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

51–60 of 82 posts

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#51

Post by rincebrain »

ifthenelseor wrote: post #36
jasonjayr wrote: post #23

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?

Other comics that have left hiveworks that I know of: Daughter of the Lilies (weird christian fantasy, currently on hiatus) In Blood We Rise (idk, I don't read it, looks like gay vampires) There was a rumor going around that Hiveworks is having financial issues, linked to a post that was then taken down and vagueposting from the DotL person. When I saw DotL move, I figured it was personal drama, and when I saw the on…

It's also quite possible Hiveworks is getting bought by someone that the creators in question don't want to touch with a long, long pole.

My personal guess, though, would be that Hiveworks wanted creators to sign an updated contract that had some terms around feeding their stuff into genAI and creators who could are NOPEing out of that.

I cannot overstate how much comic creators don't want to touch managing any of this, so n=2 or more of them leaving in a short window is a really, really bad smell.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#52

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

throwanem wrote: post #34
seanalltogether wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Nebula did it.

Nebula is mostly video, but also hosts a bunch of podcasts. I wonder whether they could be persuaded to expand their range of offerings to other media.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#53

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

ccppurcell wrote: post #19
trilbyglens wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does. If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch tha…

I think you're wrong about that last part. For ads to make sense as a revenue stream you have to basically auction them, for example at different times and different countries etc. So there has to be some automation, you can't just manually include each ad. This will have to be done programmatically, and there will always be traces (e.g. in div classes). You can try to randomise these or what have you, but it's basic…

Their used to be a system (which was created by a webcomic artist, though I forget which one) where ads could be sold in slots of time, completely independent of clicks. But it died a few years ago.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#54

Post by homarp »

TylerE wrote: post #31
rat87 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm skeptical of this. There's likely some open source software that's good enough and considering the advances in hardware likely much cheaper to run then it was way back when. Besides the fact that many people prefer large platf…

Good enough isn’t nearly good enough. You’re competing against apps, offering just a much better use experience. One bit of feedback I got repeatedly from users on a couple communities (now dead) I helped run was how much harder posting image and video content in a forum is - true user generated content I mean, not shared from YouTube. Even that meant ricking around with bbcode.

i somehow envision a forum as text first. Image and video hosting is 'out of scope'.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#55

Post by wizzwizz4 »

ben_w wrote: post #46
lazide wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you participate in the economy or are dependent on anything related to taxes, it quite literally does pay your bills.

I beleive the argument being made here is a map-territory distinction — certainly I myself see it this way. I mean, their other comment was: > If we'd lose so much GDP, without losing anything of value, perhaps GDP is not a useful measure of the economy. Meta etc., can pay taxes on the profits made from connecting advertisers to eyeballs, but what actual value do they really provide? What real value gets created due…

Advertisement is positive sum: it connects people who need goods or services with people who can provide those goods and services. The modern advertising industry is negative-sum: the sheer cost to everyone far outweighs this theoretical benefit. (Most people I know will deliberately refuse to buy anything that's advertised at them, unless they have no other option.)

The "attention economy" is stealing people's time, then trying to sell it. Other people's cognitive resources are not yours to sell. (Are there really people who do not realise how cartoonishly evil this is?) Time was, people used to pay for big books full of advertisements. Would anyone pay to receive modern online advertising?

The advertising companies are a big part of why I don't have the money to spare to pay for "ad-supported" websites: I'm too busy trying to keep my personal life away from their mass surveillance systems, missing or declining opportunities in the process. I, and those around me, would be richer if not for this pointlessly-wasted effort, me establishing increasingly-impractical countermeasures to maintain my privacy, and them building increasingly-elaborate workarounds to spy on me anyway, all so they can try to sell me a washing machine.

Banksy put it best. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy

> People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#56

Post by skizm »

I sympathize, I really do. But I was a daily reader for a while and the ads on their mobile site were particularly brutal so I stopped visiting a while ago. I’ve since setup pi-hole and the site was probably viewable at that point, but I never ended up going back to reading daily. I’d probably have paid a monthly or annual subscription for an ad-free experience, but I also know that’s not as profitable.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#57

Post by elsonrodriguez »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #53
ccppurcell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're wrong about that last part. For ads to make sense as a revenue stream you have to basically auction them, for example at different times and different countries etc. So there has to be some automation, you can't just manually include each ad. This will have to be done programmatically, and there will always be traces (e.g. in div classes). You can try to randomise these or what have you, but it's basic…

Their used to be a system (which was created by a webcomic artist, though I forget which one) where ads could be sold in slots of time, completely independent of clicks. But it died a few years ago.

Dinosaur Comics I believe.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#58

Post by superkuh »

jasonjayr wrote: post #23

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?

I thought the same thing and I doubt we're talking about the same comics. The one I noticed dropping hiveworks ads was "The Devil's Panties" (not actually porn, just wholesome slice of life).

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#59

Post by superkuh »

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've been playing NationStates(.net) for 20+ years now. They run a php forum as part of the civic simulation php site. It hasn't really changed in the 20 years. Lately the entire site has become completely inaccessible to many of us because they've deployed a cloudflare block. They say they had to do this because the increase in bot traffic was slowing down the site so much it was costing them money: https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=562415

I never once noticed the site was slow. But now that cloudflare is blocking me and my non-corporate browser completely, no matter how many captchas I complete, it is very, very slow (dead).

It's shocking to me as someone that runs multiple websites (for the last 20+ years) that they're having so much trouble suddenly. I too see bot traffic on my sites increasing (ie, it's like 4:1 now instead of 1:1 bots:humans) but it is not a problem.

I have to wonder how much of this is a socially contagious hysteria. Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years. I get the feeling people are "having" to block bots from accessing their websites just because they "feel" they have to block them. They actually don't.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#60

Post by spondylosaurus »

jasonjayr wrote: post #23

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?

I know of an artist who left Hiveworks years ago for various reasons, among them being controlling about what artists could/couldn't say on social media and trying to choke out the competition in arguably shady ways.
Post reply on HN