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Just doesn’t feel good

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Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#191

Post by chipotle_coyote »

DanBlake wrote: post #2

Although I have no direct knowledge, it feels like there is something going on behind the scenes forcing this reaction. If I had to guess, I would point the finger at Ghostery causing this. Lifehacker wrote¹ that Ghostery sells some data to marketers, so perhaps the approach taken with the app interferes with Ghostery's model and they were not willing to continue allowing access to their rule list. Alternatively Ghos…

I admit the line "Ghostery and I have both decided that it doesn't serve our goals or beliefs well enough" does make me wonder what Ghostery's input in this decision was. A previous post indicated a future release of Peace would have brought a similar granularity level for individual tracker/network blocking that the Ghostery desktop extension provides. If that's enough nuanced control for the desktop, why isn't it for mobile?

Having said that, though, I've followed Marco's writing/podcasting long enough to generally take him at his word. He's been pretty forthright about why he makes the choices he does and acknowledging things he considers mistakes. I noticed that several fairly big names in the Mac blogging/podcasting space came across the last couple of days as very hostile to the notion of ad blockers. Imagine having people you respect, work with at times and have considered friends for years attack the essential concept underpinning your new application as an immoral action that will destroy their livelihood. Given that, I don't find the "I stopped feeling good about this" explanation at all hard to swallow.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#192

Post by theworstshill »

dang wrote: post #174
theworstshill wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I mentioned I was speculating That doesn't matter. Insinuations without evidence of astroturfing, shillage, corruption, etc., have no place on HN. Please don't do that again.

No problem dung, in around 60 years once Marco is on his deathbed and publishes his autobiography with the actual facts we can come back to this discussion. Not.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#193

Post by Moshe_Silnorin »

robotresearcher wrote: post #181
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments have a monopoly. In this case, new services will take all his customers. It's very different.

They don't have a monopoly on gambling opportunities in most places.

They do have a monopoly on lotteries.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#194

Post by dmit »

scott_s wrote: post #128
inversionOf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

especially if you expected this app to be not very popular in the first place The anticipation about adblockers on iOS has been fervent and growing for a while now. Marco went and setup an agreement with one of the larger purveyors of block lists, then utilizing that to all advantages to corner the market. I find it highly dubious that he didn't think it would be lucrative. The ramifications and gray area of adblocki…

What argument are you making? The person you are arguing against is saying that Marco didn't fully realize what he was getting into, quickly did realize it, felt uncomfortable, then got out. If your argument is that Marco should have realized what he was getting into, then you're not disagreeing with anyone, including Marco.

That's clearly not what inversionOf was saying.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#195

Post by frou_dh »

Osmium wrote: post #69

> I’m sorry to all of my fans and customers who bought this on my name, expecting it to be supported for longer than two days. Well, that was me. Funnily enough I haven't had a good experience with Overcast either (vs. Pocket Casts), so I think next time Marco releases a product I'll be a lot more skeptical. It's an awkward position too: I know I should request a refund since the app will become progressively less us…

> It's an awkward position too: I know I should request a refund since the app will become progressively less useful as its blocklist becomes out of date, but I would've liked to keep using it until then.

AFAIK the app will stay on your device after getting a refund. You just stop being able to update or re-download it, which in this case are no longer on the table anyway.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#196

Post by untog »

Filligree wrote: post #178
untog wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it entitled to want to keep up with society, when I pay $10/GB for bandwidth?

Why on earth are you paying $10/GB for bandwidth?

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#197

Post by napoleoncomplex »

There's no need to make up dark motives on Marco's side, his blogpost on blocking The Deck (http://www.marco.org/2015/09/17/why-peace-blocks-deck-ads) pretty clearly showed where the cracks were. A lot of people and business will get hurt in this, plenty of them not at fault or at least with no better way to monetize.

Now to be clear, I use ad blockers on the web myself, and intend to install the Android ones once I root my phone. But it's getting tiring reading people standing on some moral high ground to justify their use of ad blockers. There is no scenario where this leads to better-behaving ad networks, or to better monetization models for the web. The final winner of this ad blocker war is a no-frills ad blocker that blocks as much ads as possible, regardless of the quality of the ad network and its ads. The majority won't go and fiddle with the settings to approve ads on sites they like, or from ad networks that are cool. Give people a chance to block all ads and they will, even if some "innocent bystanders" get hurt. And I think Marco saw that scenario unfolding in real life with Peace's success.

One example, Daring Fireball is proud of how his monetization strategy is working out for him, and justly so, he hand picks his promotions and packages them into little promotional posts. But that's basically a native ad. So let's say the next big idea from everyone hurt by blocking is that native ads are the big thing now (not that it isn't already being used heavily), and everyone should hide them among the real content, undetectable to current ad blockers. So ad blockers will evolve, and people will build filters that hide the content of these native ads in smart ways. And they might build a filter that hides posts on Daring Fireball that contain the words "my thanks" or "sponsoring this week". Will Gruber still be so supportive of content blockers then? And where's the line? Who decides what the right types of ads are?

It's not that I have any smart answers about this, but I think it's disingenuous to pretend this "culling" of the shitty ads will lead into a brave new world with fair ad networks where everyone decides to turn off ad blocking on The Verge, because gosh, they've really improved, or into some kind of fairytale where people pay for The Verge's content through subscriptions. But they will keep visiting The Verge en masse, and expecting fresh content served in miliseconds. Who will pay for it and who will write it, I sincerely don't know.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#198

Post by gtCameron »

taco_emoji wrote: post #183
Killswitch wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example about Ars Technica is perfect. They do it great and in a very tasteful way. I applaud them. The issue lies in that all the people who do it bad, The Verge, etc ruin it for Ars Technica. Why? Because the ads on The Verge are so atrocious they install adblockers. Now these adblockers are all in whitelist mode from the start. Nobody cares to turn it into blacklist mode and require users to manually enable i…

Even further, I'm not sure many adblockers even have a blacklist mode. Neither Ghostery nor uBlock Origin appear to have one, at least at first glance...

That is my experience as well. I would love to run an adblocker in blacklist mode and only punish the sites that annoy me, but I haven't found one that works that way. If anyone knows of one let me know.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#199

Post by ixtli »

s73v3r wrote: post #149
ixtli wrote: post #55

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. Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else? Annoying advertisements are, in practice, the result of people failing to be creative in monetization. Ars Technica, for instance, has done a great job of integrating ads in…

"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. Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else?" What's the user experience of an app that dies because it doesn't have the revenue to continue?

Why is that my problem? There are a hundred thousand shitty games on the App Store that all have in app purchases. Should I go and pay for them because I don't want them to die? It's the job of someone who wants money to convince me to part with it. To this end, they probably shouldn't slap me after asking for it.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#200

Post by chipotle_coyote »

cstross wrote: post #10
DanBlake wrote: post #2

Although I have no direct knowledge, it feels like there is something going on behind the scenes forcing this reaction. If I had to guess, I would point the finger at Ghostery causing this. Lifehacker wrote¹ that Ghostery sells some data to marketers, so perhaps the approach taken with the app interferes with Ghostery's model and they were not willing to continue allowing access to their rule list. Alternatively Ghos…

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…

I certainly can't speak for The Public At Large . In my case, though, I agree with the fundamental argument for advertising -- writers gotta be paid somehow, and if you're going to read stuff on the web for free, it's either ads or PBS-style pledge drives -- but I've slowly come around to the ad-blocking camp anyway. The problem to my mind isn't web advertising as a concept, it's web advertising as it's frequently implemented. Reading a web page is conceptually more like a magazine than a television, yet web ads increasingly make even the most intrusive television ads seem pleasant by comparison.

I suspect that a fundamental part of the problem with web ads stems, paradoxically, from web pages having zero marginal cost. There's effectively an infinite amount of advertising space to sell, which has quickly driven the value of ads toward zero. I don't think advertising as it exists now is going to be a sustainable business model for the web; Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News may do better, because they impose a scarcity on ad space -- which will both make the UX better and make the ads more valuable. But I doubt that's a long-term solution, either.

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