Ads pay for hosting websites in the current model that got to the point of being the only option. Thank you, but I will do all I can to upset this particular apple cart.
> Why dont you build a better model then replace it?
I do not know if you are serious or sarcastic. Assuming serious, that was feasible 30 years ago. Now trying to build anything competitively different gets you bought out or deplatformed. Neither Brin nor Zuckerberg would stand a chance if they started today.
> A lot of jobs depend on ads, dont shit all over people
A lot of jobs depend on mass calling people at dinnertime with spam donation requests. That is not the reason not to challenge this business model.
One fb and google were startups, startups will one day beat them. It is the nature of the marketplace. There is so much room to play in areas they can not.
I dont hear you challenging a business model. I hear you calling to tear down a system that you do not understand with naive statements.
Ah so you are an extremist with no understanding of the real world, thank you, I will exit this conversation before you start telling me about the lizard people who really control our leaders living in the underground.
Most websites are completely trivial to host. e.g. from what I can find, Reddit only gets ~8k page views/second, and only has 13B posts/comments total? An old archive of the site had ~1.7B posts/comments at ~1TB uncompressed, meaning you could fit every text post today on a few SSDs and host the whole site for the price of a high end gaming computer (or a couple of them for redundancy) and an unmetered connection.
In our modern world of user generated content and incredible hardware, any nerd could host even the most popular sites as a relatively cheap hobby. The only thing making them non-trivial is... all of the infrastructure for the ads, spying, and control. That and image/video hosting, which could be done through something like ipfs if it were integrated into browsers.
Spoken like an engineer with no real understanding of what it takes to host Reddit let alone an understand of the business side of things. You have zero idea what you are talking about.
Like I said in my comment, the "business side of things" (i.e. the infrastructure to support ads, spying, control) are what makes it non-trivial. You can't use "making money is hard" as an argument against me saying that it's so cheap a hobbyist could do it for fun.
Hosting a forum that gets the traffic Reddit does at higher availability than Reddit does (Reddit returns error pages all the time) is absolutely trivial on modern hardware (except for images/videos, as I said). I've known several people that have unmetered connections/servers in datacenters as a hobby.
The entire history of every text post/comment ever on that site could fit on 2-3 SSDs now. The traffic is nothing. It doesn't take a lot to host a site that can fit on one computer with plenty of room to spare.
sigh, nothing wrong with ad blockers and I've got nothing against them.
But, if you want to support the websites you use you should think about what you are doing. What is frustrating here is the lack of respect for people who create a lot of the web you use, and then you don't pay them. Ads are a way to fund websites, not all of them, but a lot.
My attention is mine. It is part of me, a part of my mind, my consciousness. There is not a single person on this earth that is entitled to it. It is not a currency they can pay their bills with. It is not something that they have any assumed right to.
So it's funny to see you talk about respect. Advertising's inherent property is its complete lack of respect for me, my choices and my attention. They don't ask if I want to see this crap, they just show it to me. They insert their noise into my mind without my consent. I block them and they double down on it by finding ways to get past my blocker. And to you this mind rape is okay just because it funds your site?
Those websites are creating something for you, and you are complaining that they are trying to get paid for their work? Don't browse websites with ads then.
Attention is not something you actively control, its a very complex issue between your subconscious and conscious. That is a much bigger discussion.
> you are complaining that they are trying to get paid for their work
I got nothing against you or anyone else getting paid. I'm complaining about the general lack of respect. People act as if they own my attention and can sell it off to the highest bidder. Blockers are merely self defense against these hostile websites.
> Attention is not something you actively control
It's still mine and nobody has any business selling it off for money. If they try, I'll stop them.
I don't have any problems interacting with people on the street, especially when they ask for help. In my experience they are always polite and respectful too. Unlike advertisers.
I'm in favor for websites being paid what they ask for.
The problem with ads is that people don't want to pay with their attention and personal data.
Another problem with ads is that website owners can not directly set a price, and they cannot set the price above a certain threshold where ads simply don't work anymore. It doesn't scale.
They sell by manipulating people into buying. Seriously stop being naive. Coca Cola doesn't need to raise awareness of its product, it's in every fridge ever. The ads are not there to inform people that Coca Cola exists, they're there to manipulate people into buying Coca Cola.
Are you so easily convinced you believe whatever political opinion Fox News is selling?
The dictionary says that to manipulate is to 'control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.' If you want to tack on 'when they're not selling products" for your personal use, be my guest, but then 'advertising isn't manipulation' is tautologous. And you really should have brought up that you have a special, secret definition when you told someone point blank that advertising wasn't it.
And waste thousands of man hours for few measly pennies for the webmaster. They don't care about us or websites, they don't care if they wasted 30s from thousands of people in exchange from one more sale. Excessive advertising is a modern plague because it has become too cheap.
My estimation is likely exaggerated, I was thinking of YouTube and websites with sticky video ads.
Since 20,000 people seeing a 30s unskippable ad in Youtube amounts to 167 man hours used, maybe I should have said "hundreds of man hours wasted for a few measly dollars?".
Look, it's going to get worse as more people get fed up with aggressive advertising practices and learn about safe ad blocking. It's going to be disruptive, and it will put out of business many websites that aren't paying attention. Big ad companies know it and are actively looking for new ways to keep eyeballs and product placement everywhere.
Don't worry about the few people who use ad blockers, just be ready to follow new ad practices when they come.
In fact, If I find a website useful, and it doesn't push aggressive/tracking ads, I purposefully whitelist it. Complaining about people blocking ads on your website might not encourage them to whitelist it, though. Your best advocate is your own work.
Ads pay for websites.