171–180 of 315 posts
If you suddenly sell 20k copies at $3 each, and make enough in a day to buy a BMW, then maybe you think a bit more.
Lots of people here trying to infer motives. Why not just believe what he says? He's a guy who has enough money, wants to do what he loves, and doesn't enjoy controversy. He's hacker enough to want to muck about with how to make a blocker, but it's not his joy. Basically, he's what many of us aspire to be.
Doesn't he? He always seemed like a guy wanting to go into controversy to me.
Not of John McAffee levels of course, but still far more vocal and controversial than most tech bloggers, especially when they're not professional bloggers in the first place (this site is just his outlet, not his core business like for Gruber or others).
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I hate this supposition that everyone should bend over backwards to allow people who make money in a certain way continue making money in that way. You could just stop visiting the site that offends you. That would be the actual principled way to treat this - the content is not worth the price of admission. Instead, ad blockers let you take the content and sidestep the price of admission. I absolutely agree that medi…
I'm signed up for Contributor. I blacklist ads on every site where I see them, which is most of them; as far as I can tell, this also stops Contributor from working on those sites. Seriously. Take my money. But you don't get to show me ads. And I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely.
This is exactly the entitled attitude I was referring to.
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Are you fucking kidding me? You're going to casually call him corrupt and a liar because you're too small-minded to believe he can have a change of heart?
I mentioned I was speculating. I don't know a lot of people who spend dozens of hours of their life developing a product, then publish it, then manage to achieve success and then throw it all away. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but what are the chances?
That doesn't matter. Insinuations without evidence of astroturfing, shillage, corruption, etc., have no place on HN. Please don't do that again.
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> "You're sticking it to the little guy." And I'll keep doing it so long the little guy thinks being the little guy entitles them to dick their users around. Yeah, there's nuance to the debate around ad blocking, but this argument is just silly. If a mom and pop diner refused to follow basic hygiene procedures we'd shut them down, just as we would a huge restaurant chain for doing the same. If small businesses are sp…
If a mom and pop diner refused to follow basic hygiene procedures we'd shut them down But that's not what you're doing. You're going to the mom and pop diner, eating their food, then declaring that their hygiene standards mean you don't think you should have to pay for the food.
You figuratively have no way of knowing what ad networks they're integrated with until said ad networks are loaded and serving ads. Or worse, you have no idea what you're in for until the latest Flash 0-day has pwned your machine. Hell, it's impossible to even know if a website is integrated with any ad networks at all until you load them.
This makes the ethics of blocking ads markedly different from say, dining and dashing. Hell, it makes it a closer neighbor to "if you're reading this you've already agreed to our TOS" than anything else.
I think the biggest issue I have here is that internet journos are taking this out against users rather than ad networks. Effectively the entire defense so far has been:
"yeah our ad networks are shitty, they are full of malware, they are full of user-hostile abusive shit, they exploit your browser, and they are horribly engineered and slow. We sympathize, but despite the fact that we they are still our preferred vendor should in no way reflect on us and you should continue allowing the abuse, and if you have any problems take it up with our ad vendors. In no way should we be held in any way responsible for the current sorry state of affairs"
Which is a completely, absolutely, insanely bullshit stance. Publishers are the customers of ad networks, not us, and until they start pushing for better standards (like, say, The Deck) users will keep blocking them, ethically or otherwise.
Lots of people here trying to infer motives. Why not just believe what he says? He's a guy who has enough money, wants to do what he loves, and doesn't enjoy controversy. He's hacker enough to want to muck about with how to make a blocker, but it's not his joy. Basically, he's what many of us aspire to be.
I don't want to infer motives because I don't know. I will say that I am among those who doesn't really believe this is simply a morality tale. There are several folks here, like yourself, who are basically saying, "yeah, I can understand the mentality of not wanting to do and ad-blocker because of the moral grey area" I can understand that as well. What I can't understand is the quite sudden change of heart 2 days a…
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Alternatively: I am seeing a lot of angry articles by journalists who see adblockers as an existential threat to them, and Marco also developed Instapaper. He's almost certainly already getting hate mail from content sites who don't like the way that Instapaper renders their content readable without allowing annoying intrusions. Releasing Peace on top of Instapaper set him up as a high-profile target -- even higher w…
Why exactly do you think that's a dispositive argument? Poll the public about their appetite for paywalls and you'll get an even more vigorous response --- paywalls are reviled by normal people. And yet logically, if you think ad-supported content isn't a good model, you should support paywalls. They're transparent and up-front and don't require cross-site tracking. Really, this is pretty simple: people just want it…
But none of that is as intrusive as modern ad tech. Ads dug their own grave, slowly, gradually, and are now shocked to find people are shoveling dirt in on top of them.
Moreover, ad blockers are a proportionate response to Web bugs, trackers, and ad tech in general. E-mail marketing figured out how to be tolerable. Ads have not. They keep pushing the boundaries. I've seen some startup ideas around "good" ads, but eventually the people behind these ideas just can't resist the Dark Side.
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I'm signed up for Contributor. I blacklist ads on every site where I see them, which is most of them; as far as I can tell, this also stops Contributor from working on those sites. Seriously. Take my money. But you don't get to show me ads. And I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely.
I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely. This is exactly the entitled attitude I was referring to.
The developer says, "It’ll keep working for a long time if you already have it, but with no updates."... but this is what I am not so sure about.
I looked at my iTunes backups and didn't see Peace. It's also not in the list of my updated apps in iTunes, presumably because it got pulled from the store. Suggestion to the developer: how about a heads up next time you're planning something like this? It wouldn't have hurt anyone.
Do you know of any way how I can backup Peace that is currently sitting in my phone, in case I need to do a full iPhone restore?
I must admit if that is the fundamental belief, how one can prefer to side with the people who manipulate other people.
I am not against ads myself, I just don't understand the rationale.