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Just doesn’t feel good

marco.org

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Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#201

Post by ixtli »

makeitsuckless wrote: post #165
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 just visited Ars Technica without the usual self-protection. I get greeted by a salvo of dozens of third part trackers from the likes of Doubleclick & co. Ars Technica operates as maliciously as any other publisher. There's no "careful consideration here", just blatant disrespect for the privacy of their public.

Yes but that's not what's being discussed in this thread. However, I did mention it in another comment because I think it's terribly disingenuous of people to post in here saying "BUT HOW ELSE WILL THESE POOR POOR BLOGGERS SURVIVE" while we give them huge amounts of behavioral data, often unwillingly. Just because they're not clever enough to monetize their content doesn't mean I should have to suffer. But the reality is that I wont. Before you could ad block on iOS I just stopped going to bad websites. So clearly they prefer this to me even seeing their content at all.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#202

Post by acdha »

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 think ArsTechnica is also an example of where publishing needs to go because they don't show ads to subscribers. That's a great balance for casual and regular readers: if you visit enough to find it reasonable to pay you get faster page loads, less distraction, etc. and they get far more money from a subscription than a single user's ad revenue would have generated.

It'd be really interesting to see if someone, maybe one of the conscientious networks like The Deck, seizes the opportunity to setup something like an indie-web network where you see decent ads with a link to subscribe and not see ads on any participating site. Google Contributor could turn into something like that but it seems like they're afraid to commit to that as a serious effort.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#203

Post by addicted »

ixtli wrote: post #119
cjensen wrote: post #20

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 think it's extremely simple that someone he had a business relationship with put pressure on him in private and he caved. This is a far more common occurrence than people acting against their own financial best interest in the name of a vague morality. Especially when that morality is almost directly opposed to something they _just did publicly_ several days ago.

He isn't even making a morality argument. He's just saying the app, and decisions he makes with the app, will affect far too many livelihoods and since he is fortunate to be in a position to say no to the revenues produced by the app he is choosing not to make those far reaching decisions.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#204

Post by Killswitch »

gtCameron wrote: post #198
taco_emoji wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

uBlock origin actually does and it's what I am running right now, ofcourse in blacklist mode.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-tu...

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#205

Post by soylentcola »

untog wrote: post #196
Filligree wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mobile data plans can be very expensive, especially if they're sold by a provider with a lock on a particular user's region.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#206

Post by byuu »

acdha wrote: post #202
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 think ArsTechnica is also an example of where publishing needs to go because they don't show ads to subscribers. That's a great balance for casual and regular readers: if you visit enough to find it reasonable to pay you get faster page loads, less distraction, etc. and they get far more money from a subscription than a single user's ad revenue would have generated. It'd be really interesting to see if someone, may…

> I think ArsTechnica is also an example of where publishing needs to go because they don't show ads to subscribers.

I think subscriptions are the way to go, but these sites really need to work on their pricing.

Ars wants $5 a month for a few articles of text a day; whereas Netflix gives me millions of hours of movies for $8 a month. Frankly, I can't even imagine how Netflix pays for the bandwidth, let alone all the licenses, to allow that to be possible.

The value proposition is extremely out of balance ... as if one is selling you a bottle of soda, and the other a brand new car, and they're asking similar prices. While I spend maybe 2-3 hours a month on Ars for content that's traditionally been free, I spend probably 30-60 a month on Netflix consuming content that's traditionally charged around $10-20 an hour for their content.

It's not that a lot of us are too cheap for $5 a month, it's that we visit a hundred or more sites, and the bottom 90% of the population cannot afford $500-$2000 a month in website subscription fees.

I know supply and demand is a balancing act, but I really believe sites would make a lot more money if we had a sort of Paypal-like subscription management site, and could easily manage lots of site subscriptions for $1 a month or so per site.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#207

Post by ClashTheBunny »

msoad wrote: post #74

* I don't want ads * I don't want native advertising or sponsored content * I don't want to pay for content * I don't want my tax goes to government sponsored content * I want free independent content That's me nowadays... I don't even know what's the answer!

Affiliate links?

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#208

Post by mrsaint »

smoser wrote: post #188
mrsaint wrote: post #179

Let's say I don't care about a refund but I want to continue using it, albeit unsupported. 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 develope…

You can always download previously purchased apps from your purchased list unless it was removed due to a legal reason.

There we go... muchas gracias.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#209

Post by niccaluim »

tdicola wrote: post #162
cjensen wrote: post #20

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.

Why does he continue to recommend people use Ghostery and block ads on the desktop though? Blocking ads on mobile is bad, but blocking them on desktop is ok--huh?

He's pulling the app because he doesn't want to be the arbiter of what's acceptable advertising and what's not, not because he thinks ad blocking is bad in and of itself.

Re: Just doesn’t feel good

#210

Post by eric_h »

code_sterling wrote: post #108
cjensen wrote: post #20

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.

Considering the cost and time to develop an app, I don't really buy it. Quick web app that you throw up, sure, but with an App Store app, it's a lot more time and money.

Content blockers for iOS 9 are stupid easy to put together. I was at a code.genius.com meetup where one of the speakers live coded one in about 5 minutes on stage. Marco got the blocking data from someone else, so I imagine he did not spend much time on building it (in fact, I bet it spent more time in review than he did coding it).
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