There are different kinds of advertising: On the internet you often have "Buy OUR crap. Now." ads which hope people click on them and buy stuff. But for the reasons you stated, most ads outside of search engines won't lead to direct sales that way because people rarely come to websites like Facebook looking to buy stuff *right now*.
Another kind of ad are more about brand recognition, about getting your name out. So that people who aren't looking to buy something *right now* will either remember your name or at least recognize it again on a more subtle level.
I mean, it's not like a company putting an ad for a lawn mower in a magazine or airing one during the Super Bowl expects people to jump up and run out to buy a lawn mower right after they see it (i.e. offline they usually don't expect the equivalent of a click-through leading to a sale when someone views their ad). BUT: the next time you need to buy a lawn mower, you might remember their name and make sure to look at their products before coming to a decision what to buy. Or, if you are in the store in front of a line of lawn mowers and have to make a decision between a few models which are similar on features and price, a lot of people won't toss a coin, they'll often - maybe just subconsciously - favor the manufacturer whose name rings a faint bell over ones they've never heard of before.
This probably becomes more important the cheaper and harder to distinguish the products are. When buying a car, there's lots of stuff you can look up to compare or have preferences for. When standing in front of a wall of unknown toilet cleaners with tiny price difference and your usual one [ how did it become your usual..?] is out of stock, name recognition or the design of the bottle might influence how "randomly" you select one of the other options. And if your random(?) pick works for you, it might become your new usual product.
I didn't RTFA and don't know if the "freedom of the press" bit is addressed in it, but my guess is that the argument will be more along the lines of the need for an independent press as 4th power.
Something like:
"You can't have an independent press without financial independence. People aren't paying directly for it, so the money will have to come from somewhere else if you don't want to have less press ( == smaller spectrum of voices/opinions). Ads are an independent way to get the necessary money compared to publishing embedded ads/paid content or the press depending on the goodwill of a few rich folks who would be in control of what gets published."
That's the only thing coming to mind that makes some sense to me, but one obvious problem with that is the assumption that we aren't already at that point.
And "But things will be even worse!" doesn't convince me because there's no guarantee that things won't get worse anyway: Why should commercial news organizations be more likely to go for product quality instead of profit maximisation than other businesses?
There is this.
But the reasons I've heard more often are
* (hardware performance / hosting prices have reached a point that iit's possible now)
* doing SSL without browser complaints will be difficult if the page contains 3rd party images included via http instead of https
* images will still be there later; in most old threads, especially photoshop contests, they're mostly gone because the hosts don't exist anymore
* easier to moderate threads (no need to run their scripts anymore that check old threads for images which have been swapped out, either by the user or the host)
* easier to use because you neither need to know HTML nor have an external host
Years ago, fark.com went from external images to hosted images. I didn't see the endgame.
This week, JavaScript is required to load the images. It's vendor lock in all over again. Because who uses an external host if you can just click upload?
Uh, I've Javascript disabled an no problem seeing images in Fark threads.
As a matter of fact, if you've Javascript disabled, there's no "upload" to click and you have to use an external host (Fark then downloads the image from there onto their servers).
And I wouldn't call some forum rehosting external images on their own servers "vendor lock-in".
Not that it matters because the entire discussion is purely theoretical, but copyright works slightly different in Germany.
AFAIK as a creator you always retain the copyright, you can only sell / license (distribution) rights-
Forget compile time bugs or errors in algorithm, think more towards project management, development processes, maintainability, impact of requirement changes or new feature requests to a large project after it's basically done etc.
I don't know if maps is a steaming pile, but I do know that the new maps and especially street view are really, really sluggish in comparison to classic. As a n00b driver in a big city with heavy traffic I loved being able to "drive" through key points of an unknown route the day before to see what the streets were like, what lane would be best before entering a 5-lane-roundabout, what the parking situation near the destination looked like etc. F_ck that with the new version, too slow; even on an i7, there's almost no such thing as having a _quick_ look.
Because it lacks a lot of things, has some visual bugs and lots of crashes.
Sounds like if they manage to make it lose data and corrupt settings upon upgrading the k* programs, they'll have kept the user experience consistent with 4.
Radio stations are usually limited to a relatively small geographic reach due to the physics of radio waves. The Internet has no boundaries. Larger reach means more potential value for advertisers.
I have to disagree with that one; I doubt that this is an advantage.
I think that small geographic reach can be an advantage if the region is sufficiently populated.
I haven't listened to a lot of radio in years, but when I did, there were lots of adverts by local businesses or the regional branches of bigger chains; you don't have e.g Ford advertising how awesome their new trucks are, you have some car dealership with a couple of local branches promoting zero interest payment plans.
I don't think there are many brands where it's a selling point that a stream is really popular in New York, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Vienna; even with globally operating brands it's likely that there isn't a global marketing department paying for spots, but national ones who might want to tailor the ads they're paying for to the local market (not to mention language).
It's a potentially(!) large audience of people lots of ad buyers don't care about
Pretty much this.
And IMHO a lot of the perceived hostility was people getting treated like they treated others by making the crime fit the punishment or simply holding up a mirror:
If you're by definition the tolerant, "aware", good person fighting bigotry for the greater good, you can't possibly behave like a bigot yourself and people pointing this out must be haters attacking you.
Most telling were the complaints about how Fark "has recently become" more hostile.
"Mommy Drew, the kid whose hair I've been pulling all week has started punching me!"
I've stopped commenting in certain threads and just use them to add people to my ignore list.
My problem isn't even with that PC policy, but with the posters who applauded its introduction and felt it was necessary - I recognized a lot of names whose level of "discourse" and reaction to well-reasoned arguments I've come to associate with "lalala-I-can't-hear-you-lalalala"
Among them there are some of the most intentionally(?) obtuse, hypocritical people on the internet. They don't even realize that they act exactly like people they complain or make fun of in other threads. On certain issues they seem to switch off their brains, argue purely from emotion, apparently misinterpret everything to fit their views or emotional state and blindly attack everyone who doesn't echo their sentiments.
They made it impossible to have actual, reasonable discussions because they're e.g. apparently incapable of differentiating between trying to understand why some bad thing happened and endorsing it. They also give the impression that showing the correct amount of outrage about a problem and the correct distribution of blame is much more important than actually fixing problems or preventing shit from happening again.
I gave up on Fark when I clicked on the profile of one of the densest, most hypocritical, most vocal, personal attacks launching, reasonable discussion killing douchebags - and saw that someone thought it a good idea to make this massive all-around asshole a moderator.
If 9/11 had happened with todays Fark, the first comment would be "in before some victim blaming terrorism apologist explains why the people in the WTC deserved it" and then you can watch how the first poor sod posting something like "I wonder what reaction Osama was hoping for" or "how do you brainwash 20 people to commit those acts" gets assigned the aforementioned "in before.." role and torn to pieces for shit that was never said or even remotely implied.
The photographer owns the the copyright of his picture, but in jurisdictions with stronger data protection laws than apparently most of the US, that doesn't give a photographer permission to publish the picture without consent of the depicted person.
You might want to have a look at deslide.clusterfake.net. It's not a browser extension, but there's a bookmarklet. If your particular clickbait slideshow/listicle site happens to be supported, it'll reformat the clickbait into a single page and discard everything but the actual content.
If it's like the usual weekly assignments I've experienced, it's probably both small and specific AND really obvious cheating, as in copy&pasting without even bothering to change the variable names or removing code that had been commented out by the one who originally wrote it.
Usually there would also be parts where you had to write stuff - for a data structures and algorithm class there might be formal or informal proofs/discussions of the running time or correctness of the implementation of an algorithm or of some operations on the data structure.
I still remember that in a first semester CS class about formal logic, set theory etc, our teaching assistant was dressing down unnamed students in class for copying solutions 1:1; it was very obvious to her that several folks had copied their solutions from a very bright student from Russia who at this point hadn't quite mastered the language (German) yet.
The TA was especially angry that the cheating native speakers couldn't even be bothered to put in enough work to correct the little quirks and mistakes in the Russian student's grammar when they copied her solutions.
Are you ready to take responsibility for the next real world victims who might have been willing to protect themselves despite it not being their responsibility in happy ideological lala-land, but who didn't know how to or weren't even aware of the danger because your knee-jerk "victim blame" reaction suppressed that information and finally managed to alienate the last one who would have been willing to help?
On a slightly (un)related note, on some website there recently were some very vocal habitual "Victim blamer! MRA!"-screaming hypocrites apparently living in homes without mirrors wondering where that backlash of "SJW"-screaming came from and why "social justice" could have become(!) an insult and how the environment and the "discussions" have become(!) more hostile.
Then I remembered my father whose hearing has gotten pretty bad over the years. When my parents were out together riding their bicycles somewhere, my mom noticed that he clearly didn't hear some cars approaching from behind. She said that it was kinda worrying in some situations. I guess when your hearing gets gradually worse, you can sometimes forget that not hearing a car doesn't mean there isn't one close by.
And thinking a bit more about it, I've already seen ("heard" would be wrong) an incredibly silent hybrid car; the loudest noise it generated was the dirt being crushed between the tires and the asphalt.
Then again, turning your head now and then or some of those rear-view mirrors for the handlebars will be a lot cheaper.
but this guy can tell which scratch tickets will pay off by by reading their serial numbers, winning wasn't as improbable as one is led to believe
CSB:
My elementary school set up a sort of lottery during a yearly festival.
So two classes were tasked with preparing the winning and losing lots for the lottery by writing the kind of price or something like "no win" on little paper squares. They then folded the paper squares and stapled them shut so you couldn't tell what was written inside.
During the festivities the kids ran a stand were you could buy and draw the lots from a couple of big, open bowls.
Almost all of the prices went to a handful of kids from my class:
A couple of guys from my class drew winning lots for smallish stuff, noticed something that had escaped everyone else, came up with a theory and successfully put their theory to the test by buying more winners. As 10-year-olds are, they bragged to their best friends about it who then proceeded to buy most of the remaining winners.
Well, the winning and losing lots had been prepared separately and, not thinking about it and lacking the direct comparison, the teachers in charge of the two groups had been unaware that their staplers were loaded with silver- and copper-colored staples respectively.
So by looking at the color of the staples, you were able to pick only winners out of the open bowls.
Furthermore, in some books the million-to-one-chance even has an embodiment of sorts as "The Lady", one of the Discworld Gods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
But yeah, Pratchett was mostly poking fun at the heroes in stories alway succeeding against all odds. Another Discworld example would be a group of people being hesitant to attack a single guy if the guy looks harmless and smiles or if he shows characteristics in line with being a story's hero - because everybody just knows ta a vastly outnumbered hero always wins the fight.
Making fun of or playing with such story cliches is something that Practhett does a lot - to a point that such cliches have become something like a natural law and an (al)chemical element (Narrative causality / Narrativium) on the Discworld.
Some characters like the witches are even very aware of it and try to manipulate the narrative (e.g. Witches Abroad is a lot about stories (not) running their "natural" course).
Slashdot Mirror
There are different kinds of advertising:
On the internet you often have "Buy OUR crap. Now." ads which hope people click on them and buy stuff. But for the reasons you stated, most ads outside of search engines won't lead to direct sales that way because people rarely come to websites like Facebook looking to buy stuff *right now*.
Another kind of ad are more about brand recognition, about getting your name out. So that people who aren't looking to buy something *right now* will either remember your name or at least recognize it again on a more subtle level.
I mean, it's not like a company putting an ad for a lawn mower in a magazine or airing one during the Super Bowl expects people to jump up and run out to buy a lawn mower right after they see it (i.e. offline they usually don't expect the equivalent of a click-through leading to a sale when someone views their ad).
BUT: the next time you need to buy a lawn mower, you might remember their name and make sure to look at their products before coming to a decision what to buy.
Or, if you are in the store in front of a line of lawn mowers and have to make a decision between a few models which are similar on features and price, a lot of people won't toss a coin, they'll often - maybe just subconsciously - favor the manufacturer whose name rings a faint bell over ones they've never heard of before.
This probably becomes more important the cheaper and harder to distinguish the products are.
When buying a car, there's lots of stuff you can look up to compare or have preferences for.
When standing in front of a wall of unknown toilet cleaners with tiny price difference and your usual one [ how did it become your usual..?] is out of stock, name recognition or the design of the bottle might influence how "randomly" you select one of the other options.
And if your random(?) pick works for you, it might become your new usual product.
Finland sells a lot of oil?
You're probably confusing Finland and Norway...
I didn't RTFA and don't know if the "freedom of the press" bit is addressed in it, but my guess is that the argument will be more along the lines of the need for an independent press as 4th power. Something like:
"You can't have an independent press without financial independence. People aren't paying directly for it, so the money will have to come from somewhere else if you don't want to have less press ( == smaller spectrum of voices/opinions). Ads are an independent way to get the necessary money compared to publishing embedded ads/paid content or the press depending on the goodwill of a few rich folks who would be in control of what gets published."
That's the only thing coming to mind that makes some sense to me, but one obvious problem with that is the assumption that we aren't already at that point.
And "But things will be even worse!" doesn't convince me because there's no guarantee that things won't get worse anyway:
Why should commercial news organizations be more likely to go for product quality instead of profit maximisation than other businesses?
But the reasons I've heard more often are
Years ago, fark.com went from external images to hosted images. I didn't see the endgame. This week, JavaScript is required to load the images. It's vendor lock in all over again. Because who uses an external host if you can just click upload?
Uh, I've Javascript disabled an no problem seeing images in Fark threads.
As a matter of fact, if you've Javascript disabled, there's no "upload" to click and you have to use an external host (Fark then downloads the image from there onto their servers).
And I wouldn't call some forum rehosting external images on their own servers "vendor lock-in".
I've been in many, MANY poorly-maintained taxis, often with egregious flaws.
In Germany, as was parent's example?
Otherwise I would assume that there aren't such regulations/requirements or they aren't enforced.
I've yet to see an Uber car that is even close to this level of disrepair.
Give it 5-10 years or whenever the current Uber drivers have to get a new one.
post to remove accidental moderation - effing Javascript autosubmit boxes
Not that it matters because the entire discussion is purely theoretical, but copyright works slightly different in Germany. AFAIK as a creator you always retain the copyright, you can only sell / license (distribution) rights-
Don't mix taking pictures with distributing them.
I'm pretty sure the German case was about distributing pictures, not taking them.
Uh, "not sure if serious"!?
Forget compile time bugs or errors in algorithm, think more towards project management, development processes, maintainability, impact of requirement changes or new feature requests to a large project after it's basically done etc.
I don't know if maps is a steaming pile, but I do know that the new maps and especially street view are really, really sluggish in comparison to classic.
As a n00b driver in a big city with heavy traffic I loved being able to "drive" through key points of an unknown route the day before to see what the streets were like, what lane would be best before entering a 5-lane-roundabout, what the parking situation near the destination looked like etc.
F_ck that with the new version, too slow; even on an i7, there's almost no such thing as having a _quick_ look.
Because it lacks a lot of things, has some visual bugs and lots of crashes.
Sounds like if they manage to make it lose data and corrupt settings upon upgrading the k* programs, they'll have kept the user experience consistent with 4.
Radio stations are usually limited to a relatively small geographic reach due to the physics of radio waves. The Internet has no boundaries. Larger reach means more potential value for advertisers.
I have to disagree with that one; I doubt that this is an advantage. I think that small geographic reach can be an advantage if the region is sufficiently populated.
I haven't listened to a lot of radio in years, but when I did, there were lots of adverts by local businesses or the regional branches of bigger chains; you don't have e.g Ford advertising how awesome their new trucks are, you have some car dealership with a couple of local branches promoting zero interest payment plans.
I don't think there are many brands where it's a selling point that a stream is really popular in New York, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Vienna; even with globally operating brands it's likely that there isn't a global marketing department paying for spots, but national ones who might want to tailor the ads they're paying for to the local market (not to mention language).
It's a potentially(!) large audience of people lots of ad buyers don't care about
Pretty much this.
And IMHO a lot of the perceived hostility was people getting treated like they treated others by making the crime fit the punishment or simply holding up a mirror:
If you're by definition the tolerant, "aware", good person fighting bigotry for the greater good, you can't possibly behave like a bigot yourself and people pointing this out must be haters attacking you.
Most telling were the complaints about how Fark "has recently become" more hostile.
"Mommy Drew, the kid whose hair I've been pulling all week has started punching me!"
I've stopped commenting in certain threads and just use them to add people to my ignore list.
My problem isn't even with that PC policy, but with the posters who applauded its introduction and felt it was necessary - I recognized a lot of names whose level of "discourse" and reaction to well-reasoned arguments I've come to associate with "lalala-I-can't-hear-you-lalalala"
Among them there are some of the most intentionally(?) obtuse, hypocritical people on the internet.
They don't even realize that they act exactly like people they complain or make fun of in other threads.
On certain issues they seem to switch off their brains, argue purely from emotion, apparently misinterpret everything to fit their views or emotional state and blindly attack everyone who doesn't echo their sentiments.
They made it impossible to have actual, reasonable discussions because they're e.g. apparently incapable of differentiating between trying to understand why some bad thing happened and endorsing it.
They also give the impression that showing the correct amount of outrage about a problem and the correct distribution of blame is much more important than actually fixing problems or preventing shit from happening again.
I gave up on Fark when I clicked on the profile of one of the densest, most hypocritical, most vocal, personal attacks launching, reasonable discussion killing douchebags - and saw that someone thought it a good idea to make this massive all-around asshole a moderator.
If 9/11 had happened with todays Fark, the first comment would be "in before some victim blaming terrorism apologist explains why the people in the WTC deserved it" and then you can watch how the first poor sod posting something like "I wonder what reaction Osama was hoping for" or "how do you brainwash 20 people to commit those acts" gets assigned the aforementioned "in before.." role and torn to pieces for shit that was never said or even remotely implied.
I don't know when you last posted a picture on Fark, but Fark has been rehosting posted images on their servers for some time now.
*Western Europe*
Look at how many wars EU members / NATO allies used to fight against each other.
The photographer owns the the copyright of his picture, but in jurisdictions with stronger data protection laws than apparently most of the US, that doesn't give a photographer permission to publish the picture without consent of the depicted person.
You might want to have a look at deslide.clusterfake.net.
It's not a browser extension, but there's a bookmarklet.
If your particular clickbait slideshow/listicle site happens to be supported, it'll reformat the clickbait into a single page and discard everything but the actual content.
If it's like the usual weekly assignments I've experienced, it's probably both small and specific AND really obvious cheating, as in copy&pasting without even bothering to change the variable names or removing code that had been commented out by the one who originally wrote it.
Usually there would also be parts where you had to write stuff - for a data structures and algorithm class there might be formal or informal proofs/discussions of the running time or correctness of the implementation of an algorithm or of some operations on the data structure.
I still remember that in a first semester CS class about formal logic, set theory etc, our teaching assistant was dressing down unnamed students in class for copying solutions 1:1; it was very obvious to her that several folks had copied their solutions from a very bright student from Russia who at this point hadn't quite mastered the language (German) yet.
The TA was especially angry that the cheating native speakers couldn't even be bothered to put in enough work to correct the little quirks and mistakes in the Russian student's grammar when they copied her solutions.
Are you ready to take responsibility for the next real world victims who might have been willing to protect themselves despite it not being their responsibility in happy ideological lala-land, but who didn't know how to or weren't even aware of the danger because your knee-jerk "victim blame" reaction suppressed that information and finally managed to alienate the last one who would have been willing to help?
On a slightly (un)related note, on some website there recently were some very vocal habitual "Victim blamer! MRA!"-screaming hypocrites apparently living in homes without mirrors wondering where that backlash of "SJW"-screaming came from and why "social justice" could have become(!) an insult and how the environment and the "discussions" have become(!) more hostile.
Here is it on one page without ads: http://deslide.clusterfake.net/?o=html_table&u=http://www.itworld.com/slideshow/163234/head-scratchers-10-confounding-programming-language-features-434442
I had the same reaction at first ("useless") .
Then I remembered my father whose hearing has gotten pretty bad over the years.
When my parents were out together riding their bicycles somewhere, my mom noticed that he clearly didn't hear some cars approaching from behind. She said that it was kinda worrying in some situations.
I guess when your hearing gets gradually worse, you can sometimes forget that not hearing a car doesn't mean there isn't one close by.
And thinking a bit more about it, I've already seen ("heard" would be wrong) an incredibly silent hybrid car; the loudest noise it generated was the dirt being crushed between the tires and the asphalt.
Then again, turning your head now and then or some of those rear-view mirrors for the handlebars will be a lot cheaper.
but this guy can tell which scratch tickets will pay off by by reading their serial numbers, winning wasn't as improbable as one is led to believe
CSB:
My elementary school set up a sort of lottery during a yearly festival.
So two classes were tasked with preparing the winning and losing lots for the lottery by writing the kind of price or something like "no win" on little paper squares.
They then folded the paper squares and stapled them shut so you couldn't tell what was written inside.
During the festivities the kids ran a stand were you could buy and draw the lots from a couple of big, open bowls.
Almost all of the prices went to a handful of kids from my class:
A couple of guys from my class drew winning lots for smallish stuff, noticed something that had escaped everyone else, came up with a theory and successfully put their theory to the test by buying more winners.
As 10-year-olds are, they bragged to their best friends about it who then proceeded to buy most of the remaining winners.
Well, the winning and losing lots had been prepared separately and, not thinking about it and lacking the direct comparison, the teachers in charge of the two groups had been unaware that their staplers were loaded with silver- and copper-colored staples respectively.
So by looking at the color of the staples, you were able to pick only winners out of the open bowls.
Furthermore, in some books the million-to-one-chance even has an embodiment of sorts as "The Lady", one of the Discworld Gods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
But yeah, Pratchett was mostly poking fun at the heroes in stories alway succeeding against all odds.
Another Discworld example would be a group of people being hesitant to attack a single guy if the guy looks harmless and smiles or if he shows characteristics in line with being a story's hero - because everybody just knows ta a vastly outnumbered hero always wins the fight.
Making fun of or playing with such story cliches is something that Practhett does a lot - to a point that such cliches have become something like a natural law and an (al)chemical element (Narrative causality / Narrativium) on the Discworld.
Some characters like the witches are even very aware of it and try to manipulate the narrative (e.g. Witches Abroad is a lot about stories (not) running their "natural" course).