might be a bit off topic, but do you mind elaborating on your anti-copyright philosophy?

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#104

Post by TylerE »

flatiron wrote: post #83
baal80spam wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to the point that I can't imagine using the internet without uBlock installed.

I don’t install anything on my work computer that I can’t say 100% is used for work so I could never justify uBlock. It does make a HUGE difference. The web without it is a giant mess.

It's easy to justify as a security measure, given the amount of malicious ads trying to serve up exploits.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#105

Post by mdorazio »

cnasc wrote: post #88
flatiron wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t install anything on my work computer that I can’t say 100% is used for work so I could never justify uBlock. It does make a HUGE difference. The web without it is a giant mess.

My company installs uBlock on all laptops by default

Same. They do it as a security measure.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#106

Post by technion »

approxim8ion wrote: post #3

I can't think of too many pieces of software that have improved my life as significantly as uBlock Origin in the last decade. It's been an absolute godsend.

It's actually a substantive money saver in a shared compute environment. Running Windows RDS or VDA solutions, you can actually watch CPU and RAM reductions across the board by deploying uBlock Origin.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#107

Post by kingcharles »

smoe wrote: post #96
kingcharles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing the Web of 2021 with a mobile hotspot on a desktop is impossible without an ad blocker. There is so much shit on web pages now that: (a) site assume you're on a desktop and have infinite bandwidth, (b) on a mobile connection the pages take forever to complete, and (c) the pages use up all of your mobile data allowance. I'm ethically against taking money away from people who want to generate revenue through a…

I wouldn't mind ads if there was any resemblance of self-restraint what they put on there. But yes, the web has become absolutely unbearable without blockers. I guess some big sites were always bad, but now just everything is plastered. I recently used Youtube with all the ads for the first time in a long while and its just abhorrent. From extremely low quality minutes long text-to-speech ads, some that make question…

Two things about YouTube: (1) they are different to most sites in that they'll let you pay to remove the ads (which I do), but (2) for some reason all the ads they showed me I actually found very useful and were for products I genuinely wanted - if I had infinite time in my life I would have watched the ads, but I don't, so (1).

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#108

Post by AnthonyMouse »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #95
gus_massa wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody thinks that people wants to watch ads. The premise is that people hates opening their wallet more than what they hate watching an ad.

That premise is false. There's always money to be made by selling people's attention. They'd put ads under people's eyelids if they could. People who open up their wallets and spend money are worth even more money to advertisers. The more you pay, the more ads they want to subject you to. The only way to get rid of them is to deny them any attention at all. They are not entitled to it under any circumstances. Drive t…

The other point to be made here is that the average revenue per user for even the most successful advertising companies (e.g. Google) is less than $1/day. That's not a huge amount of money even for someone with a low income. (From a first-world perspective. Incomes are lower in other parts of the world, but so are advertising revenues from users there.)

So the amount you would have to pay to deliver the same revenues to creators as advertising does is not very much. Especially if we could cut out the middle man so that all of what you pay goes to the content creator.

That's the biggest problem we have right now. You have someone write a news article, a million people read it, it cost you maybe a thousand dollars to write (assuming it's well-researched and not garbage clickbait), so to recover your costs you need one tenth of one cent per user.

We need a payment system which makes transactions that small efficient. And it needs to be anonymous for the buyer, because the whole point is to get rid of the tracking, right?

Fix that and you can sustainably pay <$300 and not have to see any ads all year.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#109

Post by behnamoh »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #92
approxim8ion wrote: post #3

I can't think of too many pieces of software that have improved my life as significantly as uBlock Origin in the last decade. It's been an absolute godsend.

Yeah, it's one of those life-changing projects. It's so important and trusted that it should actually be integrated into the browsers themselves so that it can do its job even more effectively. Sadly, conflicts of interest prevent that. It should probably come pre-installed with every browser instead. I wish iOS Firefox had support for it. Seems Apple doesn't allow extensions. I told all my friends about uBlock Origi…

I wish there was a uBlock app for iOS, similar to other ad-blockers that are available on iOS. I'd be willing to pay for such an app and be able to use any browser on iOS (including FF) w/o worrying about ads.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#110

Post by [deleted] »

gus_massa wrote: post #93
nocturnial wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite viewpoint about ads. I don't think we should reward a business model which relies on the premise that humans like to watch ads. I never had someone tell me to drive slower because they wanted to take a closer look at a billboard. Never had I had to rewind a video because someone missed an ad. etc... etc... Let's be honest. If someone told you to do any of the above things regularly and consistentl…

Nobody thinks that people wants to watch ads. The premise is that people hates opening their wallet more than what they hate watching an ad.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN