211–220 of 292 posts
This is absolutely not true in my case. I'm both a small publisher and a small advertiser. I have absolutely no trouble making ends meet. Perhaps I will in the future, but it is very unlikely that click fraud or or privacy concerns will be to blame.
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>How about ending hunger worldwide? It's mostly a distribution problem nowadays. It's also incentives problem if you are not all in communist. If you simply send food from Europe to Africa, it disincentives food production in Africa. Which causes unemployment and hinders economic growth with it. And it also causes huge security of supply problem and might cause starvation if something happens to the shipping. My best…
Its principally a corruption issue. Western governments and corporations reinforce crony, incompetent governments in developing countries so that their resources can be exploited. These crony governments then steal (literally) from the population who need it. Until the poor governance issues are resolved, a lot of foreign aid is wasted.
And that's why you get biggest impact by sharing the money as evenly as possible.
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>How about ending hunger worldwide? It's mostly a distribution problem nowadays. It's also incentives problem if you are not all in communist. If you simply send food from Europe to Africa, it disincentives food production in Africa. Which causes unemployment and hinders economic growth with it. And it also causes huge security of supply problem and might cause starvation if something happens to the shipping. My best…
I'm sure this will work brilliantly, considering that no one who needs your money there has a bank account or credit card. Cash also won't work due to the tiny problem of all the warlords and corrupt government/police/military/paramilitary taking all this money away by force. The only way to make a shit place better for people, is if some rich guy finds an investment opportunity there, that as a side effect, might di…
Ok, this is a fantastic piece that says a lot of useful and thoughtful things, some of them critical about the priorities of the SF startup scene. And what are a nontrivial portion of the HN comments doing? Complaining that he was unfair to Elon freaking Musk!! This is exactly the sort of techno-douchebaggery that the author is writing about, so way to prove his point, nimrods. The one redeeming quality of such comme…
So I'm not sure where 1 == nontrivial portion of HN comments....
I agree with all of the author's points and quite enjoyed the read-through. The ONLY thing I took issue with was the Musk comment and even then it was just annoying, it's not like I'm going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I'm getting really annoyed by these top-rated comments saying some BS like "Everyone is complaining about X" then I look for those complaints and there are 1-2....
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And the imaginary internet points incentive system HN uses implicitly incentivizes those posts. One way to stop this would be to have people who post low-value high-expected-karma-yield posts get randomly banned. This would function as a variable punishment and should be quite effective at training HN users.
Ehhh I think HN already directs too much of the discourse. I understand the intent of minimum karma downvoting, for example, but I think that encourages elitism, because if you have to be validated with 500 karma before you can downvote, then the implication is that you're in a class of people that's better than others and you don't feel you have to explain yourself. EDIT: like how this comment is being silently down…
If you read this paragraph critically, it is easy to find the problem with the argument in this article.
There is a fundamental failure to explain how the privacy concerns are having a negative impact right now.
The cigarette comparison is ridiculous, because cancer is an obvious problem. Cancer is bad. Cigarettes cause cancer. It's is very easy to understand that.
What is the "cancer" correlation with online ads?
Something that might happen in the future if the advertising bubble bursts?
I'm not saying that there isn't a serious problem. It's just that the negative affects are not clearly stated. And that is a problem -- especially if you want to cause change.
People don't want cancer. That's why cigarettes are almost universally seen as bad. With online advertising, what is the correlation? I don't see one.
edit: I want to add, that in my experience as a small publisher and a small advertiser, I have no problem with click fraud. The robots are not winning. (I spend around $30-40k a year in ads, generate significantly more in ad revenue.)
The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads. Ever. If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. A…
Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. You're asking sites to remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users. Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety o…
In reality, I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts which seem very distracting and poorly-targeted when compared to, say, ads for O'Reilly math/CS books or a MOOC on probability and statistics.
I'm so glad someone finally has courage to comment so poignantly on what San Francisco has become. This sentence will stay with me: "But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable"
This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.
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I think this is a very trenchant criticism of what I said, and I appreciate you not taking offense at me! For a) I imagine data sharing is fine, except that you can't share behavioral data about users, and you can't use any of the shared data for advertising. That said, I know very little about how publisher networks work and would appreciate pushback. b) is unfortunately quite right. If you're sufficiently pessimist…
I'm still a bit confused about how right-to-download helps non-nerds. I think I have a minor allergic reaction to things that are (a) so hard to implement that they raise barriers to newcomers and (b) only help the nerd class.
- lets you make backups you physically control
- prevents vendor lock-in
- lets you spot and correct mistakes in things like your user profile
- lets you verify that things you deleted were actually deleted
- promotes competition by making it easier to take your data and go elsewhere
- protects your privacy by forcing vendors to keep better track internally of what user data they're storing