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Make Firefox Private Again

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161–170 of 348 posts

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money. Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by. The content shared…

> which didn't have the volume agreed > and quality filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

> filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which didn't have the volume agreed > and quality filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Agree. Production quality != overall quality. I'd much rather have great content badly produced than professionally produced crap.

Most people still seem to watch Hollywood quality movies so I don't know if your taste is very representative.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#163

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…

> They can find other business models other than advertisement. The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can. Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price. I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of…

You're arguing that speech should earn a living, which sounds like asserting everyone has the right to patronage.

Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.

Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising. It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid…

> The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place. If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change? BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.

> If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?

Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns.

The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#166

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…

I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.

HN does not have extensive server costs. Last I saw (~10 years ago) it was running off a single machine in a closet. Apparently they've since moved to two machines at a hosting company.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#167
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet. Also most people don't want to pay for content. This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

> This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet. No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet. And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar sca…

> the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow

This is already happening.

They wanted to make us pay more because we are using netflix and other streaming services so much.

Everything important like internet and streets should be built and maintained by the gov and not some random companies, f*ck Telekom.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure? Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation. When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, wh…

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.

[deleted]

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#169
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers are going to use it as just another data point, though. Why give them any more information than they already have? You know some of the best technical people we have waste their lives working for advertisers, and they _will_ find a way to extract more information from these technologies regardless of how supposedly private they are. I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless ad…

> I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance. Indeed, but such regulation is much more likely to happen if there already exist privacy-preserving solutions like PPA. "There's a good way to do it and a bad way, and we're making it illegal to do it the bad way" vs "There only way to do it is…

This isn't an alternative, that's the argument

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#170
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article in German about this from August 1: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/klage-gegen-datenschutzbehoerde... They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying. The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks…

> The question is, can you convince Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers , I guess. I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay. Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned q…

> I'm afraid that it's a new trend

Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?

And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.

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