No you don't. Again, you REALLY need to do some reading. Or have you been calling commercial airliners to demand they stop flying above your house, as well?
If I'm flying at 100-some ft or more, and I just happen to go over your imaginary line, whether by accident or on the way to a destination, I am not "invading your space" in any fathomable sense of the phrase.
That's neat and all, but I don't (currently) want the AMA representing quads. Otherwise, we'd be stuck flying loops in the same fields over and over, which is not the purpose of this technology. I also think 400 ft is overly-restrictive (COAs allow for 500 ft). You must adhere to both of these in order to receive any of those benefits.
We need realistic policies that work with the technologies of these devices. It doesn't need the horizontal space of an RC plane, and they don't require the same kind of control as an RC helicopter. The sooner that lawmakers and organizations actually understand what quads are, the better everyone will be. I fully concede that it will take some work on the part of the idiots hovering over emergency situations, but "the public" can help by not being so stupidly fearful of the 'd' word.
...what the hell are you going on about? Flying in public airspace is not equivalent to a bathroom inside my house. How you got from one to the other is absolutely baffling to me.
"From heaven to hell" is not a thing in modern law. Please do more reading. I have no interest in 'violating your rights' or 'invade your privacy'. It's your insistence that simply flying a quadcopter is inherently out to get you that we're arguing against.
No we aren't. We're talking about keeping the government out of over-regulating something that only needs minimal intervention. The FAA is not "giving" anything by failing to act except a little more freedom. I can assure you that you are not special enough for anyone to want to "violate your rights".
"depriving them of their rights"? I think you're vastly overstating the impact of a 4 lb quadcopter on your life. Also, #4 is pretty easy to ascertain: If they blindly rabble about "rights" or "privacy", the statement evaluates true.
Uh, what? That's kind of ridiculous - that's like 20 times the average liability for car insurance. Far more damage is done by a car than a 4-lb quad, and far more frequently.
Also, "your property" might not be as 'yours' as you think. The general regulations for what's "yours" above your property is "what you can reasonably enjoy". Should it be defined? Maybe. But a common fallacy is to think that your property lines extend vertically to infinity.
The internet didn't used to be like this. It used to be all (well, maybe not "all") high-quality stuff that people put together and hosted for free.
It used to be all university-hosted webspace. Literally every site I visited 'back in the day' were ~ home directories. It was interesting, and the signal-to-noise was lower, but it was far from high-quality. It sounds like your real gripe is that it's no longer a niche, exclusive community, which I personally think is a fair argument. There are many aspects/types of sites that are a lot worse now that we have the general public online (the biggest example for me would be personals sites. Yahoo had an awesome personals site where most everyone was real, and you had a high chance of meeting them. Contrast to today where most sites have bots, and people are jaded because of the million braindead messages that everyone gets assaulted with)
However, as much as I hold those days dear, I don't want to go back to that. I ENJOY the commercial internet. For all its faults, there are plenty of benefits. I feel people who have opinions like yours fail to truly realize the impact advertising has had to help shape the internet... for just as much good as it has bad. I don't want it all to be corporate presence and student home directories. It would have never gone anywhere; nobody would have cared enough to bring all of those things we now do online without thinking.
Directly, the rise of advertising helped people care about making (more) stuff online, and has indirectly helped us get everyday things we take for granted, like paying bills online. I can even order a pizza for delivery. I can buy tickets to things I would have never known existed from friends of friends, who can more easily share it. I say indirectly because obviously these aren't benefits of advertising, but of the internet population it helped form. It's not that I don't get what you're saying. It WAS much quieter back then, no question. But the joy was that of discovery; clicking around some student page who linked to a student page at another university that talked about something else. That WAS cool. But it was hard to find, and it was very limited. People did make stuff 'for free' (MUDs, and their chat equivalent, talkers), but is that really the limit of entertainment you want to go back to?
I also don't want to 'micropay' to the million different websites I visit, and I think that holds true for many people. Even as a tip jar (rather than having an actual account to manage), who handles those payments? Paypal (who takes a piece for themselves)? Because I don't think you're getting money transfer on your utopia internet; that requires resources (especially in terms of regulation and protection) that companies will want to be paid for, but it seems that would be wrong.
You are correct that it doesn't seem I'm going to change your mind or understand that it's a necessary 'evil'. I understand your idea of the perfect internet, because I've gone through the same thought exercise, but we came to vastly different conclusions. What we simply need is advertising reform. An eradication of the TRULY evil side of online advertising, and back to its roots of simply "paying to get a message out". Once that happens, I think (most rational) people will be more understanding of the relationships between reader, 'content' provider (whatever that content may be), the infrastructure needed to handle it. I assure you that ads are not your enemy. Exploitative and careless ad networks are. Let's fight against those.
In 6 years, I never had any advertising work solely on CPC or CPA. There were monetary values for them, of course, but CPM (Cost Per thousand (Roman numeral M) impressions) was the primary source. Eyeballs have importance, because as I said, advertising at its core is about being able to broadcast your message for a price. I still find it very misleading for you to assert that advertising is solely about malware infections and scams. Yes, of course it happens, but I greatly feel you're overstating it (or I've just been out of the game for too long)... there are reputable ad networks out there.
You spent several paragraphs discussing Google Ads, but while I'm familiar enough with them, I never used them on my site, so I couldn't directly comment. But overall I'm not surprised at your findings.
What FunkSoulBrother quoted from me is my assertion to you that using "local ads" allows a website owner to fudge the number of impressions, and makes it hard to ask an advertiser who has never worked with you before to take them as fact.
How would you propose the advertiser do that research? There are only so many ways traffic can be objectively quantified. Alexa used to be the standard, then Quantcast for a while (in which I was in the top 1K sites for a time), but those require tracking, much like GA. One could use GA, but now people are blocking that, too.
In your example, you said 'sell[ing] local ad space based on average traffic over a window of time', but I'm still trying to figure out how you provide that data to a buyer in a way that they can trust - like I said, I could inflate the numbers I give in traffic reports. Is it a "trust it, or don't"? I'm not familiar how print advertising does things; I am not sure if you have any insight into that, or were just making an analogy. I think people probably inherently trust the NYT more than they would a random website, though.
I'm just talking out loud. Again, I don't think advertising is inherently bad, but I do recognize it's been egregiously abused. Some balance between being able to quantify numbers to an advertiser without the "risk of malware" that people claim as their reason for blocking ads and/or the quantification metrics.
my claim was that the ads are for malware and scams
While I'm not denying that stuff happens, that hasn't been my experience. Again, I was mostly with reputable ad networks, including niche ones that didn't do 'punch the monkey' stuff, and the furthest they got away from gaming (and ancillary stuff like snack foods and the like) were other household items. Since my site actually did have a decent percentage of women and parents, it really wasn't that far off. The only time it was completely off-base was Yahoo, who served up a few very weird adult ads (well, maybe that's *not* that far off from the gaming demographic, but still not something you'd want:P)
was too expensive for the value it gave to users.
Now you're just teetering on being offensive. Yes, it required a decent amount of resources to operate (serving 14-million requests for images; half cached and half needing to be generated on-the-fly), but I don't think you have any authority to comment on the value it gave. Not that I'm saying it was the best site ever, but to imply that it wasn't providing 'enough' value is not for you to decide, no matter what the eventual outcome was. Ad blocking is generally a set-and-forget thing. The entire point of my post was to show that it has a material effect.
The removal of that ad-based income forced you to stop thanklessly slaving away for a game developer
I guess you didn't fully read my last post. It wasn't for one game developer specifically, it was for an entire service. I wasn't 'slaving away for them'; they didn't ask me for anything. In fact, as I also said, they provided things specifically for me. Running that site was my own interest.
I apologize if I'm being unnecessarily harsh, it's tough to get someone to see things from my point of view if they've never been there. Since you said you had a site, you could relate, but it doesn't seem so.. I'm simply saying that I believe your opinion would change, just like Arment's opinion did, if it was your creation in question. You did answer my question by saying you'd shut it down. That's a sad thought, and I hope you never have to make that decision. Thank you for the response.
I imagine you wouldn't have had too much difficulty convincing some of your users into donating $10 per month towards keeping the service alive for everyone else
Actually, I did have donation drives, there wasn't any rule against those. While I did have some nice folks (and some generous folks), overall they weren't effective. The pre-paywall mentality is 'why buy when I can get it for free'? That's what advertising does. It gives a reasonable idea that you're accessing something for "free" - in other words, not being an out of pocket cost.
if the game's developer hadn't been strangling your ability to fund what you were doing
To be fair it was an entire service, not just a developer.. but anyway, I don't know if 'strangling' is the right word. After all, they were directly providing me the data to make the site a 'thing' in the first place. The idea was that I was supposed to be a "community" site, not a commercial effort. Enabling subscriptions or some sort of for-pay element changes the nature of the domain. Is it a pedantic difference? Possibly. But I wanted to keep a good relationship, and worked within the terms I agreed to.
I think it simply shouldn't have existed.
Well.... thanks, I guess.
....through the cost of malware infections
That's some unfair prejudice. Only once in its 6-year history was there ever an instance of an ad doing something it shouldn't have been (twice if you count the old Yahoo Ads giving adult-oriented text ads, which sucked). It was taken care of within 30 minutes. Does that justify it? Of course not. But it's not like the ad networks I used were continually serving up junk. Once the site got established, most ads (within the US) were directly or ancillarily relevant to the site, just like people argue it should always be.
You're also talking about gamers. Graphical ads are important to this subset of users, who are naturally attracted to flashy (not necessarily Flash-y) things. Since I had very little "reading" content (again, it wasn't a blog), it's not like it was pulling them away from a sentence. And if they ignored it, that was fine, because CPM worked well. When you boil it down, advertising is only about getting your message out. Sure, there's extra monetary incentive if people do something about it, but as a site owner, I only needed the message to be displayed.
hosting those ads on the blog itself
I tried using packages to manage ads (OpenAds, which I think renamed to openX, or something to that effect). That required me to be the advertising agent, in addition to wearing the hats of programming, infrastructure, sysadmin, and Community stuff. Also, since some advertisers want to handle the insertions of the ads, it was "yet another" interface to do that, whereas aligning with an ad network lets them do it once.
As a site owner, the entire reason to have ad networks is to essentially hire someone to handle these things for you. AND, since I was able to get into some niche ad platforms (e.g. ones specific to gaming websites), the network was able to leverage all of their sites as a collective property, giving access to higher quality ads. Not everything is 'punch the monkey'.
The second issue with hosting ads yourself is that advertisers want to certify the total number of impressions, the number of uniques, and where the views came from. There's no impartial source for that information without an ad network. What's to say I didn't "suddenly" have 5 million uniques the week a high-paying advertiser decides to buy ad space? That's what the javascript portions of ads were supposed to do; simply certify visitors were real. I understand that a good portion of networks abused that trust. But it wasn't always like that.
ad blocking software doesn't target these kinds of ads
What about for people who don't have "$20/year" needs?
I once had a website that was very popular in its niche, a community for a gaming service. It started out as a small hobby, which I figured only a couple of people would ever use. It eventually turned out to be one of the cornerstones of that particular community, arguably helping to define it. Part of the draw was generated images you could use in signatures, be it forums, blogs, or MySpace (we are talking 10 years ago), which also happened to be the means of advertising for the accompanying website, which displayed relevant stats for the gaming service, as well as comparisons to the other community members.
My site wasn't 'blog content', it was a way for people to "track" (not in the ad sense, but in the "over time" sense) their progress, their friends' progress, and get some neat info about the community as a whole. For some, it appealed to their competitive nature; for others, it was just a way to make sure they were getting the most out of the games they were playing.
As I mentioned, I never set out to create what it became. I started it on my home internet connection. In less than 60 days I had signed up with a colocation facility to get real bandwidth and real computing power. By the end of the next year, I had half a dozen servers. I had a fantastic relationship with the colo company, who wasn't charging me bandwidth (and trust me, I was pushing out something like 9 Gb/day with those remote images), but I still had to pay 'real estate'. I had gotten a lot of 'dev cred' with my creation and was easily able to get jobs (and subsequently get fired from for working on the site instead of my job), but ~$1k/month in hosting (at its peak) isn't exactly pocket change.
Now, I was in sort of a unique situation, because as I mentioned, this was for a gaming service, and I had an agreement with that service who was providing me with some exclusive APIs to easily consume the information I needed. Because it was supposed to be a "community site", one of those agreements was that I couldn't charge a subscription fee. My only true means for monetization was advertising, and for 4 of the 6 years, it was great. I got the resources I needed to continue reinvesting into the site - namely hardware, software licenses (forums), and consulting services when things got tough (scaling issues; and a contractor to do some Flash work (again, 10 years ago:P)). After that, ad-blockers started getting popular, and while my monthly advertising revs took a noticeable hit, I was still able to at least cover my costs. Then, the recession finally hit the advertising space, and I literally went to two-figures overnight. It's hard to pay a $700 bill with $90 in advertising revenue. I paid out of pocket for about a year, until I finally shuttered the site -- for multiple reasons, to be fair, but this being the largest reason.
This isn't meant to be a sob story, but a genuine look at how not all sites are 'content farms', that advertising does help websites, and how ad-blocking does demonstrably hurt. You may not care - if you look at my post history, I post on this topic a lot, to many people who are apathetic. I'm not necessarily interested in changing your mind. Your post was just interesting to me because you mentioned how it should be a 'public service' to pay for things out of pocket, and I'm curious how you would go about things if your "$20/year" suddenly needed to become much more.
Not everything. Apache itself couldn't query the user's effective browser/screen size, for instance, which can help during redesigns. The UA string only goes so far.
Great. So people who enjoy flying drones can go there. There's no need to declare the whole city a designated fly zone.
They do. You do realize that "public spaces" generally encompass all outside areas that aren't private property. Public. In other words, the vast majority of "the whole city". So thanks for your approval!
"Don't be a dick" rule of life. Sure, there are people who violate that
And what happens? Nothing.
Yeah, sometimes that happens. I can give you tons of examples of people being dicks that end up with no legal or social repercussions, and somehow life goes on.
You can't fix everything, especially with arbitrary laws; you only end up hurting the good folks. There's an certain level of risk that you inherently accept when you live in a first-world society.
Now I see the root issue that's causing you to act this way... delusion. Nobody is going to fly a camera in front of your window to look at you. You're not that important.
Open your window, get some sun. Try not to have a heart attack if you hear a buzzing sound outside; it's more likely to be a weedwacker than a quadcopter.
But you've already admitted that you've not experienced anyone who has flown over this busy road or busy footpath. So maybe you should give operators (as a whole) a little more credit to their intelligence?
There will always be stupid people in this life that go outside the norms, but you can't damn the entire group or the tool itself. Technology has no will of its own.
Do you not have hobbies? How would you feel if someone wanted to arbitrarily restrict them?
There are already designated places to fly: Public spaces and private areas that operators own or have permission. There are already guidelines on how not to fly recklessly, not to mention the general "Don't be a dick" rule of life.
Sure, there are people who violate that, but they don't need a quadcopter to do it. Again, there is nothing novel about a quadcopter over any other piece of technology that it needs special legislation. I can set a remote shutter for a camera in a tree. I can use a telephoto lens. I could set up an IP camera with 3G access purchased anonymously. There are tons of ways I could act like an asshole without anyone knowing it was me.
Stay in your house if you are so afraid of people and let the rest of society enjoy the freedom of choice.
It is always wrong to ban the tool over the activity.
The vast majority of the debate on quadcopters is the camera, so it's really not that different from a DSLR or smartphone camera.
> People don't stand in front of houses filming through the window. Do you not know about 'Peeping Tom' laws? That shit was going on decades, if not centuries, before the first quadcopter was developed.
Bottom line: There is nothing novel about cameras on quadcopters, from a legal standpoint. Ill intent is already against the law. We do not need overarching legislation.
I really hope you're not in the US... your sentiments are the complete opposite of how the country should operate.
Your final paragraph is contradictory. You started off saying you want a full ban, with a permissive list of uses; then you suggesting I wasn't agreeing with your opinion on making a restrictive list of things to not do. You should know that these two scenarios are very different.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting that I oppose the banning of "peeping, tracking, stalking, and harassing", it's just that those things are ALREADY illegal in most jurisdictions, making additional "because drone" legislation overkill, and likely overreach (because modern lawmaking is never only about the issue at hand anymore). There's not much that's illegal with a handheld camera that isn't presently illegal with a quadcopter.
Where have you personally observed them 'being a pest'? I want to hear your experiences, which will lend credibility to your kneejerk reactions; don't just point to yawn-worthy "news" stories.
You keep parroting this (which I replied to elsewhere), but 'designated fly spaces' is not what this technology is for. (And before you respond, it's not "for" "violating privacy" either). It's like saying the only place you should have a gun is on a range. I'm no gun nut, but I still think that sentiment is a little absurd.
Anyway, one thing that's important to understand is that these are HUGELY different from RC Aircraft. They do not require the same vertical space. They can stop, turn, and hover on a dime. The majority of them also have a number of safeguards (not as many as they could - I still want to see them incorporate the spinning algorithm to safely land if one prop/motor goes out). They are, in almost every way, better than RC Airplanes, and you'd have them restricted even more than the planes are.
Show me one instance where someone is specifically advocating for "unlimited right to invade people's privacy" (* Government entities not valid for this discussion, of course).
The vast, overwhelming majority of quadcopter operators do NOT want to 'violate people's privacy'. It's also increasingly obvious that people don't actually understand what is or isn't an violation of privacy. Flying over public space, or even permissible private property (like my own, or a friend's), where your yard or person is simply 'within view' is NOT a violation of your privacy. Nobody is going to argue that it should be legal to fly into your yard with the intent of filming you inside of outside of your home.
That's ridiculous, and shows you don't actually know what these are. 99.999% of the tens of thousands of daily quad flights are for 'good clean fun'.
There are bad apples with every single technology - are you going to propose we 'ban all uses of computers, then start to make exceptions'? Do you want to 'ban all uses of cellphones, then start to make exceptions'?
Slashdot Mirror
No you don't. Again, you REALLY need to do some reading.
Or have you been calling commercial airliners to demand they stop flying above your house, as well?
If I'm flying at 100-some ft or more, and I just happen to go over your imaginary line, whether by accident or on the way to a destination, I am not "invading your space" in any fathomable sense of the phrase.
That's neat and all, but I don't (currently) want the AMA representing quads. Otherwise, we'd be stuck flying loops in the same fields over and over, which is not the purpose of this technology. I also think 400 ft is overly-restrictive (COAs allow for 500 ft). You must adhere to both of these in order to receive any of those benefits.
We need realistic policies that work with the technologies of these devices. It doesn't need the horizontal space of an RC plane, and they don't require the same kind of control as an RC helicopter. The sooner that lawmakers and organizations actually understand what quads are, the better everyone will be. I fully concede that it will take some work on the part of the idiots hovering over emergency situations, but "the public" can help by not being so stupidly fearful of the 'd' word.
...what the hell are you going on about? Flying in public airspace is not equivalent to a bathroom inside my house. How you got from one to the other is absolutely baffling to me.
"From heaven to hell" is not a thing in modern law. Please do more reading.
I have no interest in 'violating your rights' or 'invade your privacy'. It's your insistence that simply flying a quadcopter is inherently out to get you that we're arguing against.
No we aren't. We're talking about keeping the government out of over-regulating something that only needs minimal intervention. The FAA is not "giving" anything by failing to act except a little more freedom. I can assure you that you are not special enough for anyone to want to "violate your rights".
"depriving them of their rights"? I think you're vastly overstating the impact of a 4 lb quadcopter on your life.
Also, #4 is pretty easy to ascertain: If they blindly rabble about "rights" or "privacy", the statement evaluates true.
Uh, what? That's kind of ridiculous - that's like 20 times the average liability for car insurance. Far more damage is done by a car than a 4-lb quad, and far more frequently.
Also, "your property" might not be as 'yours' as you think. The general regulations for what's "yours" above your property is "what you can reasonably enjoy". Should it be defined? Maybe. But a common fallacy is to think that your property lines extend vertically to infinity.
The internet didn't used to be like this. It used to be all (well, maybe not "all") high-quality stuff that people put together and hosted for free.
It used to be all university-hosted webspace. Literally every site I visited 'back in the day' were ~ home directories. It was interesting, and the signal-to-noise was lower, but it was far from high-quality. It sounds like your real gripe is that it's no longer a niche, exclusive community, which I personally think is a fair argument. There are many aspects/types of sites that are a lot worse now that we have the general public online (the biggest example for me would be personals sites. Yahoo had an awesome personals site where most everyone was real, and you had a high chance of meeting them. Contrast to today where most sites have bots, and people are jaded because of the million braindead messages that everyone gets assaulted with)
However, as much as I hold those days dear, I don't want to go back to that. I ENJOY the commercial internet. For all its faults, there are plenty of benefits. I feel people who have opinions like yours fail to truly realize the impact advertising has had to help shape the internet... for just as much good as it has bad. I don't want it all to be corporate presence and student home directories. It would have never gone anywhere; nobody would have cared enough to bring all of those things we now do online without thinking.
Directly, the rise of advertising helped people care about making (more) stuff online, and has indirectly helped us get everyday things we take for granted, like paying bills online. I can even order a pizza for delivery. I can buy tickets to things I would have never known existed from friends of friends, who can more easily share it. I say indirectly because obviously these aren't benefits of advertising, but of the internet population it helped form. It's not that I don't get what you're saying. It WAS much quieter back then, no question. But the joy was that of discovery; clicking around some student page who linked to a student page at another university that talked about something else. That WAS cool. But it was hard to find, and it was very limited. People did make stuff 'for free' (MUDs, and their chat equivalent, talkers), but is that really the limit of entertainment you want to go back to?
I also don't want to 'micropay' to the million different websites I visit, and I think that holds true for many people. Even as a tip jar (rather than having an actual account to manage), who handles those payments? Paypal (who takes a piece for themselves)? Because I don't think you're getting money transfer on your utopia internet; that requires resources (especially in terms of regulation and protection) that companies will want to be paid for, but it seems that would be wrong.
You are correct that it doesn't seem I'm going to change your mind or understand that it's a necessary 'evil'. I understand your idea of the perfect internet, because I've gone through the same thought exercise, but we came to vastly different conclusions. What we simply need is advertising reform. An eradication of the TRULY evil side of online advertising, and back to its roots of simply "paying to get a message out". Once that happens, I think (most rational) people will be more understanding of the relationships between reader, 'content' provider (whatever that content may be), the infrastructure needed to handle it. I assure you that ads are not your enemy. Exploitative and careless ad networks are. Let's fight against those.
In 6 years, I never had any advertising work solely on CPC or CPA. There were monetary values for them, of course, but CPM (Cost Per thousand (Roman numeral M) impressions) was the primary source. Eyeballs have importance, because as I said, advertising at its core is about being able to broadcast your message for a price. I still find it very misleading for you to assert that advertising is solely about malware infections and scams. Yes, of course it happens, but I greatly feel you're overstating it (or I've just been out of the game for too long)... there are reputable ad networks out there.
You spent several paragraphs discussing Google Ads, but while I'm familiar enough with them, I never used them on my site, so I couldn't directly comment. But overall I'm not surprised at your findings.
What FunkSoulBrother quoted from me is my assertion to you that using "local ads" allows a website owner to fudge the number of impressions, and makes it hard to ask an advertiser who has never worked with you before to take them as fact.
Thank you.
How would you propose the advertiser do that research? There are only so many ways traffic can be objectively quantified. Alexa used to be the standard, then Quantcast for a while (in which I was in the top 1K sites for a time), but those require tracking, much like GA. One could use GA, but now people are blocking that, too.
In your example, you said 'sell[ing] local ad space based on average traffic over a window of time', but I'm still trying to figure out how you provide that data to a buyer in a way that they can trust - like I said, I could inflate the numbers I give in traffic reports. Is it a "trust it, or don't"? I'm not familiar how print advertising does things; I am not sure if you have any insight into that, or were just making an analogy. I think people probably inherently trust the NYT more than they would a random website, though.
I'm just talking out loud. Again, I don't think advertising is inherently bad, but I do recognize it's been egregiously abused. Some balance between being able to quantify numbers to an advertiser without the "risk of malware" that people claim as their reason for blocking ads and/or the quantification metrics.
my claim was that the ads are for malware and scams
While I'm not denying that stuff happens, that hasn't been my experience. Again, I was mostly with reputable ad networks, including niche ones that didn't do 'punch the monkey' stuff, and the furthest they got away from gaming (and ancillary stuff like snack foods and the like) were other household items. Since my site actually did have a decent percentage of women and parents, it really wasn't that far off. The only time it was completely off-base was Yahoo, who served up a few very weird adult ads (well, maybe that's *not* that far off from the gaming demographic, but still not something you'd want :P)
was too expensive for the value it gave to users.
Now you're just teetering on being offensive. Yes, it required a decent amount of resources to operate (serving 14-million requests for images; half cached and half needing to be generated on-the-fly), but I don't think you have any authority to comment on the value it gave. Not that I'm saying it was the best site ever, but to imply that it wasn't providing 'enough' value is not for you to decide, no matter what the eventual outcome was. Ad blocking is generally a set-and-forget thing. The entire point of my post was to show that it has a material effect.
The removal of that ad-based income forced you to stop thanklessly slaving away for a game developer
I guess you didn't fully read my last post. It wasn't for one game developer specifically, it was for an entire service. I wasn't 'slaving away for them'; they didn't ask me for anything. In fact, as I also said, they provided things specifically for me. Running that site was my own interest.
I apologize if I'm being unnecessarily harsh, it's tough to get someone to see things from my point of view if they've never been there. Since you said you had a site, you could relate, but it doesn't seem so.. I'm simply saying that I believe your opinion would change, just like Arment's opinion did, if it was your creation in question. You did answer my question by saying you'd shut it down. That's a sad thought, and I hope you never have to make that decision. Thank you for the response.
I imagine you wouldn't have had too much difficulty convincing some of your users into donating $10 per month towards keeping the service alive for everyone else
Actually, I did have donation drives, there wasn't any rule against those. While I did have some nice folks (and some generous folks), overall they weren't effective. The pre-paywall mentality is 'why buy when I can get it for free'? That's what advertising does. It gives a reasonable idea that you're accessing something for "free" - in other words, not being an out of pocket cost.
if the game's developer hadn't been strangling your ability to fund what you were doing
To be fair it was an entire service, not just a developer.. but anyway, I don't know if 'strangling' is the right word. After all, they were directly providing me the data to make the site a 'thing' in the first place. The idea was that I was supposed to be a "community" site, not a commercial effort. Enabling subscriptions or some sort of for-pay element changes the nature of the domain. Is it a pedantic difference? Possibly. But I wanted to keep a good relationship, and worked within the terms I agreed to.
I think it simply shouldn't have existed.
Well.... thanks, I guess.
....through the cost of malware infections
That's some unfair prejudice. Only once in its 6-year history was there ever an instance of an ad doing something it shouldn't have been (twice if you count the old Yahoo Ads giving adult-oriented text ads, which sucked). It was taken care of within 30 minutes. Does that justify it? Of course not. But it's not like the ad networks I used were continually serving up junk. Once the site got established, most ads (within the US) were directly or ancillarily relevant to the site, just like people argue it should always be.
You're also talking about gamers. Graphical ads are important to this subset of users, who are naturally attracted to flashy (not necessarily Flash-y) things. Since I had very little "reading" content (again, it wasn't a blog), it's not like it was pulling them away from a sentence. And if they ignored it, that was fine, because CPM worked well. When you boil it down, advertising is only about getting your message out. Sure, there's extra monetary incentive if people do something about it, but as a site owner, I only needed the message to be displayed.
hosting those ads on the blog itself
I tried using packages to manage ads (OpenAds, which I think renamed to openX, or something to that effect). That required me to be the advertising agent, in addition to wearing the hats of programming, infrastructure, sysadmin, and Community stuff. Also, since some advertisers want to handle the insertions of the ads, it was "yet another" interface to do that, whereas aligning with an ad network lets them do it once.
As a site owner, the entire reason to have ad networks is to essentially hire someone to handle these things for you. AND, since I was able to get into some niche ad platforms (e.g. ones specific to gaming websites), the network was able to leverage all of their sites as a collective property, giving access to higher quality ads. Not everything is 'punch the monkey'.
The second issue with hosting ads yourself is that advertisers want to certify the total number of impressions, the number of uniques, and where the views came from. There's no impartial source for that information without an ad network. What's to say I didn't "suddenly" have 5 million uniques the week a high-paying advertiser decides to buy ad space? That's what the javascript portions of ads were supposed to do; simply certify visitors were real. I understand that a good portion of networks abused that trust. But it wasn't always like that.
ad blocking software doesn't target these kinds of ads
Uh, [Citation Needed]. Maybe they
What about for people who don't have "$20/year" needs?
I once had a website that was very popular in its niche, a community for a gaming service. It started out as a small hobby, which I figured only a couple of people would ever use. It eventually turned out to be one of the cornerstones of that particular community, arguably helping to define it. Part of the draw was generated images you could use in signatures, be it forums, blogs, or MySpace (we are talking 10 years ago), which also happened to be the means of advertising for the accompanying website, which displayed relevant stats for the gaming service, as well as comparisons to the other community members.
My site wasn't 'blog content', it was a way for people to "track" (not in the ad sense, but in the "over time" sense) their progress, their friends' progress, and get some neat info about the community as a whole. For some, it appealed to their competitive nature; for others, it was just a way to make sure they were getting the most out of the games they were playing.
As I mentioned, I never set out to create what it became. I started it on my home internet connection. In less than 60 days I had signed up with a colocation facility to get real bandwidth and real computing power. By the end of the next year, I had half a dozen servers. I had a fantastic relationship with the colo company, who wasn't charging me bandwidth (and trust me, I was pushing out something like 9 Gb/day with those remote images), but I still had to pay 'real estate'. I had gotten a lot of 'dev cred' with my creation and was easily able to get jobs (and subsequently get fired from for working on the site instead of my job), but ~$1k/month in hosting (at its peak) isn't exactly pocket change.
Now, I was in sort of a unique situation, because as I mentioned, this was for a gaming service, and I had an agreement with that service who was providing me with some exclusive APIs to easily consume the information I needed. Because it was supposed to be a "community site", one of those agreements was that I couldn't charge a subscription fee. My only true means for monetization was advertising, and for 4 of the 6 years, it was great. I got the resources I needed to continue reinvesting into the site - namely hardware, software licenses (forums), and consulting services when things got tough (scaling issues; and a contractor to do some Flash work (again, 10 years ago :P)). After that, ad-blockers started getting popular, and while my monthly advertising revs took a noticeable hit, I was still able to at least cover my costs. Then, the recession finally hit the advertising space, and I literally went to two-figures overnight. It's hard to pay a $700 bill with $90 in advertising revenue. I paid out of pocket for about a year, until I finally shuttered the site -- for multiple reasons, to be fair, but this being the largest reason.
This isn't meant to be a sob story, but a genuine look at how not all sites are 'content farms', that advertising does help websites, and how ad-blocking does demonstrably hurt. You may not care - if you look at my post history, I post on this topic a lot, to many people who are apathetic. I'm not necessarily interested in changing your mind. Your post was just interesting to me because you mentioned how it should be a 'public service' to pay for things out of pocket, and I'm curious how you would go about things if your "$20/year" suddenly needed to become much more.
Not everything. Apache itself couldn't query the user's effective browser/screen size, for instance, which can help during redesigns. The UA string only goes so far.
Great. So people who enjoy flying drones can go there. There's no need to declare the whole city a designated fly zone.
They do. You do realize that "public spaces" generally encompass all outside areas that aren't private property. Public. In other words, the vast majority of "the whole city". So thanks for your approval!
"Don't be a dick" rule of life. Sure, there are people who violate that
And what happens? Nothing.
Yeah, sometimes that happens. I can give you tons of examples of people being dicks that end up with no legal or social repercussions, and somehow life goes on.
You can't fix everything, especially with arbitrary laws; you only end up hurting the good folks. There's an certain level of risk that you inherently accept when you live in a first-world society.
Now I see the root issue that's causing you to act this way ... delusion.
Nobody is going to fly a camera in front of your window to look at you.
You're not that important.
Open your window, get some sun. Try not to have a heart attack if you hear a buzzing sound outside; it's more likely to be a weedwacker than a quadcopter.
But you've already admitted that you've not experienced anyone who has flown over this busy road or busy footpath. So maybe you should give operators (as a whole) a little more credit to their intelligence?
There will always be stupid people in this life that go outside the norms, but you can't damn the entire group or the tool itself. Technology has no will of its own.
Do you not have hobbies? How would you feel if someone wanted to arbitrarily restrict them?
There are already designated places to fly: Public spaces and private areas that operators own or have permission. There are already guidelines on how not to fly recklessly, not to mention the general "Don't be a dick" rule of life.
Sure, there are people who violate that, but they don't need a quadcopter to do it. Again, there is nothing novel about a quadcopter over any other piece of technology that it needs special legislation. I can set a remote shutter for a camera in a tree. I can use a telephoto lens. I could set up an IP camera with 3G access purchased anonymously. There are tons of ways I could act like an asshole without anyone knowing it was me.
Stay in your house if you are so afraid of people and let the rest of society enjoy the freedom of choice.
It is always wrong to ban the tool over the activity.
The vast majority of the debate on quadcopters is the camera, so it's really not that different from a DSLR or smartphone camera.
> People don't stand in front of houses filming through the window.
Do you not know about 'Peeping Tom' laws? That shit was going on decades, if not centuries, before the first quadcopter was developed.
Bottom line: There is nothing novel about cameras on quadcopters, from a legal standpoint. Ill intent is already against the law. We do not need overarching legislation.
I really hope you're not in the US... your sentiments are the complete opposite of how the country should operate.
Your final paragraph is contradictory. You started off saying you want a full ban, with a permissive list of uses; then you suggesting I wasn't agreeing with your opinion on making a restrictive list of things to not do. You should know that these two scenarios are very different.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting that I oppose the banning of "peeping, tracking, stalking, and harassing", it's just that those things are ALREADY illegal in most jurisdictions, making additional "because drone" legislation overkill, and likely overreach (because modern lawmaking is never only about the issue at hand anymore). There's not much that's illegal with a handheld camera that isn't presently illegal with a quadcopter.
Where have you personally observed them 'being a pest'? I want to hear your experiences, which will lend credibility to your kneejerk reactions; don't just point to yawn-worthy "news" stories.
You keep parroting this (which I replied to elsewhere), but 'designated fly spaces' is not what this technology is for. (And before you respond, it's not "for" "violating privacy" either). It's like saying the only place you should have a gun is on a range. I'm no gun nut, but I still think that sentiment is a little absurd.
Anyway, one thing that's important to understand is that these are HUGELY different from RC Aircraft. They do not require the same vertical space. They can stop, turn, and hover on a dime. The majority of them also have a number of safeguards (not as many as they could - I still want to see them incorporate the spinning algorithm to safely land if one prop/motor goes out). They are, in almost every way, better than RC Airplanes, and you'd have them restricted even more than the planes are.
You've allowed the media to instill false fears.
Show me one instance where someone is specifically advocating for "unlimited right to invade people's privacy" (* Government entities not valid for this discussion, of course).
The vast, overwhelming majority of quadcopter operators do NOT want to 'violate people's privacy'. It's also increasingly obvious that people don't actually understand what is or isn't an violation of privacy. Flying over public space, or even permissible private property (like my own, or a friend's), where your yard or person is simply 'within view' is NOT a violation of your privacy. Nobody is going to argue that it should be legal to fly into your yard with the intent of filming you inside of outside of your home.
That's ridiculous, and shows you don't actually know what these are. 99.999% of the tens of thousands of daily quad flights are for 'good clean fun'.
There are bad apples with every single technology - are you going to propose we 'ban all uses of computers, then start to make exceptions'? Do you want to 'ban all uses of cellphones, then start to make exceptions'?
Give me a break.