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Why don't you accept donations?

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131–140 of 193 posts

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#131

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.

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…

Would you be against using junk mail sent to your house as fuel, or padding in a box, any other use that's not "Reading the ad"? Is that different?

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#132

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.

Courthouse i'm in has obviously locked browser extensions but there's no adblock.. i can't help but see ublock's logo in the toolbar and imagine how much bandwidth that frail network would grab back if it was there.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#133

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…

Of course people watch ads. It is (or used to be#one reason outdoor watch the Superbowl. The world would actually be a boring place without ads. The problem is when they are over done or deliver malware.

My world would definitely not be boring without ads. I'm not even sure how to respond to such a blatantly false claim.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Not at all. This is something I'm passionate about.

Copyright made sense before computers existed. Back then it was still possible to infringe copyright. For example, people could copy books by hand. However, the scale of such operations was small. To operate at massive scales you had to be a major industry player and own machinery such as printing presses. It's trivial to enforce copyright against such huge targets. Therefore, artificial scarcity was easy to create and it made sense.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Networked computers exist and everything is data. Filling up an entire hard drive with copies is as easy as copy paste. It's trivial to duplicate information and transmit data to other computers. People now have worldwide networked computers in their pockets. People now infringe copyright on a massive scale without even realizing what they are doing simply because technology has changed the way people perceive copyrighted works. Nobody really thinks before downloading stuff and sending it to their friends even though this is unauthorized copying and therefore copyright infringement. Nobody thinks before editing some picture and making a funny meme out of it even though it's a derivative work. Nobody thinks before reposting someone else's work on social media. Copyright infringement has become natural.

The truth is computers make a mockery of copyright. The fundamental notion behind copyright is artificial scarcity. Computers make data infinitely abundant. It's incredibly subversive technology. Before computers you needed expensive hardware and logistics to produce and distribute a million books or a million records. With computers it's a trivial task. The world has been changed forever and there's no way to go back.

They're definitely trying to rewind the clock though. To create artificial scarcity of data in the 21st century, free computing must be destroyed. We must not be allowed to run arbitrary software or make our own software. Hacking as we know it must come to an end. They must lock down computers so that we can only run software they approve, software that obeys them instead of us, software that only copies when they authorize. This is completely aligned with government interests in banning civilian use of cryptography.

I say computers are too important to allow them to become mere tools of aging industries and oppressive governments. Copyright makes no sense in the 21st century, it's time to abolish it. The alternative is to give up our computing freedom. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than live in such a bleak future.

Copyright is also a tool that corporations use against other countries via political pressure by the US government. These corporations are extremely rich, they can afford to lobby the US government to the point it applies pressure on foreign nations. I've posted about this before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946738

I wish I could find one particular news article I remember reading years ago. It was about some MPAA official who came to my country to lobby the government on their copyright interests. Some journalist approached him and asked him point blank if he thought this should be a priority in a country that fails to offer even basic infrastructure such as sanitation to its entire population. Obviously he had no response.

Copyright holders also lobby governments in order to extend copyright duration indefinitely. They have effectively robbed us all of our public domain rights. I've written about this before too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29426856

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28813563

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28518061

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28413192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22757439

You can see everything else I've posted about this using this query:

https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=copyright%20mathe...

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#135

> no donations = no expectations No donations should result in no expectations , but unfortunately all sorts of people will have all sorts of expectations from you when you release an open-source project, donations or not.

I think gorhill means "No donations means I can feel justified ignoring any expectations of the project."

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#136

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 use Firefox Focus and the Lockdown Privacy app on iOS. Not the same experience but achieves a good result.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#137

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…

Plenty of people like watching ads. Just go to youtube and see all the ads posted. There's whole channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUBpIWz6bPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTcV-7Ubzpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYFyruOvAnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVwvmozG6-A&list=PLjHdPL8MeP... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdCYe4FoMRA I had plenty of friends that hated Football but would throw a party to wat…

[deleted]

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? Hopefully Monero will achieve this one day.

My monero investment is down so bad that a micro payment is all I will be able to afford

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#139

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…

You can take a look at american television to see how that works. There are more ads than actual content, and the quality of the content is... well, you be the judge of that. If someone says they won't do something because they can't pay the bills unless they finance it via ad revenue, I'm fine with that. I'm not convinced that the world is losing any value because of this. (Or put it in another way: would Gabriel Garcia Marquez have written One Hundred Years of Solitude, had he not received ad-revenue for it?)

On the other hand, while I'm extremely happy I don't have to watch random Google cr*p adverts before/during/after Youtube videos thanks to adblock, if the creator itself includes an advert in his/her video I usually watch it. That is acceptable to me, and more direct support than just unrelated ads.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#140
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Sure you can set up and accept money quite easily using any number of methods. The problem then comes in of how you are legally classified with each governmental jurisdiction that each donation happens to fall under, and now you're in a mountain of registrations, reports, audits, licenses, and other red tape.

You make it sound so complicated but even 14 year old teenagers on TikTok can make it work -- everything from Venmo, Patreon, buy me a coffee type sites, Amazon wishlists. Unless you're pulling in crazy amounts of cash there's really no legal red tape for person to person gifts.

Sure they do, but it's not strictly legal. Everyone just kind of lets it slide. A gift is no longer a gift if something is expected in return (like Patreon exclusive perks) - it's a service and you can't provide a service as a regular person. Many of these creators should really be setting up companies or registering as self-employed (I'm not too familiar with the English terminology for this stuff) and then paying all the required taxes and other fees.

As soon as we're no longer talking about just teenagers on TikTok, but instead about everyone on the Web, regulators are going to want to make sure it's used legally. And we're not talking about one, but theoretically all the jurisdictions at once. Having an open standard for that sounds impossible to me and having a defacto standard corporate service (like if Google Pay became the "standard" for web payments) sounds worse than nothing.

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