what an idiot
Just doesn’t feel good
281–290 of 315 posts
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It looks like he just felt uncomfortable making money off of his friends' and colleagues' loss. Anytime you sell a product in a competitive market, you do this. Those ad companies are happy to steal costumers' attention from other companies.
I think people are fine losing money to competition but this isn't losing to competition. An ad blocker actually destroys potential value because sites that used to generate money no longer do. These sites aren't losing money to other sites making more money, the money just isn't made at all. You could potentially argue that the intended viewer of those ads is now capturing that value, however real world examples of…
> An ad blocker actually destroys potential value because sites that used to generate money no longer do.
Or maybe it creates value by allowing me to spend my money on things I care about, rather than bandwidth for video ads?
Or maybe it creates value by speeding up the web for me, giving me the one precious and non-reneable resource: Time?
Or maybe it create value for me by giving me privacy? I value that.
Ad blockers are simply moving value around. If people didn’t think it created value, they wouldn’t have paid for it.
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that approach hasn't worked well either. See for instance the failure of Newsstand, which had the benefit of being a marquee iOS feature featured in a keynote. People want free and no-strings-attached.
I don't think that's true, at least not for "people" as a whole group. For me, paywalls are a pain because I don't want to jump through the hoops to get past them, and you're often stuck ordering a full subscription or the like (as well as other posters rightly pointing out that paywalls can often come prior to any ability to decide that you WANT what's paywalled). If there was a truly low friction way to get a singl…
> If there was a truly low friction way to get a single piece of vetted/high quality content for a marginal one time rate
There is: ads, but people don't like them.
I do no think there's anything that matches how frictionless ads are in exchanging value, but I'm sure someone else smarter than me might work it out; hopefully before the sites I like implode.
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought ad blockers on iOS only block ads on Safari web pages, not ads within apps?
Yes, that's true. A lot of people have been interpreting iOS content blocking as Apple's way of pushing people to make more apps. Content blockers also can't block Apple's official "hey, we have an app for this web site" banner that you can have Safari show for your site.
How deliciously overt. Increase apps ecosystem & destroy competitors revenue in one blow. Which is good news for privacy because the one thing that can't track you is an app on your mobile device.
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd urge you to medidate on what the constant complaints about paywalls imply about the public's appetite for non-advertising revenue streams. Journalists have to eat.
One of the journalists I follow in Canada has a Patreon and doesn't inundate his work with ads or paywall. I voluntarily pay him more money per month than any news site because he actually produces work that matters to me (politics, journalism) and doesn't reduce the user experience.
It's a good setup, but I doubt it can scale.
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're forgetting the fact that this application still works. Sure, when iOS 10 is released it may break - but the same could be said for any now-abandoned app. It's a shame but he gave people notice (instead of just stopping development) and recommended people request refunds. This is nowhere close to being a scam.
This isn't an ordinary application. Ad blocking applications live and die by their blocklist. Many people purchased this application with the implied assumption that the blocklist would continue to be updated for the foreseeable future. Without an updated blocklist, this app will quickly become useless.
Ghostery is providing the blocklist, not Marco.I doubt they are going to stop anytime soon as they also have a browser extenstion that relies on it
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't an ordinary application. Ad blocking applications live and die by their blocklist. Many people purchased this application with the implied assumption that the blocklist would continue to be updated for the foreseeable future. Without an updated blocklist, this app will quickly become useless.
Ghostery is providing the blocklist, not Marco.I doubt they are going to stop anytime soon as they also have a browser extenstion that relies on it
Doubtful.
"The app is completely my code, using a copy of Ghostery’s tracker database hosted on my server that the app periodically checks for updates."
So since he's abandoned the app, and broken his agreement with Ghostery, I'd assume he'll no longer be receiving an updated database from Ghostery.
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#288I have a huge amount of respect for Marco but this decision makes no sense to me. Was he afraid of hurting journalist friends and losing invites to the hottest media parties around NYC? Or pissing off other friends and ex-colleagues who now work at analytics and optimization companies? I hate to be a cynic but that's how his post read to me - this launch had cast a personal shadow that he didn't want to deal with. Some % of users don't want to be tracked and they downloaded an app to stop it. It's not like he removed the Safari API that enabled this. Now that Peace is gone, it will just be replaced by other similar apps, likely from far less scrupulous authors (such as ABP with their ''acceptable ads'').
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Instapaper is owned by Instapaper Holdings (Betaworks), not Marco. (In addition to starting Instapaper, Marco also started a publication called The Magazine, which he sold and is now shuttered.)
And let's not gloss over the fact that he made at least a few million from his equity stake in Tumblr when it was sold to Yahoo. He was the first employee of the company.
From everything I've heard on his podcast, it is strongly hinted that he really never needs to work another day in his life.
Re: Just doesn’t feel good
#290When I visit a site, I want to see content from that site. I did not consent to view ads from a third party. I would be happy to view ads that a site decides to host and display. The problem is that most sites have absolutely no idea what ads they are displaying. They just want money. It is probably not even feasible to block ads that a site hosts themselves.