251–260 of 348 posts
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The fact that the disgusting parasitic entity that is Meta is a part of this makes me sick to my stomach. The fact that the Mozilla CTO is supportive of Meta being a part of it? Just unspeakable.
Using overwrought rhetoric doesn't help to make your point.
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> advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting. Advertising-based social…
Having run one, I have to say that towards the end people were moving to social media BECAUSE posts had a like counter. I regret not adding one to my forum.
I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.) If advertising must exist, I'd prefer…
We had safe and private advertising back in the 90s. Local computer store in Cityville would pay money to local Cityville forum, and when you'd open the "computers" subforum, the Computer store banner would be at the top. Then advertisers and websites went beserk, covered every square centimeter with ads, including the content of the websites themselves, and started tracking everything, from location, age, gender to…
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If HN didn't exist people would gather on another link aggregator.
And yet no successful link aggregator has ever been "free" or "open" in a meaningful sense. Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of p…
Not a link aggregator.
> Lemmy
Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?
I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.) If advertising must exist, I'd prefer…
Let's start with the fact that they've added their spying as opt out instead of opt in because they know that if people were asked they would not consent to it. They're already disrespecting users by trying to slip this unwanted thing into their browser largely unnoticed.
There is no way to exploit and manipulate people that is safe and private. A browser is a user-agent. It's supposed to be working for you, the user. Not for advertisers who will try to manipulate you and take your money.
Mozilla is not working to protect your privacy and security. They are trying to come up with a scheme that will trick users who object to ads and reject surveillance capitalism into accepting them along with the violations of privacy and security they depend on.
There is nothing "noble" about this. This is just about making money at your expense. It's the exact same goal every other ad-tech company has.
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> It doesn't keep the Internet free There are two different definitions of free. Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However there is also freedom and advertising doesn't help there at all.
That's the rub. You do pay for it. By the intention and definition of the business, advertisement eventually extracts money from you. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise. The fact that it happens more subtly and enables them to extract money from you in ways that you don't notice doesn't change the fact that it's still paid for. An advertisement funded Internet is still you paying for your content, it's just built so…
Most advertisements are for junk that makes your life worse if you buy, but there are some that are useful.
wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…
Most importantly, advertisement is a business. It's not charity and it's not a publicly owned resource. It doesn't keep the Internet free, because it makes a boat load of money doing what it does. It doesn't take an expert understanding of economics to see that any belief that advertisement allows for a free Internet is smoke and mirrors. The money comes from somewhere, notably from you. Either advertisement works, a…
I view content. It either exists and is delivered to me, or it doesn't. Either way, I'm blocking it, for my mental health. I see your viewpoint. But, I'm not a metric, I'm not a KPI, I'm not a cost per click, or a cost per view. I don't want my data saved, tracked, bought, sold, manipulated, interpolated, twisted, catered and sprinkled on top to deliver to the next guy. I'm a human being.
I get it, I entirely do, but that's my stance. I'm sticking with it.
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> It doesn't keep the Internet free There are two different definitions of free. Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However there is also freedom and advertising doesn't help there at all.
> Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However Ads and the spying they depend on only trick you into thinking that you aren't paying for it when in reality, not only are you paying (often resulting with money coming out of your pocket) but you also never get to stop paying for it. Once your data is out there, it will be used against you for the rest of your life. It never goes away…
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I'm pretty sure ad revenue for most channels is negligible so they resort to third party sponsorships or platforms like Patreon. The advertisements are there for Google to recoup some of the cost of running YT.
not sure what your point is. let's assume it's true. That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos. Without that those channels would have to pay for hosting themselves and could not afford to make the content. Further, most of them would have never even tried if it wasn't free to start Then, I don't buy your premise. Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly for Brilliant, NordVPN, etc...…
Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.
> That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos
Your assertion was related to the channels themselves existing, not YT as a platform. I can agree that the platform probably wouldn't exist without some sort of funding source but that doesn't necessarily need to come from ads.
wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…
> advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting. Advertising-based social…
Content must be hosted, and hosting costs money. So how is money going to interact with this system?
Copyright answered that question in the worst possible way. Copyright says that the content itself is the object with monetary value. To support that claim, copyright wraps every piece of content in a box, and says, "Whoever made this shall monopolize its value." In reality, only the box itself can actually behave as a discrete commodity, and no one truly creates content alone: all art is derivative, especially written media. Regardless of reality, copyright demands that we all participate in this delusional game.
So now everyone who hosts content is holding commodities. It's naturally advantageous to exploit the value of your commodities (you can reinvest your profit into actual value), so any business that does that will be more successful than the rest. Anyone who refuses to play the game will simply lose (or be prosecuted). So how do you sell forum posts and memes?
You don't. That doesn't make any sense, remember? You don't actually sell the content: you sell the box. You sell the warehouse. You sell the marketplace. This entire game is predicated on monopoly, so what's the most natural implementation? Vertical integration! Facebook and Twitter don't sell social networks: they sell social walls. What are those walls made of? Incompatibility. The best part is: if anyone tries to build a door into your wall, you get to sue them out of existence! It doesn't matter how broken or exploitative your business model is: if it is based on copyright, then it is guaranteed by law to succeed!
So now you own everyone and everything. How do you make money? By selling them to each other. In other words: advertising.
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But wait, there's more! Copyright answered even more questions: How do you stop people from misrepresenting someone else's work as their own? How do you stop people from sharing your secrets? How do you censor abusive material? The answer is to prosecute fraud and abuse, because those are already illegal. Right? Right? No. That would make too much sense. The real answer is copyright.