Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

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Additionally, visitors don't sign a contract to agree to view ads in exchange for content, content-makers don't own their visitors' eyes or attention and can't expect to just sell them off willy-nilly.

I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about it. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support.

Look, a lot of this ad revenue was bullshit anyway. Online ads have not been very effective historically, but people were still willing to pay for them and that pumped a lot of money into any site with a lot of traffic, regardless of whether or not the ads on that site actually worked. It turns out that visitors have started blocking ads before people started figuring out how crappy the RoI on those ads actually were, but that money was likely to dry up one way or the other eventually.

There are plenty of non-obnoxious ways to do product reviews and endorsements that can still bring in revenue (that's the laziest option) but there are also a ton of excellent options out there for content-creators to gain financial support without relying on ads. It's easier than it's ever been to earn a living without ads and it's only getting easier over time. If you're a web-focused content creator in 2015 and you don't have something for sale on your site (even just "brand" merch), don't have patreon set up, and don't have plans for crowd funded projects then you're making a huge mistake and leaving a crap-ton of money on the table.

> I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support.

People who hated spam signed the Boulder Pledge.

People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway.

You're living in a fantasy world. Nearly everyone universally hates spam, and nearly everyone uses a mail system that automatically filters it. They don't sign a pledge, they just use tools that help then avoid spam. They mark spam they get in their inbox to help others avoid it automatically. And they have no compunction about using a site that relies on spam, they merely find it annoying.

And as I mentioned there's no formal system in place where users agree to see ads in exchange for access to content. Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.

But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam.

> Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.

Don't pretend that you have unique moral authority, able to decide the rights and wrongs. If you don't want ads you should boycott ad supported sites - not giving them your traffic is at least as effective as giving them your traffic but hiding their ads. They respond to you by having advertisers paying for content. They respond to me by improving the quality of the content and charging for it.

Are we talking about spam or ads served over the web? If the latter - they are taking up my bandwidth!

If either reach your local machine then they are both taking up your bandwidth.

I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge.

> But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam.

And people that use spam filters on a daily basis just like the fact that they don't get as much spam anymore. You know like people that use adblockers and appreciate that they don't have as many adverts anymore.

You are comparing apples and cats. If you want to compare apples and apples compare the people that created spam filters with those that created blockers and compare the people that use spam filters with those that use blockers.

> I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge.

How old are you? How long have you been using the Internet? Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?

I’ve used the Internet since before the Web, and I’ve never heard of the Boulder Pledge either.

> Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?

Yes

Any thoughts on the rest of my comments?

Not really, I was just curious about the[1] change in culture from "don't support people sending you ads by giving them your custom or pageviews" to "just block the ads, and take the content."

[1] There hasn't been any change. It's just my perception, and that turns out to be wrong.

My favorite part of HN, the reason I prefer this news feed over any other, is because the comments are usually intelligent and civil.

Your comment here is neither, and it just turned a discussion about the morality of ad-blocking and the viability of ad-based revenue models into a dick measuring contest.

Not cool.

A more charitable reading of DanBC's comment is simply inquisitive. If we're going to hold civility in such high esteem, then we should also be assuming good faith, which it seems you have not done.

Honestly now. I am as enthusiastic a practitioner of the principle of charity as anyone else, but that doesn't mean you have to ignore overwhelming signs of bad faith when they're staring you in the face.

When Floegipoky decided DanBC's comment was probably not made in good faith, I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a mere assumption. More like an inference well supported by the available evidence.

Sorry. Re-reading it it does come across that way, and deserves the downvotes.

It wasn't intended that way though - I was genuinely just trying to see if people who'd used the Internet earlier were more aware of things like Boulder pledge. (Turns out several people who had significant involvement in Internet email at the time didn't know about it.)

I also have been on the internet since before the WWW (not just its commercial use) and have run mail servers for businesses since the mid-90s. Never heard of the Boulder Pledge.

I've also been using the internet since long before the WWW even existed. I was there for MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Never heard of this "Boulder Pledge."

I'd edit this if I could, but I can't because the edit / delete window has closed.

> People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway.

You ever see stats on ads taking the bandwidth?

http://betanews.com/2015/08/25/ad-blocker-crystal-massively-...

The ad vendors business model depends on the user paying for the ads. Why in living hell are they complaining? I am subsidizing their crappy business model. If I want to stop subsidizing them, it's my right.

I think this link was posted here a little while ago:

https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-fro...

The article is exactly what it says on the tin: You are charged more (roughly 16x) for the data inherent in the ad than the publisher makes for serving it.

In an ideal world with perfect coordination, we'd agree to just directly send the publisher a quarter of what the current ad data costs us, and everybody relevant wins.

Sure, block ads. But why then visit those same sites that try to serve ads? Those sites clearly don't care about you, so why do you want to give them the pageviews?

Are you going to donate to the pages you visit?

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