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Who's doing this to my internet?

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Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#141

Post by yc1010 »

Frondo wrote: post #135
yc1010 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a better and safer online payment method its called Bitcoin But the existing financial and payment companies realize that this new technology makes them largely redundant hence they lobby and make it hard to acquire bitcoin for the average person with existing payment methods. The attitude of banks and regulators towards bitcoin is the same of the motor industry and governments towards the electric car, some…

People may also not like bitcoin because they want a democratic say in the design and operation of their currency. Bitcoin has economic features built into it that its users simply have no democratic redress to change, even if they wanted to. Power should be to the people, not some guy who likes deflation and baked that in years ago.

Yes because the average person has power over the central banks

Anyways it is sad being down-voted in technical forum by people who should better than most understand that bitcoin despite its faults is still a damned good online payment method especially when compared to existing alternatives.

It does everything the OP i replied to wants.

Anyways fuck this place, people use their votes as a way to not encourage conversation but as a punishment tool.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#142

Post by fit2rule »

icebraining wrote: post #99
fit2rule wrote: post #48

This is why I think solutions like IPFS are the future: http://ipfs.io/ (tl;dr: go get github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/cmd/ipfs) Basically, the day will come when any single one of us will be able to serve our own content privately from our own machine without requiring a massive infrastructure investment, nor any kind of fancy participation in what is, essentially, branding on steroids (Internet of today), but rather all it…

You can already set up a website using a "website builder" which hosts it for a couple of bucks and doesn't force any branding on it. A site on Squarespace costs $8/m and gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth to distribute your music; for $18 more, you get to use the ecommerce part to sell your stuff. If artists aren't doing this already, which is much less intrusive than Soundcloud/iTunes/etc, what makes you thi…

Because you said server, and the solution is serverless. $8/month is still $8/month. I'd rather that anyone who was interested in my artistry just come and get it from me, directly. Remember the aim is to eradicate the middle man entirely. You have not done this in your position.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#143

Post by madaxe_again »

binxbolling wrote: post #33
Steuard wrote: post #31

I feel old. This article begins by pining for the good, old-fashioned 'net of 2012. I know that I'm not the most attentive person on this topic, but honestly I don't feel like the big picture has changed much in years. Services like Twitter started up, grew wildly, and then looked for some way to make money for pretty much that whole time. Social networks sprout up; some make it, some don't. Big companies do some coo…

You're right, author has rose-colored glasses. I almost thought it was a joke at first—2012 as the good ol' days? The internet ruined in the last three years? Come on.

"Septembering" should be the term for this phenomenon.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#144

Post by eevilspock »

icebraining wrote: post #7

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

You're putting all the responsibility on the consumer, and none on us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?

Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that?

Only the truth is it isn't free. We all pay in the end. The lunch is not only not free, it's costing us more and its loaded with toxic crap.

The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden[1], and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. You can already see it in the top comments to this post.

Admittedly I suck as a writer, but ever time I make my very strong case that advertising may be the primary evil of internet[2], I almost invariably receive a great number of silent downvotes. No one solidly counters my arguments, except to fall back on the utter bullshit that that advertising is great because it gives us the internet for free, which proves that they didn’t even read my argument.

Boykis is wrong in saying that things were fine in 2012. No, they were bad then, and the internet's original sin, relying on advertising, started long before that. It’s only that now it is accelerating toward a crescendo. It will get worse unless we do something about it.

-

[1] Today on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961527

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#145

Post by vkb »

There is a lot of focus and discussion around the $1.50 figure I mentioned, and perhaps I was wrong to include it in the post. The $1.50 is not the point. I would pay $1.50. I gladly pay for Pinboard, Newsblur, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, and many other online services that provide exponential value to me. And, as I mentioned in the post, I am more than happy to pay $10 a month for SoundCloud because I use it so much.

My point is that instead of even offering the option of a subscription, SoundCloud immediately went to ads that are annoying and hostile and started deleting music, forcing me to scramble to other options that are just as hostile (where hostile == "first world problem" of paying with a credit card to multiple unknown vendors) because music distribution online is broken.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#146

Post by Frondo »

yc1010 wrote: post #141
Frondo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may also not like bitcoin because they want a democratic say in the design and operation of their currency. Bitcoin has economic features built into it that its users simply have no democratic redress to change, even if they wanted to. Power should be to the people, not some guy who likes deflation and baked that in years ago.

Yes because the average person has power over the central banks Anyways it is sad being down-voted in technical forum by people who should better than most understand that bitcoin despite its faults is still a damned good online payment method especially when compared to existing alternatives. It does everything the OP i replied to wants. Anyways fuck this place, people use their votes as a way to not encourage conve…

I get to vote on the people who appoint the fed chief every so often. There is no mechanism, even theoretical, to put that democratic power in the hands of the citizen user of bitcoin.

Edit: Wow you changed your comment a lot in the edit!

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#147

Post by calineczka »

pjc50 wrote: post #81
pi-err wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it says that there's an untapped opportunity for low friction, micro-transactions instead of "ads" or full-fledged purchases on unknown websites. It's clear by now that ads are for lazy. If your plan is to monetize your site with ads, today just like 10 years ago, you lost. Edit: surprised by the negativity on her reaction for _hacker_news. She's rebuffed by the $ and time investment for a single song ("unknown we…

Microtransactions have a minimum mental cost to the user. This is why even the services that could track your actual consumption and bill you to the penny don't.

What about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453821 then ?

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#148

Post by aaronem »

72deluxe wrote: post #127
freehunter wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only way you could get to Hacker News was over a dial-up connection, would you switch to dial-up or would you just go to a different site that loads a broadband speed? Waiting two days to then have to deal with the unpleasant experience of getting a physical CD sucks. Wait two days, then rip the CD, then move the file to your phone... or just find other music you like that can be immediately downloaded. I love…

I've done that with my entire music collection. I have only ever bought one MP3 in my entire life. The rest of it is ripped from the CDs that I have bought. If the artist has gone to the effort of recording, mixing, mastering and designing sleeve notes and documenting who took part in the process, then that's really something worth buying. If we only consider music to be as valuable as background white noise, then do…

You really haven't noticed before now?

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#150

Post by mseebach »

[deleted] wrote: post #129

[deleted]

You don't make a "very strong case", your post come off as ranty. Your analysis of why ads aren't discussed on terms that suit you better is, frankly, condescending and arrogant. Find any discussion of tracking or ads, and there will be lively discussion of blockers and plenty of posts that are very critical of advertising in general.

Those two points might serve better as a model of explanation of a few down votes than a grand conspiracy on behalf of advertising would.

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