NPM Bans Terminal Ads

Re:NPM Bans Terminal Ads by mikl on Friday August 30, 2019 @01:04PM (#20840420)

It’s a slippery slope. The first packages with ads just printed a single line of text. Then others started adding more lines, more aggressive colors, and now you have npm ads painting a half a screenful of empty lines with their ad in the middle. Once can imagine an arms race of ever worse ads.

And considering that it’s not unusual to be installing hundreds of npm packages for a single project, the ads would soon render the logging output unusable, giving rise to an arms race between npm ads and npm ad-blockers.

So npm basically had to nip this in the bud, before it makes the ecosystem unusable through the tragedy of the commons.

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Re:NPM Bans Terminal Ads by bipolar_lisper on Friday August 30, 2019 @08:14PM (#20843871)

they didn't limit ads. they banned them altogether. it's a charitable thought, but doesn't hold up.

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Re:NPM Bans Terminal Ads by mikl on Saturday August 31, 2019 @02:14AM (#20844861)

That was the correct thing to do. Considering how many npm packages the average project consumes, having even a single line of advertising for each would make npm a pain in the ass to use, and people would be looking for ways to block the ads.

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Re:NPM Bans Terminal Ads by gerogerke on Saturday August 31, 2019 @08:30AM (#20845919)

Clearly, you didn't read the article from the original author. Ads were deduplicated, so only a single ad was shown, even if 500 deps used the funding dependency.

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Re:NPM Bans Terminal Ads by mikl on Saturday August 31, 2019 @07:21PM (#20849432)

That’s a big _if_. Until now, each package with ads have rolled their own, and since there’s probably more money to be had that way, there’s no reason that would not continue.

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