Look, what it boils down to is that you and others have positioned yourselves to be dependent on an unstable, unprotected, noncritical source of income (web ad revenues) on a shaky foundation of hoping that people use the net the same way as they always have. Out comes another Google or Skype or entrenched service bundle or some new well-funded thing in your own niche etc, and BAM, everyone's there and no ad revenue for you. Out comes pervasive ad blocking and legally-backed privacy protections, and BAM, no ad revenue for you.
dont make assumptions. i am a web developer. i dont persist on ad revenue. and the above is not a good thing for people. its no different than a megacorp entering some area and eradicating all small shops then imposing its prices to everyone.
Sorry, but there is no protection for your type of income and if you're dependent on it, you've made a horribly short-sighted decision and have no right to complain about loss of revenue. Nothing will stop the web from changing around you and away from you if you're using something that people don't want (like invasive advertising). If you can make money before it doesn't work anymore, fine, but blogging and other such small-time sites are not some crucial service that will be protected, and it is no big loss to the world when those things fall from their current fad status to the wayside and niches again.
again, you are taking the matter like a 3rd year economics/business senior. the above can be only easily said with a lightheart in scenarios, simulations, projects, discussions and such. it cant be said in real life. because in real life, the effects of "free market" are real :
- french aristocracy were saying "let them eat cake if they cant find bread". (it is not certain that marie antoinette said this) look what happened then.
- "free market" it was back at 1929. look then what happened - 5 year long global recession, 2 new fascist countries, a world war and 15 million confirmed dead.
- again back to crop example, the concept of a famine is very real if the situation goes on like this, crops being bought to make fuel, and not making it into bakeries.
im again reciting - such an approach, which is fit for economy discussions and in college dorms, which states that 'if it doesnt work, let it die' is not fit for real world. because in real world, effects are irreversible, and in the cases they are, doing so costs much more time and effort and their money equivalents. losing the internet to megacorporations which will make it into another cable tv in which the free speech we know now is none is not something that can be remedied easily. and they are already trying to do it, by trying to push laws to their end. and you are suggesting that it is just allright that ordinary people be let fall out of the web's social and economic facet, further leaving the ground to megacorps because the interest in the web will wane and corps will dictate what goes.
this is rather "american" way of approach, the one you are making - "let the suckers die" "let the best win" "winner/loser" concept etc.
Remember all the "pay to surf" systems that were paying out decently? They're all gone, or pay out only pennies. Imagine if you depended on those for your living. That is exactly a Darwinistic "Oh no, I can't afford bread anymore!" scenario, but that's exactly what happened and people had to go somewhere else for income. A similar thing will happen with web ad revenues, and you'll be stuck complaining that they're gone with no protection from the change. It's already started: There is a real backlash to web advertising, and the funds for many sites _will_ continue to dry up and a lot of them _will_ fold. It's your own fault if you think that you can have long term funding from ads at a small site (even if it pays well now) and end up with nothing at the end of it because you didn't see that it wouldn't last. Everybo
yes indeed sire.. its choice. they are not being given that choice by their government. so someone should give them that. however harmful spam is on "our" world where internet is (at least seemingly) free, it becomes a little shining light in repressive countries with a single mail that tells how you can get around the repression.
I never had any complaint about the internet's quality of content. You claim that the internet of 20 years ago was a 'toy', yet I was showing that it had the same content and services as nowadays, complete with profitable international businesses and trade, free and for-pay fun stuff and socializing services, etc. This shows that the added advertising and money grubbing of today is not critical in any way to the internet's health. The addition of such people like you relying on this added garbage did not make it magically attain some different 'non-toy' status; the online content and services (both commercial and personal/social/academic) were already there, and are still progressing and developing regardless.
i promptly object to that. 20 years ago, it was 1987, and the concept was not even existent in its form today, it was merely a limited research facility. and even at 1994, when it was opened to commercialization, it was still an academic/research concept. the services and stuff back then were pathetically simple, not only that but most of them were running on academic infrastructures - backgammon servers, simple chat systems and so on. even at 1995-6, opening up a website for doing anything was a phenomenonal investment, nobody without ties and footing in the newly forming i.t. world already were going and setting up sites and services. even in 1997, getting a domain name alone for a year costed more than $250, when they finally made it 250 that year there was much talk "whoa how inexpensive domains are now". and dont even talk about hosting. you had a deep pocket to shell out amounts around $1000 back then.
in such an environment you cant service millions of people. and the solution came with investment - phenomenonal investment in companies like netscape, yahoo and altavista brought the internet to where it is. note that all of those are ad-supported services.
I never said that the internet should be cost-free. It is you who whine about internet hosting not being free, and want free money in return. People who host stuff are generally stuck with the cost, or endure the terms of service to piggyback on other people who already pay for hosting. If you can't afford to host your own content, or don't want to endure others' terms, or can't get customers or investors to pay for it, then too bad... you can't afford to do that online. You have no right to expect to be paid for simply having content online for free.
much contradiction here that i dont know where to start.
i am the one stating that enduring ads is another form of 'paying' for content. you were the one who was annoyed with 'enduring ads'. its a form of 'wanting for free'.
and again, such darwinian approaches are suicidal - lets see, there is a crop shortage now due to crops being used for fuel production. the prices of crops are going up. will you be content as to say "it is free market economy, fuel companies are paying more for crops, hence crops are not making it into bakeries, hence no bread. people should learn if they can not pay for bread, they will be hungry". similar situation is about the internet. if the ad supported concept which makes internet so big and so easy place to be for ordinary people goes away, internet will increasingly be a domain of mega corporations who can afford, and after a time they will easily turn it into a cable tv, removing freedom of information, right to choose concepts we now enjoy.
and this is the flies' problem, because we are the flies and the spiders too. if we ignore this situation, the birds will win, the natural predators for both of us, which are megacorps.
As far as searching goes, there were automated search engines long before Google, there were manual web directories, there were discussion boards with links all over the place... the same way we have now. As far as word of mouth goes, it is FAST on the internet. Something strikes a chord and it is in email folders and forums all over the world nearly instantly... just like it was 40 years ago. It is true that there is far more social and other non-scientific/governmental/academic content online now than then, but the content isn't the point; the point is people avoiding the invasiveness that now pervades the internet with the unwanted abundance of tracking and advertising. Besides, there was tons of just-for-fun stuff online then, people's own opinionated pages, online games, social areas, etc, dating well back to the 70s and even 60s.
first you spoke as if your main concern was the quality, then you moved into privacy.
15-20 years ago, web/internet/anything i.t. being just a curiosity among technological institution/university people and therefore there being no risks of privacy violation, or invasive facets of it also means that it was pretty useless, being just a toy amongst a very limited portion of populace.
for things to revolutionize the world, widespread usage is necessary. this is what we got in the last 15 years. and you yourself saying that there are still strong word of mouth practices around the net, content sites, good sites, so there shouldnt be any problem.
It's a relatively new and completely unsustainable concept that people should somehow magically get paid just for putting stuff online. The only thing that will change the current monetary burden of hosting is pervasive peer-to-peer 'hosting' where no single point of bandwidth concentration needs to be paid for; everyone would just maintain their own link and forward what interests them.
information is NOT free. you apparently missed that point - maybe due to the very successful model that you disdain - sponsorship through advertising -, you, like many people just got accustomed to things being 'free' on the net. it is not as such. even in the days where sites were popping up in university infrastructures nothing was free - the people there were already being paid for their presence there, by govt (scholarships) or their parents if students, and by the university if they were academicians. so they were taking those paid time off and putting and maintaining stuff on the web. just the infrastructure seemed 'free', because it was not directly paid.
and afterwards with the boom of the advertising business model on the net, and the expansion of the net, apparently people got too accustomed to things being free on the net to the extent that it has become the accepted 'norm'. and they now started to see advertisements as 'annoyance' and 'invasion'.
well. nothing comes for free in life. trigger happy darwinian approaches like "unsuccessful business models should be let die" (even though there is no proof of being unsuccessful - you people here arguing that you have a right to block ads, even though they are the factor that by which the content is paid for) just makes what one cherishes and cares for to go away along with the 'unsuccessful business model' sometimes. this is one of those incidents - actually the issue is very simple here - people want to get stuff, but do not want to pay. in this case the stuff is content/information, and payment is enduring advertisements. hence the selfishness.
people who were put to no fly list just because they published a pathetically small excerpt criticizing bush & co on their personal blogs were explicitly named here in other media outlets. maybe you are rather uninformed, or choose which information you want to keep ?
Yes, "just a bunch of sites" etc is exactly what open and free means. And it was just as trans-national then as it is now. I was interacting and developing with people all over the world back then, whereas today a lot of the 'majority' focus seems to be USA-centric online, so I have no idea what you are implying there. Exactly how long have you been on the internet? It doesn't sound like very long.
this is elitism. you are talking about and gratifying an era that internet was limited to a bunch of sites, was serving a very small minority, and that mostly academicians. plain old elitism.
if you dig, you can find bazillions of the site types you want. you should ask yourself maybe you have gone rather lazy, with all search engine/directories around like google and such, and is not seeking for anything that you dont find on the 2nd page of google anymore ? how did you learn of the sites back then ? there were times sites were coming up with ips, there was no domain name around. yet people were finding sites by word of mouth. word of mouth is still here, and still as slow as it was back then - if you are finding kind of sites you like by word of mouth with the same speed, and i dont see any reason you cant, you dont need to even vie for old times. because nothing is changed - still there are a bunch of sites of the kind you speak of on university/institiution networks, and there are on private domains even, not only uni/inst. networks - finding them is as fast as it was back then, so whats the trouble ?
Once things get monetized, lockdowns and invasive tracking become imminent, and the freedoms and openness to new concepts and ways of doing things are squelched because it rocks the status quo of shakily established business models (which on the net go obsolete VERY fast anyway) that are trying to make money off of people's free time and voluntary efforts by inserting themselves into the common ways of doing things (which also go obsolete VERY fast on the net). People will always take the path of least resistance, and being an average Joe exploring and contributing to the net means they will continually avoid the funneling and control aspects of internet profit mongering.
what you said above is not valid for site discussion. and in regard to internet, to fight back option is always there, and there are many fighting back and winning. open source is an example, wiki is another example, bloggers with their $50-60 budget-hosting sites reaching out to 900 000 unique people a month are another example. everything comes with a price. the thing is to buy the right thing for the right price.
If you believe that, you're hopelessly irrational. Go read the article... it doesn't offer any evidence that there is any truth to such absurd notions. People on this site REALLY need to learn to think critically, and to apply those skills to things they read.
i dont believe that. it is a rational concluded fact.
they have put forward patriot act, and numerous people ended up in the "no fly" lists for just criticizing the bush adm, and cant use any air service in united states as of today.
they have been running a gulag on guantanamo unquestioned for around 8 years, the congress is just being able to get back at them. it is not known how many gulags they have.
attorneys who were not compliant with bush and co were fired.
i can go on an on with shady stuff bush & co has been doing in the last 8 years. but no need to waste time for both of us.
it is just a rational conclusion that this new gig wont be too different.
we are not acting like they're going to throw people in jail for "acting funny". they ARE going to throw people in jail for "acting funny". because this is what it is.
dont even get annoyed by namecalling in this post. because that has gone WAY out of hand.
now this government is intent on detaining people according to their FACE EXPRESSIONS for god's sakes !!!! have you ever seen something like that ? maybe in nazi germany. even not in fascist italy ffs !
some officer treats you poorly, you frown and voila ! youre in jail !!!
dont tell me that this is not bush & co and republican bullshit. because it hell is.
lets face it - web surfing and filesharing are the bulk of all activities people do on the net. if they hamper either one, people will just go and find an isp that doesnt hamper them and thats it. its the people who decide.
Yeah, because without ads, sites like Amazon.com wouldn't make a bajillion dollars selling things online in a trans-national market. It's ad revenue alone that keeps them alive. Yup.
how many amazons are there ? how many googles ? how many yahoo ?
these kind of sites, which have a whopping reach are an almost nonexistent percentage compared to the privately run one-ten person websites that are dotting the net. recently there was a research noting that majority of the net's content were coming from this sites, from cooking recipes to game hints. what these sites funding themselves with are meager advertising revenues - because as per the unofficial "1 per 1000" rule, roughly 1 visitor would be buying anything from a site out of 1000, and such kind of turnover never is enough to fund a small site. even google, yahoo like giants can get into trouble due to non-ads, or need to turn themselves to some other kind of amazons in this setup. this is bad.
You know what? Sites like The Krib are a relic nowadays... that's the sort of content that most of the interesting parts of the WWW used to contain. I was happy with it back then! "Shoot the monkey" advertisements and selfishly duplicated content (uhh... wikipedia text showing up on hundreds of different ad-laden sites?) don't add any value.
refer to what i said above. the link in my signature is a small business, yet it hosts more than 200 clients' 250 or so sites, and majority of them like the site you described - there are sites with varied contents ranging from "mining basics" guides to personal arts feats, all of them constructed by ordinary people with shallow pockets. just that you cant find such sites through google or any other major engine does not mean that they dont exist. they do exist, and they are the majority on the net, and this "ad blocking" smartiness can be the biggest setback to these sites, and in the end internet.
That's one way things could happen, but it seems like a wildly unlikely scenario to me.
First, many unfortunate events in history of mankind were wildly unlikely scenarios before they happened.
Some people have been blocking web ads for as long as they have existed (that's more than 10 years now), and nothing horrible has happened to the web yet.
Yea, and thats a main factor that caused online advertisement's popularity and payout to fall very dramatically since the first years of the internet to a point where websites needed to fill up every possible space and resort to intrusive ads to get to remaining users in order to maintain viability maybe ?
yes and its necessary for it to be in that way
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Fox Hacks Fark
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everything on the face of the world turn their attention to things that are threat to their survival whenever such occurences come up, leaving what they were busy with at that moment for a while. likewise, slashdot and many other sites, institutes, foundations, civil organizations and even individuals have turned their attention to things that are threatening their existence and what they do and stand for - like erosion of civil rights, freedom, any liberty under the yoke of bush & co, and etc.
ad supported free service/content website concept is the reason that internet is the border-penetrating and above-nations entity it is today. non ad supported websites either belong to foundations, which are low in numbers, or belong to individuals. the latter wont be able to support the costs of maintaining a web site if their costs go high with increasing usage and shut down. as there is no concept of ad support anymore, such private sites will also go under or get sold/merged to big media corporation entities. as a result the internet will turn to something like the tv - some small percentage of decent websites which are founded and maintained on university/institution infrastructures, sites that belong to megacorps, and government stuff.
and as you see i wasnt relating ad supported websites to great depression, but this.
for your final comment, if advertisers remove obnoxious ads and go to less disturbing text ads and such, ad blocking software will start blocking them, and the spiral down will continue.
Fox - why im not surprised
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look here, im turkish, and despite that even i know that fox is a channel that is the mouthpiece of the crowd who brought bush into power, who in turn took away many fundamental civil rights that were the reasons modern nations were founded for in the first place.
so go figure, its not surprising to see some illegal mischief from fox even if you are turkish.
even if ms bought entire international standards boards and pushed their format, whatever public prefers to use will be the format to stay, and in time even goverment agencies will have to switch to the format public has chosen by their invisible hand. it has happened many times before and this is no exception.
yea. its just market economy for me. 1929 great depression was also a market economy case. look what happened because of it - fascists taking over in germany and italy and balkan states, poverty and despair everywhere, great struggle to get things back on their feet and finally a world war.
current u.s. subprime mortgage crisis is another market economy case too. but it have propelled itself into being a global crisis. now theres the talk of global recession. noone knows what will come after. maybe another 1929. and then god knows.
some stuff cant be left to 'market economy' in stupidly overdarwinian approaches. else things important to entire humanity may get jeopardized or entire civilization can be set back 20-30 years like in the case of wars.
internet is something much more important than many stuff that were around in 1929. so proposing that it may wither and rot just because some wimps do not like to forfeit some conveniences is just ignorance.
i definitely did. actually i, alongside many millions of users who were not hesitant to suck stuff have been able to bring internet to being the trans national concept it is today. it didnt happen on its own. wouldnt you like to suck some too ?
that "open, free" internet was just a bunch of sites that were created out of curiosity and created in mostly academic institution infrastructures. without ads internet wouldnt be the trans-national concept it is today.
Slashdot Mirror
definition of bureaucrat here is 'non visionary' or 'non creative'.
and all the lightbulbs are being produced by engineers.
yet an inventor invented it. without the inventor, engineers would just be producing other stuff. so engineer is not the ingredient here, inventor is.
It might be a good feature to have when a quarrel starts among a project's contributors, they can use this feature to settle things down.
OS kooks obsessed with ridiculous ideals made the internet, web, pc, I.t. what they are today. all the rest were bureaucrats.
Look, what it boils down to is that you and others have positioned yourselves to be dependent on an unstable, unprotected, noncritical source of income (web ad revenues) on a shaky foundation of hoping that people use the net the same way as they always have. Out comes another Google or Skype or entrenched service bundle or some new well-funded thing in your own niche etc, and BAM, everyone's there and no ad revenue for you. Out comes pervasive ad blocking and legally-backed privacy protections, and BAM, no ad revenue for you.
dont make assumptions. i am a web developer. i dont persist on ad revenue. and the above is not a good thing for people. its no different than a megacorp entering some area and eradicating all small shops then imposing its prices to everyone.
Sorry, but there is no protection for your type of income and if you're dependent on it, you've made a horribly short-sighted decision and have no right to complain about loss of revenue. Nothing will stop the web from changing around you and away from you if you're using something that people don't want (like invasive advertising). If you can make money before it doesn't work anymore, fine, but blogging and other such small-time sites are not some crucial service that will be protected, and it is no big loss to the world when those things fall from their current fad status to the wayside and niches again.
again, you are taking the matter like a 3rd year economics/business senior. the above can be only easily said with a lightheart in scenarios, simulations, projects, discussions and such. it cant be said in real life. because in real life, the effects of "free market" are real :
- french aristocracy were saying "let them eat cake if they cant find bread". (it is not certain that marie antoinette said this) look what happened then.
- "free market" it was back at 1929. look then what happened - 5 year long global recession, 2 new fascist countries, a world war and 15 million confirmed dead.
- again back to crop example, the concept of a famine is very real if the situation goes on like this, crops being bought to make fuel, and not making it into bakeries.
im again reciting - such an approach, which is fit for economy discussions and in college dorms, which states that 'if it doesnt work, let it die' is not fit for real world. because in real world, effects are irreversible, and in the cases they are, doing so costs much more time and effort and their money equivalents. losing the internet to megacorporations which will make it into another cable tv in which the free speech we know now is none is not something that can be remedied easily. and they are already trying to do it, by trying to push laws to their end. and you are suggesting that it is just allright that ordinary people be let fall out of the web's social and economic facet, further leaving the ground to megacorps because the interest in the web will wane and corps will dictate what goes.
this is rather "american" way of approach, the one you are making - "let the suckers die" "let the best win" "winner/loser" concept etc.
Remember all the "pay to surf" systems that were paying out decently? They're all gone, or pay out only pennies. Imagine if you depended on those for your living. That is exactly a Darwinistic "Oh no, I can't afford bread anymore!" scenario, but that's exactly what happened and people had to go somewhere else for income. A similar thing will happen with web ad revenues, and you'll be stuck complaining that they're gone with no protection from the change. It's already started: There is a real backlash to web advertising, and the funds for many sites _will_ continue to dry up and a lot of them _will_ fold. It's your own fault if you think that you can have long term funding from ads at a small site (even if it pays well now) and end up with nothing at the end of it because you didn't see that it wouldn't last. Everybo
yes indeed sire.. its choice. they are not being given that choice by their government. so someone should give them that. however harmful spam is on "our" world where internet is (at least seemingly) free, it becomes a little shining light in repressive countries with a single mail that tells how you can get around the repression.
do it.
i promptly object to that. 20 years ago, it was 1987, and the concept was not even existent in its form today, it was merely a limited research facility. and even at 1994, when it was opened to commercialization, it was still an academic/research concept. the services and stuff back then were pathetically simple, not only that but most of them were running on academic infrastructures - backgammon servers, simple chat systems and so on. even at 1995-6, opening up a website for doing anything was a phenomenonal investment, nobody without ties and footing in the newly forming i.t. world already were going and setting up sites and services. even in 1997, getting a domain name alone for a year costed more than $250, when they finally made it 250 that year there was much talk "whoa how inexpensive domains are now". and dont even talk about hosting. you had a deep pocket to shell out amounts around $1000 back then.
in such an environment you cant service millions of people. and the solution came with investment - phenomenonal investment in companies like netscape, yahoo and altavista brought the internet to where it is. note that all of those are ad-supported services.
I never said that the internet should be cost-free. It is you who whine about internet hosting not being free, and want free money in return. People who host stuff are generally stuck with the cost, or endure the terms of service to piggyback on other people who already pay for hosting. If you can't afford to host your own content, or don't want to endure others' terms, or can't get customers or investors to pay for it, then too bad... you can't afford to do that online. You have no right to expect to be paid for simply having content online for free.
much contradiction here that i dont know where to start.
i am the one stating that enduring ads is another form of 'paying' for content. you were the one who was annoyed with 'enduring ads'. its a form of 'wanting for free'.
and again, such darwinian approaches are suicidal - lets see, there is a crop shortage now due to crops being used for fuel production. the prices of crops are going up. will you be content as to say "it is free market economy, fuel companies are paying more for crops, hence crops are not making it into bakeries, hence no bread. people should learn if they can not pay for bread, they will be hungry". similar situation is about the internet. if the ad supported concept which makes internet so big and so easy place to be for ordinary people goes away, internet will increasingly be a domain of mega corporations who can afford, and after a time they will easily turn it into a cable tv, removing freedom of information, right to choose concepts we now enjoy.
and this is the flies' problem, because we are the flies and the spiders too. if we ignore this situation, the birds will win, the natural predators for both of us, which are megacorps.
better control of what people sees of course !
theres always this main motive behind 'new internet' crap.
first you spoke as if your main concern was the quality, then you moved into privacy.
15-20 years ago, web/internet/anything i.t. being just a curiosity among technological institution/university people and therefore there being no risks of privacy violation, or invasive facets of it also means that it was pretty useless, being just a toy amongst a very limited portion of populace.
for things to revolutionize the world, widespread usage is necessary. this is what we got in the last 15 years. and you yourself saying that there are still strong word of mouth practices around the net, content sites, good sites, so there shouldnt be any problem.
It's a relatively new and completely unsustainable concept that people should somehow magically get paid just for putting stuff online. The only thing that will change the current monetary burden of hosting is pervasive peer-to-peer 'hosting' where no single point of bandwidth concentration needs to be paid for; everyone would just maintain their own link and forward what interests them.
information is NOT free. you apparently missed that point - maybe due to the very successful model that you disdain - sponsorship through advertising -, you, like many people just got accustomed to things being 'free' on the net. it is not as such. even in the days where sites were popping up in university infrastructures nothing was free - the people there were already being paid for their presence there, by govt (scholarships) or their parents if students, and by the university if they were academicians. so they were taking those paid time off and putting and maintaining stuff on the web. just the infrastructure seemed 'free', because it was not directly paid.
and afterwards with the boom of the advertising business model on the net, and the expansion of the net, apparently people got too accustomed to things being free on the net to the extent that it has become the accepted 'norm'. and they now started to see advertisements as 'annoyance' and 'invasion'.
well. nothing comes for free in life. trigger happy darwinian approaches like "unsuccessful business models should be let die" (even though there is no proof of being unsuccessful - you people here arguing that you have a right to block ads, even though they are the factor that by which the content is paid for) just makes what one cherishes and cares for to go away along with the 'unsuccessful business model' sometimes. this is one of those incidents - actually the issue is very simple here - people want to get stuff, but do not want to pay. in this case the stuff is content/information, and payment is enduring advertisements. hence the selfishness.
people who were put to no fly list just because they published a pathetically small excerpt criticizing bush & co on their personal blogs were explicitly named here in other media outlets. maybe you are rather uninformed, or choose which information you want to keep ?
this is elitism. you are talking about and gratifying an era that internet was limited to a bunch of sites, was serving a very small minority, and that mostly academicians. plain old elitism.
if you dig, you can find bazillions of the site types you want. you should ask yourself maybe you have gone rather lazy, with all search engine/directories around like google and such, and is not seeking for anything that you dont find on the 2nd page of google anymore ? how did you learn of the sites back then ? there were times sites were coming up with ips, there was no domain name around. yet people were finding sites by word of mouth. word of mouth is still here, and still as slow as it was back then - if you are finding kind of sites you like by word of mouth with the same speed, and i dont see any reason you cant, you dont need to even vie for old times. because nothing is changed - still there are a bunch of sites of the kind you speak of on university/institiution networks, and there are on private domains even, not only uni/inst. networks - finding them is as fast as it was back then, so whats the trouble ?
Once things get monetized, lockdowns and invasive tracking become imminent, and the freedoms and openness to new concepts and ways of doing things are squelched because it rocks the status quo of shakily established business models (which on the net go obsolete VERY fast anyway) that are trying to make money off of people's free time and voluntary efforts by inserting themselves into the common ways of doing things (which also go obsolete VERY fast on the net). People will always take the path of least resistance, and being an average Joe exploring and contributing to the net means they will continually avoid the funneling and control aspects of internet profit mongering.
what you said above is not valid for site discussion. and in regard to internet, to fight back option is always there, and there are many fighting back and winning. open source is an example, wiki is another example, bloggers with their $50-60 budget-hosting sites reaching out to 900 000 unique people a month are another example. everything comes with a price. the thing is to buy the right thing for the right price.
i dont believe that. it is a rational concluded fact.
they have put forward patriot act, and numerous people ended up in the "no fly" lists for just criticizing the bush adm, and cant use any air service in united states as of today.
they have been running a gulag on guantanamo unquestioned for around 8 years, the congress is just being able to get back at them. it is not known how many gulags they have.
attorneys who were not compliant with bush and co were fired.
i can go on an on with shady stuff bush & co has been doing in the last 8 years. but no need to waste time for both of us.
it is just a rational conclusion that this new gig wont be too different.
we are not acting like they're going to throw people in jail for "acting funny". they ARE going to throw people in jail for "acting funny". because this is what it is.
dont even get annoyed by namecalling in this post. because that has gone WAY out of hand.
now this government is intent on detaining people according to their FACE EXPRESSIONS for god's sakes !!!! have you ever seen something like that ? maybe in nazi germany. even not in fascist italy ffs !
some officer treats you poorly, you frown and voila ! youre in jail !!!
dont tell me that this is not bush & co and republican bullshit. because it hell is.
or any other filesharing.
lets face it - web surfing and filesharing are the bulk of all activities people do on the net. if they hamper either one, people will just go and find an isp that doesnt hamper them and thats it. its the people who decide.
how many amazons are there ? how many googles ? how many yahoo ?
these kind of sites, which have a whopping reach are an almost nonexistent percentage compared to the privately run one-ten person websites that are dotting the net. recently there was a research noting that majority of the net's content were coming from this sites, from cooking recipes to game hints. what these sites funding themselves with are meager advertising revenues - because as per the unofficial "1 per 1000" rule, roughly 1 visitor would be buying anything from a site out of 1000, and such kind of turnover never is enough to fund a small site. even google, yahoo like giants can get into trouble due to non-ads, or need to turn themselves to some other kind of amazons in this setup. this is bad.
You know what? Sites like The Krib are a relic nowadays... that's the sort of content that most of the interesting parts of the WWW used to contain. I was happy with it back then! "Shoot the monkey" advertisements and selfishly duplicated content (uhh... wikipedia text showing up on hundreds of different ad-laden sites?) don't add any value.
refer to what i said above. the link in my signature is a small business, yet it hosts more than 200 clients' 250 or so sites, and majority of them like the site you described - there are sites with varied contents ranging from "mining basics" guides to personal arts feats, all of them constructed by ordinary people with shallow pockets. just that you cant find such sites through google or any other major engine does not mean that they dont exist. they do exist, and they are the majority on the net, and this "ad blocking" smartiness can be the biggest setback to these sites, and in the end internet.
First, many unfortunate events in history of mankind were wildly unlikely scenarios before they happened.
Some people have been blocking web ads for as long as they have existed (that's more than 10 years now), and nothing horrible has happened to the web yet.
Yea, and thats a main factor that caused online advertisement's popularity and payout to fall very dramatically since the first years of the internet to a point where websites needed to fill up every possible space and resort to intrusive ads to get to remaining users in order to maintain viability maybe ?
everything on the face of the world turn their attention to things that are threat to their survival whenever such occurences come up, leaving what they were busy with at that moment for a while. likewise, slashdot and many other sites, institutes, foundations, civil organizations and even individuals have turned their attention to things that are threatening their existence and what they do and stand for - like erosion of civil rights, freedom, any liberty under the yoke of bush & co, and etc.
ad supported free service/content website concept is the reason that internet is the border-penetrating and above-nations entity it is today. non ad supported websites either belong to foundations, which are low in numbers, or belong to individuals. the latter wont be able to support the costs of maintaining a web site if their costs go high with increasing usage and shut down. as there is no concept of ad support anymore, such private sites will also go under or get sold/merged to big media corporation entities. as a result the internet will turn to something like the tv - some small percentage of decent websites which are founded and maintained on university/institution infrastructures, sites that belong to megacorps, and government stuff.
and as you see i wasnt relating ad supported websites to great depression, but this.
for your final comment, if advertisers remove obnoxious ads and go to less disturbing text ads and such, ad blocking software will start blocking them, and the spiral down will continue.
look here, im turkish, and despite that even i know that fox is a channel that is the mouthpiece of the crowd who brought bush into power, who in turn took away many fundamental civil rights that were the reasons modern nations were founded for in the first place.
so go figure, its not surprising to see some illegal mischief from fox even if you are turkish.
even if ms bought entire international standards boards and pushed their format, whatever public prefers to use will be the format to stay, and in time even goverment agencies will have to switch to the format public has chosen by their invisible hand. it has happened many times before and this is no exception.
always report such cases to the /. administration. they take it seriously as they should. ill do it as far as im concerned now.
yea. its just market economy for me. 1929 great depression was also a market economy case. look what happened because of it - fascists taking over in germany and italy and balkan states, poverty and despair everywhere, great struggle to get things back on their feet and finally a world war.
current u.s. subprime mortgage crisis is another market economy case too. but it have propelled itself into being a global crisis. now theres the talk of global recession. noone knows what will come after. maybe another 1929. and then god knows.
some stuff cant be left to 'market economy' in stupidly overdarwinian approaches. else things important to entire humanity may get jeopardized or entire civilization can be set back 20-30 years like in the case of wars.
internet is something much more important than many stuff that were around in 1929. so proposing that it may wither and rot just because some wimps do not like to forfeit some conveniences is just ignorance.
i definitely did. actually i, alongside many millions of users who were not hesitant to suck stuff have been able to bring internet to being the trans national concept it is today. it didnt happen on its own. wouldnt you like to suck some too ?
that "open, free" internet was just a bunch of sites that were created out of curiosity and created in mostly academic institution infrastructures. without ads internet wouldnt be the trans-national concept it is today.