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The Pirate Bay is counting down

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Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#101

Post by zxcdw »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #95
TeMPOraL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service. Honestly? In my long time of adblock-free browsing I've noticed an interesting correlation - the more ads there are on a page and the crappier they get, the less trustworthy and useful the site itself is. Moreover, heavily advertised products tend to be crap designed to extract money from you by luring you into a suboptimal choice. Ads are a good proxy fo…

So people who don't or can't charge money for their services don't deserve to earn a living?

Ideally, of course, everyone could charge what they want for what they are trying to do, and everything would be flawless regarding to that. However, if we try to live by this idealism in this digital world, we also have to accept that the road to that said idealism goes through DRM, walled gardens and broken net-neutrality. Basically, to achieve that idealism with modern day digital devices we have to give up digital liberties (including privacy more or less).

I prefer the digital freedom over the anti-piracy idealism anyday. I suppose "digital anarchism" and "digital totalitarianism" would be descriptive terms for the (exaggerrated) ends of the spectrum.

Being an European, I at times praise the American gun culture and how the American constitution is such a holy thing over there (not that I want the guns over here though, but the attitude). What I would love to see is a similar attitude taken towards not guns, but computing. Fuck the authorities who try to whitelist sequences of instructions to execute on my general purpose computer in the name of protecting their copyright or patents, or corporate profits or local monopolies of digital information exchange.

If we ever go to this digital dystopian future (as if some wouldn't claim we are there already!), I firmly believe, and am afraid, that it is first and foremost lead by arguments in favor of entertainment industry (and to some extent by "protecting children" and "catching terrorist", how else...).

This is why the copyright laws and the whole notion of digital copyright enforcement is meaningless for me, and I personally am opposed to them regardless of being well aware that it's almost certainly a battle which can't be won. Not because we'd be wrong, but because digital liberties undermine ability to make profit in many ways. Oh well, at least there were us who tried.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#102

Post by jumpwah »

sysk wrote: post #73
jumpwah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think adblockers are immoral? Genuine question, not trying to stand on some moral high ground, just curious of your opinion, is all.

This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

Ah sorry, I'm honestly quite naive on this topic, so you'll have to excuse me if this is boring/tiring. Maybe it's best to give me some links to rtfm on in you can be bothered (otherwise I'll just google it myself of course).

But just thought experimenting.. Say everyone uses ad blockers. Websites receive no ad revenue, websites die as main source of support to stay alive is ads. Now who gets affected by this? People who like the website and essentially are 'subscribed' to it right (keep coming back for more)? As opposed to those who just visit probably most commonly once for some particular piece of info or news.

So eventually it should go back to the days before ads infested the internet right, where everyone hosted because they could / was useful / original content etc? What's so scary or immoral about that, if anything that's even better right?

But that's only good for small websites, today's internet literally runs the world, sophisticated, large and complicated systems. Would this mean that to run the world without such ads (assuming I actually want the world to continue to being run by the internet), as everyone would use ad blockers anyway, these big websites would start charging for their content/functionality? Is that bad? I think maybe yes, that might be worse than just being gratis, but with ads (paywall → privacy concerns just to surf the internet). And so now I've come full circle and contradicted my original position. What other efficient ways are there to easily support large websites financially as ads can, if any?

---

Why do I avoid ads though in the first place?

1. Often (as in 99% of the time), they are very distracting. There are times when I'm on a computer without adblock, and I don't know how I ever survived without it. (Actually, I always inspect element > deleted, but to bother to do that everytime before I can read the content makes a point right?)

2. _Tracking → privacy concerns._

3. Because not what I came for. Captain obvious here.

So at the end of that, I think personally I wouldn't be opposed to non-tracking and non-distracting ads. But how do you confirm they do not track you? Can you? Is it possible to stop potential tracking attempts, without blocking the non-distractive (or unobtrusive) ads themselves?

---

I don't care if a site cannot support itself without ads and dies, I don't think it's immoral to not care about them if I don't care about their content in the long term.

Also, I don't think it's immoral to continue to use a site with adblockers when knowing full well that it might be functioning just due to those who do. I can understand why people think it's bad and is freeloading, but I think it's still justified because ads fuck you over privacy wise anyway, and so I think it's more important to protect yourself and your privacy than to have the only way to pay for the content compromise that. Just a too extreme form of payment.

Ignoring whether or not it's actually practically enforceable (because I don't think it is, nor do I think it should be possible), should it be the case that accessing a site's content is all or nothing. I.e. you get both the content and the ads or nothing at all. But even if you accept the all or nothing concept, you still have to compromise your privacy. I don't want the internet to be a place that's only useful if I 'accept' to give away my privacy. And I just realised how much of a simpleton I am regarding this topic..

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#103

Post by blablablaat »

waldir wrote: post #53
SiVal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any that you recommend?

I normally use the torrentz.com meta search engine and go with the torrent with the most seeds. It then shows me all the sites that have that torrent, and I pick one whose name I recognize. Works like a charm.

Same, but you will miss some torrents. Both torrentz.eu and kat.ph are complying with DMCA requests.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#104

Post by crpatino »

foobarqux wrote: post #96
sysk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

People who don't buy advertised products are freeloading off those who do.

You could equally argue that people who build products that do not sell but thanks to (heavy-handed) advertising are freeloading off the rest of society.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#105

Post by krapp »

alextgordon wrote: post #89
krapp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every form of communication between people is an attempt at manipulation. For instance, your comment is attempting to manipulate people into seeing advertising is a form of brainwashing. As attempts at manipulation go, though, advertising is at least up front and overt about its intentions. Can anyone say the same about politics, the media, even Hacker News?

The difference is that I honestly believe that advertising is manipulative (and I think there is good evidence!). I don't stand to gain any money if I convince you. I am not, I hope, spreading falsehoods. I'm certainly not preying on your innate desires for food or sex. I'm not installing malware on your computer. I'm not building a profile of your interests. I'm not autoplaying a video if you mouseover this comment!…

I can certainly agree with you that there should be no place for malware, aggressive or intrusive advertising on the web.

I'm not convinced that they're effective enough that they're dangerous, though. I'm more concerned by viral advertising than I am web banners. Arguably, the only reason viral marketing exists is that advertising is so useless, otherwise, online.

And realistically, not everyone advertising is trying to deceive. There's nothing necessarily wrong with trying to convince someone to buy your product if you think you have a product worth selling.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#106

Post by binaryanomaly »

eddyb wrote: post #84
jarnix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the key to add in BitTorrent Sync. In this software, click settings, "enter a key" and then you will have some torrents that people share, but to my experience it was sh*t and not organized in folders etc. Maybe now it's better.

No, that has been refuted to death (on reddit, mostly) - the BitTorrent Sync folder was created much later by random people making the same faulty assumption.

Ok so if it was not intended to be that - what is it?

It's 64 chars and likely AES as this is the name of the picture?

http://www.reddit.com/r/thepiratebay/comments/2q23mm/the_key...

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#107

Post by [deleted] »

idlewan wrote: post #100
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people who don't or can't charge money for their services don't deserve to earn a living?

They can earn a living in other ways. Some examples: - having a day job (this obviously means they won't have as much time to put in the site, I know) - Service As a Software Substitute (this doesn't work for sites that just display information) - subscription/premium model (for press sites like Arstechnica, it seems like an alternative) - donations (this usually doesn't scale up to a salary, but can sometimes cover…

[deleted]

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#108

Post by laumars »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #99
laumars wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth was that voted down? It wasn't rude, spam, nor factually inaccurate. I'm getting quite fed up with people who abuse their negative karma privileges. I mean, at least justify your peer moderation with a follow up comment when the reason for the penalty is as ambiguous as it is in this instance. I excepect I'll just get down voted again though, for daring to have a rant about people who do "hit and run" do…

Because it was wrong. It's not a penalty, it's just a downvote. Penalty would be flagging. Honestly sometimes I wish people had to justify upvotes...

> Because it was wrong.

...and once again you've failed to specify why it was wrong. Simply stating something to be wrong is a worthless comment. Provide an reason; or citation if it's necessary. I'm open to correction if you can provide a counter argument.

Though on this occasion I can say with certainty that I'm right about Comic Sans being non-free (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/font.aspx?FMID=35) and that @font-face allows you to include custom fonts into webpages (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face).

> It's not a penalty, it's just a downvote. Penalty would be flagging.

It deducts points from my karma; it's a penalty.

> Honestly sometimes I wish people had to justify upvotes...

I agree with that too. However that's not the issue here.

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#109

Post by laumars »

clarry wrote: post #70
laumars wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that was a joke or not, but this problem has already been solved in CSS (@font-face). Though the downside to that would be that they'd then have the issue of hosting copyrighted content (ie the typeface).

Not all browsers allow or support custom typefaces.

True, but equally not all browsers support images either (lynx, elinks, etc). Which is probably about the same market share as browsers that don't support custom typefaces these days. And at least custom typefaces would still leave you with a readable text on non-supported browsers - which is more than an image would (which also gives them added bonus of being easily programmatically parseable, eg by web crawlers).

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#110

Post by Dylan16807 »

laumars wrote: post #108
Dylan16807 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was wrong. It's not a penalty, it's just a downvote. Penalty would be flagging. Honestly sometimes I wish people had to justify upvotes...

> Because it was wrong. ...and once again you've failed to specify why it was wrong. Simply stating something to be wrong is a worthless comment. Provide an reason; or citation if it's necessary. I'm open to correction if you can provide a counter argument. Though on this occasion I can say with certainty that I'm right about Comic Sans being non-free ( http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/font.aspx?FMID=35 ) an…

@font-face is not a solution that works 100% of the time.

I'm not sure how to back that up, it's a basic fact.

Someone was being cheeky about ensuring comic sans. You replied by 'correcting' them with something that wouldn't in fact ensure comic sans. It was wrong and not particularly useful, and it had a good amount of missing-the-joke, so it got downvoted.

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