Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

smbc-comics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 82 posts

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#21

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

stavros wrote: post #11
derkster wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now? In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can reme…

I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of…

Cheap isn’t the relevant metric. I’ve run a couple of forums, over the years. It’s entirely possible to customize the software, to make the user experience, for both users and administrators, quite good.

Moderating and managing the forum is the pain.

Also, it can be fairly corrosive to personal mental health.

I recently had an old acquaintance reach out to me, asking me to revive one of my old communities, that was killed by Facebook. This person argued that many of the old community members were now thoroughly sick of Facebook, and would want to go back to the dedicated forum.

I politely declined, and was surprised at how the idea really horrified me.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#23

Post by jasonjayr »

From a comment on the announcement page:

> This is the third webcomic, among the ones I read, that has quit Hiveworks in the past month. Anyone know what’s up with that?

What were the other ones? Any material changes from the Hiveworks folks that prompted this?

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#24

Post by multjoy »

stavros wrote: post #11
derkster wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now? In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can reme…

I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of…

I remember running a semi-popular phpBB back in the early 00's. There was nothing like Digital Ocean or Linode. You can run a small instance for pocket change today.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#25

Post by dmurray »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

> Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would put all of their content behind a paywall, or in an app, or something else that's worse than the status quo right?

The NYT already puts its content behind a pay wall, and SMBC (as of this update) doesn't rely on third party ads either. So it's not clear that something else would be worse than the status quo for them.

Some content creators would certainly suffer, but if online ads were not normalized, others would thrive.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#26

Post by ben_w »

lazide wrote: post #7
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attention economy is powered by payments from maximizing ad impressions but the public is increasingly recognizing that the attention economy is mentally and culturally toxic. To break free of the attention economy death spiral that we're in, internet advertising has to undergo a pretty drastic dieback. In other words, the whole thing has to fall apart and the sooner the better.

That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT .

> That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die).

And nothing of value was lost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSGVk2KVokQ

> So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded.

Not even.

Market Cap is more like net worth than like GDP, GDP is more like annual revenue (both are still somewhat different, hence "more like") — Meta's global revenue is $164.5 billion, Alphabet's is $350.02 billion, so even if that's entirely in the USA (it isn't), and the money spent was purely positive-sum (it isn't), even combined that's less than the US military budget of $849.8 billion.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#27

Post by seanalltogether »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

The answer to no more ads is you can't be independent. You have to have service aggregation.

The fundamental problem is that you can't grow an audience all your content is behind a paywall. So you have to offer some content for free, but if you're an independent comic artist like smbc, no one is going to visit your site if only 1 comic per week is free.

But if a lot of creators are behind a single paywall, and that paywall was able to feature 10 random free webcomics every day, then you pull in lots of visitors and have more opportunity to convert them into paying customers.

Now the harder question, how do you convince a bunch of independent content creators to band together behind a single paywall.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#28

Post by michaelt »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #10
lazide wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT .

Google and Meta collectively employ how many software people in the United States? The jobs hit would be unimaginable. High octane nightmare fuel, that idea.

Doesn’t seem like a nightmare to me - a trillion dollars spent on ads that get blocked is a trillion dollars wasted.

The real nightmare is hundreds of thousands of people on six figure salaries wasting their lives producing ads everyone hates.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#29

Post by lproven »

lazide wrote: post #7
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attention economy is powered by payments from maximizing ad impressions but the public is increasingly recognizing that the attention economy is mentally and culturally toxic. To break free of the attention economy death spiral that we're in, internet advertising has to undergo a pretty drastic dieback. In other words, the whole thing has to fall apart and the sooner the better.

That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT .

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#30

Post by lazide »

ben_w wrote: post #26
lazide wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT .

> That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). And nothing of value was lost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSGVk2KVokQ > So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not even. Market…

I guarantee you if Meta all the sudden couldn’t sell any ads tomorrow, it would be a lot more than a 1 trln GDP hit we’d experience.
Post reply on HN